Power and the Professions in Britain 1700-1850

Penelope J Corfield, Penelope J. Corfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134596362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The modern professions have a long history that predates the development of formal institutions and examinations in the nineteenth century. Long before the Victorian era the emergent professions wielded power through their specialist knowledge and set up informal mechanisms of control and self-regulation.
Penelope Corfield devotes a chapter each to lawyers, clerics and doctors and makes reference to many other professionals - teachers, apothecaries, governesses, army officers and others. She shows how as the professions gained in power and influence, so they were challenged increasingly by satire and ridicule. Corfield's analysis of the rise of the professions during this period centres on a discussion of the philosophical questions arising from the complex relationship between power and knowledge.

1

Power

Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est – knowledge itself is power.

(Francis Bacon, 1598)

Power is protean and takes many forms. It is forceful, renewable and divisible – although in practice not infinitely so. It is also notoriously difficult to apportion or quantify. There are often many different sources of power within any given community; and outer manifestations do not always coincide with real command. Contests may produce immediate winners and losers. But even then, if success has been brought at too high a price, the long-term impact may differ from the short-term result. Furthermore, in an expanding universe, there is no ‘fixed cake’ or restricted quota of power. As a result, it cannot be tallied by strict rules of accounting. An increase in power for one person or group does not automatically mean that all others lose by an absolutely equal amount, although that does not prevent established power-brokers from generally fearing such an outcome. Equally, however, authority can decline as well as rise. Some power – above all, monopoly power – is genuinely diminished by the advent of successful rivals.

Indeed, even the definition of such a strong but abstract concept is not simple. The connotations of power in its human application are, however, undeniably robust. Its synonyms indicate authority, control, dominion, puissance, predominance, command, hegemony. It converges with ideas of might and force. At the same time, it is similar but not identical to vaguer notions of influence, which can also confer power. And it overlaps with prestige, which often adorns authority. Yet here the match is not absolute. There have been éminences grises with covert supremacy but only little public fame – just as there have been gilded figureheads with social glory but no real executive authority.

At its core, therefore, power in human affairs refers to the capacity of one individual, group, institution or cultural agency to exert dominance over others.¹ It may be wielded through force and/or persuasion. It may be exercised overtly or covertly. And it may be sustained by conscious will or by deep-rooted predispositions within society or by the two in conjunction. Consequently, it gains in force when strong power-brokers work within strong systems of power. But it does not not invariably triumph. Power, which is augmented if it is used skilfully, may also be weakened, if it is not. Above all, it may be challenged by open or covert opposition. One clear signal of power in action is therefore the successful coercion and defeat of an enemy force. At the same time, however, contests for dominance are not always as starkly identified as a pitched battle between two rivals. Contests may be much more diffuse and their outcome not instantly apparent.

All this makes power, and indeed powerlessness, into fascinating topics of enquiry, with a truly global scope. This study has selected a specific focus in order to consider some general issues. It is a case history of the power of the professions in Britain, during the years from approximately 1700 to 1850 when the economy was gradually industrialising and society liberalising. The focus is deliberately upon a history of change, and upon a contentious social group with specialist knowhow. After all, the professions were credited with mysterious powers not upon the basis of any special political, military or economic resources but by virtue of their command of professional knowledge. Yet such an approach does not assume that there were no other forms of authority in eighteenth-century Britain. On the contrary, it is because the professions were challengers not supreme wielders of power that their role attracts attention.

When investigating the sources of terrestrial command, it quickly becomes apparent that there is no single and universally accepted answer. That is indicated by the many definitions of power that have been canvassed over time.² It seems more plausible to assume, instead, that power can take many forms, often simultaneously – rather as physicists argue that light can have at the same time the properties of both waves and particles.

The quest for definitions certainly lends itself to striking dicta. Thus, military leaders know the sentiment (though of course the technology has varied) which asserts that ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’. These words came from Mao Zedong, but Oliver Cromwell and Hermann Goering, for example, both made very similar observations.³ By contrast, Edward Bulwer Lytton in 1839 had countered classically on behalf of all opinion-formers with the rival claim that ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’.⁴ That highlighted the debate between the brutal power of force and the more insidious but often compelling power of ideas.

Others instead note that people have to eat before they can either fight or write. The famous dictum, attributed to Napoleon, held that ‘an army marches on its stomach’. His comment was at once jovial and deeply serious. It emphasised the importance of economic resources as the substratum of power. Versions of this were often stated. ‘Money masters all things’, ran an anonymous English verse in 1696⁵ – and money was able to buy not only weapons but also propaganda. ‘All property is power’, noted Archdeacon William Paley in 1785.⁶ This drew upon the ideas of political theorists such as James Harrington and John Locke. They stressed the importance of property as the basis of governmental authority. Meanwhile, Karl Marx gave a radical turn to the analysis by identifying the deep-rooted dynamic of changing economic infrastructures as the key to changing political systems.

Yet armed force, ideas and property hardly exhaust the list. Political rulers are positively expected to wield and to represent power; and religious teachers to lead their flocks. In addition, in many walks of life, senior figures often control advancement within their hierarchies of command. Thus Archdeacon Paley again noted that: ‘Patronage universally is power’.⁷ Assumptions about gender roles also coloured views about authority. Traditional patriarchy defined men as the stronger sex and therefore powerful. Some, however, argued that women had their own attributes. Female beauty has ‘strange power’, mused John Milton’s Samson Agonistes.⁸ ‘And the hand that rocks the cradle/ Is the hand that rules the world’, suggested William Wallace in the later nineteenth century.⁹ But others rejected both the stark and the gilded versions of domestic hierarchy. Men’s apparent superiority was based upon ‘unnatural violence and lawless usurpation’, snorted an anonymous lady in 1739, identified only as ‘Sophia’ or ‘Wisdom’.¹⁰ Instead, power should be shared by all rational beings.

Many impersonal forces, beyond the scope of individual will-power, were also cited. Disease and death have been said to triumph over all, including sceptres and crowns; yet faith, memory and love may outlast even death. Others have pointed to the continuing power of tradition, custom, culture, the past, law, ideology, religion. To that list can be added the force of music, art, science, technology. Recently, the role of words and language in mediating or even forming human thought has been much debated. And there are many variants on the power of ideas and access to ideas. ‘Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run’, wrote Mark Twain playfully although not entirely flippantly.¹¹

Famously, too, in a dictum that has found many later echoes, the scientist and politician Francis Bacon asserted roundly in 1598 that: ‘Knowledge itself is power.’¹² He was writing of divine omniscience, but the proposition was eminently capable of secular adaptation. Thus Bacon’s one-time secretary, the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, decided that all people coveted power – since ‘riches, knowledge, and honour [reputation] are but several sorts of power.’¹³ As that indicates, the linkages could be interpreted in different ways. Knowledge could be viewed as a source of individual and social empowerment. That gave it a liberal and humanist meaning.

Alternatively, knowledge could be construed not so much as an intellectual system in its own right but instead as a form of power, that could moreover be used as a cloak for power-broking purposes. That has been much explored in the twentieth century. For example, the novelists Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell wrote about the totalitarian possibilities of state-operated ‘thought control’.¹⁴ And the political theorist Antonio Gramsci reshaped Marx’s stress upon economic infrastructures to propound an alternative theorisation of ruling-class power based upon a pervasive ideological and cultural ‘hegemony’.¹⁵

Such approaches entailed a distinctly unreverential view of knowledge systems. No Whig concept of ‘progress’ or triumphalist ‘march of ideas’ here. The most extreme version was propounded in the pugnacious philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche in the later nineteenth century. For him, all human beliefs did not spring from abstract reasoning or from a spiritually sanctioned sense of good or evil but instead derived from a fundamental human ‘will-to-power’, elsewhere defined as the will-of-life itself.¹⁶ This formulation has influenced a number of later thinkers. Above all, the French cultural theorist Michel Foucault has extended the analysis. His own much quoted central statement in Surveiller et punir (1975) explained that within the power/knowledge equation the former constituted the latter:

We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.¹⁷

Foucault’s statement was not intended as a manifesto for the rule of the savant– or professor–king. On the contrary. His formulation explicitly gave primacy to power relations in the generation of ideas. Thus he stressed that knowledge systems were shaped by external factors rather than by their own internal logic or intellectual progression or fundamental truth. In that assumption, there was some common ground between Foucault and Antonio Gramsci. For both, absolute knowledge was dethroned from its pedestal. ‘Philosophy in general does not in fact exist’, agreed Gramsci.¹⁸ Choice was always possible, although dissidents had to work hard to combat the ideological hegemony of the ruling elite. By contrast, Foucault was not interested in the concept of class struggle, whether defined in economic or ideological terms. It was the intellectual and institutional construction of sets of ruling ideas rather than the social origins of authority that intrigued him. As a result, his fertile and controversial writings focused upon the ways in which power relations were inscribed in knowledge systems – making strong claims about the nature both of power and of knowledge.

These issues for debate are relevant to the history of Britain’s emergent professions in a number of ways. Not only did these ‘experts’ excercise power by virtue of their specialist knowledge but the extent and nature of their power were changing. Furthermore, they did not exercise supreme authority. They were subject to hostility and satire. And they faced other mighty contenders for power.

One obvious problem relates to the methods of adjudication when discussing general concepts such as these. There is no simple test to identify power in either its systemic or its active agencies. Past declarations about the location of authority are helpful as a starting point. As power – unless otherwise disturbed – runs easily in established grooves, it is very relevant to know where it officially reposed. But contemporary descriptions often concentrated upon the outward and ‘reputational’ forms of authority. That could obscure not only the manoeuvres behind the scenes but also the cultural frameworks in which power was operated.

Another perspective is afforded by varying the focus to look at ‘events’ as well as ‘reputations’. Such a tactic does not mean that there is an absolute gulf between deeds and words, since not only are deeds often (but not always) recorded in words but in Wittgenstein’s pithy phrase ‘words are also deeds’.¹⁹ Still less does an examination of ‘events’ imply that ideas are mere illusions that do not correspond to a gritty ‘reality’. Instead, people’s views about the location of power were j...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• 1. Power
• 2. Mystery
• 3. Satire
• 4. Lawyers
• 5. Clerics
• 6. Doctors
• 7. Trend
• 8. Ethos
• 9. Advancement
• 10. Power/Knowledge?
• Select Bibliography
• Index