W.G. Runciman

To embark, as I have just done, on the writing of a volume on the sociology of 20th-century England is to be struck at once by the contrast between studying events and people in the immediate past and events and people which, for anyone of my age or less, are as remote as the First Reform Bill or the Charge of the Light Brigade. I have started by reading in parallel Peter Jenkins’s Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution and the two concluding volumes of Halévy’s magisterial History of the English People in the 19th Century, which between them take the story from 1895 to 1914. The contrast is not so much between an era of greatness and an era of decline as between – or so it seems at first sight – issues and characters larger and smaller than life. Is it just that distance lends glamour? Or is it fair to say that Parliament in the 1980s is distinguished only by its mediocrity when contrasted with the days when Asquith was at No 10, Lloyd George at the Exchequer, and Winston Churchill at the Board of Trade – and, down on the Bristol waterfront, a young carter called Ernest Bevin was getting himself elected chairman of a newly established carmen’s branch of the Dockers’ Union?’

The Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920 defies all stereotypes. It had no vanguard party and no coherent ideology. It owed almost nothing to external influences. It only started because of the gratuitous folly of Porfirio Diaz, whose dictatorial rule had lasted unchallenged since 1876, in failing to make effective arrangements for the succession to himself. Its initial protagonist, Francisco Madero, was as unlikely a revolutionist as it would be possible to conceive – the diminutive, squeaky-voiced theosophist eldest son of a rich landed family whose own grandfather likened his defiance of Diaz to ‘a microbe’s challenge to an elephant’. Its ultimate victors were hardly more sympathetic to the hopes and wishes of those who had borne the brunt of the fighting than Diaz himself. It ended by pitting urban workers in half-hearted alliance with bourgeois constitutionalists against an equally half-hearted alliance of Northern cow-boys and Southern peasants led in the one case by a homicidal, teetotal, illiterate ex-cattle rustler (Pancho Villa) and in the other by a dandified, horse-loving, ex-municipal village president (Emiliano Zapata). It was characterised throughout by a quite astonishing degree of duplicity, cynicism, self-seeking, and uninhibited recourse to violence. Indeed, it so often appears to be no more than a protracted slugging-match between rival caudillos that it can be (and has been) questioned whether it should be called a revolution at all.’

The play Serious Money, now transferred from the Royal Court to the West End, is a disappointment. It is neither farce nor satire, only caricature. The City is a splendid target for mockery, but loud doggerel and insistent overacting are no substitute for wit. The play may well enjoy a steady run simply because its subject is topical and its script full of four-letter words. But if you want to indulge your hatred, envy or disdain, as the case may be, for the wonderful world of financial capitalism, you can just as well stay home and read the ‘Slicker’ column in Private Eye.

Books on the theme of society-down-the-ages generally fall into one of two kinds. Either they are a narrative synthesis organised according to some preconceived criterion of historical significance, or they are an attempt to test against the historical evidence some would-be general theory to the effect that demography, class struggle, national psychology or whatever it may be is the master key to the explanation of the whole long story. Michael Mann, however, deliberately places himself mid-way in-between. As a result, he risks being simultaneously attacked by one set of readers for writing potted history at a safe distance from the sources, and by another for theorising at an insufficiently high and abstract level. But this is, in a sense, the point of the exercise. ‘Historical sociology’, so called, needs to vivify the higher theory with the right infusion of historical detail and vice versa, and it is by this that its success or failure requires to be judged.