Disciplining the people

The state's transformation from an instrument into an ideal could never have taken place if it had not also reinforced its grip on society far beyond anything attempted by its early modern predecessor.

As has been shown in an earlier section, two of the most characteristic features of the modern state are its specialized police forces on the one hand and the prison system on the other. The former was made necessary by the French Revolution and the levee en masse which it was the first to introduce. The latter itself was a typical state-owned bureaucratic in­strument, presupposing as it did whole armies of forms, regulations, wardens, physicians, social workers, psychologists, and of course the fortified structures in which their unfortunate wards were incarcerated. While the connection between them and the state is thus strong and intimate, both of them also reflect the fact that, once the Napoleonic Wars were over, the nature of the internal security problem facing the state underwent a decisive change.

From the time of the earliest empires on - and as the establishment of tyrannies in such ancient and medieval city-states as Corinth, Syracuse, Rome, Milan, and Florence inter alia also showed - traditionally the persons most in need of supervision had been the great.

With Locke and Montesquieu, the need to defend property against all comers - be it non-property-owners or the ruler himself- was elevated to

Botero, The Reason of State, p. 83.

See C. B. McPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), particularly pp. 264-5, 197-221, 247-8. the rank of a cardinal principle of political theory. The former made the right to property into an inalienable law of nature, even to the point that he defined life itself as a ‘‘possession” of which no person should be deprived without cause. The latter devoted some of the most critical parts of his work to a detailed explanation of the ways in which that right was to be enforced in practice. In the event, the first state explicitly to adopt the principle as one of its foundations was England after the ‘‘Glorious Revolution” of 1688. The United States and France followed, the former as soon as it adopted its constitution and the latter in the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789).

The acquiescence, often even the enthusiastic support, of the posses­sing classes having been secured in this way the early nineteenth-century state set out to extend its law and its order into those parts of the population which, up until then, were usually considered to be beneath its notice. Previously in most countries, crime among the lower social classes had been understood as the ‘‘depravity” of individuals. However regrettable from a moral point of view, it did not endanger society, the more so because most of it took the form of petty neighborhood quarrels directed by the poor against each other. As the emergence of the modern state caused the members of the upper classes to be disarmed, and as industrialization caused vast numbers of have-nots to concentrate in the rapidly growing cities, this situation changed. The events of 1789-94 had demonstrated what the mob, provided it was properly aroused and led, could do even to the most powerful and best organized state in history until then. During the decades after 1815 the emerging ‘‘social question” came to be seen as threatening the foundations of the estab­lishment; and, with it, the working discipline that modern capitalism and industry required.

Whatever their exact motivation, during the two decades after 1810 one country after another set out to imitate Napoleon, establish new

³⁵ K.

Among the main European countries, the one with the strongest liberal traditions was Britain. Though individual members of Parliament repeat­edly protested the effect on liberty, here too the growth and centralization of state-run, regular police forces proceeded apace; in 1829 the city of London received its ‘‘bobbies'' (after Home Secretary Robert Peel). In 1835 Parliament ordered all incorporated municipalities to follow Lon­don's lead, and twenty-one years after that the County and Borough Police Act made police forces mandatory all over the country.

By the time these developments were taking place, the state, originally a purely European invention, had started the march of conquest that was to make it master of the world. The process of expansion will be studied later in this volume; here we must merely note that the British system of professional police forces was exported to the most important colonies which naturally looked to the mother country for a solution to their problems. In the United States, as the most important extra-European state by far, New York became the first city to create a municipal police force in 1845. Originally it numbered 800 men - massive for its day, but soon rendered out of date by a population which, over the next two decades, expanded from 400,000 to 650,000.^[228] The year 1865 saw the establishment of the Secret Service, the first nationwide police force, whose mission was to protect the president. In 1905 Pennsylvania be­came the first US state to set up a state police, a measure that was later imitated by New York (1917), Michigan, Colorado, and West Virginia (1919), and Massachusetts (1920). By 1920 the Bureau of Investigation- later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation or FBI - had been in existence for twelve years.

Having put their forces in place, these and other US states proceeded to impose order both on the countryside and on those lower-class urban neighborhoods which had previously been almost entirely beyond their reach. Patrolling the streets, monitoring markets, beer-houses, and brothels (but careful to avoid those known to be frequented by the state's own high officials), the police soon made their presence felt, though this was more true in Europe than in the United States with its wide open spaces and frontier society. Again Britain with its relatively liberal tradi­tions provides a good measuring-rod. The number of prosecutions grew sevenfold between 1805 and 1842; compared to the population the increase was by a factor of four and a half. Given the new emphasis on public order - for example, the UK Vagrancy Act of 1824 made it possible to prosecute people merely for being on the streets - it is not surprising that the vast majority of those indicted belonged to the lower classes. The results deserve to be called dramatic. After 1848 it was seldom necessary any longer to bring in troops for quelling riots, etc.; in Britain between 1850 and 1914 (when the curve changed direction and became horizontal), the rate of burglary per 100,000 of population dec­lined by 35 percent, that of homicide by 42 percent, and that of assault by 71 percent.^[229] Using the need to discipline the people as its excuse, the state set out to conquer entire city quarters that previously had been out of bounds, and remake them in its own image.

Even as its police forces were imposing acceptable standards of behav­ior on the people, the nineteenth-century state felt that the time had come to invade their minds as well. During most of history, education had been left almost entirely to the family and to the established church. Sparta, of course, was a notable exception; reflecting the practices of earlier tribal societies, male children were taken away from their parents at the age of six and raised in special dormitories from which they only emerged in order to marry. Prominent men of other ancient city-states also some­times founded schools, but they did so in order to display their generosity to their fellow citizens, as part of the liturgies to which they were subject, rather than in a comprehensive attempt to control the minds of the young.^[230] The Carolingian, Inca, Ottoman, and Chinese empires all boas­ted imperially run schools; but their student intake consisted almost exclusively of the relatives of court officials and, perhaps, some of the aspiring members of the bureaucracy. Whatever the system, and again with the very partial exception of the ancient city-states, the vast majority of the people were left to cope as best they could. Throughout history, this meant that the rural population in particular received scarcely any formal education at all.

Proposals aimed at setting up a state-run education system may be found in the works of such seventeenth-century utopian writers as Val­entin Andrea and Gerrard Winstanley, whom we already met as an advocate of a national information-gathering apparatus. Possibly in­fluenced by the Spartan example and also by Plato, Andrea wanted children of both sexes to be taken away from their parents at the age of six and raised in dormitories. Winstanley suggested that the ‘‘Common­wealth” assume responsibility for ensuring that no future citizen should be without the requisite moral and professional education needed for making a living, though just how this was to be done he did not explain. As the eighteenth century progressed schemes of this kind multiplied. All wanted to see education taken out of the hands of the church; but while some were motivated by what we today would call patriotic and national considerations, others merely reflected the desire to provide the nascent bureaucracy with a steady stream of compliant penpushers. The first type was exemplified by Rousseau who, in his Considerations concer­nant le gouvernement de Pologne (1772), suggested that the goal of educa­tion should be to make students replace the words ubi bene ibi patria (home is where life is nice) by their opposite.⁴² The second included several detailed schemes submitted by Prussian and Bavarian theolo­gians - Konrad von Zeydlitz and Heinrich Braun - to their respective royal masters during the 1780s.

In the event, so long as the old regime lasted, little came of these and similar proposals. Focusing on the negative side, most monarchs were content to make sure that nothing should be taught in church schools that was likely to undermine their own position; beyond that, it was merely a question of providing money and sometimes buildings for instruction in whatever subjects which for one reason or another excited their interest. Thus Louis XIV, prompted by Colbert, gave his support to a short-lived Academie politique as well as a few technical colleges, the most important of which was to develop into the subsequent Ecole des ponts et chaus- sees.⁴³ Another field that attracted the attention of the powers that be was officer training. Previously officers had been persons who, either working with their own capital or with that provided to them by others, received ‘‘commissions’’ from rulers to recruit soldiers. With the advent of regular armed forces after 1648 or so, the system changed: cadet schools int­ended for the sons of the impoverished nobility became fairly common, each of the main states (except Britain, where the form used by regimen­tal commanders to enlist officers did not include a blank for education) founding at least one. By the end of the eighteenth century, they had spread from Europe to the new state across the Atlantic. Here two of them - the one at West Point and the one at Annapolis - were preparing themselves for a great future.⁴⁴

The first ruler to take a practical interest in the education of his subjects

⁴² J.-J. Rousseau, The Government of Poland (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1977), p. 14.

⁴³ G. Thuillier, ‘L’Academie politique de Torcy, 1712-1719,’’ Revue d'Histoire Dip­lomatique, 97, 1-2, 1983, pp. 54-74; F. B. Artz, The Development of Technical Educationin France (Cleveland, OH: Society for the History of Technology, 1966), ch. 1.

⁴⁴ On the origins of officer schools, see M. van Creveld, The Training of Officers: From Professionalism to Irrelevance (New York: Free Press, 1989), ch. 1. at large was Prussia's Frederick William I. In 1717 he claimed to have learnt that children were ‘‘grossly ignorant... of those things that are most necessary for their welfare and eternal salvation''; thereupon a royal decree was issued which ordered all parents to send their children to school, but since nothing was done to follow the matter up the results, if any, were minimal. Frederick the Great in his Landschulregiment (1763) decreed that all children between five and thirteen should attend school; nine years later he set aside 200,000 thalers to pay teachers and rescue his newly acquired Pomeranian subjects from what he called ‘‘their Polish slavishness.”^[231] Again little came of the matter, not least because parents were too poor, and local authorities unwilling, to bear the cost. For example, as late as 1792 only one out of six East Prussian villages had a school. In West Prussia the percentage was even lower; throughout the kingdom such schools as did exist tended to be concentrated in the royal domains, whereas Prussia's Junkers did little to educate their serfs. Frederick did, however, complete his father's work by bringing secondary and university education under the control of a state department. A school-leaving examination known as Abitur was instituted and became a condition for admission both to the universities and to the ranks of the Prussian administration. As the nineteenth century progressed, it also became a prerequisite for those who aspired to commissioned rank in the military.

While Prussia dawdled, Bavaria acted. The Peace of Luneville (1801) put an end to the old sancta Bavaria as it had existed from 1648 on. Not only was the country drawn into a tight alliance with Napoleonic France, but the annexation of territories formerly belonging to Austria brought with it a massive infusion of Protestants and Jews who could not be assimilated by the old system. Accordingly, in October 1802, the Council for Ecclesiastical Affairs was abolished and a Ministry of Education, the first of its kind in any country, founded. Besides making entry into the civil service conditional on the completion of high school, as in Prussia, the Bavarian authorities instituted compulsory schooling for all children, compliance to be secured by issuing a school-leaving certificate that would be required for permission to purchase real estate, practice a trade, or marry. Most of the cost was to be covered by fees paid by parents; the rest would come out of church property which was being secularized as fast as possible. A law of 1804 went further still, placing all existing schools under state supervision and making them nonconfessional. The curriculum was given a secular, utilitarian bent. Once instituted it was destined to remain in force until the next wave of reforms swept it away during the 1860s.^[232]

45

Whereas in Bavaria commitment to education flagged after the Res­toration, in Prussia things went the other way. Thanks to the efforts of Frederick William III, who took a personal interest in the question, a department of education was set up in 1808; nine years later its impor­tance was formally acknowledged when it received cabinet rank. With higher and secondary education already under its own control, no sooner had the Wars of Liberation ended than it, provided with relatively ample means, began to found schools by the hundred. Finance came partly from the parents themselves, partly from contributions made by local gover­nment. The system covered girls as well as boys; not only Germans but Poles and even Jews were admitted, a real innovation for the time. The task of providing faculty fell on twenty-eight specially organized, state- funded boarding schools. In Konigsberg, such was the shortage of quali­fied teachers that orphans in state institutions were summarily designated as future educators and, once their training had been completed, un­leashed upon their fellow youngsters.

The results of the state ‘‘being turned into an educational institution writ large,” as one official in charge of the curriculum put it,^[233] did not take long to bear fruit. By 1837, 80 percent of Prussian children were attending school and, to allow them to do so, the first child labor laws were being passed. By mid-century 80 percent of the adult population were literate, compared to only 50-65 percent in Britain and France; among Prussian army recruits, only one in ten had failed to receive any schooling at all.^[234] The final steps were taken by the constitution of 1849 which turned all teachers - including university professors, some of whom had to be dragged by the neck - into state employees. After 1871, and making use of the fact that the remaining states had long been in control over their own schools, the system was extended over the whole of Germany. As liberals turned their coats and gave their support to Bis­marck, any doubts that the aim of schooling was to help make the Reich good and strong were overcome and the direction of German education was well and truly established on lines that were to be altered, if at all, only after 1945.

For reasons that cannot be examined here, other countries were slower off the mark. Bills which would have led to the establishment of parish schools were put before the British Parliament in 1796, 1797, 1807, and 1820; all were rejected, however, and it was only in 1833 that a paltry sum - £20,000 - was set aside ‘‘in aid for the education of the poorer clas­ses.”⁴⁹ By 1858, funding had increased to £700,000, not a negligible sum (among other things it provided for the training of 14,000 pupil­teachers), but this was still far short of the £24 million spent on defense in the same year. Meanwhile, motions for the establishment of universal and compulsory instruction controlled by a Ministry of Education continued to be defeated. In the face of opposition on the part of ratepayers, steps to extend schooling to larger segments of the population progressed only very slowly. In the main, they were limited to parliamentary committees of inquiry which looked into the way the sums which had been voted were spent.

By and large, and in spite of the existence of a much more centralized political system, the same was true in France. Napoleon’s greatest con­tribution to the French educational system consisted of the two ‘‘great schools’’ - the Ecole polytechnique and the Ecole superieure d’adminis­tration - that he founded. He also set up a series of lycees, intended for the sons of the middle classes and run on military lines; however, his interest in elementary education was limited and, far from ordering its expansion, he was content to have existing institutions placed under state super­vision. In his capacity as secretary of education to Louis-Philippe, the historian Francois Guizot ordered the opening of an elementary school in each community. However, implementation was haphazard and those few institutes which were put into operation were run jointly by the state and the parish priest.

In the event, what galvanized both countries - and others as well - into action was the series of Prussian military victories that began in 1864. In 1866 von Roon, the minister of war, informed King William I that ‘‘the victor at Koniggratz was the Prussian Volkschule teacher.’’⁵⁰ Von Roon’s original intention was probably to rob von Moltke’s rapidly rising general staff of some of the glory; however, the phrase served other countries as their cue. The first step, taken in France, was to establish an ecole normale primaire in each departement. Within a few years whole armies of teachers had been mass-produced and had embarked on their designated task of

⁴⁹ For the rise of state-directed education in Britain, see E. Midwinter, Nineteenth-Century Education (London: Longman, 1970), pp. 32ff.

⁵⁰ R. Rissman, Deutsche Pädagogen des 19. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Klinkhardt, 1910), p. 219. turning every Frenchman into a burning patriot ready to give his (nobody yet thought of a woman being made, let alone asking, to give her life) for Alsace-Lorraine.^[235] Several other measures followed, until the process was crowned by the establishment of universal free compulsory education in 1882.^[236] The person most responsible for pushing the scheme through parliament was Prime Minister Jules Ferry. Not accidentally, he also played a major role in the expansion of France's colonial empire into Tunisia, Madagascar, Tonkin, and the French Congo.

Faced with ‘‘the challenge of Germany,''^[237] other states felt they had little choice but to follow. Compulsory, universal education - which sooner or later was bound to be made free as well - reached Japan (where it was part of the process known as the Meiji Restoration) in 1872. Italy's turn came in 1877, that of Britain in 1890, and that of Spain in 1908. But whereas in Germany it was the states which made up the empire that laid down the curriculum, the political system of most other countries tended to be more centralized, with the result that, around the turn of the century, it was claimed that the French minister of education, for example, could tell you what was being taught in each one out of a hundred thousand classrooms by simply looking at his watch. By the time World War I ended the measure had even been adopted by many Latin American countries,^[238] albeit from then to the present day it has often remained largely on the statute books.

This was not so in the most advanced countries, where the reform had largely accomplished its goals. In 1895, 82 percent of all eligible British children were in fact attending school and the system was even beginning to provide some medical care as well as subsidized meals. On the eve of World War I, the social reformer Beatrice Webb was waxing lyrical over the ‘‘utopian'' picture in front of her eyes: ‘‘7,000,000 children emerge every morning, washed and brushed... traversing street and road and lonely woodland... to present themselves at a given hour at their 30,000 schools where each of the 7,000,000 finds his or her own individual place, with books and blackboard and teachers provided.”⁵⁵ Reality, to be sure, was less idyllic. As early as the 1880s escorting truant children to school - and sometimes jailing their parents for failing to force them into doing so - had become a routine police duty in the ‘‘best-ordered” countries such as Germany.

Possibly because it costs more on a per student basis, the situation in respect to secondary and tertiary education was more variable. State funding to pay the way of the talented sons (much later, daughters as well) of the poor who wished to attend high school began to be provided during the 1880s, and again Britain provides a good case in point. From 1902, when a centralized organization took the place of the earlier school boards, 56 places out of every 1,000 in rate-supported schools had to be provided free of charge. Twenty-seven years later that figure was doub­led; in 1932 a means test was introduced to distinguish between parents who were able to pay for their children’s education and those who were not. Though parallel measures were taken in many other countries, by and large secondary education remained limited to the offspring of the middle classes, and it was only after 1945 that it was made anything like universal and free. In most countries the school-leaving age, which had originally stood at eleven, was raised first to fourteen and then to sixteen, that being a limit which not even the modern state, for all its self­righteousness and the unprecedented apparatus of coercion at its dis­posal, dares cross.

Since tertiary education requires high expertise on the part of the faculty, by and large governments were less able to control it. Relatively few countries followed the German example in turning all universities into state-owned institutions and all tenured faculty into Beamter (of­ficials). Elsewhere there was a tendency for government to subsidize universities; for example, in Britain between the world wars the gover­nment provided one-third to one-half of their income. Surprisingly, one of the first countries to establish ‘‘state’’ universities was the United States. The first one to open its doors was Rutgers, the New Jersey State University, in 1766. This was followed by the University of Georgia in 1785, the University of Vermont in 1791, the University of Tennessee in 1794, and the University of Cincinnati in 1819.⁵⁶ Many of these public universities were set up in places too remote and too recently settled to be reached by money-conscious private ones. Perhaps not surprisingly, their prestige (and, presumably, their educational standards) has tended to lag behind the latter from the time they were founded to the present day.

⁵⁵ Quoted in A. Trop, The Schoolteachers London: Heinemann, 1957), p. 195.

⁵⁶ World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1998 (Mahwah, NJ: K-III Reference Corporation, 1998), pp. 234-8.

Whereas, except in totalitarian countries, universities were for the most part given license to determine their own curriculum, the same was not true of secondary and, a fortiori, elementary schools. Consequently the instruction that they offered often became subject to the political de­mands of the moment; depending on how much states feared their citizens or trusted them, now practical subjects were emphasized, now more theoretical ones. While schools in all countries tended to replace religion with (national) history, German and French schools in particular were caught in the struggle between church and state. In Germany, Bismarck waged the Kulturkampf from 1872 on; in France a Radical government came to power in 1900 and closed all religious schools until 1914, when they were allowed to reopen. In an age when more and more people were receiving the vote, the state's desire to dominate the cur­riculum was partly motivated by the need to ‘‘educate our masters'' (as one British MP put it in 1867). However, democratization could not explain why, in virtually every country, children were increasingly forced to study the ‘‘national'' language at the expense of their mother tongue - quite the contrary. Nor can it account for the constant parading, flag­saluting, anthem-singing, and hero-worshipping that went on in many places, to say nothing of the need to ‘‘foster loyalty to one Kaiser, one army, one navy'' (Germany); assist the ‘‘race'' in its ‘‘battle for life'' (Britain); and prevent ‘‘the power of national defense from lagging be­hind that of other countries'' (the United States).^[239]

Last but not least, having established a firm grip on the minds of the young, the state moved to acquire the allegiance of those old enough to perceive that their real interests consisted not of circuses but of bread. By and large, the early nineteenth century had been the heyday of laissez faire. Many of the old institutions were dead; having finally succeeded in drawing a clear line between government and ownership, the state had no desire to place limits on what might be done in the name of the latter. However, already during the 1830s the direction of the wind began to change. In Britain as the most industrialized country by far, there were no fewer than thirty-nine royal commissions appointed to look into the conditions of the poor between 1831 and 1842 alone. What they brought to light was masses of people living in squalor; neglected children who, to keep them quiet as their parents were at work, were given opium instead of an education; fourteen-hour work­days for young and old; working conditions which, in many cases, could only be called appalling; wages which, even at the best of times, were barely sufficient to keep body and soul together; and no insurance against unemployment, accidents, illness, and old age.^[240] Some re­formers were motivated by a genuine concern for the welfare of the people; others, perhaps more numerous, by fear of the revolutionary consequences that might follow if nothing were done. Whatever the cause, states started laying their hands on social and economic life in ways, and to an extent, that would have been wholly beyond the imagin­ation of previous political communities.

The first Factory Acts, prohibiting the employment of children under nine and limiting the working hours of persons under eighteen to twelve a day, were passed in Britain in 1834. As the name implies, originally they applied to factories only; they were extended to mines in 1842, merchant shipping in 1876, and railways in 1889. An 1844 law prohibited women from being employed for more than twelve hours a day - this being the first of a very long list of statues which the modern state, claiming that women were weak and needed special protection, enacted in their favor. As early as 1847 Parliament passed a ten-hour bill; however, it was not until 1874 that it was applied to all factories, whereas other workers, particularly those employed as shop assistants and in domestic service, began to have their working hours limited only early in the twentieth century. To enforce these laws, as well as the safety regulations gradually being enacted from the 1840s on, a system of inspection was established. During the early days it often met with resistance, not only on the part of employers who resented the intrusion but also on that of the workers themselves who did not want limits on the earning power of their youn­gest family members. Other countries followed Britain's lead, albeit reluctantly and often after a considerable interval. For example, Germany got the twelve-hour day only after unification in 1871; France, where conditions were in some ways worse than anywhere else, even later.

With working conditions increasingly falling under its own control, the state started expanding its power into other spheres of public welfare. In 1834 in Britain the old Speenhamland system of outdoor relief, dating to Elizabethan times, was abolished. Not only had the burden risen beyond the ability of individual parishes to bear; but its decentralized nature was incompatible with the demographic changes brought about by urbaniz­ation. Its place was taken by state-owned workhouses which admitted people on the basis of a means test. In an attempt to keep costs down, they were run on prison-like lines with conditions deliberately made as harsh as possible. Families were separated, and most forms of innocent amuse­ment, such as smoking or playing games, prohibited, while the work provided was onerous and unpleasant. The reform's aim - namely, cut­ting cost - was achieved; until the 1860s, the sums spent on welfare actually fell. Precisely for that reason, it probably did little to help the poor. Still, this was the first time when authority was taken away from the Justices of the Peace and put into the hands of a central supervisory board. As such, it marked a major step toward the construction of the modern British civil service.

The first Public Health Bill was passed in Britain in 1848 and led to the appointment of local Boards of Health with power over water supplies as well as the paving, draining, and cleansing of streets. The act proved unpopular and in 1854 it was not renewed, the London Times claiming that John Bull had wearied of the ‘‘perpetual Saturday night'' of clean­liness. Much to the chagrin of ratepayers, though, the setback turned out to be temporary. To note a few landmarks only, in 1853 vaccination against smallpox became compulsory (in 1898, the right of religiously minded parents not to have their children inoculated was recognized). In 1858 the General Medical Council was created to oversee education and licensing in the fields of medicine, surgery, and midwifery; in 1860 the Adulteration of Food Act was passed, and fifteen years later local authori­ties were given the power to appoint food analysts in order to enforce the law. A Lunacy Act, making compulsory hospitalization of the mentally ill conditional on the approval of a state-appointed physician, was passed in 1890; 1899 saw the establishment of the first ante-natal and maternity clinics, though the scheme became nationwide only in 1919. Finally the state began to build its own institutions for the physically and mentally ill, thus taking over from the church. As law followed law and inspector was piled on inspector, the call arose for a centralized organization; and a centralized organization inevitably sought to undertake additional tasks. The ultimate outcome was the establishment of a Ministry of Health, which took place in 1919.

Already by the 1840s these developments had gathered sufficient mo­mentum to find their expression in socialist thought. Previous writers such as Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen - to say nothing of Rousseau - had put their faith for the salvation of mankind not in bureaucracy but in its opposite. To them the answer to contemporary social problems consis­ted of dismantling modern life and returning to the land; there groups of workers, having established autonomous communities with their own laws, would look after their own economic needs while living in freedom and equality among themselves.^[241] However, the advent of modern indus­try caused such a solution to lose its appeal. For all that the black satanic mills were undoubtedly evil, their contribution to industrial production was such that to turn one's back on them merely meant condemning oneself to isolation, backwardness, and even hunger. Hence would-be reformers such as Etienne Cabet in France and Edward Bellamy in the United States turned their hopes to the state. As they saw it, states as they existed in their time merely represented the political framework of capi­talist exploitation; the problem was to make them work for society as a whole. Taking over from private enterprise, future states would substitute cooperation for competition and planning for individual caprice, thus vastly increasing production while at the same time providing employ­ment, welfare, and plenty for all.^[242] This optimistic view of the benefits of centralized planning was even shared by those visionaries who, like Marx and Engels, predicted that the state would ‘‘wither away.''

The first to declare the citizen's ‘‘right to work'' were the French revolutionaries of 1848. Attempting to turn theory into practice, Louis Blanc established his social workshops or ateliers nationaux of 1848-9; whether through his own fault or through that of his opponents, they turned out to be a disastrous failure and were soon closed. Other, perhaps wiser, minds set their sights lower and called for insurance plans that would ease the workers' lot during periods of hardship. The first such schemes to be turned into reality were promoted by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Germany whose goal was to wean his country's proletarians away from the growing Social Democratic Party. In 1881-5 old-age, sickness, and unemployment insurance schemes were pushed through the Reichstag and became law. The state, the employers, and the em­ployees were all made to contribute; initially applying to factory workers only, the plan was later extended to other groups until, during the Weimar Republic, virtually all trades received coverage.^[243] Quickly taking up the German example, the Scandinavian countries established their own schemes and by 1914 several of them were in operation. In 1893 Switzerland, too, began to experiment with a state-run, voluntary unem­ployment insurance scheme. It proved unable to meet its commitments and went bankrupt within four years; however, this failure did not deter others. By 1920 Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand, France, the Nether­lands, Finland, and Belgium all possessed voluntary, state-run and state- subsidized unemployment insurance systems.

Having been the first country to industrialize, Britain was remarkably slow to establish any kind of social security system; still, in 1908-11 ten years of argument were brought to a close by the Liberal Party in the person of its remarkable chancellor of the exchequer, David Lloyd George. As in Germany, the reforms included a compulsory health and unemployment insurance system with contributions by employers, em­ployees, and the state; on top of this came a 30-shilling ($7.50) maternity benefit and a universal, non-contributory, scheme for paying flat pen­sions to persons over sixty-five years of age with no other sources of income. Described by its originators as ‘‘the greatest scheme of social reconstruction ever attempted,” the reform immediately ran into trouble because almost twice as many people turned out to receive benefits than had been expected - money having a remarkable power to flush out individuals whose very existence had previously gone unnoticed. By 1914 the cost of the program had doubled from the planned £6 million to £12 million annually, while the cost of all ‘‘social” spending combined rose from a modest £22,6000,0000 in 1891 to a staggering £338,500,000 in 1925.^[244] This, however, did not prevent other countries, notably Ger­many and Ireland, from going way beyond the British model in extending their own social services during the interwar years.^[245]

By that time even the United States, traditionally the stronghold of rugged individualism and low taxes (to make the House of Lords vote money for his plans, Lloyd George had threatened to create the necess­ary number of new peers), was feeling the need to do something for its working population. A modest first step had been taken in 1912 when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed a law requiring the pay­ment of minimum wages. However, it only lasted a few years; in 1923 a Supreme Court decision declared a State of Oregon minimum-wage law for women unconstitutional. Other measures to extend government con­trol and limit private enterprise were equally unsuccessful. For example, the number of persons who benefited from a government vocational education scheme instituted in 1917 was so small that statistics about it simply ceased to be published. In 1920 a law calling for the abolition of child labor failed to make it through Congress. Five years later, a Kansas law for the compulsory arbitration of industrial disputes was similarly thrown out of the High Court. In 1929, the last year of prosperity, all American federal welfare expenditure combined only amounted to $0.25 per head of population,^[246] which constituted perhaps one percent of its British equivalent.

In the event it took the Great Depression and 12 million unemployed to shake the United States out of the world of laissez faire and into the one in which, whatever the names attached to the various schemes, welfare came to be financed out of taxation. The foundations were laid in 1933 when President Roosevelt, ignoring howls of Republican opposition, set up the Federal Emergency Relief Agency (FERA). Its first director was a social worker, Harry Hopkins; armed with a war chest of $500,000,000, it provided work for at least some of those who needed it.^[247] Over the next six years this and numerous other programs led to the spending of some $13 billion over and the construction of 122,000 public buildings, 77,000 bridges, and 64,000 miles of roads inter alia - all, however, without making a real dent in the Depression which only ended in September 1939 when, following the outbreak of war in Europe, the stock exchange went through the roof.

Administratively speaking, the annus mirabilis of the New Deal proved to be 1935. That year saw the introduction of social security including old-age insurance and assistance, unemployment compensation, aid to dependent children, and aid to the blind. In 1939 survivors’ and disability insurance, already a standard feature in the most advanced European countries, were added to the list. By that time every American citizen had been issued with his or her social security card and the Department of Health and Human Services had been created to oversee the system’s operation. Even the Supreme Court was prepared to cooperate, though not before Roosevelt, having fought a battle royal with Congress, packed it with his own supporters. In 1937 a Washington State minimum wage law was declared constitutional. Another ruling did the same for social security itself; the age of big government had truly begun.

Finally, just as totalitarian states went further than anybody else in indoctrinating the people, so they took the lead in disciplining them. This was particularly true of the USSR which turned itself into the complete welfare state - one that, however harsh the discipline it exercised and however low the quality of the services it provided, did try to cover the individual’s needs from the moment that he or she was born to the time he or she was put into the crematorium or grave. Though neither Fascist Italy nor Nazi Germany went nearly as far as this, both regarded themsel­ves as rooted in the common people. Neither embraced capitalism whole­heartedly, looking instead for a ‘‘third way” that was neither reactionary nor socialist.^[248] Each, according to its lights, designed its social security system with the explicit aim of ending class warfare, restoring the dignity of the working people, and harnessing them to the state's aims.^[249] In many ways - e.g., providing for paid vacations - these programs differed little from those of other countries.^[250] Italy and Germany did, however, put an unusual emphasis on benefits such as marriage allowances, housing loans, and child payments (sometimes made conditional on the wife not working outside the home), all of which were meant to spur population growth and prepare the country for war.

The ‘‘totalitarian'' regimes also made a determined effort to control the minds of the young by way of formal and informal schooling, often against the will of their parents who distrusted the experiment - with good reason, as it turned out. Except in Fascist Italy, where Catholic education was never completely suppressed and where the Concordat of 1929 led to its revival,^[251] schools other than the state's own were simply shut down. The rest had their faculty vetted for political reliability, their curricula dictated from above in accordance with ideological considerations, and their classes subjected to supervision so strict that one could hardly turn a corner without being gazed upon by the Sun of Nations, Il Duce, or Der Führer.

Finally, and by way of backing up their control over both welfare and education the Communist, Fascist, and Nazi states also established po­lice organizations far more terrible than anything seen in history until then. Thanks to the fact that they operated without requiring juridical authorization, the NKVD, OVRA (Organizazione Vigilanza Repressione Antifascismo), and Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei) counted their vic­tims in the millions; their names still send shudders down people's backs. To compare the security forces run by the likes of Lavrenty Beria, Arturo Boccini, and Heinrich Himmler with the police apparatus maintained by the democratic countries of the West is less than fair. Yet it should be kept in mind that, however great the differences that separated them, in the end they were all offshoots of the same tree whose roots had been so firmly planted by Napoleon. All sought to achieve the same end, namely to make sure that no person and no institution should be in a position to resist any ‘‘lawful” demands made on it by the state. The torture chamber and the concentration camp merely completed the work that the class­room had begun:

What did you learn at school today

Dear little boy of mine?

What did you learn at school today Dear little boy of mine?

I learnt our country is good and strong!

Always right and never wrong!

I learnt our leaders are the best of men! That's why we elect them again and again. What did you learn at school today...