Conclusion: the Making of a Political Culture

Abstract

The social and political values (justice, peace, welfare, morality, order) discussed in the foregoing chapters are far from unfamiliar to historians of late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century England. The social depth of their internalisation (especially among the middling sort) has, however, rarely been recognised. The novelty of this analysis accordingly lies in its contribution to a more fully integrated understanding of the nature and mechanics of governance. Taken together, these chapters cumulatively demonstrate the deeply paradoxical nature of the relationship between state and society. On the one hand, they suggest that recent historiography has exaggerated not only the modernity of social relations in this period, but also the effectiveness of the state that mediated them. On the other, they intimate that the shifting configurations of interest in early modern England represent a decisive phase in the emergence of novel social and political categories. These conclusions imply that the late Elizabethan and early Stuart period constituted a crucial phase of adjustment, a decisive episode of discontinuity, during which the parameters of the relationship between the state and society were redefined. This redefinition, moreover, was just as much a matter of local as of central initiative.

The argument [concerning the nature and development of English social relations in the past] is in part about power and in part about cultural alienation.

Edward Thompson (1991)¹