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The desire to find in the philosophes the origins of modern democratic ideals may lead us to read the past from the future—to define eighteenth-century Enlightenment political discourse as necessarily anti-absolutist, as if the philosophes were already, and always had been, subversives and closet democrats.  But democratic, and not to mention egalitarian, ideas emerged slowly and in response to specific historical events. Reading eighteenth-century political discourse from its past rather than its future reveals its historical continuity with a seventeenth-century political discourse that sought to answer fundamental problems of government in an age of crisis.  Viewed in historical context, the Republic of Letters—the intellectual community—did not “betray its independence” by settling into the royal academies in the seventeenth century.  Instead, the alliance of the monarchy and the intellectual community was intentional and ideologically conceived—designed to further the goals of a political ideology that sought stability and rationalization after the chaos of the civil wars through the agency of a strong, centralized monarchic, even despotic, state. 

The rationalizing ideology begins with the Montmor Discourse.  On Tuesday, April 3, 1663, Samuel Sorbière (1610-1670), a scholar and physician, pronounced a discourse on the sciences at a meeting of savants in the Parisian home of Henri-Louis Habert de Montmor.  History has largely forgotten his speech, and those who do remember it—historians of early-modern science—consider it primarily of symbolic importance, for it contained one of the first serious proposals in France for a royal academy of the sciences.  Samuel Sorbière’s speech was, according to most accounts, merely a blip in the development of modern state-sponsored science, barely worth notice except as a curiosity.  Someone had to stand up and make a proposal, and history fated this small honor to an obscure savant who, after his short moment as a world-historic actor, withdrew behind the curtains of time and disappeared.  But when viewed in a larger context, Sorbière’s speech proves more than a curiosity.  Sorbière voiced a new ideological conception of the relation between the sciences and society, and his speech marks the beginning of an Enlightenment ideology that sought to apply the discourse of the rational sciences to the socio-political realm to make the world conform to the scientific ideals of objectivity, harmony, and stability.

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Paul A. Rahe, from "Speaking of Books: Britain in Revolution"
Woolrych’s method serves him well, enabling him to construct a compelling narrative in which, again and again, we witness tensions build and then release in unexpected ways.  To his great credit, he emphasizes three important circumstances that recent historians have neglected: revenue, which had become inadequate to meet the government’s real needs; the disparity and complexity of the three realms Charles governed; and the religious divide besetting each, which Woolrych examines in detail, describing the tensions within the English church, the fragility of the settlement that James managed to impose in Scotland, and the ongoing struggle taking place in Ireland between the Gaelic-speaking Old Irish majority, their Catholic co-religionists of Old English, Anglo-Norman stock, and a third group made up of the New English adherents of the Protestant Church of Ireland and their allies among the immigrants to Ireland of Scots Presbyterian stock.  The Civil War would have been avoided, Woolrych insists, had Charles not split the English church, overturned the religious settlement that had brought an uneasy peace to Scotland, exacerbated the tensions dividing Ireland, and alienated and infuriated those members of Parliament who revered the common law and took pride in the service they rendered king and country as members of Parliament.

Woolrych is a master of the storyteller’s art, and he has a sharp eye for the telling detail.  He rightly asserts that the English Civil War need not have occurred.  In line with the trend started by G. R. Elton’s 1965 attack on historians who asserted that the Elizabethan and Stuart parliaments marked “a high road to civil war,” however, Woolrych fails to attend carefully to the growing assertiveness, from the 1570s to 1640, of the English parliament.  No doubt earlier generations of historians exaggerated the impact of an assertive parliament, which certainly had nothing to do with the rise of a middle-class gentry at odds with the scions of the great noble houses.  But James clearly found it almost impossible to manage his parliaments, and Charles encountered fierce resistance from the start.  Parliament’s growing assertiveness explains the events of 1628.  In that year, Charles, who at first sought to avoid giving his assent to the Petition of Right, resorted to a remonstrance so radical that it foreshadowed in many particulars the Grand Remonstrance of 1641; then, in 1629, Parliament drafted a set of resolutions that assumed its right, not only to declare what constituted the doctrine of the Church of England, but to redefine treason as a betrayal of the realm rather than its king, and the House of Commons refused to comply with the king’s order for an immediate adjournment.

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Dermot A. Quinn, from "Speaking of Books: The Prime Minister" 
The English constitution–its checks and balances, dignity and efficiency, and negotiation of power between and within different branches of government—often strikes outsiders and insiders alike as a combination of the rational and the bizarre.  Many do not understand the constitution, wondering at its written and unwritten elements and puzzling over how important matters of state could be decided by reference to precedents nowhere committed to print.  They question its preoccupation with structures of power–the relations among the Executive, the Legislature, and the Judiciary–to the exclusion of individual rights.  They blink hard at government conducted at every turn on behalf of a monarch whose powers seem to be, for all practical purposes, nil. Above all, they gasp at arrangements that, into the twenty-first century, still seem to reflect the invented medievalism of Augustus Pugin or Sir Charles Barry.  The Palace of Westminster is a masterpiece of the Gothic Revival, symbolizing backwardness and forwardness, history and historicism, seemingly new laws made in seemingly old surroundings.  Watching the State Opening of Parliament, we wallow in its fusty choreography, where Black Rod meets Silver Stick meets the Earl Marshal meets the Lady of the Purse.

How on earth is this government supposed to work?  In an era of globalism, when our destinies are determined by G8 summits and Security Council Resolutions, Britain still hums to the cheerful tunes of Gilbert and Sullivan. As Winston Churchill said on another occasion, it is an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a riddle, and we need a whole troop of constitutional theorists to help us make sense of it.

We also need help interpreting the figure standing at the center of this creaky machinery of governance, the Prime Minister.  The personification of the quirkiness of the English constitution, the Prime Minister inhabits a sphere entirely his own.

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David L. Stebenne, from "IBM’s 'New Deal': Employment Policies of the International Business Machines Corporation, 1933-1956" 
During the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, IBM's New Deal appealed to an overwhelmingly white, Protestant, and morally traditional workforce, and the firm attracted employees who identified strongly with the nation's prevailing values, including its acceptance of corporate dominance, racial divisions, and a patriarchal social system.  The highly unusual and often traumatic circumstances of the Depression helped to render IBM’s bargain highly attractive to its employees—twelve years of very high unemployment rates made even IBM's highly skilled male workers and their intelligent, educated spouses appreciate the safety and security offered by the company's New Deal, and, thanks to the lasting memories of the depression’s worst years, these feelings of gratitude persisted well into the 1950s.  The terrible loss of life during World War II seems to have greatly strengthened Americans’ desire for the safety and security IBM seemed to offer, even at the cost of considerable personal freedom.

Although today we may see IBM’s policies as characteristic of other countries and cultures, most notably Japan, American firms such as Hershey, NCR, Pullman, and others that created “company towns,” pioneered them.  During the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, IBM made a distinctive contribution by revising and expanding earlier versions of welfare capitalism into a New Deal with its employees, which, although at first something of an anomaly, came to exert ever greater influence on other employers, both at home and abroad.  IBM, which eventually became the world's largest non-union company, offered American firms eager to ward off unionization instructive lessons in how to deal with their own employees.  The wartime and postwar economic boom gave many major American firms the greater income and profits they needed to follow in IBM's footsteps.  IBM's presence worldwide eventually influenced employers in many other countries.  IBM’s policies in the 1930s pointed the way to the international economic solutions reached during the immediate post-World-War-II period.  Watson himself liked to say that IBM’s policies were good for his form and for the country—and, later for the world.
 

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Eugene McCarraher, from "'An Industrial Marcus Aurelius': Corporate Humanism, Management Theory, and Social Selfhood, 1908-1956" 
Since the late 1960s, cultural and intellectual historians have placed the corporate regime of production under the rubric of “corporate liberalism,” defined as an array of attempts to construct, through state intervention and new business practices, a political economy of regulated competition and stabilized class relations.  By focusing upon the subjectivities and politics generated within “consumer culture,” cultural historians seem uncritically to assume that modern Americans float unmoored within, or are barely anchored to, the realm of labor and production.  When historians do notice that most adults spend most of their waking hours each weekday at a job, they often rehearse familiar assertions about the supposed monotony or degradation of modern labor.  Cultural historians like Richard Hofstadter acknowledge the injustice and indignity of the modern workplace, yet they also conclude that “something else even in white-collar life” exists—suggesting that, perhaps, they should leave the department stores to study boardrooms, suites, and offices.  Bourne’s sketch, contrary to Weberian nostrums about a “disenchanted” bureaucratic rationality, suggests they would discover a new evangel preaching the good news of corporate management and managerial expertise.

Scholars have characterized management theory as a series of “ideologies of the workplace,” a “cult of efficiency,” a “technology of social production,” a scheme of “rational reform,” and even as the “Marxism of the professional middle class.”  I make two larger and related claims.  First, corporate management theory exemplifies a neglected but pivotal discourse of moral imagination in modern American culture, arising from the collapse of the nineteenth century’s proprietary-Protestant order and containing a form of what E. P. Thompson once dubbed “moral economy”: “a consistent, traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community,” which rested upon “definite and passionately held notions of the common weal.”  Created by a business intelligensia of academics, management writers, journalists, and corporate professionals, the corporate moral economy–corporate humanism, as I dub it–employed management theory, leavened by moral idealism and spirituality and abounding with moral and religious concerns, as one of its most articulate and visionary vehicles.  Many managerial theorists believed the realm of production necessary for the fruition of the moral personality, and even for contact with the divine.  Managerial literature, far from merely encapsulating instrumental rationality, has aspired to a beloved republic of labor, a forum of “industrial democracy” leavened and energized by “a new evangel.”

Second, the corporate manager has personified what Alasdair MacIntyre called a “moral character”: a “social role which provides a culture with its moral definitions.” To fill the void left by the demise of the omni-competent male proprietor–the moral character who occupied center stage in the proprietary-Protestant moral economy—the corporate intelligentsia articulated a new character ideal, combining moral and religious longing, a greater awareness of social interdependence, and modern,  “scientific” forms of technical and organizational prowess.  The new managerial archetype elaborated a new conception of agency and labor, or “corporate selfhood,” that partially supplanted the proprietary-Protestant ideal of the autonomous individual, transforming management theory into a course in character-building.

 
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