LITMIR.BIZ

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cities of the industrial north and the midlands exploded. London itself grew in size from perhaps around one million in 1800 to more than six million a century later. As Hannah Arendt points out, the production of goods, which had been largely confined to the household, now took place on a massively larger scale in the quasi-public context of the factory and the mine.3

      The complexities of urban and industrial civilization, the expansion of private industry beyond the private household, not to mention the moral enormities of unrestrained capitalism, forced the state to interfere in what had previously been considered private matters. As early as the 1830s the government had prohibited the use of children under the age of eight in the textile industry. The state did not only restrain private industry. The incapacitation of Parliament by the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858, not to mention a series of cholera epidemics, vividly demonstrated the limits of private planning. After all, epidemics that began in the slums, as Geoffrey Barraclough notes, had a habit of ‘spreading and slaughtering tens of thousands without respect for ranks or person’.4 The notion of ‘public health’ emerged as a matter of political concern in the mid-nineteenth century as the state used tax revenues on an unprecedented scale to improve the water supply.

      In the second half of the nineteenth century another round of reform took place. Entrance to the civil service became conditional on success in a competitive examination in 1870 and the buying and selling of commissions in the army was abolished in 1871. Indeed, in the 1870s the relationship between the public and the private changed decisively. For the first time the 1871 trade union act legalized trade unions and a few years later picketing became legal and workers’ organizations were given a public status for the first time. Rather than being treated as illegal conspirators, trade unionists were now recognized as the legitimate representatives of legitimate interests. There was also a wider pattern of interference in the private economy in the form of increased regulation and a greater willingness to use tax revenue to promote social goods, especially education.

      In part, perhaps, the state moved into areas seen previously as matters for private philanthropy and the market in order to satisfy the promptings of humanitarian concern – what William Gladstone in 1887 called ‘a gentler time’ in which the ‘public conscience’ had ‘grown more tender’.5 In part it did so because industrialized and urbanized society was too complex to function without an interventionist state. But the state also abandoned laissez-faire and the division between the public and the private it implied in order to address the twin challenges of domestic unrest and the German Empire. Education provides a prime example. The reformer Sir James Kay Shuttleworth justified the establishment of state-funded school on the grounds that ‘property would be more secure, indigence more rare, and the whole people more provident and contented if they were better educated’.6 When Gladstone drew up plans for a national system of education it was to the Prussian model that he turned. Indeed Britain’s politics of administrative and social reform after 1870 derive from the recognition that a united Germany had emerged as a serious rival to the Empire abroad and that organized labour posed a threat to the structure of society at home.

      Where the claims of private property had once dovetailed neatly with the needs of state power the state now moved to intervene in the economy and in society on a much larger scale. It placed increasing emphasis on accountability, selection on merit and incorrupt administration and it justified its growing activism by insisting on its disinterested commitment to the common good. In the famous Northcote-Trevelyan report on civil service reform the authors claimed that:

      The great and increasing burden of public business . . . could not be carried on without an efficient body of permanent officers, occupying a post duly subordinate to that of Ministers . . . yet possessing sufficient independence, character, ability and experience to be able to advise, assist and, to some extent, to influence those who are from time to time set above them.7

      The decision to move gradually towards universal male suffrage should be seen in the light of this increased state activism. As Benjamin Ginsberg notes, ‘electoral mobilization was closely linked to changes in the capacity of governments to extract revenues from their subjects’.8 An expanding state needed more money from more of its citizens. Giving them the vote made the state seem more a vehicle for serving the public interest, less an instrument for entrenching the interests of a narrow elite.

      The notion of the public interest develops in Britain in ways that move away from classical liberal ideas; the operations of the private economy can no longer be left to deliver public goods. Instead the state must intervene in order to maintain the country’s stability and its global pre-eminence. It does so in the name of principles of both social justice and strategic necessity. This is not to claim that those who pursued reform all did so as conscious agents of imperial greatness, although both Joseph Chamberlain and Charles Dilke show how hostility to laissez-faire could exist alongside a close identification with Britain’s global Empire. But it became necessary to accommodate long-standing demands for reform against a background of steadily rising international tension. Where Locke had previously sidestepped the state in his justification of conquest in America and relied instead on the improving powers of private property, those who controlled the state asserted their right to intervene in the economy to maintain their position in the global system.

      The decision to interfere in the relationship between capital and labour, to increase the state’s role in education, and to expand the franchise all derive from attempts by the elite to reshape British society in the face of external competition and the threat of internal disorder. The revival of Platonism as a governing ethos in Oxford and Cambridge ties the intellectual elite to a more highly professionalized state administration; the notion of public service expounded in the newly founded Victorian public schools binds the expanding middle class to the imperial project; the legal status granted trade unions undermines working-class radicalism by recasting the state as an institution capable of balancing competing interests. The success of public service as a device for promoting national unity can be seen in the enthusiastic response of much of the population, including much of the urban working class, to the outbreak of both the Boer War and the First World War.

      The scope of state activity continues to expand into the twentieth century. After the Second World War the British state establishes a national system of healthcare and nationalizes a number of industries. In the long post-war boom it appeared that the relationship between state power, capital and labour had been settled permanently. The idea of the ‘public domain’, which extended beyond the state to include the organizations of civil society, contributed to the sense that a rational and stable balance of interests had been achieved. This ideal of disinterested service to the greater good achieved a kind of apotheosis in the 1940s when the widespread acceptance of Keynesian economics combined with Keynes’s own ‘most characteristic belief: that public affairs should and could be managed by an elite of clever and disinterested public servants’.9 In the 1950s the Labour politician and intellectual Anthony Crosland was still convinced that capitalism had been transformed by the public service values of the managers of large companies.10

      Keynes, and the administrative elite of which he was part, owed a good deal to the Platonism of the late nineteenth century. The self-interested owners and the narrow-minded workers could not be expected to take the broader and more generous view of the common good. A caste of guardians was indispensable if the precarious achievements of civilization were to be preserved. According to Edward Bridges this caste needed ‘much the same qualities as are called for in the academic world, namely the capacity and determination to study difficult subjects intensively and objectively, with the same disinterested desire to find the truth at all costs’.11 In Bridges’ account the modern state comes to resemble a space safe for public reasoning in Kant’s sense of the word.

      The ethos of public service has inspired a good deal of nostalgia in recent years and has re-emerged as a model for liberal critics of neoliberalism. For example, at the 2009 Reith Lectures the British politician Shirley Williams argued that the British and the Prussians had underpinned their societies by producing ‘the modern concept of public service’. She went on to ask Michael Sandel if he thought that there was ‘any chance of creating what one might call the underpinning of democratic societies without having the sense of public service revived’.12 In the United States too, the notion that disinterested public servants should have a greater role

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