Intellectual trends after the French Revolution

  Critics contended that the roots of the illness lie in the Victorian self-righteous philosophies and liberal economic theories that helped develop harmful educational institutions and social relations. Protestant Christian tenets of 'predestination' and 'original sin' inclined people to assign responsibility for one's moral and economic condition to the individual alone.[20] Thomas Malthus's (1766-1834) theory on 'population equilibrium, ' and David Ricardo's (1772-1823) 'iron wage law' supported a biblical contention that 'the poor will always be with us.' Adam Smith's (1723-1790) laissez faire and Jeremy Bentham's (1748-1832) utilitarian liberal economic theories justified as little state action as possible. Social Darwinism convinced many that the long hours and filthy working conditions in the factories served the evolution of the human species.[21] Britain's industrial success further reinforced acceptance of these 'dismal' theories and led the elite of every political persuasion (except a few Quakers) to believe in the apparent inevitability of class conflict and the irreconcilability between the 'dirty' industrial,
'material' and the 'pure' classical, 'spiritual' realms.
  The literary and artistic movements of the early nineteenth century reflected and reinforced these elite philosophies. The books of Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) , from The French Revolution to Past and Present, exemplified well the evolution of early nineteenth century elite thought--from conservative pessimism toward the democratic tenets of the French Revolution, to disgust with things industrial (i.e., 'Mamonism' and the 'cash nexus'), and the call to hold on to traditions like ancient religious orders and 'the land.'  The works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) , John Ruskin (l819-1900) , and Charles Dickens (1812-l870) followed a similar course; and, although Karl Marx (l818-1883) did not advocate retreat to tradition, he was just as
conservative as most others among the elite in his contention that the abhorrent working conditions and developing class differences were natural and inherently antagonistic.
  Industry and factory life in particular, came to represent an evil zone where the antagonistic spaces of labor and capital struggled in conflict. Many referred to the factories as 'satanic mills' that robbed the humanity from civilization. The Luddites simply destroyed the 'evil' machines, while Marx and Ruskin were sure that factories would alienate workers from the product and produce increasingly intolerable conditions until workers would be forced to organize a revolution' Because capital, or ownership and their managers, were not expected to be socially responsible or morally obligated toward labor, even new technology was viewed as capital's rightful tool to exploit labor in the 'zero-sum,' 'win-lose' game of production.  As late as the 1970s, a predominant view was still that industrialization would slowly 'de-skill' employees in the inevitable 'labor process' of capital making production more efficient.[22]
  Such assumptions affected the passage of labor legislation throughout the twentieth century. whereas other industrializing countries (Germany and Japan in particular) sought to establish more cooperative relations between capital and labor to avoid the dreaded strike, in Britain, the right to strike, formal or informal, continued to be a stalwart feature of industrial relations policy. 'Collective bargaining' between the ' inherently antagonistic' moral spaces of the zero-sum game remained a given until the Japanese model offered an alternative image of an encompassing moral space (the 'firm as community') in the 1980s.

Institutional trends in public education

  The British public education system in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries developed concurrently with binary intellectual trends and helped further define the antagonistic spaces of the 'dirty, ' 'applied' scientific/industrial and the 'pure, ' 'theoretical, ' literary. At one extreme, early nineteenth century education for the working classes in charity schools and Mechanics' Institutes lacked reading because it was thought that teaching writing to the 'inherently lazy' would produce in him a distaste for work. Allistair Mant, a scholar on British management, quoted one early-nineteenth century educator, that the teaching of writing to the working classes was thought to be counterproductive because it 'might produce in him a disrelish for the laborious occupations of life.'[23] Similar observations were found in an 1861 Royal Commission Report which stated that a large proportion of the students coming out of popular (state-supported) elementary schools could barely read.[24] Because children were an integral part of British manufacturing at this time, public education theorists believed that education for the masses should be based on industrial utility alone.
  At the other extreme, Public (fee-based) schools for the elite--from the Clarendon nine (Harrow, Winchester, Eton, Rugby, etc.) to the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge" were devoid of any technical training, or 'applied' science, because headmasters thought these subjects to be antithetical to the 'pure' classical learning of Greek and Roman literature. Indeed, one of the classics, Plato's Republic,  justified such divisions in its advocacy of a 'purely' philosophic education for the elite ruling (Guardian) class, versus a menial education for the working class.  Thomas Arnold (l795-1842) and John Henry Newman (1801-l890) , two leading spokesmen for the Public schools in the mid-19th century, helped win the debate for the expansion of   the elite public schools and 'pure' learning. critics were fond of quoting Arnold:

Rather than have science the principal thing in my
son's mind, I would gladly have him think the sun
went round the earth, and that the stars were so
many spangles set in the bright blue
firmament. [25]

An excerpt from one of Newman's speeches as well reflected the development of two tracks for education:

You see then, Gentlemen, here are two methods of
education,. the one aspires to be philosophical,
the other mechanical,. the one rises towards ideas,
the other is exhausted upon what is particular and
external. [26]

Increasingly convinced that academic opposites reflected apparent social corollaries, the British elite became less concerned with innovation as Workshop of the world, and more concerned with their mission as 'civilizer, ' or  'Britannicizer' of the world.[27]  The effect, critics contended, was a civilizing of the 'industrial spirit' and a 'gentrification' of the industrialist. This was the thesis of Martin Wiener (1981), and it was also implicit in every other book on British decline critical of the growing aversion to industry and the 'cult of the amateur' in the workplace where university-trained engineers were viewed with contempt.[28]
  The assumed moral superiority of studying Greek and Roman classics and playing organized sports must have seemed appropriate in a Glorious Empire in need of administrators; but as the nineteenth century progressed, the 'pure' track appealed to the industrialists as well. They sent their children to these boarding schools to rise above their 'inferior' occupational status and one day become part of the gentry. This aversion among the Public schools for technical studies was the one likened to the condition of education in china at the turn of the century in which Chinese educators deemed the Confucian classics superior to science-related studies.
  Despite numerous official reports warning of Britain's technical vulnerability, business management studies and engineering never developed into specialized disciplines at the university level to the degree they did in France, Germany, Japan, and the U.S.[29] Britain's 'best and brightest' continued to prefer the classical literary education track leading to Oxford and Cambridge, and a civil service job;  and, only if all else failed,  a high level management position in industry. A 1929 report by the Balfour Committee on Industry and Trade reflected the concern, but also the powerlessness of government officials faced with the general lack of support for science education initiatives:

The available information makes it clear that the
present response of industrial and commercial
enterprises to the educational efforts made to
train candidates for entry into the higher grades
of these organizations is much less certain and
widespread than in certain countries, e.g.,
Germany and the United States.[30]

Critics maintained that because most government officials had deficient backgrounds in science themselves, policy-making was doomed to be misguided and ineffective. Similarly, upper-level managers in industry, 'gentrified' in the elite schools, were increasingly ineffective at managing
innovation in their companies.
  The rare management specialists and engineers who did find education programs and a place in industry often found that labor did not respect their education anyway because of the persistent ideal of the 'practical man' educated on the shop-floor.[31] Critics maintained that these trends,
reinforced by the complacency induced by Britain's victory in the Second World War, accounted for the deficit in engineers and technically-trained managers into the postwar period.[32]Although the Education Acts of 1870, 1902, and 1944 expanded education for more children and adolescents, their delegation of technical education to the non-university track reinforced the association of technical studies with the low-status 'blue-collar' versus the literary 'white
collar' occupation groups.[33] It was not until the Labour-initiated comprehensive school movement of the 1960s that reformers sought to abolish these traditional divisions incrementally over the course of a decade. This effort, however, provided no quick fix for Britain's industrial and economic ills and would later be blamed for the troubles by successive conservative governments in the 1980s and early 1990s.  Some critics argued that the ineffectiveness of the
comprehensive schools lay in their failure to 'democratize' the A-level college entry exam preparation which remained the monopoly of independent (fee-based) schools.[34] As the
comprehensive schools came under increasing fire and independent schools gained credit for 'maintaining high standards, ' George Cyril Allen lamented in 1976 that

England is [still] unique in possessing two
entirely distinct systems of education from
childhood upwards. Nowhere else are the children
from different social groups kept so rigidly apart
throughout their school life.[35]

Allen's convictions regarding the significance of the public schools in socializing traditional social classes dated back to a trip he made to Japan in the 1920s when he observed that

. . . although [the schools] did not then claim to
be democratic, children from all classes attended
the same primary school. A Japanese friend was
surprised that I should have found this a matter
for remark' Though he was well-to-do, he thought
it natural that the people who were now his
servants and the local farm workers should have
attended the same primary schools as he.[36]

Although Allen's observations may exaggerate the egalitarianism of the public education system in Japan at this time (for they had their Eton and Rugby elite higher middle school equivalents) , it was true that, unlike England (which segregated education from the start) , the Meiji and Taisho elementary schools were comprehensive and in theory everyone began with equal privileges.[37] In his concluding chapter on The British Disease, "The Solution: Deep-seated Adaption to Industrial Society," Allen again raises the issue of elementary schools as a factor to be considered in the search for foreign models:

The absence of a common system of primary
education must bear much of the blame and here a
foreign example is to be commended. A
satisfactory remedy cannot he found by way of
compulsion, and parental choice should not be
fettered. Perhaps one must keep content with
hopes for a gradual erosion of older social
attitudes and a continuous improvement in the
standards of the state primary schools.[38]

Britain and Japan's different institutional histories in the public education and their internal operations were an important part of a matrix of factors that developed two different systems of management and management education, and is the subject for discussion in chapter four.
  The British disease can be summarized, then, as a growing popular awareness of the significance of intellectual and institutional trends wrought during mid-nineteenth century Victorian England which, according to the persuasive camp of Allen, Barnett, and Wiener, solidified the intellectual aversion toward technical studies and reinforced class conflict, especially through the school system. In this context, the profession of management in Britain grew increasingly incompetent, due to its lack of technical qualifications, and industrial relations became increasingly divisive and dysfunctional. Although this diagnosis received a substantial rebuttal in the early 1990s, since Britain's economy had improved, the thesis is concerned with the critique's effect on reform efforts which sought to overcome the disease.[39] The formulation of the concept of the British disease was a necessary preface to instituting far reaching institutional reforms and instigating a shift in attitudes developed during the days of the Glorious Empire. The remainder of the thesis will be seek to discern the particular reform efforts since the second World War as Conservative officials and the 'captains of industry' sought out foreign models to cure their post industrial ills.

ENDNOTES

[8] George Cyri1 Allen, The British Disease: A Short Essay on the Nature and Causes of the Nation's Lagging Wealth, (London: Institute of Economic Affairs. 1976) , p.50.[back to text]

[9] I use the term 'world economy' in the tradition of Andre Gunder-Franke, "The World Economic system in Asia Before European Hegemony," The Historian 56(2), (1994: 260-276. Gunder-Franke viewed world economies as multi-centered and dynamic throughout world history, in contrast to Emmanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and The Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century
(New York: Academic press Inc., 1979) who sees it as a uniquely European development.[back to text]

[10] The best overviews of the technological and educational imperatives between the First and Second Industrial Revolutions are David S. Landes, Prometheus Unbound: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1969) 1-358; and Robert A. Locke, The End of Practical Man: Entrepreneurship and Higher Education in Germany, France, and Great Britain, 1880-1940 (Cambridge.' Cambridge U.P., 1989).[back to text]

[11] For British industrial consultants in Germany, see Landes 1969. Peter Lawrence provided information on German coinage of the term 'British disease' in an interview at Loughborough University, 20 January 1995, Loughborough, Leicestershire England. For German 'dismay,' or
schadenfreude, over British underperformance, see Allen 1976: 15.[back to text]

[12] Alfred Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: Managerial Revolution in American Business (Boston: Harvard U.P., 1977).[back to text]

[13] For an in-depth analysis of this transformation from craft production and mass production, to Japanese 'lean production' (TQM and JIT) see James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel T. Jones in the book The Machine that Changed the World (New York: Macmillan, 1990). This influential book is based on a five year, five million dollar MIT study.[back to text]

[14] Statistics compiled in David Coates, The Question of U.K. Decline: State, Society, and Economy (London: Harvester, 1994), p.6.[back to text]

[15] Ibid. Statistics compare percentage of change in output per worker in a variety of time spans since 1960.[back to text]

[16] P.D. Anthony, The Foundation of Management (London: Tavistock Publications, 1986) , p.12.[back to text]

[17] During my travels around England (15 January - 13 February 1995) I found the people over the age of thirty whom I met were able to associate a variety of connotations with
the 'disease':  'labor problem,' 'incompetent management, ' and 'apathy.' Although one can not generalize from such a small sample, these informal definitions at least supplement the
1993 Oxford English Dictionary definition of the 'disease' as "a problem or failing supposed to be characteristically British, especially proneness to industrial conflict." (The 'disease' had not made it into the preceding 1971 edition of the dictionary.)[back to text]

[18] Allen 1976; Louis Leonard Brown, The British Disease (London: copyrighted pamphlet, 1982); James Allen Chatterton and Ray Leonard, How to Avoid the British Disease: Industry in
The Eighties (London: Northgate Publishing, 1979); Correlli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (Gloucester: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1984); Alistair Mant, The Rise and Fall of the British Manager (London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1977); M. Mathieson and G. Bernbaum, "The British Disease: a British Tradition," British Journal of Educational Studies 26(2)
(1988), pp.l26-74,. Maureen Tominson, The English Sickness: The Rise of  Trade Union Political Power (London: C. Tinling and Co. Ltd., l972).[back to text]

[19] Correlli Barnett, "Obsolescence and Dr. Arnold," Sunday Telegraph 26 January 1975, cited in Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980(Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1981). Although Martin Wiener is an American, his book on British decline became the most debated thesis on the 'British disease' in Britain during the 1980s. The best critique of Wiener and the 'British disease' genre of the 1970s and 1980s is W.D. Rubinstein, Capitalism, Culture and Decline in Britain: 1750-1990 (London: Routledge, 1993).[back to text]

[20] It should be noted that there were as many or more elements of Protestantism which complemented industrialism.  While notions of 'predestination' and 'original sin' may have
contributed toward mistrust, it also may have contributed toward reinvestment of capital to prove one's destiny for a better world. This is the thesis of the classic by Max Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism (1958). For a brief discussion of the anti-capitalist prospects of  Protestantism see Manuel Wallerstein 1974: 152.[back to text]

[21] For a readable intellectual history of the period, see David Churchill Somervell, English Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1929).[back to text]

[22] The 'labor process' thesis is best represented by H. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review press, l974).[back to text]

[23] Mant 1977: 24.[back to text]

[24] Corel1i Barnett, The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation(London: Macmillan, 1986).[back to text]

[25] T. Arnold and A.P. Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold (London: John Murray, 1877) p.32, cited in Mathieson and Bernbaum, "The British Disease: British Tradition?," p.140-41. See also Barnett 1986: 214; Mant 1977: 24.[back to text]

[26] From a speech in 1852, quoted in Sanderson, The Universities of the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp.123-4, cited in Barnett 1986: 213.[back to text]

[27] The 1931 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary includes 'Britannicize,' 'to make Britannic or British in character, ex. , 'Americans are Britannicized Indians. [back to text]

[28] Martin wiener's thesis was part of 'the received wisdom interpreting recent British history and our prospects for the future, ' according to New Society (17 November, 1983:
274). It received two successive hours on Monday night prime time television, was 'given the approval and blessing' of  authorities in the whole political spectrum. Anthony 1986: 14;
see also, Locke 1985.[back to text]

[29] In particular the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures of Paris, France; the Polytechnic of Zurich, Switzerland; the numerous Technischehochschulen and Handelshochschulen in Germany; the University of Commerce (currently, Hitotsubashi) and related colleges in Japan, and in the United States, the Harvard School of Business and MIT (ironically modeled on a British technical college). Allen 1976: 41:7.[back to text]

[30] Cmd 328: Final Report of the Committee on Industry and Trade 1928-1929 (p.23l), cited in Barnett 1986: 212.[back to text]

[31] Allen 1976; Robert Locke 1985,. and Locke, Management and Higher Education Since 1940(Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1989), pp.176-98.[back to text]

[32] As late as 1978, Britain was only graduating 1,200 engineers per year compared to Japan's 70,000. Coates 1994: 140.[back to text]

[33] David Rubinstein and Brian Simon, The Evolution of the Comprehensive School, 1926-1966 (London: Routledge, 1966), pp.1-32.[back to text]

[34] Locke 1989: 196-8; see also, Anthony Sampson, Changing Anatomy of Britain (New York, 1984).[back to text]

[35] Allen 1976: 67-8.[back to text]

[36] Ibid., p.68.[back to text]

[37] For an analysis of the higher middle schools see, Donald T. Roden, Schooldays in Imperial Japan: A Study in the Culture of a Student Elite (Berkeley: University of  California Press, 1980).[back to text]

[38] Allen 1976: 74-5.[back to text]

[39] One of the common rebuttals is that British decline was regionally specific, and British continued to have the highest share of Nobel prize winners for scientific discoveries, thereby repudiating the cultural 'aversion' to technical studies. Rubinstein 1993.[back to text]

Table of Contents/Chapter II