THE LOST WORLD OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS
Lexington Green has an interesting post “Do we really owe it all to the geography of the Norwegian fjords?” at Chicago Boyz that traces the culture of Anglo-American notions of political liberty to the nuclear families of the Norwegian fjords:
“Here is a whole corpus of writing about which I knew nothing. I have in the meantime obtained a copy of the translation of the Demolins book, Anglo-Saxon Superiority, To What is it Due? (1907). The beginning of it is a summary of the writing of M. de Tourville, which discusses how the Saxons came to dominate all the other invaders, Angles, Danes, Normans, because of their cultural practices, particularly nuclear families, which Tourville calls “particularist” social structure. The Saxons generated a unique type of state apparatus as a result, operating large states on a federal-type basis. For example, note this passage:
We know how, under Egbert, the Heptarchy fell under the domination of the Saxons. But the latter did not give the Angles a Saxon government, nor did they foist Saxon officials on them, for the good reason that their political development was most limited, their strength lying more in private than in public life. They never dreamt of administering conquered peoples in the fashion adopted by the Romans, and later by the Spaniards and the French. Their idea was rather — and has remained — a Federation. Thus were started by the Saxons that former United States of England. So little did they aim at constituting the model of a large empire, that their king continued to call himself simply ‘King of the Saxons of the West’. Yet he was sovereign over the whole island.
Remarkable if true. We see the Saxons at the earliest possible date showing the genius for distributed power and federal arrangements that we in the Anglosphere still have today. Unfortunately, the Demolins book, which I am halfway through, is more focused on reform in France a century ago, with the English case only as a background.”
Very intriguing. At the time the Demolins book was published, the troubled Third Republic was deeply split politically, socially and culturally. There was, to an extent, in France, a sense of anxiety over the might of the “Anglo-Saxon powers”, rising America and reigning Great Britain and paranoia about the aforementioned power’s distant Teutonic cousins in Wilhelmine Germany. On the other hand, admiration for British political institutions was not unusual among French intellectuals prior to the 20th century – Montesquieu and Voltaire being the most famous examples of that tradition.
February 3rd, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Mark, thanks for the link.
The whole issue of how family structure sets you up for “modern” political and economic arrangements is pretty darned important.
How much “connectivity” can do is impacted by this assessment, for one thing.
I am going to make a copy of the first section of Demolin and circulate it around, and I’ll send it to you, too. It is a very interesting “Anglospheric” discussion.
I also tend to think that the Victorian and Edwardian thinkers have held up well since our current people are often deformed in their thinking by a lot of ideological pre-loading. The old timers, in my view, were more hardnosed and objective and hard on themselves when needed.
February 8th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
“They never dreamt of administering conquered peoples in the fashion adopted by the Romans, and later by the Spaniards and the French. Their idea was rather — and has remained — a Federation.”
Well, those intellectuals who realized that Britain was acquiring an empire worried a great deal about how you could combine an empire and a republic. Machiavelli said it couldn’t be done. Their solution was to claim that their empire was (1) sea-based rather than land-based, (2) protestant rather than Catholic, and (3) born of mutual attraction from commerce rather than coercion. In short, their empire would be more like a federation than a classic empire.
But they *did* govern very much in the mold of empires. By forging bargains with indigenous elites and crushing those who didn’t go along, by appointing proconsuls to run the show, and by ruthlessly exploiting many of their subjects.
All things being equal–and as long as you weren’t a native in North America–British rule was preferable to many of the European alternatives, but none of that should lead us to conflate how the British legitimated their empire with their practices.