Description:

The advantages and disadvantages of democracy as a form of government.

How well does Democracy work?

Dear Lily,

You will often have been told that you live in a 'democracy' and that this is wonderful, something which should be exported all over the world. But what does 'democracy' mean and how does it work?

There are, in fact, two meanings. One is what I shall call 'Democracy', with a capital D. This is defined by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as 'government by the people; that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people'. It means that one person has one vote, with everyone over a certain age having such a vote. In practice it should mean that there is a choice. One-party Democracy is something of a contradiction in terms.

The second I shall call 'democracy' with a small d. This is defined by the same dictionary as 'a social state in which all have equal rights'. The Oxford Reference Dictionary suggests 'an egalitarian and tolerant form of society'. So this 'democracy' implies a feeling of freedom, equality before the law and equality of opportunities.

The system of Democracy, or the sovereignty of the people, is opposed to 'autocracy', rule by a few, which has many forms. These include oligarchy (rule by the few), plutocracy (rule by the very rich) monarchy (rule by a single ruler or King). 'Democracy' itself can take several forms, including republicanism, as in the United States or France, or limited monarchy, as in Britain.

Was Democracy expected?

Since Democracy is now the aspiration of many and the most popular form of government on earth, you may think that it has a long and successful history. Not at all. One hundred years ago no-one lived in a Democracy in the strict sense of the word. In the middle of the twentieth century the few existing Democracies were nearly wiped out by fascism (the ideology of state power) and communism (the ideology of abolition of the state and private property).

Until 1980, Democracy was still a minority form of government. The majority of governments, and the majority of people, lived in autocracies. Only with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 did Democracies outnumber autocracies. So why have many countries gravitated towards other forms?

The difficult thing in politics is to tread a middle path. At certain points in the history of civilizations there is too much chaos and factionalism. We find the 'disintegration of the state' over much of Europe after the fall of Rome, in China after the Opium Wars, or in eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Local chiefs, lords, commissars and war-lords increase in power and bandits roam. The State is dismembered and cannot maintain a monopoly of the use of force. This is deeply unpleasant for most of the inhabitants, trampled over and pulled this way and that.

If wealth and technical efficiency increase and temporary alliances turn into permanent ones, everything changes. Political power increases at the State level and local resistance is crushed. Often this coincides with the banning of all alternative groupings. So a movement from disintegration to over-integration, or at least attempted total control, is the normal pattern.

Very rarely does an alternative emerge. In small city states or in the early history of empires this alternative is often called republicanism. Citizens, that is the free members of a republic, whether in Athens, early Rome, the Florentine Republic of the fifteenth century or the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century, although usually a minority of the population, share in government. There is no single ruler, no King or dictator.

Yet this is an unstable arrangement, which soon drifts towards some form of monarchy. For instance, it took only a few years for the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell in England to drift back to the unpopular idea that Cromwell's successor should be his son. It took little time for Napoleon to set himself up as ruler and establish a new dynasty after the French Revolution had established a Republic in France in 1789.

Power is soon concentrated in the hands of a single ruler, his family and close circle. Republics are not only short lived but are usually only found in small political units. Until the later eighteenth century, there is no case of a large state (the size of France, Spain, Japan or China) being a republic for more than a few years. In the twentieth century new forms of autocracy took power away from traditional rulers (in Russia and China ) or the people (Germany, Italy, Spain) and placed it in the hands of the Communist Party or the Fascist State. The present swing to Democracy is strange and unprecedented.

Why is Democracy so fashionable?

Some say that Democracy has temporarily triumphed because it is economically successful. Democracy is part of a package which ensures that individuals can pursue their economic goals in safety and indeed are encouraged to do so. So it tends to generate economic and hence military success. Yet there are difficulties in this argument.

It is clear that Democracy does not automatically generate economic growth. It is possible to point to periods in the history of Democratic societies, including the recession in the United States in the 1930's, where there has been economic decline. Secondly, there are forms of autocracy, as in China today with its amazing economic growth, which are temporarily more successful than most Democracies. There are one-party, bureaucratic, states such as Singapore or, some would argue, Japan which have had extraordinary growth without Democracy in the normal sense of the word. So Democracy is neither a guarantee of growth nor is it the only path.

Others suggest that Democracy is successful because it wins the affections of people who feel empowered by their right to choose their leaders. They treasure the feeling of liberty when they can, through such choice, run their own lives. There is clearly something in this. Yet the speed with which people abandoned Democracy when it failed economically, as Hitler and Mussolini showed, makes us pause. The fact that most people in Britain now do not bother to vote in local and European elections, and that the number voting in national elections in the United States is shrinking so dramatically, suggests that the emotional appeal is less strong than might be assumed.

Does Democracy satisfy?

There are good reasons why people fail to vote. In ancient Athens, 'Democracy' while proclaimed, was largely incomplete. Only a very small part of 'the people', that is the free male citizens, had any say in government. Full suffrage in Britain took a long time to achieve. It was not until 1928 that women got the right to vote in parliamentary elections.

There are other dangers. One is known as the 'tyranny of the majority'. According to the logic of Democracy, the government should obey the will of the majority. This majority may well be fickle and have illiberal views. It may be swayed by newspapers or orators to be intolerant, bigoted or even, as in Maoist China or Hitler's Germany, very unpleasant. Minorities can suffer badly from the majority view. This has been found historically by the Jews. In many parts of the world asylum seekers, homosexuals and gypsies have also suffered from the intolerance of the majority.

An equal danger lies in politicians doing what they feel is best for the country, even if most of the people who elected them did not vote for their specific actions and may not agree with them.

Another difficulty lies in reducing the complexity of life to a single decision between opposing political parties. At national elections the parties put forward their ideas in a manifesto. Many people agree with bits from each of the opposing party programs. But you can only vote for one side. When they come to power the politicians may refer to their manifesto (which most have not read) and then pursue policies which those who elected them did not anticipate. People consequently feel cheated and there are allegations of 'elective dictatorship'.

Furthermore, the party in power often brings in new ideas, after a year or two, with which someone who voted for them totally disagrees. They fight a war, bring in new taxes or criminal legislation which are unacceptable to even their strongest supporters. People can write to their Member of Parliament, but they feel this has little effect. As the British labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee candidly admitted 'Democracy means government by discussion but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.'

What is the strength of Democracy?

Many think that the only real virtue of the system is that the politicians are accountable at the end of a limited term in power, through the need for re-election. This tempers the arrogance of power. The fact that there is an almost automatic swing against whoever is in power, who soon appear to be the source of our present discontents, means that the government is periodically purged. After a while in office, every government appears shabby. This may save a country from the drift to autocracy.

The fact that almost all our leaders appear to us as fools once they are in power, pathetically inadequate or seriously deceived, shows that the system is working. On a recent visit to China I met many young people who had recently discovered that their leaders were old, stupid and corrupt. These young Chinese were cynical, and yet upset by this realization. I reassured them that it is this very cynicism, rampant over the last three hundred years or more in England, which is one of the glories of Democracy. Those in power should never be trusted fully. We should always remember the novelist Daniel Defoe's short verse: 'Nature has left this tincture in the blood, That all men would be tyrants if they could.' The British Prime Minister Winston Church suggested that 'It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.' It is often a sham, a mask for power, but it is difficult to think of a better system.

Should our rights and freedoms be enshrined in writing?

People have suggested that we would be better protected against our rulers and the tyranny of the majority through a written constitution. Certainly the American Constitution was a noble document, guaranteeing individual liberties and freedom of conscience. But it has worked because the principles it enshrined were very vague and general truisms, a statement of the obvious ideas transferred from the unwritten British political system. It could be, and has been, interpreted in entirely different ways by different people.

Written constitutions, in themselves, are no guarantee of liberty. The French, Italians, Germans have had many written constitutions over the last two hundred years but this has not protected them against tyranny. Attempts to introduce a European Constitution are causing considerable alarm since there is a feeling that it is too open-ended, too easily amendable, too undermining of subsidiary powers, hazy about the level of responsibilities. The new order will soon be overburdened by trying to specify too much. By its silences and omissions it may destroy rather than increase liberty.

What is liberty?

There are two types of liberty, negative and positive. Negative liberty is the core of the English tradition. There are certain things which others, including the State, cannot do to you. They cannot seize your body or your wealth without due process of law. They cannot take away your freedom of speech, action, right of association with others without legal warrant. A very few negative rules cover most of life. They are encapsulated by the philosopher John Stuart Mill when he wrote that the 'liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.'

Positive liberty on the other hand is the right, and often the duty, to do certain things. The right to health care, the right to be employed, the right to schooling. This sounds fine, but the problem is that much more has to be itemized. Anything not specified explicitly can be assumed to be absent as a right.

Positive liberty is the essence of the past Continental European tradition. It tends to end up in over-blown bureaucracy and much extra work for lawyers. With well-meaning attention to minute details it can stifle true democracy and even Democracy.

Many have felt that laws and politicians should not tell you how you should behave. That is the province of religion. Fascism and communism are an attempt to bend the will of the people towards what the leaders think is the moral way, they combine the roles of religion and politics. Others feel on the contrary that the law and politicians should stick to stating what you must not do.

Does freedom from interference help?

One advantage of the negative definition of liberty is that it gives greater flexibility in a multi-cultural world. If we examine games, we find that their openness come from the fact that rules are negative, not positive. In football there is just a minimal set of negative rules; you must not pick up the ball (unless you are goal keeper), trip people up, get 'off side'. There are no positive rules telling you that you must be nice to anyone who smiles at you, always show courtesy, always shake hands with your opponents at any opportunity.

One of the greatest achievements of the United States has been the way in which, over the centuries, it has absorbed waves of immigrants. Although we no longer believe that it is a melting-pot, certainly many groups with different origins live moderately amicably together. They can be Americans because to be so does not demand their hearts and souls. There are things which you cannot do, to your fellow countrymen at least, as an American, kill people, steal their property, forbid them from saying things. But there are few positive things you have to do or believe. Even saluting the flag, or eating apple pie and Thanksgiving turkey is optional.

Likewise in the British Empire there were negative rules of a universal kind. But, with some exceptions such as banning widow burning and head-hunting, individual consciences and variations in belief and culture were not to be interfered with. This was different from the Catholic, continental European, tradition. This may be one of the reasons why many British look with such apprehension at the attempts to introduce positive laws and positive discrimination, positive human rights, a new political and legal order, by way of the European parliament and constitution.

What are the deeper roots of Democracy?

The British unease about the European Constitution can only be understood if we look at a thousand years of history. The English view is that modern Democracy was nurtured and grown in England in its early form, and only later exported. They argue that the social and mental under-pinning of Democracy, that is democracy in the wider sense of responsibility and power passed down to lower levels, is a very old affair.

These historians examine the workings of the unwritten English constitution. They note the balance and separation of powers, delegation of responsibility, set of intermediary institutions, that is things like the universities, companies, religious organizations, clubs and associations which lie between the subject and the state. According to the dominant ideas of the last thousand years, the ruler was not absolute, but first amongst equals. There were many loyalties or obligations, only some of them were to the State.

England was in some respects the most integrated and powerful State in history. Taxes were high, there were few over-mighty subjects, there were few banned institutions. Every subject was bound into the political system. Although only a few of the richer landholders for a very long time had a vote, thus disenfranchising the majority of the population and particularly women, many people had a say in part of the running of their own lives.

So there was relatively effective government combined with a good deal of delegated power. It was not full Democracy in the modern sense, but it was an unusually open and liberal society, there was equality before the law, with the partial exception of lords (Peers) and an unusually egalitarian and tolerant form of society, a 'democracy' of a sort.

Is Democracy the solution to the world's woes?

People living in parts of New Guinea noticed that when the white people arrived, they often built airfields. Planes would then arrive to spill out huge quantities of desirable things or 'cargo'. It seemed clear that the airfields were the key. They attracted the planes. So people hopefully built airfields and then waited for the cargo to arrive. They were disappointed.

We have become the same with 'Democracy'. We have observed that democracy is often associated with consumer success and some forms of freedom. Democracies we feel deliver the goods. We conclude that if we set out and 'build democracies' around the world, by persuasion, bribes or force, the benefits linked to democracy will automatically follow. If we put out the ballot boxes, the rest will soon occur. We will be equally disappointed. We have forgotten that 'Democracy' is the result of many other things. It is as much the consequence as the cause of things we appreciate. We have become political cargo cultists.

Can Democracy last?

It may well be that economic growth is necessary for the success of Democracy. The Soviet Union collapsed largely because of its poor economic performance. Democracy has won because it delivers wealth. Yet Democracy, as we have seen, does not guarantee growth. Other systems may be more efficient, not just in the short-term as in many of the new nations in Asia, but perhaps in the long-term as in China.

Nor does Democracy guarantee equality. It may well be that equality before the law and the rule of law are necessary for Democracy. But Democracy and such equality do not guarantee any specific outcome in terms of actual equality. The extremes of wealth and poverty which are growing in the United States, contrast starkly with the extraordinary economic equality in the largely one-party Japan. This suggests that while individuals may be politically 'free' in a place with Democracy, they may be materially unfree – the poor being worse housed, worse educated and less healthy than the rich.

History has not come to an end, as some prematurely alleged. The triumph of Democratic capitalism is not assured for ever. Only vigilance combined with luck will ensure that the least bad of all political systems lasts for another hundred years in those parts of the world which desire it. Humility is the best way to ensure that it spreads to other countries which have as yet not enjoyed its blessings and its frustrations. Active participation by the people, combined with deep scepticism, may keep the system alive.

Description:

An analsysis of the roots of personal freedom, in particular the growth of Civil Society and the legal device of the Trust.

Where does freedom come from?

Dear Lily,

You may have heard people talking about 'civil society' and wondered what it means. The talk is of exporting this idea to places which formerly lacked it, namely the communist zones of eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and China. You will certainly be aware that many people talk of defending the values of 'democracy', 'freedom', an 'open and tolerant society' against those who attack it. Yet in all this discussion there is seldom any explanation or questioning of where these strange commodities, that is freedom and openness, came from.

'Civil society' usually refers to the world of associations and organizations which lie between the State and the individual. In many societies it is the family group and sometimes the religious caste which inhabits this space. Yet in the modern west these are less important.

Instead there is a multitude of organizations to which people belong, but which are not run by the State. Schools, universities, trades unions, political clubs, sporting clubs, religious groups, scientific and literary clubs, economic institutions, these and many others enable someone to belong to an organization. This can provide strength through numbers and the pooling of resources.

In most civilizations in the past, and in Fascist and Communist nations in the last century, all these institutions were banned, or controlled by the State. Individuals owed their allegiance to the State or Party, not to other organizations. Civil Society was prohibited. How is it, then, that these associations and groups now flourish in such a lively way in much of the world? And what effect does this have?

Where did an open society come from?

The revival of Roman law, which spread over all of continental Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, brought with it a homogenizing, flattening, tendency. This set almost all of Europe along a new path. Yet during this important period England retained its Common (Germanic) Law system.

At this time, a legal accident occurred in England that was to change the world we live in. Lawyers were, as ever, trying to find a way round a tax regime. When a wealthy man died, his landed property, held in the strict feudal system directly of the King, was forfeited back to the Crown. In order for his heirs to re-claim it, they had to pay a heavy death duty on their estates. Naturally the rich did not like this. Their legal advisors saw that the problem could be avoided if they made the man at his death no longer the owner of the property. If he did not hold the property at death, the Crown could not seize it and insist on a tax before it passed on to his heirs.

So the lawyers invented the device of the Trust. A group of friends of the property holder were chosen and the estate was legally conveyed to them. They held it 'in trust for the use of another'. It was legally theirs to do what they liked with, but the owner trusted them to pass it on at his death to his heirs and to carry out his wishes in whatever way he had privately told them.

The Trust created a strange and anomalous thing. Trustees were appointed to work together to hold and administer property and to take collective decisions. The Trust had a name, a separate existence, a body that existed through time. So it was technically a 'corporation', a 'body'. Yet it had not been set up by the State, it had not been 'incorporated' or licensed by the State with a formal document. It had been set up by a group of private citizens, yet it was recognized by national law.

Such entities were threatening to the State if they became powerful since trustees could make their own rules. It also allowed citizens to work together and create alternative loyalties. Consequently trusts were banned during the French, Russian and Chinese revolutionary periods, and by Mussolini and Hitler. In England, Henry VIII tried to destroy them but it was too late. Abolished for a few years, the Trusts were restored by a technical legal trick.

How did we get freedom?

From very early on the Trust idea spread beyond the simple avoiding of death duties. The idea provided a device which could be used for any need. In the field of economics, any group that wished to set up a mutually-supportive, private, non-State, entity could now do so. Whether it was a great trading organization such as the East India Company, a bank or insurance company such as Lloyds, or even the Stock Exchange, the device of the Trust was ready at hand. Much of the success of Britain came from this form of organization. The United States has widely used the same idea as the foundation of the mighty trusts and corporations which now rule the world.

In religion, the Trust sheltered the growing independence of the Protestant Christian sects. Without the ability to set up meeting places and independent organizations provided by the Trust, the Quakers, Baptists, Methodists and other religious nonconformists could never have flourished. Much of what we call religious liberty was made possible by this device. Without it, in certain Catholic countries, the Jews, Masons, Lutherans and others were persecuted almost to extinction.

When the State becomes more powerful it does not usually tolerate rivals. The growth of parties, of political clubs and organizations, grew out of the Trust concept. The early clubs of the Whigs and Tories, the later clubs and associations of working men, the Trades Union movement, all were based on the legal device of the Trust.

Likewise, the whole system of devolved government, the shires with their magistrates and local power, the parish councils and many other local and regional bodies were given strength by the concept. Local educational and church organizations, grammar schools and vestries, all were trust-based.

Normally rulers come to believe that power is their private property, they own it. The strange thing in Democracy is that power is held in trust for the people. The present rulers are trustees, they have been entrusted with temporary power, which is not theirs but has to be passed on to their successors. When they are felt no longer to be performing adequately, they are replaced by another 'board of trustees', or as they are called, the Government. The corruption of power is held in check by the limited period for which it can be held.

In international politics, the Trust idea formed the core of an extraordinary Empire. All other Empires in history have been held, usually through force of conquest, by the imperial country entirely for its own purposes. Rome, Spain and France 'owned' their Empire. In the British Empire, however greatly the ideal became tarnished in practice, the concept grew that the imperial territories were held 'in trust' for the people who inhabited them.

In theory, at least, Britain held its vast dominions in trust. When the children or grand-children of the people from whom the land had been appropriated had grown to 'adulthood', that is to a position where they could assume responsibility, the Trust would be ended. Thus wealth raised from different parts of the Empire should, as in a Trust, be put back into the Trust for the future welfare of those on whose behalf it was held. There was, in other words, responsibility as well as power. Even if it is largely a a myth, and some would say hypocricy and humbug, it is a powerful and inhibiting one. Nationalists such as the lawyer Gandhi could use the rhetoric to gain freedom for India.

How did we get social and intellectual freedom?

The Trust gave the British two of their most famous institutions. There were the social and philanthropic clubs and associations; the Women's Institute, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides, Oxfam, Amnesty, the Samaritans, the Salvation Army, the National Trust, the Royal Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, for the Protection of Birds, for the Protection of Children, the Lions, the Rotarians. There were numerous working class clubs and organizations, funeral societies, pigeon-fancying, leek growing, discussion groups, sports groups. Many of the clubs and institutions which have spread around the world were invented in Britain on the basis of the idea of non-governmental clubs.

Secondly there are the team games, cricket, football, rugby football, hockey which are now the world's great passion. Many of the team games played in the world were invented in Britain and others like baseball and American football developed in the other land of associations. They all revolve round the club and the club-house (as did golf from Scotland and tennis originally from France). Some of the clubs were famous, such as the Marylebone Cricket Club or M.C.C., or the institution which was described as the most powerful political body in nineteenth century Britain, the Jockey Club. Many others were local and small. The concept of the club run by trustees formed the shell within which team games could be nurtured and enjoyed.

The Universities and learned societies, whether of the elite (the Royal Society, British Academy) or the masses (working men's clubs, local libraries and institutions such as the London Lending Library) were based on the trust idea. Without these, the meetings of engineers, philosophers and others in the coffee clubs and hundreds of small groupings would not have occurred. These clubs had an incalculable effect on the development of scientific and industrial knowledge.

What happens if we don't trust people?

The Trust idea encouraged that rare commodity 'trust' to develop. Without this, the economic, political and social foundations of modern Democracies could not exist. The hybrid device of the Trust runs counter to most of the powerful tendencies in the development of civilizations. Almost always any advance in wealth or power in a society has, after a short while, been gobbled up by the central power. Knowledge is power, so it must be incorporated into the centre. Social status is power, so it must be harnessed. Economic wealth must be absorbed. Religious loyalty must be channelled towards the State in alliance with the clergy. The State demands all of this. If the State is threatened, or pretends to be threatened, its demands are almost impossible to reject.

Other threatening institutions are systematically extinguished or enfeebled, until in the later periods of every Empire, whether in Rome, China, the Habsburgs, the Ottomans or France, the peripheral powers are weak. There develops a central power which aspires to be all-powerful and which is supported by an ever-growing bureaucracy and standing army. When the absolutisms of the twentieth century emerged, with their superior forms of surveillance and advanced technologies of control, even the family group was shattered. Nothing stands between the individual and Joseph Stalin, Chairman Mao or Pol Pot.

The State is like a machine for cutting grass, a lawn-mower with its blade fixed at the maximum setting so it is very close to the earth. It cuts off and absorbs into itself anything that sticks up more than a tiny way. If the universities, the monasteries, the cities, the traders and merchants, the industrial producers or anyone else starts to accumulate visible wealth and power, especially if they start to proclaim their own rules and independent government, the State officials savagely prune or eliminate them. Only two types of organization can survive such a system which confiscates any conspicuous wealth and destroys all alternative power structures.

One is the secret, banned, organization whose members hide from the State. The mafia, yakuza, triads and even, in a somewhat different way, the Masons, are forced into a negative existence as a black or inverted Civil Society. These are outlawed groups which provide services to the individual, often with the partial complicity of some State officials.

The other survivor is the thick, flat, entangled, low level cover of strong family ties. Through most of history, all that seems able to give ordinary people some protection, to provide an area of safety against the predations of the State, are the natural bonds of birth, or the constructed bonds of kinship through such institutions as blood brotherhood or god-parenthood. Only in the family can we trust. A world of suspicion and tight family groups usually emerges, as we find from Italy to China or South America.

How are trust and democracy linked?

Through an accident, Civil Society, that is the thick layer of organizations which lies between the State and the individual Subject or Citizen, continued and flourished and the civil liberties and rights of free thought and free association became increasingly valued.

Such a flourishing of Civil Society and alternative centres of power has, of course, happened before in history, as in Athens in its great period, or for a time in the Italian city states. Yet in most cases the experiment had been small and short-lived. Only when the trust coincided with two other developments (which it also helped to bring into being) could a new type of civilization be established.

One of these was a new way of obtaining reliable knowledge about the natural world (the scientific revolution). The other was a new way of harnessing that knowledge to generate new power and wealth for humans (the industrial revolution). When these two were joined with the Trust, there developed a powerful form of political and social system, which we often term 'the open society'.

Yet it is well to remember that the creation of an open society was an accident, an unintended consequence of many other forces. It was not the result of superior virtues or intelligence on the part of people living in one part of the world. We should also remember that it is constantly under pressure from forces from both the left and right.

The danger of the lawn-mower blades being set too low and stifling all independent power (communism) is matched by an equal danger from rampant capitalism. In several parts of the world at present the blades are set so high that vast wealth is accumulated in private hands and the whole nation suffers from overgrown corporations and obscenely inflated private fortunes.

So there is nothing to suggest that a vibrant civil society will continue indefinitely. It does not take a great deal to erode it, or even to snuff it out entirely. Throughout history we have seen strong tendencies towards centralization and the erosion of lower level liberties. Some see it today behind the activities of the advocates of increasing European centralization and integration.

Even more ironically, those who appear to be most vociferous in their condemnation of assaults on the open society by terrorists and others often slip into an attack on the very civil institutions, such as the media or the due legal process, which they claim to be defending. They can act unwittingly as the very agents of the enemies of the open society.

Description:

A analysis of some of the functions of bureaucracy, and also of some of the strong tendencies for organizations to become over-bureaucratic.

Transcript:

What is bureaucracy for?

Dear Lily,

As soon as societies developed complex organizations, the state, churches,cities, they needed organizers and managers. Almost all activities, in fact,need some rules and administration. No games could be played, no artsperformed, no knowledge transmitted, no products made if there were not rulesand umpires, referees and teachers to administer them. Schools, hospitals,courts of law, libraries, universities, industrial firms, parliament, all needrules and all need bureaucracy. Unadulterated foodstuffs, uniform measures andstandards, agreed rules about behaviour, all need supervision.

So bureaucracy is one of the great tools of civilization. Nowadays mostorganizations need an accountant, a lawyer, a secretary and an administrator.Our lives would collapse into disorder without bureaucracy.

As a form of government it has many things to commend it, especially when comparedto its competitors. The aim of the bureaucrat is to apply uniform rules touniform cases, to work by a recognized code. Favouritism, corruption, theemotional tugs of power, patronage, family ties should be rejected. Impersonalrules should be imposed. All of this is very commendable. In this letter,however, I shall concentrate on the negative side of bureaucracy, for this isless often noticed.

How do people keep order?

Under traditional authority, society is held together by rulers whom we obeybecause they represent the past, the ancestral and customary wisdom. Obedienceis unquestioning, passed on from generation to generation by succession tooffices of power vested with authority. A king, a chief, a priest, all havethis source of authority.

From time to time such traditional authority is challenged and sometimesoverthrown in a moment of creative chaos by the personal insights and dynamismof a single individual. Why such moments of 'charismatic' (literally meaning alaying on of hands) authority occurs, whether through the lives of the Buddha,Jesus Christ, Genghis Khan, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon or Chairman Mao is alarge question.

What is certain is that the periods inaugurated by a charismatic leader tend tolast only a short time. Soon the founder dies. Yet he or his followers may setup institutions which live by the rules or precedents which he outlined,whether he was St Benedict or Karl Marx. This leads to the third type ofauthority, the setting of impartial rules and standards, operated by trainedofficials in a 'bureaucracy', literally a place where paper is stored.

All of history can be read as a tension between these types of authority. Infact they usually co-exist rather than one replacing another. The prophetrelies on bureaucratic structures, the Civil Service relies on the charisma ofpoliticians.

Why do organizations grow?

The benefits of bureaucracy make it attractive to many. Increased efficiencycan lead to better medical care, better traffic control, a better economy, andall sorts of benefits which make life run smoothly. Bureaucrats can stand outagainst the partisan influence of connections and kinship and the corruptionsof threat and bribery. Bureaucracy is a powerful bulwark against revolution,subversion and over-enthusiasm. It can protect scarce resources, allocatewealth more fairly and protect the weak from the strong. As the poet AlexanderPope put it, 'For forms of government let fools contest: Whate'er is bestadminister'd is best'.

So there is very often a growing desire to control through administrativeaction, to use bureaucracies as an arm of government. The State holds thepeople together primarily through administrative centralization. As it seeks toextend its power, so it increases its chief tool of power, bureaucracy. Thereis a powerful pressure towards multiplying the number and control ofbureaucrats.

A second much more recent trend in modern states is the desire to encourageequality of access and execution of rules. This usually opens with a campaignagainst inequality, privilege and special favours, with a desire to level andredistribute what there is.

In order to do this, everything must be flattened, be put on the same level.Communist societies try to abolish classes and the State ends up withall-powerful administrative classes and a nightmare of incompatible rules whichfew believe in. It is no accident that the Soviet Union was ruled by somethingcalled the 'Politburo' (the political bureaucracy).

For much of the past, bureaucracies were used to maintain inequality, toextract wealth from the mass of the population and distribute it to theprivileged. Since the American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenthcentury, the desire to enforce equality through bureaucratic pressures has beenrelated to the desire to enforce equality and individualism. It is proclaimedthat individuals have inherent rights, and if these are infringed then theremust be action to protect them.

That is fine up to a point. The problem is that it is much easier to define andprotect individual rights than to define and defend the wider community orsocial rights. It is much easier (and more profitable) for a bureaucrat orlawyer to deal with single individuals than with communities.

Are organizations a disease?

One reason for bureaucracies to grow is the desire to increase power and pay.As each procedure in an organization is made into a job, it creates 'ecologicalniches' or nesting places, as it were, for officials, who live off theinstitution. Since there is little power, pay or prestige if one has few or nosubordinates, to increase their power and importance, each bureaucrat tries toincrease the number of their assistants. The number of 'officials' very quicklyexpands to consume the resources available.

As soon as a germ (administrator) moves into a new body (hospital, school,university, law court) it breeds, dividing and sub-dividing tasks, creatingneeds which only new administrators can fulfil. It develops or applies aspecial status-enhancing language ('goals', 'bench-marks', 'missionstatements'). This compensates for the fact that it is in the nature of suchprofessional administrators that they have no particular skill or knowledge ofthe area in which they work.

They are not trained to give lectures, to perform surgical operations or toteach children. They probably know little of the content. Yet they do know howto work in local politics, to deal with outside bureaucratic agencies. They aretrained to help to bring in money, to minimize risk, to homogenize andgeneralize rules and to avoid some of the 'corruption' of individual action andsubjective judgements.

Examples of bureaucratic systems becoming ever larger and powerful arewidespread. For example, a constant flow of requests for information or thebringing in of new rules has quite overwhelmed the central administration inmany universities, hospitals and police forces in Britain. So theadministrators try to handle this by creating new posts and also passing onparts of the load down the system. Lower down, the burden rises and newadministrative posts are set up, then soon overwhelmed, which again passesfurther work on down.

The great analyst of bureaucracies, C.Northcote Parkinson, gives a good exampleof what happens. In 1914 the British Navy had 62 capital ships in commission,run by 2000 admiralty officials. By 1928 there were 20 capital ships, run by3569 Admiralty officials. There was, as was noted, 'a magnificent navy onland', since the ships had decreased by 67% while the bureaucrats had increasedby 78%.

To believe that the spread of more administrators will either diminish workloads, or even lead to more efficient administration (measured by input/outputof time and energy) is as naïve as to assume that computers will one day bringless work for humans or create the paperless office.

What is bureaucracy?

Bureaucracy is an extremely efficient and effective system because it rests ona rational ordering of time and space. It is based on the idea of a bureau orwriting desk with drawers in it. Everything must fit somewhere. The fact thatmany things are untidy, or fit between categories, cannot be tolerated.

Ideally, everything should be placed on an equal level on the desk. Like cases,like solutions; a level playing field, universal tariffs. Do not allowdiscretion or personal circumstances to cloud judgement. Everything should becomparable. Since qualities cannot be compared, as in apples and oranges, sothey must be reduced to something similar, for example weight or volume.

It is also necessary to generate some principle of filing the information that is collected so that it can be re-used. Usually an hierarchal storage system is created, based on stating very general principles and then working to split these, layer after layer, until every conceivable type of case has its own pigeon-hole.

The bureaucracy disapproves of all rule breaking, which it tends to label 'corruption'. It thrives on the multiplication of rules, attempts to make provision for every kind of situation, tries to prevent individuals in the group from exercising too much personal discretion.

Another tendency is towards centralization of power. If possible, decisions are moved upwards in the system, too much delegated power is to be avoided as it might lead to a lack of uniformity, 'unprincipled exceptionalism'. If it can be shown that different parts of the same institution act differently, this is equivalent to corruption. Usually in a bureaucracy there is not only an hierarchical arrangement of the drawers so that rules are of a rigid kind, but the organization of roles is hierarchical. This means that every decision of any importance has to be ratified by someone higher up the chain.

Why measure everything?

It has often been noted that assessing is a very strong feature of bureaucracies. They always wish to place things on lists in their attempt to turn uniquely varied qualities into measurable quantities. This is very obvious in all walks of life. In schools there are increasing numbers of tests which are marketed as good for the child, parent and school. They will make assessments available in order to mark progress towards targets and to make some kind of comparison between the intrinsically incomparable. In hospitals, universities and elsewhere it is the same.

One particularly intriguing and rapid growth in one branch of this desire to assess, is the wish to try to protect against the future. There is now a huge business in 'risk assessment'. There are many organizations and individuals whose life is spent trying to quantify and specify and hence, in theory, diminish risks. Since life is full of risk, when consulted they usually suggest extreme caution.

Another technique of modern bureaucracies uses the metaphor of the path or track, namely the 'audit trail'. The old saying that justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done, now applies to all administration. It is not enough to teach or examine well, but every stage must be put on paper so that if there is an enquiry or 'audit', the 'paper trail' is clear, unambiguous and correct. The principle of finance, that everything must be accounted for, that life is to be reduced to a double-entry page, that there must be written receipts for everything, is now applied more generally.

There are now teaching audits, research audits, hospital, legal, and many other kinds of audits. 'If it moves salute it, if it doesn't move whitewash it' used to be an army saying. The equivalent now is, 'if it is unpredictable at all, risk assess it; if it leads to an outcome, make an audit trail'.

Is bureaucracy a danger?

A certain amount of bureaucracy, accountability and organization is vital for the world we live in. The benefits of bureaucracy do not need urging. Yet the hidden costs of over-doing the regulation are very considerable. As the rules multiply, it becomes so difficult to do anything that one has to cheat or break the rules in order to survive. Indeed, since the rules often conflict with each other and whatever one does breaks some rule so it is a question of choosing between illegalities.

I still remember how surprised I was when a building regulations inspector came to check the house we live in. We had put in a new staircase without a handrail. He said it was unsafe and must have a handrail. When we put that in, he said that it was now too narrow for safety. Short of pulling down much of a seventeenth century structure, we were bound to break the law one way or another.

The system becomes ever more complicated, with more and more rules. Rather than leading to openness and transparency (which was the original intention), this leads to a situation where only a highly trained specialist (professional bureaucrat) knows how it works. There is as a result more space for hidden corruption.

There is also a loss of personal incentives. Humans like freedom and responsibility in their lives. They like to be given basic guidance and then encouraged to get on with things; to be ingenious and creative in their solutions. As bureaucracy increases, people are ever more rule-bound, forced to work 'by the book'. This means that jobs become dead; creative and ingenious solutions are often frowned upon.

The hierarchical nature of bureaucracy leads to duplication, the erosion of trust and individual creativity are the emergence of a 'surveillance society'. It ends up in the typical Japanese office with its endless stamps and fear of being 'the nail that sticks up' which will quickly be hammered down.

One unexpected effect of over-bureaucratization is the spread of cynicism. For much of English history rules were few but were observed and respected. The proliferation of rules, as in the Soviet Union, means that they are seen as obstacles, nuisances, pressures which work against the individual, barriers to get round and break if possible.

Cunning, cheating, deviance, learning the real rules behind the rules, are what it is all about, a phenomenon found in all over-centralized bureaucracies. This breeds cynicism since the less successful, the small rule breakers, assume that the successful have got to where they are by cheating, bribery, corruption and breaking rules.

Another harmful effect of over-active bureaucracies is that they divert talent. In almost all organizations, the higher the pay and the higher the status, the less practical work and the more administration. A head teacher who was perhaps an excellent communicator does not teach any more. An excellent surgeon ends up doing paperwork as head of a hospital. A brilliant academic is finally the administrative head of a University. None of them any longer do the thing they most enjoy or are good at. They spend their time as fund raisers, personnel officers, chairs of committees. It is a widespread tendency: if you can do anything really well, stop doing it and become an administrator.

The aim of the bureaucrat is to prevent 'corruption', which is defined as the use of human contacts, networks, allowing in warmth, affection and emotion. Ironically the proliferation of rules often means that the only way to cut through them is through a form of networking or as it is known in Nepal, afno manche, literally 'own people' knowing someone and using ties of patronage.

A further effect is waste of time and effort, much of it never accounted for despite the fact that bureaucracy is supposed to be based on accountability. In case an institution might need to justify an action, huge amounts of time are spent on concocting audit trails, lengthy agendas, minutes, papers to cover every aspect of everything. The time and energy in doing all this when set against the cost of any likely harmful outcome is probably out of all proportion. Yet it is held to be irresponsible not to do it. If there is trouble, the lawyers will go for the weakest point, so the bureaucracies have to lumber themselves with huge protective defences over their whole body.

Can we avoid being drowned in paper?

When people looked at bureaucracy over Europe during the period between 1200-1800, they pointed to one path which had avoided this almost universal tendency. This was to be found in England. Linked to the growth of powerful middling groups, the absence of the threat of war, the nature of the Common Law, the proliferation of wealth, the growth of a powerful set of intermediary groupings, the English from the twelfth to nineteenth centuries represented a strange paradox.

England maintained a curious tension between the most centralized feudal landholding and judicial system in history (with all land ultimately held and all justice flowing from the Crown) and the most de-centralized administrative system, where the legislature and executive were practically separate. Local government was extremely strong and independent down through the county to the parish level. The central bureaucracy in the capital, as well as the size of the standing army and police, was small when compared to almost every other middling-sized state in Europe.

This unusual tradition, which many observers thought was one of Britain's greatest strengths, has almost vanished. Since the 1980's as bureaucracy has spread with the so-called 'management revolution'. Every attempt to get rid of the tentacles seems only to increase the problem.

So what can be done? The main thing is to be aware of the reasons for the spread of this replicating growth. The second is to be aware of some of its effects. The third is, if it cannot be altered, to learn how to survive within the increasingly bureaucratic systems. These are arts which those living in eastern Europe or Italy have perfected.

One obvious way to survive bureaucracy is to join it. This will be a real temptation for you when you are looking for a job. Many people have joined professions and have by their very success been promoted into management positions. Or they have been forced to seek promotion to an administrative post to pay for the mortgage, health insurance, pensions or children's education.

If you are faced with very intrusive bureaucracy you will be forced to learn various ways to out-wit the system and to get round some of the more unacceptable tests and indices. While these techniques are important, the most important thing is to keep cheerful and positive.

The most insidious feature of bureaucracy is that, like all power, it tends to affect even those who start off as sceptical. People come to believe in the assessments, audits and mechanisms. They tend to take them very seriously and try to fit themselves into the evolving system. Once this concession has been made, there is little chance of escape.

Keeping a sense of humour which mocks some of the more extreme forms of bureaucratic behaviour helps. We need to remember the jokes. Most bureaucracies have an element of the criticism made of the British Civil Service, which provides 'a difficulty for every solution'. A Committee can often be 'a group that takes minutes and wastes hours'.

Yet being forced into such joking, and the feelings of wasted talent and time, is a considerable price to pay for supposed gains in efficiency. As in many of the great bureaucracies such as classical Iran or Mandarin China, cynicism is corrosive of integrity, personal and civic, and of morale, personal and public. The dilemma is that we need an uncorrupted civil service and an uncorrupt bureaucracy to make life tolerable. Yet bureaucracies have a tendency to expand and become over-intrusive. Getting the balance right is very difficult.

Description:

A comparison of different legal systems, their structures and outcomes, particularly English Common Law and Japan.

How do we get justice?

Dear Lily,

In most societies the last thing a person wants to do is to go anywhere near a court of law. A lot of money is wasted and you may lose. So if you want to sort out a quarrel you get your brothers to smash up the other person's house or seize their property. Or, in a Nepalese village, you ask some senior villagers to come and settle the quarrel in a relaxed way, sitting on the veranda amongst the grain baskets and chickens.

Are English and American courts odd?

Law is a strange process which in many ways goes against the grain of ordinary life. A court is basically a place where people behave in an odd way. They bring their disputes to a complete stranger and after listening and asking questions he or she says one is in the right and the other in the wrong.

If going to court is a strange thing to do, going to an English or American court is an extreme form of this peculiarity. You are asked to 'tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth'. In most societies there is no belief that there is an abstract thing called 'truth'. There are believed to be many conflicting types of truth, factual, social, religious, mythical. Each is 'true' in a different way. Furthermore, no-one but a lunatic or a traitor would tell the court something that would hurt their family or friends. People are expected to lie, or at least to tell partial truths.

When you are judged in an English court it is by a curious standard. The ultimate test in the mind of the jury or judge, both of whether your story is true, and whether you have done something wrong, is to ask themselves 'was this the behaviour of a reasonable man?' 'Man' here is a short-hand for everyone, men, women, upper class, lower class. It is assumed that all individuals should and indeed do adhere to the same idea of reasonableness and that all behaviour can therefore be judged by the same standards.

Almost everywhere else, men and women, rich and poor, old and young are assumed to be 'reasonable' in very different ways. Furthermore, reasonable behaviour entirely depends on the social relationship involved. It is reasonable for a man to strike his wife or his son, highly unreasonable for a woman or son to strike back. It is reasonable for an uncle to find a job in his office for his nephew, but not reasonable to find jobs for unrelated people. It is reasonable to pay a bribe to a customs officer or policeman, but not to someone who has no power.

Much of law is concerned with deciding about the behaviour of people who are by birth or achieved position unequal. In Anglo-American law, it is about deciding between people who are considered to be on a level, not intrinsically unequal, even if they appear strikingly different in their education, sex, wealth, race.

It is assumed in modern law that individuals have rights. Men, women, children, disabled people, even the unborn foetus or animals have intrinsic 'rights'. Very few societies in the world share this view. It is usually thought that an individual only exists as part of a group, he or she has rights in relation to others, which are inseparable from responsibilities. There are no innate rights which come with birth.

The idea that, in the words of the American Declaration of Independence, 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' are intrinsic and inextinguishable human rights would be regarded by a large part of the world, even today, and certainly over most of history, as an outrageous claim. When the idea was imported into India in the nineteenth century by the British it caused immense confusion and disapproval. A member of a lower caste, a woman, a child, had never been conceived of as having the same rights as a high caste person, a man, an adult.

This assumption of individual human rights is a very old feature of English law. It has now spread over the world and become a central doctrine of a new form of mission activity. It has many merits. When taken to extremes, without attention to the counter-balancing rights of communities and groups, or the responsibilities that go with the rights, it is as dangerous as rightlessness.

How does law rule over us?

We often hear about 'the rule of law', but what does this mean? One idea is that people are prepared to settle disputes through legal process, rather than by force. A second is that all actions and all power is ultimately under the law. Above the rulers there is something higher; they also are under the law.

Usually legal systems develop in a different way. At first the rulers may say 'we make the laws and we keep the laws'. But after a time they forget the second half of this. They are above the law. So the law does not rule them, they rule the law. You can see this in Stalin's Russia, Chairman Mao's China, or France in the later seventeenth century. There is one Law for the powerful and rich and another Law for the people.

Only in England (Scotland had a different system) for a long period of about seven hundred years have we believed that ultimately the Law is supreme and even the King and his ministers have to abide by it. Everybody is under the same rule. Unlike chess, where certain pieces have privileges, the English law gives few privileges, at least in theory.

The 'rule of law' depends on uniform application of laws and a common procedure. It means that the legal process should be separated off from the political, that the judges and the courts should be independent. All of this is difficult to sustain. Powerful forces, economic and political, are constantly hoping to bias law in their direction.

How do courts work?

The great problem is to persuade people to accept what you are doing in the legal process. Law is a dramatic and often elaborate affair. People dress up in archaic costumes, the judge sits high up above the court, long-sounding words are used in a strangely formal way. There are often dramatic public punishments, as in the so-called 'theatre of Tyburn' where criminals were taken through the streets and executed before the crowds in eighteenth century England.

The legal process takes people out of their ordinary lives where they have become entangled in conflicts. It puts them in an arena that is out of normal time and space. The procedure in the court then re-arranges their lives. You have to exert a lot of pressure in order to persuade people to follow a decision which they may think is against their interest.

So the law is like a game of tennis. People go to a 'court'. They play a combative game, either on their own behalf or through their representatives, serving, returning, trying to outwit their opponents. The judge is the umpire. After the case is heard, their world is changed. One side has won, the other lost.

What are juries?

In almost all serious legal cases you have a confrontation between the State and the Citizen or Subject. The State has almost all the power and the single individual is inherently very weak. So if the State says 'you are suspected of an offence' how can you defend yourself?

When you have a jury system, where it is the duty of your equals (or peers) to decide your guilt or innocence, everything is changed. The jury are not themselves on trial but observers and arbiters. It is one thing to grind down a single individual who is already accused of an offence. It is entirely different to be able to persuade twelve, free, moderately affluent and reasonably educated individuals who have been told on oath to judge as fairly as possible without fear or favour.

So the jury acts as a filter to State power, a protection for the single citizen or subject. It is a key institution in any democracy. Most countries in western Europe had juries of a sort a thousand years ago. Yet almost all had given up the jury system by the eighteenth century. England maintained a jury system up to the present. There are now increasing calls by politicians for its abolition in a wide range of cases.

Should we torture people?

The absence of the use of torture in criminal trials throughout most of English history is a notable feature of its legal system. Very early on the English courts set their face against torture. People believed that if you tortured someone you would not get a true confession. The tortured person would lie in order to make the torture stop. There was also perhaps a certain appreciation of the force in the philosopher Montaigne's remark that 'After all, it is setting a very high price on one's conjectures to burn a man alive for them.'

In English law you did not need the confession of the accused. You proved them guilty or not on the basis of evidence. It has never mattered what the individual thinks after he has been proven guilty. If the jury thinks that you are guilty, you are guilty. You can go to prison or the gallows tree protesting you innocence. That is your right.

This tradition of avoiding the short-cut of torture is also under threat. Some of those engaged in the 'war against terrorism' in Britain and America, where torture is currently banned, are now arguing that it should be allowed, or at least the evidence from those tortured by less scrupulous regimes in other countries should be accepted.

How unusual is England?

The essence of English law is the protection of the individual and his or her rights: to a certain amount of liberty, freedom of speech, control of his or her body and personal space and to everything that they own. Ownership includes visible things, like bits of land and houses, but also invisible things, such as intellectual property rights and certain things such as the right to a title or office.

In most societies, law is mainly concerned with interpersonal matters of status and physical injuries. England, in contrast, has been obsessed with property, with civil law, that is cases between individuals who use the courts to sort out disputes about who has rights in what.

Nowadays the principles of an old English system have spread through the former British Empire and the United States. They are so widespread that they have become the normal way of proceeding. Many of the fundamental ideas, for instance the absence of judicial torture, the separation of politics from law and the rules of evidence have become enshrined in the European constitution and elsewhere. This makes it easy to forget that if we had looked around the world in about 1750 we would have been astonished at the English exception.

Does the English system have advantages?

The sophisticated development of property law and safeguarding of economic interests have helped to make England and America wealthy. People can afford to trust each other and if that trust breaks down they can use the legal system. The early development of industrial capitalism could not have occurred without the extraordinary development of English law.

The other main advantage of this kind of legal system is that, on the whole, the majority of people feel safe under it. Without a legal warrant from a Justice of the Peace, the police cannot raid a person's house or business. Most people most of the time can rest secure that they will not be subject to arbitrary punishment or imprisonment, except asylum seekers and some racial minorities.

If you are thrown into prison you have the right to call a lawyer and the right to know what you are being charged with, and the right to be freed if no charge is brought within a certain number of hours (habeas corpus).

Under the rule of law, an individual is relatively free from censorship of thought and action. Criticism of the authorities, freedom of speech (within reason), the possibilities of reasoned opposition to the present system, are all tolerated.

Some of these advantages of the rule of law are being whittled away. State officials argue that suspected terrorists and asylum seekers should not be given legal protection, they should be imprisoned without charge or trial for long periods. There are those who now fear that once certain categories of people are denied basic legal protection, it will not be too long before we all find ourselves in the nightmare world of Stalin or Chairman Mao.

Are there disadvantages?

People complain about the slowness, cost, complexity and at times inefficiency of the English system. There is something in the satirist Jonathan Swift's observation that 'Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.' It is sometimes impossible to convict someone who is clearly guilty. The inquisitorial system, where the judge can call for more investigation, might well avoid some of these difficulties.

Yet the main disadvantage of the English system is that it can generate an antagonistic attitude. Much of the English system of politics and social life (including sports) is confrontational. The English legal system is odd because it believes, or pretends to believe, that disputes are resolvable into one person winning (being right) and the other losing (being wrong). If this is accepted, then the best way to sort out difficulties is to get those in the dispute to carry out as fierce an argument as possible in front of a referee.

In divorces for instance, a confrontational legal system can lead to much bitterness. The people who profit most from this are the lawyers, who sometimes have a vested interest in dragging the case out. There is much in life where right is evenly divided and mediation or arbitration, poorly developed in the English legal system, is a much better approach to settlement.

In a Nepalese village all quarrels are settled outside the court and in Japan nearly everything is done through mediation or arbitration. The aim of the Anglo-American system is to cut ties, to have a winner and a loser. The aim of many dispute settlement systems has been reconciliation. Relationships are complex and multi-stranded. People will have to on living close to each other and inter-acting in various ways. It is best that their quarrel is smoothed over, rather than settled dramatically in favour of one or the other.

Description:

Different systems of inequality examined - caste, class, serfdom etc. and why there is a growing tendency towards inequality.

Dear Lily,

Throughout your life you will encounter the relics of a world where you were treated as second-rate just because you were female. People will not always listen to what you say, they will not always pay you properly, you may be subjected to indignities that a man would not have to face.

Yet you will also be aware that, compared to most women in the past and present, you are fortunate. Many millions have been assumed to be inferior by birth, the possession of their family. They have been forced to work and to have children, to wear restricting clothes, to have their bodies mutilated. So you may well wonder why gender inequality is so widespread.

Are men and women the same?

There are arguments that men and women are the same. This causes problems because they patently are not the same physically and probably in other ways as well. On the other hand, if they are accepted as different, then there is always the temptation to build this natural difference into inequality.

In Christianity, with Adam created first and Eve made out of his rib and leading him into temptation, or in some Islamic civilizations there is a long tradition of the danger associated with women. So religion often tends to suggest the inferiority of women. In much of the eastern half of the Asian continent women were seen as inferior all the time. In Hindu civilization in India, women should be subservient to their husbands and their brothers.

No-one has really explained this. Some relate it to the superior ability of men in war and hunting, where strength and aggression are more valuable. But what of the reputed Amazons? Furthermore, in most of these civilizations, a well armed woman could well have defeated a man.

Others say it reflects the relative role of men and women in economic production. They suggest that in societies where women are the main producers of the crops through their work with simple hoes (as in much of Africa), they are often powerful and independent. In societies where men are needed to guard the flocks of animals, or to work with heavy tools such as ploughs, as in India and China, then men have the higher status.

There is something in this, but we need to remember that women can plough – as they did in northern Spain and Portugal. Also, in Japan and much of China, the intensive rice cultivation was done with hoes and women were just as important as men in the work. Yet this did not improve their status.

From our own experience we know that the crucial producers, for instance those who worked in the factories and mines in nineteenth century Britain, were still treated as inferior and expendable. So the roots of the inequality seems to be more than just political or economic.

Again, people have said that the attributed inferiority reflects the way we classify the world. We tend to oppose the cultural world of human artefacts, objects which are often thought of as male, to the natural world of wild forces. With their bodies supposedly subject to the moon (the monthly cycle of menstruation), and more emotional nature, women are linked to the natural world. Yet all of this seems rather arbitrary and hardly grounds for gross discrimination.

What does seem clear is that women have had their highest status in certain religious traditions which emphasize their direct link to spiritual power, particularly Protestant Christianity and Buddhism. They also seem to have higher status in late industrial societies such as the one now dominant in western Europe and America.

Women also often have high status in societies where men are away working as shepherds or migrant labourers, as in the Nepalese village where I work, where many of the men went into the army and now go off to work abroad. Recently I visited the so-called 'Kingdom of Women' in Yunnan, south-western China. There the men traditionally went off for six months of the year to carry goods along the south-west silk road to India. The women were left and ran the households and the farms and were the central power in the society.

What makes people unequal?

The very simplest societies, those that hunted, gathered and practiced agriculture over the planet for a hundred thousand years were often egalitarian. There were sometimes 'Big Men' and some were richer than others. There were even sometimes captured slaves. Yet there were no permanent divisions into castes and classes.

It was with the emergence of 'civilization' that real differences in life style and expectations occurred. The universal human desire to be 'king of the castle', to dominate in play, to receive the deferential respect of others, to let others work for us, could now be consolidated through the use of new technologies. Those in charge could use superior weapons to enforce their dominance. These included horses, armour, writing, money, law, bureaucracy and even religion.

Because we live in an unusual civilization which is officially constantly striving towards equality, at least of opportunity, it is easy to forget that in almost all of history people have striven in the opposite direction. The general tendency has been for the differences between strata to increase. The basic premise was that people were born unequal.

On the other hand the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 started 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' Such an assertion would have struck almost everyone who ever lived as complete nonsense. It has been very generally assumed that some humans are by nature better, more intelligent, more gifted. Furthermore, no-one has unalienable rights to anything.

What kinds of inequality are there?

Inequality expresses itself in different ways. One is 'caste', which comes from the Portuguese word for sexual relations. It is a system which is found in classic form in Hindu India. A person is born into a certain group. Each group has its function; priests, warriors, merchants, farmers. Its meaning lies in relation to other groups. This is a hierarchical system of differences which means that one is only allowed to have sex, marry, eat and even touch the bodies of people within one's group. To do these things outside leads to impurity, spiritual danger and pollution.

A second system is 'class'. This is based on success in life. It is not principally given by blood or birth. It is mainly an economic rather than religious matter. Some people are wealthier, some poorer, some own the means of producing wealth, others work for them. Often there are three classes, each of which are sub-divided. The English are perhaps the most class divided and class conscious society in history.

My grand-mother was not unusual in thinking of her world as like a large chest of drawers. A few people were in the top drawer, many were in the middle drawers which were divided into upper, middle and lower (she felt she was in the upper one of these). The drawer at the bottom contained the vast majority of the world, who could be spotted at some distance by their clothes, accents, tastes and hobbies.

The third form of classification is race. This combines inequalities of wealth with ideas of ritual pollution and dirt. Because of the colour of skin, a person is not allowed to marry, have sex with, touch or eat with people with skin of another colour, or eyes of a different shape. The extreme case of this was often combined with slavery.

What is the American way?

Outside these is the peculiar system we now try to practice, which we might call the American way. It assumes that everyone is born equal and should have equal opportunities. Yet curiously, with equal chances and equal abilities, some end up as very rich, and most end up as poor. So there is a paradox.

America, based on the premise of absolute equality, has one of the most extremely unequal divisions of wealth in the world. Japan, based on the premise of inequality, is one of the most egalitarian.

The added difficulty is that where the society proclaims that it provides equality of opportunity, there is no-one else to blame for ending up near the bottom of the pile. In caste systems we may have a lowly position, but that is not our fault. It is written on our brow at the moment of birth.

The strain comes to bear most heavily in our educational systems. If there is no natural inequality, yet people have to be assigned to differently valued and paid jobs, then something other than blood must separate them. So we use education. While we proclaim everyone is equally gifted, some end up with firsts at a good University, others leave school with poor grades at sixteen. The latter may bear the double burden of a life with far fewer material comforts and the knowledge that they have 'failed', that they are considered lazy or stupid by the wider society.

Does inequality usually increase?

The normal tendency is towards the growth of both caste and class and the effective enslavement of much of the population. We can see this process at work over much of Europe in the past.

After the fall of the western Roman Empire some sixteen hundred years ago, much of Europe started with light populations of 'barbarian' peoples mixed in with the remains of Roman civilization. Slavery had been abandoned, serfdom had not started, people were largely free to follow a military leader, work for a patron, or set up on their own. There was little instituted inequality or hierarchy. There were no inherited statuses, little division of labour and task, no huge disparities in wealth and life chances.

If we then look at western Europe a thousand years later, something extraordinary had happened. As wealth and population grew and more sophisticated technologies were developed, they created great inequalities and a caste-like structure. The rich and powerful had become superior. Through education and cultural ornamentation they had turned wealth into superior status.

For not only had inequality increased, but much of Europe had become very like a caste society. There were blood differences, that is differences based on birth and enshrined in legal rights. There were the nobility and the ignoble or commoners. There were the free-born and the bound and illiterate peasantry. There were huge gaps between these birth-given orders so that, as in the caste system of India, marriage between the castes was forbidden. Nobles must not marry commoners, a peasant could not marry a bourgeois.

What had happened was that the strong human drive to assert superiority over others, when coupled with new opportunities and tools, had created first inequalities and then hierarchy. The earlier assumption that all men were born equal in the sight of God had given way to the basic premise that some men were naturally superior to others. It was against this that the French revolutionaries set themselves with their cry of 'liberty, equality, fraternity' in 1789.

The tendency to drift towards inequality as a civilization settles down after a period of turbulence could be documented from many other civilizations and periods of history. We see it in various phases of Chinese civilization, or in the increasing rigidities and divisions of Japan in the seventeenth century.

What was the English path?

There was one notable exception to this almost universal tendency towards inequality and then hierarchy. Although the English to a certain extent moved towards a sort of class system they did not move towards caste. The basic premise of birth equality had been maintained. There was no legal difference between a gentleman or an aristocrat and a commoner or farmer. Their children could marry each other, they could move from one status to another through marriage or money in a few years. By the eighteenth century a 'modern' social structure had emerged, in opposition to the increasingly hierarchical path that had been followed by almost all previous agrarian civilizations.

One way in which past writers drew attention to this was in the curious differences in the words given to groups. In France there were definite status groups, named after a mixture of where they lived and what people did. There were the blood-born and superior warriors, the nobilité, the religious literate group or clergé, the town-dwelling merchants and craftsmen or bourgeoisie, and the country dwelling workers or paysans. They were part of the great Indo-European varna system which stretches as far as Hindu India.

In England, however, there were strange different labels. In the seventeenth century, for example, no-one used any of the above terms or their equivalents. Instead they talked of lords, gentlemen, yeomen, merchants, artificers, husbandmen, of labourers, servants, cottagers, paupers and vagrants. None of these fitted with French categories.

There was nothing like the yeoman in France. The English yeoman was a middling man, who usually lived in the country, but was educated, independent, a voter and jury-man, held substantial property, perhaps did some farming but also might do other things, making, buying, selling. It really meant a free and relatively prosperous man. As I sit writing this letter in a seventeenth century yeoman's house I have a strong feeling of what sort of person he was. There are famous descriptions of him, with silver buttons on his coat, eating good food, sending children to the local grammar school, standing up to the knights of the shire, the 'backbone of England'.

It is a category or class not defined by any particular occupation and which only existed in the eyes of others. It had no fixed badges or legal status. People just felt they were, and were regarded by others, as yeomen. Every English village had them, and they were numerous. There is nothing equivalent elsewhere in the world, though there are hints of something like it in parts of historic Japan. The kulaks of Russia, the rich peasants of Spain or Italy were very different in many respects. If a modern audience wants to appreciate the archetype of the yeoman living in the shires of England, they only have to turn to Tolkein's portrayal of the hobbits living in the shires of Middle Earth. Bilbo, Frodo and their friends are yeomen.

How have some societies avoided caste?

What almost always happens is that as wealth increases the gaps between groups widen. At first everything is jumbled up and people struggle in a competitive and fairly equal world. The downfall of an Empire like Rome or the Sung in China, or the medieval wars of Japan, create a chaos of confused, overlapping, groupings where people fight to survive. As the situation clears and wealth accumulates, the social structure solidifies and small cracks become large fissures which are impossible to leap across. People increasingly live within enclosures, high fences surround them and protect them from other groups.

If a society is imagined as something vertical, then the ladder usually has few rungs and they are far apart and growing ever wider. It is impossible to climb up and difficult to drop down. There are four rungs as we have seen: the warrior-rulers, literate clergy, traders and manufacturers, country workers. There may also be outcaste groups who fit nowhere, for example the Jews and gypsies. This is the normal tendency towards greater rigidity. Yet it is not the path that led to modern western civilization.

For what was odd about the English path was that it did not look like this. There were no 'enclosures', or if there were, the fences round them were so flimsy and constantly broken through that they were almost meaningless. Some elocution lessons could turn a common flower girl into an upper class lady, as in Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion. Those within each ramshackle enclosure were no doubt constantly trying to prop up the fences, but then someone would let in another rich trader's daughter or expel a useless son.

In fact there were numerous parallel ladders, each with many, closely spaced, rungs. The Church of England is a good example. This was a ladder on its own, mirroring the whole social structure from the impoverished, poorly educated, hopeless, curate in some remote living, to the Bishop of Durham or Archbishop of Canterbury, equal to any lord in wealth and status. A very talented, ruthless or cunning individual might climb this slippery ladder.

A parallel ladder occurred in trade and business. From a humble small shop-keeper in a rural village up to the heads of great trading companies, from Dick Whittington when he arrived with just a bundle on his back and his cat, to his position as a great city gentleman and Lord Mayor of London, there were hundreds of rungs on this particular ladder. The same is true for the legal, academic, farming, military and office-holding ladders.

Furthermore, one could move up one ladder and then hop across to another, or move one's children up from rung to rung through education. There were countless cases of a person who had made a career in one field, say farming or manufacturing, who then moved their children onto another ladder, say the church or law. There were no true hereditary professions.

This system of ladders means that people are always able to climb up and fall down. Most of us would secretly agree with a man who observed that 'What makes equality such a difficult business is that we only want it with our superiors.' So we concentrate on climbing, as does everyone else, and the system ends up as it is.

Description:The meaning of individualism and theories of the causes for its development and some of its consequences.

What makes us individuals?

Dear Lily,

You are an individual. You act on your own, with your own rights and obligations. You can practice any religion you choose, vote for whatever political party you like, do whatever job you are qualified for, marry whom you want. You can keep (after tax) any money you earn. Although there are now many people in the industrial and capitalist parts of the world who are in your position, it is still decidedly unusual.

Most people on the planet cannot do most of these things. They belong to larger groups of the family, caste or village community who regulate what they think and what they do. This was even more so in the past. Two hundred years ago there was nowhere on earth where you could have been an individual in the way I have described above. So how has individualism, a location of economic, religious, political and social power in the hands of each person, emerged so suddenly and so dramatically?

This is a large topic and a full account would take us into the rise of religious freedom, political democracy, modern industrial organization and many other areas. Here I will limit myself to the social and economic side. In particular, I will write about the way in which the individual has become separated out from the wider family group.

This separation of the social world of the family from the economic world of the production of wealth is one of the great changes in history and is described as the 'rise of capitalism'. It is particularly relevant to you since England has often been described as the first capitalist society. In your own country there emerged a new system of individualistic economic and social relationships which now dominates much of the world. How did this happen?

What happened in England?

In the period between A.D. 700-1200 much of western Europe was uniform. A traveller through northern France, northern Germany, the Low Countries and through England would have felt no real sense of contrasting civilizations. There was a relatively light population, ruled by feudal lords and kings, practising a form of Christianity. The people were partially unified by a Latin language and governed by Barbarian legal codes mixed with bits of Roman law.

The social system was based on the rather individualistic family systems of the Germanic tribes which gave people much the same roles as the family system today. People were struggling to preserve the vestiges of Roman civilization and build up a new world. Language apart, English visitors to Spain or Italy would have felt at home.

The society which grew up in western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire was a feudal, not a family-based one. Its primary bonds were contractual, ones of allegiance and power based on choice, rather than on blood. Between the fifth and twelfth centuries, the collapse of a status based civilization gave rise to feudalism.

Yet, from this common base, a curious divergence occurred over the centuries. An almost universal tendency asserted itself. As wealth accumulated, the feudal bonds were loosened and then snapped and what we can roughly call a peasant civilization re-asserted itself. The details of the process are complex and uneven over Europe. They include the increasing power of kings, the re-establishment of a centralizing form of Roman Law, the growing distinction between a literate class of clergy and nobility and an illiterate peasantry who were discouraged from learning to read.

Above all it involved the emergence of a form of ownership and production in which the family line again became dominant. The land was given into the private ownership of families. It was owned by them as a group. Every child had birth-given rights in the family property. The unit which produced and consumed wealth became the family. There were real peasants, who stood in opposition to other orders, that is the town dwellers or bourgeoisie, the nobility and the clergy.

This was reflected in the terminology. In Italy a group known as contadini, in Germany bauern, in France paysans, emerged. Yet there was no such group in England and no native term to describe such a category. There were country men and women, but this only showed where they lived. Instead there were many words, husbandman, artificer, yeoman, labourer, to specify status. None of them fitted with the meaning of the word 'peasant'.

Why are there so many peasants?

England was clearly the exception. So why is there such a strong tendency for civilizations to move towards a peasant path? The simplest answer seems to be that it is in the interest of both the rulers and the ruled. To this we may add that the family property solution is in many ways a considerable improvement on what usually preceded it. It works better than communal agriculture or even slavery.

A family based peasantry is created when the agricultural population are given inheritance rights so that the family as a unit owns the land. Previously families had usually enjoyed very insecure or shared rights, either as members of a larger village community which re-distributed use-rights from time to time, or holding on an insecure tenure from large land-holders. Both of these other systems have grave disadvantages for the family. They leave it vulnerable to the tendency for any hard-working person to find that he or she is supporting lazier fellow villagers, or at the mercy of the landlord's whim.

So when the rural dwellers are offered complete ownership of their fields, usually in return for a reasonable tax based on what they can produce, they are hardly likely to refuse the offer. They now own the property and can pass it on safely to their children, who are, in fact, co-owners from birth. They are happy and their children are happy.

The system is often productive and there is likely to be a noticeable improvement in yields. Family members have direct incentives to improve their production which will now benefit themselves and their close relatives. They can invest in the knowledge that they and their heirs will benefit in the longer run. Effort and intelligent planning is rewarded by increased prosperity for his or her loved ones, rather than to the nebulous 'community' or a distant landlord.

Meanwhile the ruler is also happy. The production will rise so the taxes will rise. Furthermore, governance will be easier since a mass of peasant families with a deep attachment to the soil can be relatively easily controlled. The family is used as the foundation on which the system works, with the head of the family taking responsibility for the behaviour of his family members.

As in the Confucian or Roman Law system, a form of patriarchal power (the power of the senior male) is encouraged. The head of the family rules the younger brothers, the women and the children. Furthermore, in the perennial contest with over-mighty subjects, a strong peasantry can act as a buffer against the local gentry or lords.

What happens when peasants emerge?

However, there are certain hazards along this usual path. One is that as time passes and the population tends to increase, the position of the peasants deteriorates. The family holding is split between ever increasing numbers of descendants. No-one has to leave the holding, but, in the absence of improvements in yield through new technologies, there is less and less per member of the family. Peasants deteriorate into subsistence farmers where people retreat from the use of money and markets. This is what happened in Ireland in the hundred years before the great famine of the middle of the nineteenth century, or in France in the centuries before the Revolution of 1789.

Likewise the rulers tend to make the situation worse. As their power and means of control increases, they are tempted (or with the threat of war forced) to extract more and more from a trapped rural population. So taxes and rents increase. After some centuries what started as an extraction of ten percent or so of the crops, may increase to up to half the yield of the family farm. The family is trapped in the system.

Another consequence of moving down the peasant path is that alternative paths, whether towards crafts, trade or urban growth, become less attractive. The response to the shrinking of resources as children divide and sub-divide plots and the lords and rulers press their increasing demands, is not to flee or set up new types of activity. These require capital, which would have to be withdrawn from the farm, and are risky. The way out is thought to be to work ever harder and to cut all costs, for example the cost of keeping animals.

So the peasant path is very attractive to both the rural dwellers and their rulers when it starts. Yet it often becomes more and more bumpy and unsatisfactory over time. It leads, in the end, to a position from which there is little chance of escape. There are no paths down which the densely packed peasantry can now move away from rural misery.

How did the English take another path?

A way out is to move to an even more extreme form of privatization of property, not down to the level of the family as a group, but to an individual within a family. England moved to such a system of single-heir, individually held, property.

In the English case there was no family-owned land, nor was there community held land. Over the centuries an unusual system developed whereby there was a combination of two major landholding methods. Between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, much of the land was held by individuals, not families. It was held from a manorial lord on a kind of lease but in this system there was considerable security. The land could be inherited by whoever one chose as one's heirs, or sold to another, as long as the lord was paid a fee and the transaction was recorded in the manor court.

Alongside this there was freehold property, held directly by an individual from the King, but to all intents and purposes privately owned. So there was no family property, children had no automatic rights in a holding by their birth into the family unit, the individuals who held the land could dispose of it as they wished within the constraints of the customs of the manor or the laws of England.

In this system the centre was powerful enough to hold each individual in its grip without having to resort to giving families absolute rights. Yet it was also found to be effective to give considerable security to individuals. The absence of the usual threats and pressures of invasion from landed neighbours, because England was an island, was a key factor.

What happened to our sense of Community?

Most of us believe that in the past there were true communities within which people lived. The community came first, the individual second. There were villages or other physical places where a person was born, married and died. It was a community of residence. Since their forefathers had lived there for generations, many of the villagers were related by kinship and marriage. It was a community of blood. There were village organizations, a council, a headman, village customs and laws and a village sentiment. 'We' are of this community, 'you' are an outsider from elsewhere. In extreme cases, as in some Chinese villages, everyone even had the same surname, everyone you met was called Chen or Yan or whatever.

I saw many of these features of what we might call natural or real Community with a capital c when I first visited a Nepalese village in 1968. Many people were surrounded by relatives and some of the families stretched back for some generations. Even the women, who often married out, retained strong links with their maita or birth village. Many people lived out almost all of their life in the village into which they were born.

Many believe that almost everyone lived in such natural communities until the nineteenth century. Then a revolutionary change occurred from Community to Association. 'Association' describes our modern world where people are constantly on the move, born in one place, educated in another, married in another, moving several more times before dying. We tend to live with very few kin nearby and most of our inter-actions are relatively short-term ones with neighbours or work mates.

Increasingly in large cities or rural commuter villages we do not live in bounded communities. Many people do not feel much about people in their street or neighbourhood. The growth of cities and new patterns of work have created, we believe, the lonely crowd of rootless, drifting, modern individuals.

There is something in this powerful myth of a former close knit world. When I arrived in a fen village near Cambridge thirty years ago most people seemed to know each other and there was a sense of the village as an entity. Some of the families were old and the farming couple who lived next door had been born and were to die in the village. During the next thirty years the village has become a commuter suburb of Cambridge; the blacksmith has gone, the real shop, two pubs and the village school have all vanished. It is no longer even a ghost of a Community except in its cricket and football teams.

I seem to have witnessed the shift from Community to Association, and indeed as one of the first outside academics in the village, to have accelerated it. Yet as I feel this nostalgia I have to remind myself that my historical studies of English villages over the last seven hundred years suggest that there have never been real Communities in the 'place, blood and sentiment' sense. Considerable mobility, the fragmented family system and developed economic exchanges have meant that unlike China, India and much of mainland Europe, it is difficult to find 'natural' communities in England at any point in its history.

So the rootlessness we see today is a very old phenomenon. It is a peculiar feature of England that people have never been absorbed into a very powerful 'Community' which gives security but makes it impossible to be a free individual. We live instead in temporary , constructed, and partial 'communities', a group of friends, co-workers, neighbours, club members.

What are the consequences for your life?

So you can begin to understand why, though you live in a country village, grow vegetables and flowers and enjoy the trees and rivers of East Anglia, you are not a peasant and you do not live in a natural village Community. Unlike almost everyone in the world up to about a hundred years ago, you do not belong to a largely illiterate, household-based set of people who pay up to half their income to support a tiny elite who are totally different from you and live in cities and castles. You were not born in the street you live in now, nor will you, in all probability, stay there for more than a few years.

You are not in the absolute control of the dominant male (father, husband, brother) in the household, nor will you ever be under the practical control of the leading female (mother-in-law). You can own property in your own right and sell and give it away as you like. But you cannot automatically expect to inherit from your parents. You will leave home and set up on your own. You are able to make your own way, not tied down within a family or community with all the advantages, but also the disadvantages, that that brings. Indeed, in all true senses of the words, you, dear Lily, are a free spirit.

Description:

Back-breaking manual work is the burden of most people in history - how did some of us escape from such a world?

Why do many people work so hard?

Dear Lily,

People usually prefer leisure to labour. Even if they say they like work, it is often preferable to watch others doing it, or contemplate doing it some time in the future. Jerome K. Jerome joked that 'I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.' So most people have to be compelled to work, especially if, as is usually the case, it is boring and physical. How are people forced to work?

One method is the system of 'free' market relations, labour for wages, which is the one you are familiar with. A second form is serfdom. Serfs have to do certain labour services for their lord and pay animals as a form of rent. They cannot sell or alienate their holdings without their lord's agreement in the manorial court. They are under pressure to have their grain ground in the manorial mill. They have to consult with their neighbours about what crops they will grow. They cannot enclose their strips of land without permission. Often they have to pay a tax if they marry off their children. Sometimes they are not allowed to move from their holding without the lord's consent.

On the other hand they are not slaves. They should not be physically abused by their lord. They cannot be bought and sold. They can own personal property. In other words they are not things, but active and right-bearing human beings, though tied down to a particular place and occupation. Such serfdom existed in England until the fifteenth century when its last remnants mysteriously vanished. In Eastern Europe, it remained the major form of labour condition until the nineteenth century.

Then there is a widespread form of organization which often overlaps with but is different from serfdom. This is family-based, or household, production. Its central feature is that the compulsion to work is exerted neither through the market (wages) mechanism, nor through direct lordly power (serfdom). It comes at one remove from the lord through the compulsion of the family. There is often an enormous pressure towards hard work, but this comes to bear on the individual through loyalty to the family line. There is also a desperate need to extract a living and pay rents to the lord. This is the characteristic form in much of Africa, India, China and South America, as well as many Mediterranean countries.

A final form is slavery, which is characteristic of ancient civilizations. Here people are bought and sold as goods, they are the property of others and have no rights. The technologies of metals, writing, weaving, ploughing led for centuries to the use of slaves. Rome was the last great civilization in the West to be based on slavery, the end of an era lasting over three thousand years. There were periods of revival, such as that in the southern states of America, but the system has been dying out. Although there are still many slaves in parts of North Africa, Southern and Central America and elsewhere, slavery is not the world's way of working any longer.

Slavery and the family farming system both make people unwilling to use animals or machines. It is almost always 'cheaper' to work all hours than to keep capital invested in animals, mills and other machinery. These forms, which covered much of East Asia and India, and to a certain extent Mediterranean Europe, tend to drive out labour-saving tools. Slavery and family labour make human labour a priority. Only a free market system, and sometimes serfdom, makes it highly desirable to replace humans by machines.

How did we get to our world?

If you had looked at the world in around 1750 you would have seen that much of it seemed to have reached a plateau where it could not get any richer. Indeed, much of it was already getting poorer. With the technologies then known it was impossible to improve the general position of mankind. Nor could the earth feed many more than the five hundred million then living on the planet.

There were, however, two exceptions. One was North America, which was experiencing the fastest economic growth in the world. Its population was tiny and the resources vast. This looked as if it would be a temporary phenomenon once again, for it would quite soon use up its immense resources of soil and timber. There would be a burst of growth as there had been in China, India or the Mediterranean, and in a century or two the country would arrive at the same plateau.

The other exception was England. It had started at a low level, it was a trading nation sucking in materials from elsewhere. The country had an odd social structure where there was no large poverty stricken rural group, but rather a large and prosperous, increasingly urban and urbanised culture. It had a highly efficient farming system. For centuries it had gradually grown richer and it was continuing to do so. By the 1750s it was, per head and in terms of energy available per person, the wealthiest and technologically most sophisticated country on earth.

Yet in 1750 it seemed inevitable that even England, in due course, would hit the invisible buffers. The conversion of current energy from the sun using plants and animals will only yield a certain amount for humans. Another century of growth, at the most, and then England, like America, would end on a high-level but flat path, civilizations which could not move in a new direction.

England's special state was plainly visible. People noticed the improving technologies of production, the interest in wealth creation and scientific discovery. They even noted the increasing use of fossil fuels and the growth of wealth flowing in from the British Empire. Yet no-one at that stage could see the impending revolutionary change. For the English had harnessed the power of steam.

Who could foresee that the long path of replacing human labour by animals, wind, water and increasingly coal, and doing this through sophisticated machines (especially mills) would suddenly transform the world? Who could have seen that what was at first merely a change in scale, a movement along a pre-existing path, almost a natural evolution, would suddenly alter everything and become a revolution?

What did the steam engine do?

The steam engine was only a small adjustment to a device which had been known to the Romans and the Chinese for thousands of years. Hitherto it had no significance whatsoever. Now the fact that humans could convert coal into energy by way of fire and steam was to alter life on earth.

The human species stopped having to live off supplies of energy from the sun, a current account where the sun's energy was converted to human use through living creatures. Instead, it began to draw on an immense deposit account, the energy locked up in fossil fuels. Of course, living off stored energy was not entirely new. Humans have often done this by using the stocks of fish, timber, rich land on new frontiers. Yet in the past they had quickly burned up much of this surface energy.

What the steam engine did was to sit at the top of a funnel which went down into the vast reserves of highly concentrated sunlight which had fallen on the earth over millions of years. The stored energy in the fallen timber had become coal. Later the process was repeated with oil. In each case, the thin trickle of energy available to each person from the sun became a gushing torrent. A world not only of vast energy resources, but also of many other side products in alloys, chemicals and plastics opened up.

We could not have predicted any of this in the middle of the eighteenth century. Even as late as the middle of the nineteenth century many intelligent people could still not appreciate what had happened and its implications. The economic laws which had limited humankind for thousands of years had been temporarily suspended.

This new technology could be exported. But it was not an easy or obvious change for even after the first model of how the industrial system based on steam was revealed, it took almost eighty years for this success to be repeated anywhere else, in Germany, Japan and North America. The huge momentum of China and India was leading them in other directions and it was over a hundred and fifty years after the start of the British industrial revolution that a similar change began to happen in those great civilizations. So it is not an easy change to make, even when there are successful models to follow and much of the technology can be bought off the shelf.

What are the possible paths through time?

It is clear that these various pressures constitute a series of paths. A society or civilization starts off with new potentials. It has fresh, unused soil and forests, a good stock of animals and knowledge of the technologies of the wheel, fire and of simple mills to use water power. Its social structure is fairly firm and just.

Yet, over time, the normal tendency is not towards bettering the lot of the majority or finding new ways to get nature to yield up its goods. The flocks and herds do not increase, the coal seams are hardly exploited, the winds and waters are not increasingly harnessed, the agricultural tools are not decisively improved. A shortage of working capital leads people to borrow against their future harvests at a very high rate of interest. The power of lenders increases and the ordinary villagers become debt-ridden and increasingly impoverished.

We might have expected human labour to be supplemented and hence human material life to be improved. Yet the desire of the powerful to become more so, growing population pressing on resources and the fear of shortages constrain people and force them in a direction which is, in the long run, harmful to them and their descendants. This leads away from the one possibility of an escape from agrarian labour.

Unless we understand these powerful paths which lie behind the long-term development of civilizations and become self re-enforcing, we cannot begin to see what has happened in the world. We have to understand that the great civilizations of India, China, Japan and much of continental Europe were heading towards, or had already reached, a high-level path which could not lead towards industrialization. They were, if anything, moving away from an industrial solution.

Why do humans often give up using animals?

Domesticated animals are the earliest and most effective 'machines' available to humans. They take the strain off the human back and arms. Used with other techniques animals can raise human living standards very considerably both as supplementary foodstuffs (protein in meat and milk) and as carrying machines, plough animals, working to lift water, grind grain. Since they are so obviously of great benefit, we might expect to find that over the centuries humans would increase the number and quality of the animals they kept. Surprisingly, this has not usually been the case.

In Japan domesticated animals were quite widely used in the period up to about 1600. There were large numbers of horses and oxen. After that, as the population grew, the animals were gradually replaced by human labour. By the later nineteenth century there were practically no large domestic animals in the intensive rice growing areas of central Japan. All the land was being used to grow crops so there was nowhere for the animals to be kept. In any case human labour was cheaper.

I saw this process happening over a very short period of a couple of generations in a Nepalese village. In the middle of the twentieth century there were large numbers of buffaloes, cows, sheep, goats, oxen and other animals providing milk, meat, manure and plough animals. By the end of the century three quarters of the animals had disappeared. People could no longer 'afford' to keep them. It was cheaper to hire a man to carry goods up to the village, a five hour walk up a steep mountain, than to keep or hire a mule.

It was not only in Asia that this was happening. It is possible to see the same pattern over many parts of western Europe. For instance in France, the animal energy available per head in terms of oxen, horses, sheep and goats was higher in the thirteenth than the eighteenth century. It seems a law of nature that animals are replaced by humans and that people have to turn from a protein rich to a carbohydrate diet.
Animals are in many ways a luxury. Only the relatively well off can afford them. Poverty edges them out. A son will replace a donkey or ox, carry goods on his back or dig with a hoe or spade rather than plough with an animal. Domesticated animals have no collective bargaining power.

Why does 'more' often lead to 'less'?

Animals are just one example. The use of wind, water, wheels, gunpowder, rather than increasing as civilizations grew in population and sophistication tended to decline. Almost everywhere human labour replaced every other form of power. A form of virtual, and sometimes actual, slavery was the answer.

Sometimes this concentration on human labour was increased by the ecological conditions in a civilization, and particularly by the nature of the staple crop. Some crops, such as wheat, encourage the use of animals in ploughing and mills in grinding. Others, like rice, encourage the use of humans in planting, weeding and cutting, and human labour in the process of threshing and de-husking.

Rice also has the special ability to increase the population size since the usual law by which, after a certain point, extra work brings less and less reward, was slow to act. Extra children improve the output of rice for a considerable time. Furthermore, much of the fertilizing of the rice plants is done by natural processes in the water so that less animal manure is needed. The decline of domesticated animals has a less harmful effect than it does with wheat, maize and barley. Growing wet rice encourages hard work, rather than the move towards non-human power, that is to say industrialization.

Rice is such a fruitful grain that it tempts people down a dangerous path. Temptation also comes from other plants such as bamboo, which is so wonderfully versatile that it inhibits the use of other woods and metals. Likewise the paper mulberry saved much of Asia from developing the much more difficult rag-based paper of the west. Yet it was the effort of pounding the rags which helped the development of machinery and water power. So there was a vast difference between a bamboo and paper civilization, such as China and Japan, and a wood and stone civilization such as western Europe.

In Asia, nature provided the raw tools which merely had to be shaped. In the west, nature was stingier and more effort had to be put into making the substitutes in glass and iron and stone. Yet the extra effort and increased knowledge paid off in the longer term.

For most of history, the Asian solution was far more effective in bringing a reasonable standard of living to many millions of people. In the end, however, it was the path through coal, iron and steam which led to our modern world of industry.

That many of us no longer have to labour for long hours in the fields is a merciful release and a giant accident. The changes which occurred in one small island in the eighteenth century was the second great productive revolution in human history, equal to the domestication of animals and plants. It is very recent and it still only alleviates the stress of hard physical work for less than half of those who live on this planet.