Year: 1979
Type: article
Abstract: When men in the early nineteenth century appealed to the landed proprietors of England to accept their “paternal responsibilities”, they gave voice to the conviction that gentry behavior had special relevance for the question of social discipline. Conservatives, especially, adhered to the view that subordination and the hierarchy of ranks resting upon it constituted the fountainhead of social cohesion. But at the same time, reliance on this concept of social organization involved the governors in various commitments to their subordinates, for ultimately the cohesiveness of the social order seemed dependent upon the operation of reciprocal obligations. The place of these imperatives in rural relationships arose from, and contributed to, a tradition that saw the subsistence and well-being of the entire community to be dependent upon the social responsibilities of and the connections between the different degrees of interest within the agricultural economy. A characteristic anxiety of the conservative of the period was that the economic individualism of a rising urban and industrial society promised to undermine the social accountability of each component of the social order; this presaged the disintegration of society because the “chain of connexion” between the rich and the poor would thereby be broken. The implication was that the intrusion of self-interest, economic or otherwise, threatened a structure of interdependency and mutual respect and concern between ranks. It appeared, then, that the most serious danger to society would certainly come at that point when the landowners of England — the rulers of what still seemed an essentially rural world — abandoned their paternalist traditions and opted for indolence, indifference, or the allures of commercial farming.
Author: Peter Dunkley
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2126083531