IN the British Isles, a combination of geographic, historical, and cultural factors led to the emergence of a state of laws characterized by the primacy of private enterprise and representative institutions by the late 17th century. The origins of this state of laws can be traced to the development of feudalism and the consequent horizontal and vertical associations that were created in the British body politic. Feudalism, however, is a much-abused term that has been persistently confused in the subcontinent with landlordism. Since feudalism was the necessary historical antecedent to the emergence of a state of laws and the unique Anglo-Saxon culture of power, it merits explanation.
Feudalism is a system defined by the social, political, and economic ascendancy of landlords. These landlords, over time, are recognized as aristocrats by other members of the same class and by the supreme executive, which, in the European context, meant the king. Aristocracy, in turn, is characterized by two most conspicuous features. One is that the aristocracy is a land owning class. The other, is that aristocratic social status, often expressed in honorific titles (the Duke of Anjou, the Prince of Valois, the Marquis of Custine, the Elector of Brandenburg etc.) is autonomous of the will of the monarch. Both the private property in land and movable assets, and the social status, are inherited by the eldest son (primogeniture).
These titles and privileges often carry with them hereditary obligations to fill judicial, political, and economic roles, at the local level. The wealth, social autonomy, and deep local roots, of aristocracies make them resistant to the arbitrary exercise of power by the central government. Aristocracies have traditionally looked down upon civil servants as socially and culturally inferior. Within France, as the central state grew more powerful in the 1600s and 1700s, the aristocracy was split into the old nobility of the sword and the new nobility of the robe. The latter comprised those who had bought their noble titles from the king or received it in exchange for working in the civil service. The advent of the nobility of the robe, of course, signalled the end of aristocratic political autonomy, even though the king let them keep their social privileges. To place these developments in perspective one need only observe that by 1630 the total number of government servants in France was about 40,000, out of a population of about 19 million, compared to just 1200 in England, out of a population of about four million.
By cooperating with each other and wealthier commoners, aristocracies established and ran the network of local, provincial, and central assemblies (the Cortes of Spain, the Estates-General of France, the Imperial Diet of the Habsburg Empire, the Parliament of England etc.) characteristic of the European feudal age. Local and regional autonomy in Europe was derived from aristocratic privilege.
Indeed, the feudal aristocracy was the mother of all autonomous institutions without which the rule of law, private property, or, for that matter, representative government, would have lacked historical foundations in Europe. It is a matter of some interest that the French Revolution began when the parlement (hereditary judicial offices staffed by aristocrats with absolute security of tenure, not to be confused with a parliament, or assembly) of Paris, declared, that the king of France must summon the estates-general in order to raise taxes to avert bankruptcy.
The subcontinent, like Persia, the Middle East, North Africa, Mesoamerica, and China, neither had, nor has, a comparable set of political habits and institutions. What existed in these areas, and in pre-British India, was parasitic landlordism subject to arbitrary manipulation by the ruler and his appointed servants.
In Britain, aristocratic institutions were the strongest and most adaptable in Europe. The clearest and most important expression of that strength was Magna Charta, signed in 1215AD by King John under pressure from the aristocracy.
What is most relevant for students of local government is that in Britain the advent and victory of parliament and the higher judiciary at the centre was instrumental in preserving local liberties from the centre’s encroachment. Were it not for the fact that the lords, commons, and judges, held the line in London, local liberties in Britain would quite possibly have gone the way of France or Spain where permanent representative assemblies at the centre capable of concentrating in one place the political power of the provinces and localities to balance the power of the emerging European royal bureaucracies failed to emerge.
These factors proved conducive to the emergence of a class of entrepreneurs drawn from diverse backgrounds. There were the younger sons of nobles seeking fame and fortune in the new world. Merchants formed joint-stock companies to gain access to the markets of the orient. Zealous missionaries came forth to convert people to Christianity and save souls. Misfits and victims of persecution crowded the docks to seek a new life across the oceans. Wherever they went and settled, they carried with them their unique culture of power — that of participatory democracy and robust local government based on self-taxation. Even the great lords, due to the poverty of English agricultural land, led the advance towards capitalism by enclosing their estates and raising sheep to export wool.
Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is a testament to the uniqueness and success of the Anglo-Saxon culture of power.
Tocqueville was particularly impressed with the practice of self-taxation. He, accustomed to French bureaucratic centralization, was intrigued by the strange absence of bureaucracy in a vast continental empire such as the United States.
He attributed this freakish phenomenon to the “mores” or political habits of the Americans, which they had inherited from their English forefathers. In contrast, neighbouring Mexico, which inherited the “mores” of Spanish monarchical absolutism, but tried to govern itself, since independence, through the “laws” of the Anglo-Americans was subject to seemingly inevitable cycles of anarchy and military despotism. The Mexicans did not realize that their inability to establish a state of laws stemmed from their arbitrary culture of power.
France, the continental bureaucratic state with the closest relationship with England, had emerged as the most powerful country in Europe in the wake of the Thirty Years War (1618- 1648). Cardinal Richelieu, France’s first minister from 1624 to 1642, reformed her bureaucracy, established the superiority of national interest, as represented by raison d’itat (reason for state), over dynastic and religious loyalties, and laid the foundations of bureaucratic centralization at the expense of the aristocracy represented by the creation of the office of intendant, or collector-magistrate/commissioner, to run the provinces as the direct representative of the Royal Council. The French bureaucracy, one of the ablest in the world, was further reformed by Napoleon I, who understood that it held the key to effective government, dispensation of justice, and efficient collection of taxes. Napoleon placed law and order in the hands of prefects and entrusted the collection of taxes to a separate cadre of 840 officials. Between 1871 and 1914, under the Third Republic, France, in spite of having about 50 changes in government, managed to recover from the debacle of 1870/71 and reassert its position as a world power. The credit clearly goes to the French bureaucracy for ensuring legal democracy and maintaining policy initiative. To this day France remains a unitary and highly centralized, albeit enlightened and well governed, continental bureaucratic state.
When France finally attempted to introduce participatory democracy and instituted local governments in 1982, the immediate result was a rise in patronage, corruption, mismanagement, and nepotism. Fairly depressing when one considers that by 1982 one hundred and 93 years had passed since the French Revolution, and that the country has experienced more than a century of almost uninterrupted democratic rule. Interestingly, even in France, local governments have not had the law and order portfolio devolved to them. That vital task is still the prerogative of the bureaucracy as represented by the prefect, or our equivalent of the district commissioner. In 1756, Voltaire wondered why the French could not develop a state of laws comparable to the British. He concluded that it was because of the difference between their cultures, more specifically, their cultures of power, what Tocqueville would later call the almost immutable “habits of the heart.”
In 1757, the British East India Company seized control of Bengal and inaugurated the British Empire in India. For the first two decades, the company averted parliamentary control due to its status as a chartered organization. However, as its administration in Bengal failed to take off, parliamentary financial assistance became necessary to avoid collapse. This assistance, however, came with provisions and began the gradual transfer of power from remorselessly selfish private entrepreneurs to far more enlightened and disinterested politicians, administrators, and aristocrats, educated in the rational and moral tradition of the European Age of Reason. More specifically, it was with the arrival of Lord Cornwallis as governor-general, in 1786, that the British began the unprecedented task of trying to reform the arbitrary culture of power of the subcontinent. It is to this effort, and the inevitable compromises that result from such historically enormous undertakings, that we now turn.
