Brian Elliott

Persistence and Change: the petite bourgeoisie in industrial society

The Petite Bourgeoisie is a stratum that has attrated little academic study. Historians have given it short shrift, the radical scholars dismissing it as the petty bourgeoisie and the aristocratic historians discounting its members as small fry of no significance! And historians are not alone in their neglect, for in economics, political science and sociology there is a similar disdain for those who cannot be cast in the heros role in any of the major developments of western capitalism. The petite bourgeoisie remains in the wings because to writers of diverse opinions and academic specialisms it has appeared as essentially trivial.

The Political Economy of Place

Visitors to Edinburgh in the late eighteenth century were generally struck by three things: by the appalling squalor, the great density of population pressed into the multi-storey tenements, and the close proximity to each other of the different social strata. The social ranks were not segregated by street or district at this time, but simply by the level of the tenement they occupied. The wealthier and nobler families lived in the middle floors high enough to be spared the worst of the smells which filled the street and lower apartments, but not so far up the stairs as to make the climb wearisome. Smout cites a contemporary report which revealed that: one tenement in the High Street had a fishmonger’s house on the ground floor, a respectable lodging-house on the second floor, the rooms of the dowager Countess of Balcarres on the third floor, Mrs Buchan of Kelly living above that, the Misses Elliots, milliners and mantuamakers above that, and the garrets occupied by a great variety of tailors and other tradesmen (Smout, 1969:370).

An approach to a study of small shopkeepers and the class structure

For a good many years now the distribution of effort in the field of social stratification has been noticeably biased in the direction of analysis and description of the position of the working class. Much theoretical discussion has revolved around the possible changes that may have taken place in advanced industrial societies as a result of the relative prosperity of the post-war years. Investigators have examined political sympathies and ideologies, consumption patterns, aspirations, and relational patterns of groups within these societies and attempted to relate these to broad structural changes. But, influenced by Marxian writers and their opponents, both theoretical and empirical work has been directed very largely to change as it affects the working class. In consequence we now have a good deal of data on and discussion of sociological problems concerned with the working class, but no comparable corpus of data obtains for other classes nor, in this country at least, has very much attention been given to the identification of theoretical problems relating primarily to these other classes (1).

Petty Property: the Survival of a Moral Economy

As sociologists it would be easy to find points of disagreement with the notion of class expressed in the preface of E. P. Thompson’s celebrated study of the making of the English working class, but whatever its shortcomings, his approach has the considerable merit of forcing us to think seriously and precisely about actual social relationships. In this chapter we want to look at the character of those social relations in which men and women of the petite bourgeoisie are set, at the class experience of those who, in so much of the literature, are ignored or crudely caricatured. As in so many discussions of class, we encounter awkward problems of definition flowing from different traditions of writing, different theoretical stances and different substantive interests. In the previous essays we have brought together accounts which relate to small farmers in a developing colonial territory, small farmers set in and working for a modern capitalist economy, artisanal bakers in France, small businessmen in a socialist country and craftsmen and petty capitalists in developing countries. In what sense can such a diverse occupational set be said to have anything in common? On one thing we can surely agree: these are neither bourgeois nor proletarians. At the same time it is clear that they are unlike the routine white-collar workers in industry, commerce or public administration and they are different too from the bureaucratised professionals or salaried intelligentsia.

Power and Protest in the City

The cities of the west have been noisy places in recent years. Throughout the 1960s and the 1970s they provided the arenas for a great many collective agitations: from the racial violence of American cities or the celebrated riots of May 1968 in Paris, to the most diverse array of demonstrations and protests by squatters, council house tenants, ratepayers, environmentalists and others. The action has been channelled through national political parties, local political groups, residents’ associations, community action committees and a host of ad hoc organisations.

Property and Class Relations

We are concerned in this book with one particular kind of property, and with those who, over the past century or so, have been able to accumulate control and dispose of it. Our research has focussed on the stock of rented housing in one city, and on those who have owned it and those who continued to own it. However, our interest in landlordism really grew out of a wider sociological concern with property as an institution of fundamental importance in a modern capitalist society.

Property and Political Power

The origins of the commonly observed links between property interests and local politics are not hard to find, for in Britain as in other western societies, cities have for centuries been governed by those who own land, commercial or industrial capital, or housing. The massive urbanisation in nineteenth-century Britain produced much debate about appropriate forms of local government, and Municipal Reform Acts extended participation in local political life, but during the Victorian period they certainly did not challenge the notion that those best fitted to run our towns and cities were the local men of property. It was argued that keeping municipal affairs in the hands of local businessmen or property holders made for efficiency, minimised waste or extravagance, and ensured that those who paid the piper also called the tune. City Corporations were, after all, ‘corporations’, essentially similar to business corporations. It followed that those experienced in the direction of commercial or industrial enterprise would naturally be the best qualified to control the civic enterprise, or so it was claimed It seemed important too that these men of property be local men, for in all the discussions about municipal reform, it is clear that Victorians, or at least bourgeois Victorians, attached great importance to local autonomy: The principle of local self-government has been generally recognised as of the essence of our national vigour. Local administration under central superintendence is the distinguishing feature of our governments. The theory is that all that can should be done by the local authority, and that public expenditure should be chiefly controlled by those who contribute to it (quoted in Best, 1971:40).

Managing Property: The New Landlords

The changing character of the relationships between property interests and politics in Edinburgh largely reflects dramatic shifts in the housing tenure patterns. What occured in the city was very much in line with the national trends. In the early decades of the century, nine out of every ten households in Britain rented their housing from a private landlord, and even by 1947, six out of ten still did so. By 1981, however, only 13 per cent of households were beholden to the private landlord for their accommodation. These shifts are documented in the censuses, as shown in Table 5.1.

The World They Have Lost

Our interviews with individual landlords in Edinburgh took place in the mid-1970s, and in order fully to appreciate the political views and judgements that we gathered, it is necessary to set them in context, to sketch some major features of this remarkable period. It was a time of extraordinary turbulence — politically, economically, and socially. There had been two general elections in 1974 (in February and October of that year). The first of these had led to the defeat of the Conservative government, and in much of the right-wing press this was characterised as ‘Heath [the Prime Minister] being brought down by the power of organised labour’ — in particular by the miners. The second election, although it did not produce for Labour the hoped-for large parliamentary majority, did confirm that Party’s earlier victory over the Tories, and seemed to guarantee that Harold Wilson and his colleagues would be able to form an administration that would endure for something like a normal term.

The Persistence of Petty Landlordism

Landlords make good copy. The ‘folk-devil’ image of the landlord has lingered since the early years of the century, reinforced by the reputation of ‘Rachmanism’ in the 1960s, ‘winkling out’ in the 1970s, and housing benefit scandals in the 1980s. Proposals by the Conservative Government to allow market-level rents for new lettings, and to transfer ownership of council estates to private landlords, have resurrected the old fears of tenant exploitation. But popular myths about landlords are no substitute for accurate knowledge. If we are to understand landlordism and property relations, we need more accurate information about who landlords actually are, and the manner in which they operate.