as from the ruled. This seems to me the realistic view to take of Necker’s electoral initiatives for the French provincial estates in 1788-9, of the English reforms of 1832 and 1867 and of those of the Second Reich after 1871.
Rewards, finally, do not spontaneously grow on trees, nor are they generated and distributed to good citizens by good government. They are bargaining counters which the state acquires for distribution to its supporters by taking sides. A presumptive adversary of all in civil society, to obtain the support of some, it must become the actual adversary of others; if there were no class struggle, the state could usefully invent it.
The rise of partisan democracy in the nineteenth century served to build both mass consent and a bigger and cleverer state apparatus.
In a republic of teachers, the capitalist ends up as the political underdog.
The foundations of the lay Western welfare state were probably laid in England’s 1834 Poor Law, not because it was particularly good for the welfare of the poor (it was in fact bad in that it abolished outdoor relief) but because, at the same time as concerning itself with the poor, the state transferred the larger part of the administrative responsibility for them from the dilettante and independent local authorities to its own professionals in what was then starting to take shape as the civil service. The foremost author and promoter of this scheme of building state muscle and governing capacity was the great practical utilitarian Edwin Chadwick, without whose intense drive much of the intervention of the English central government in social affairs might have taken place several decades later than it did. However, there he was, his zeal speeding up historical inevitability by twenty years or so, clearly recognizing that if the state is effectively to promote a good cause, it must not rely on the goodwill of independent intermediaries whom it does not control.9 When subsequently he addressed his energies to public health, he obtained the creation of the General Board of Health with himself as its first Commissioner, only to have the Board peter out on his retirement in 1854, demonstrating how much depended, at that incipient stage of historical inevitability, on the commitment of a single individual. It was not till 1875 that the state got round to re-creating an administrative body in the Public Health Act and in doing so, incidentally committing “the largest invasion of property rights in the nineteenth century.”10
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