Chapter 41 Part Two Results Chapter 10 Occupations Open to Talented People 2

2 The decisive achievement of dual revolutions, then, is that they open the way to the talented, or at least to energy, shrewdness, industry, and greed.That's not to say that all avenues are open, or that they all lead to the top of the social class, with the possible exception of the United States.And yet, how remarkable are these opportunities!The static and unchanging ideal of the class system in the past has been far away from the 19th century!Kabinettsrat von Schele of the Kingdom of Hanover once refused a poor young lawyer's application for a government post on the grounds that the young lawyer's father was a bookbinder and he should inherit his father's business.Today, this reason seems both insufficient and extremely absurd.Yet Scherer did little more than follow the old maxims of a stable pre-capitalist society, and indeed in 1750 the son of a bookbinder had only one way to go.Now, he no longer had to do so.Four paths to success lay open before him: business, education (with the possibility of turning to the three goals of public service, politics, and free trade), the arts, and war.War was important in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, but in the long peace of subsequent generations it was of no importance, and therefore no longer very attractive.The third way is very recent, for now there are much greater public prizes than ever before, and the encouragement of extraordinary talents which amuse or move the masses, as indicated by the rising social status of the stage.This rise in status eventually produced an interconnected spectacle in Edwardian England: knighted male actors and nobles who married chorus girls.Even in the post-Napoleonic period there were already characteristic phenomena: idolatrous singers (like "Swedish Nightingale" Jenny Lind) or dancers (like Fanny Elssler, and deified musical artists (such as Paganini and Franz Liszt).

Neither industry nor education are among the easy avenues open to all, even among those who have sufficiently freed themselves from the shackles of custom and tradition.These are people who believe that "people like me" will accommodate them, know how to operate in a society of individual struggles, or recognize that "self-improvement" is worthwhile.The traveler who wants to take both paths must pay a toll: without some minimum means, no matter how small, it is difficult to start on the road to success.This toll is undoubtedly higher for those who want to embark on the road to education than to industry, because even in countries with established public education systems, primary education is generally neglected, and, even in countries Wherever primary education existed, it taught only a minimum of literacy, numeracy, and moral obedience, for political reasons.Yet, paradoxically, at first glance, the educational path seems more attractive than the industrial path.

This recognition is not surprising, since education requires only a small revolution in the habits and ways of living.Knowledge, if it is just the kind of knowledge learned by priests, has already had a position recognized and valued by people in traditional society, and in fact, it has a more prominent position than it has in pure bourgeois society.To have a priest, priest, or rabbi in the family is perhaps the greatest honor a poor man can hope for, and it is worth a great sacrifice for it.Once such access is opened, this social admiration can easily turn to secular scholars, officials, or teachers, or, in the best cases, to lawyers and doctors.Furthermore, learning is not as distinctly antisocial as industry.The educated man does not actively attack his fellow man like the shameless and selfish businessman and employer.In fact, it is often seen that they (especially teachers) are apparently helping their fellow men to escape the ignorance and darkness which seem to be the source of their misery.The general desire for education is more attainable than the general desire for personal business success, and schooling is more accessible than the strange art of moneymaking.In communities, such as Wales, composed almost entirely of small farmers, small traders and proletarians, one would be eager to send their sons to teaching or missionary work, but at the same time bitter social resentment of wealth and business itself .

In a sense, however, education represents individualistic competition for jobs, "vocations open to the best," and the triumph of merit over birth and connections.Here the utility of education is exactly equal to that of industry, and is achieved by competitive examinations.As usual, the most logical expression of the examination system was also produced during the French Revolution. Examinations similar to the hierarchical system are still selected from the academic winners to manage and teach the French people.Academic and competitive examinations were also the ideals of the most bourgeois-conscious schools of thought in Britain.This school is the "philosophical radical" of Benthamism, who will eventually (but not before the end of the period covered by this book) impose this ideal in a very pure form between the British Home Office and the Indian Office. above, against the fierce resistance of the nobility.Talent selection based on strength, such as passing examinations or other educational qualifications, has become a recognized ideal.Only the most archaic European public offices, such as the Holy See and the British Foreign Office, or the most democratic civil services, such as the United States, are not included.The most democratic civil services tend to use elections rather than examinations as the criteria for selecting public officials.Although, like other forms of individualistic competition, testing is a liberal approach, it is not a democratic or egalitarian approach.

The primary social consequences of opening education to the gifted are thus contradictory.What it produces is not the "open society" of free competition, but the "closed society" of bureaucracy; but both are - in their various ways - the most characteristic institutions of the age of bourgeois liberalism . The temperament of high civil servants in the nineteenth century was still basically that of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century: Masonic and "Josephinian" in Central and Eastern Europe, Napoleonic in France, and Latin Liberal and anti-clerical in the linguistic countries, Benthamist in Britain.It is generally accepted that once the powerful are consolidated in the civil service, competition turns into automatic promotion, but how fast and high a person can rise depends (in theory) on his strength, unless Regulated egalitarianism forces promotion purely on the basis of seniority.Thus, at first glance, bureaucracy is very different from the ideal of a liberal society.However, the consciousness of selecting talents based on merit, general incorruptibility, practical efficiency, a certain degree of education, and non-noble background all brought together civil servants into one.Even a rigid insistence on automatic promotion (especially in that very middle-class British Admiralty, where it lasted for an absurd amount of time) had at least the advantage of excluding typical aristocratic or monarchical favoritism.In a society with stagnant economic development, public office provides an alternative center point for the emerging middle class (all the officials in Balzac's novels seem to come from small business families or soon to become small business families) . In the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848, 68% of the members were civil servants or other officials, only 12% were "freelancers", and 2.5% were industrialists. This situation is not accidental.

Fortunately for those interested in fame and fortune, therefore, the post-Napoleonic period has been, almost everywhere, a period of marked expansion of government institutions and activities, though hardly large enough to accommodate the growing number of literate citizens . Between 1830 and 1850 public expenditure per capita increased by 25 percent in Spain, 40 percent in France, 44 percent in Russia, 50 percent in Belgium, 70 percent in Austria, 75 percent in the United States, and 75 percent in the Netherlands. An increase of more than 90%. (Only in Great Britain, the British colonies, the Scandinavian countries, and a few backward countries did per capita government spending hold steady or decline, a period when economic liberalism was in full swing.) This increased This situation is partly attributable to the obvious tax consumer of the military.Although there was no major international war, the army was much larger after the Napoleonic Wars than before.Take the total number of armies of the major powers in 1851 as an example. Among them, only Britain and France have lower figures than in 1810, when Napoleon's power was at its peak.Other great powers, such as Russia, Germany, and the Italian states, as well as Spain, actually had larger armies.This increase can also be attributed to the development of old functions of the state and the acquisition of new ones.It is a basic misconception that liberalism is hostile to bureaucracy. (Those logically minded proponents of capitalism—the radical Benthamites—did not commit this fallacy.) Liberalism is hostile only to inefficient bureaucracies and government interference in things best left to private enterprise. things, and hostility to excessive and excessive taxes.The vulgar liberal slogan of reducing the role of government to that of a night watchman belies the fact that a government cut out of inefficiencies and intrusive functions will be a stronger and more ambitious government than it was before. government.For example, by 1848 only governments had modern and often national police forces: France from 1798, Ireland from 1823, England from 1829, Spain from 1844; The public education system is generally owned by the government alone; except in Great Britain and the United States, the public railway service is or will be owned by the government; Personal Communication Needs.Population growth forced the state to maintain a larger judicial system; urban growth and urban social problems also demanded a larger system of municipal administration.Government functions, whether new or old, are increasingly carried out by a single, national civil service system of full-time officials, whose senior officials are dispatched and promoted at will by the central authority of each country.This efficient service, while greatly reducing the number of officials, eliminating corruption and part-time jobs, and reducing the cost of administrative units, nevertheless creates a government machine that is far from formidable.Most of the basic functions of the liberal state appear to be beyond the wildest dreams of most ex-revolutionary despotisms, such as employing salaried bureaucrats or maintaining a national regular local police force to efficiently assess and collect taxes payment.The level of taxation is also much higher than before, and there are even intermittently progressive income tax rates, which is why the liberal government has been maintained: the government expenditure of liberal Britain in 1840 was equivalent to that of autocratic Russia. Four times as much. (In Great Britain, the progressive income tax was temporarily imposed during the Napoleonic Wars and has been imposed year-round since 1842; no other important country followed this precedent before 1848.)

Legend has it that Napoleon's soldiers would carry the officer's epaulettes in their military knapsacks as a first step towards his eventual acquisition of the Marshal's scepter.However, few of those new bureaucratic positions were actually equivalent to these officer epaulets. In 1839 there were 130,000 civilian officials in France, most of whom were postmen, teachers, low-level tax collectors, judicial officials, and the like; even of the 450 officials in the Ministry of the Interior and 350 in the Foreign Office, Most of them are also ordinary clerks. Literary works from Dickens to Gogol have described this type of people vividly.Apart from the privileges of public office, they have little to envy, and all they have is the security of starvation and poverty for life at a steady pace.There are only a few official positions that can be called a good middle-class occupation. From an economic point of view, it is impossible for honest officials to expect more than passable comforts. Reformers in the mid-19th century designed "administrative-level" officials in the British civil service system as a level suitable for the middle class, but even today, there are no more than 3,500 administrative officials at this level.

Although the situation of petty officials or white-collar workers is so simple, they are still as high as mountains when compared with the working poor.These people do not need to engage in physical labor.His clean hands and white collar, albeit symbolically, made him lean toward the rich.They usually have the magic of public authority.In front of him, men and women can only line up to get the documents that record their lives. He can come and go with these people at will, and he can tell these people what they cannot do.In less backward countries (and in democratic America) brothers and nephews could count on him to find a job; in many less backward countries he had to accept bribes.For countless families of peasants or laborers, petty bureaucrats, schoolteachers, and clergymen, at least theoretically within reach, for those unlikely to otherwise advance in social status, this Himalayan mountain was possible for their sons to climb of.

Self-employment was seldom on their list, since to be a doctor, a lawyer, a professor (which on the Continent meant being a school principal or a university teacher), or to be a "Educated" requires years of education or outstanding talents and opportunities. In Britain in 1851, there were about 16,000 lawyers (not counting judges) and no more than 1,700 law students (the number and proportion of lawyers on the European continent is usually higher); about 17,000 doctors and surgeons, and 3,500 law students. medical students and assistants; fewer than 3,000 architects; and about 1,300 "editors and writers" (a French term for a journalist [Journalist], not yet officially recognized).Law and medicine are two professions with long traditions, and the third is priesthood.The clergy offered fewer outlets than one might hope, and that would be all right if only because it expanded far more slowly than the population, but the fact is that the profession is being slackened by the anti-clerical zeal of governments. shrink rather than expand.Joseph II banned 359 monasteries of both sexes, and Spain, in its liberal period, tried to ban all monasteries.

There is only one real way out: that of the primary school teachers, both secular and ecclesiastical.The main members of the profession of teachers are mostly farmers, artisans and other descendants of simple families, and their numbers are by no means insignificant in Western countries: in 1851, there were about 76,000 men and women in Britain who claimed to be headmasters or ordinary teachers, which is still Excluding the 20,000 or so tutors.A governess was the proverbial last resort for penniless educated girls who were unable or unwilling to earn a living in less than respectable ways.Moreover, teaching is not only huge, it is an expanding profession.Teachers are poorly paid, but, except in countries where philistinism prevails, such as England and the United States, primary school teachers are extremely popular.For if there is any one person who represents the ideal of the age when ordinary men and women first discovered that ignorance can be driven out, it is the man or woman whose life and calling must provide for children whose parents never had opportunities to open up the world to children, to imbue them with truth and morality.

Of course, industry is the most obvious occupation open to talented people, and in a rapidly developing economy, the opportunities for industry are naturally considerable.The small-scale nature of many businesses, the prevalence of subcontracting, and small-scale buying and selling make them relatively easy to engage in.However, neither material, social nor cultural conditions favor the poor.First, successful people often overlook the fact that, to develop an industrial economy, it is necessary to create more wage-earners than employers or self-employed people.For every person who rises up to the industrialist class, more must slip down.Second, financial independence requires technical ability, mental preparation, or financial resources (however limited), all of which most people do not have.Those lucky enough to have these conditions—members of religious minorities, whose talents for such activities are well known to sociologists—do well: in the "Russian Manchester" Ivanovo ), most of the serfs who became weavers belonged to the "Old Believers" sect.But it is quite unrealistic to expect those who do not possess these specialties, such as most of the Russian peasants, to do the same, or even try to imitate them on the same terms.