Historical tier-jerker

Is class all in the mind? John Dunn ponders a story of our obsession

When Margaret Thatcher famously insisted that "there is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families", she was, of course, considerably stretching a point. But she was also making one. An ontology in which individuals have a clearer and more determinate status than "society" has a solid basis in biology and physics. Families may be as much in the eye of the beholder as society itself; but individual humans really are always somewhere in particular, and their bodies at least have exceedingly clear edges.

Society, by contrast, is a much vaguer entity, always nebulous but also unimaginably complex in content, and inherently indeterminate in scope. Such boundaries as any society has have always been imposed on it by distinctly more strategic and directed forms of human action: above all by politics and economic exertion. As a state, the United Kingdom has a definite territorial scope and a given schedule of legal subjects. Britain's historians have long practised telling the story of how it came by these, and more recently begun the task of explaining how each is starting to slip away at some velocity, a task at which they can expect plenty of further practice in the near future. But if the British state has a reasonably definite, if unsurprisingly contentious, history, just what is the history of British society? What exactly is the society whose history it is?

David Cannadine's Class in Britain can be read at several levels. At one, it is a jaunty and impressively well-informed resume of the findings of Britain's professional historians on how the multiple divisions in Britain's society have been imagined and evaluated by British subjects for the past three centuries or so: from roughly the revolution of 1688 to the coming of New Labour. At another, it is a polemical rejection of the doctrines of Cannadine's recent predecessors - the generation that did its vigorous best to write class indelibly into the history of British society and the British state. At yet another, it is a more muted and carefully considered affirmation of the organising viewpoint of his own generation, postmodern, sceptical and sagely instructed by the linguistic turn. More deeply still, but perhaps less effectively considered, it is a sustained political reflection, not merely on the role of ascriptions and mobilisations of class in British politics, but also on the political implications of, and the prospects for, its diminution within them, and even its eventual elimination from them, at least as an organising factor.

No historian who won his spurs, as Cannadine did, by studying the role of urban property in sustaining the relative wealth of the British aristocracy is in much danger of being comprehensively postmodernised, or led to believe that class is a purely linguistic entity. But there is some tension in the last instance between his viewpoint as a professional historian and his sensibility as a moment in the long and often dotty history of British society. That tension is at its most uncomfortable in the political project lightly sketched at the end of his book (the belated Americanisation of Britain's politics by the depoliticisation of class - and its replacement by precisely what? In the wake of Monica Lewinsky, one scarcely dares to ask).

Cannadine is a teasing and not invariably accurate writer. But he is also effervescently and enviably easy to read. Like many successful historians he is seldom reluctant to sacrifice a precisely articulated idea for a more dashing phrase; and, like them, too, verily he has his reward. Many will read Class in Britain with sympathy and enjoyment: maybe not quite as many as read Jilly Cooper (who gets a mention), but certainly more than ever read John Goldthorpe or Garry Runciman or Gordon Marshall (who also get bouquets). Just what will they learn from it; and how far should we applaud the instruction they receive? To raise such questions would be a more than priggish response to some of the levels on offer. But it is no less than is due to the political project ultimately proposed, and at least appropriate to the summary of historiographical wisdom.

Cannadine's brilliant career on both sides of the Atlantic has positioned him ideally to provide this summary. To the assignment of placing the history of class in Britain he brings both the perspective of America's very different society and the social assurance of Oxbridge: a view sternly from without and a confidence very much from within.

His main critical point is that class is ontologically more a mental than a material entity. Indeed it is mental twice over: a way of envisaging how a set of human beings imagine (and feel about) their interactions with one another, an answer to a question about ways of thinking and feeling, rather than a free-standing fact about the history of the universe. In this it is firmly on a par with Mrs Thatcher's valid intuition about society. So seen, on Cannadine's analysis, Britain has naturally had an extraordinarily complicated and differentiated class history. In mapping and recounting that history the historian should be, must be, and recently largely has been, engaged in telling the story of the British mind, rather than in tracing the history of wealth or power or work or even political (or, dare one say it, social) subjugation. If it is true (insofar as it is true) that Britain has long been pathologically obsessed with class, what it has been obsessed with, it turns out, is not the distinctive features of its own economy or polity, but in the end just its own obsessions.

It is a tale, on Cannadine's estimate, of three distinct, mutually exclusive, yet endlessly recombined ways of viewing the makeup of society. The first, the oldest, and until very recently the clearly dominant way is as an ordered and unified hierarchy of individuals: a shapely whole. The second way, now more in vogue, is as a triad of functionally and occupationally distinct groups, upper, middle and lower, in which the middle has always had an easier time of it explicating its singular merits than either those above or below. The third way, politically more embattled throughout, is as a riven duality: the rulers and the ruled, the rich and the poor, Us and Them. In the history of language and its use the English noun class has been employed in articulating all three visions, though more prominently and relentlessly in the last than either of the other two. But although Cannadine gives a proper weight to the history of vocabulary and its deployment, he quite rightly insists that what is at stake are three models or conceptions of the structuring of social, political or economic relations, not simply three patterns of speaking or writing about them.

In sustaining these three conceptions so assiduously across the centuries, Cannadine claims, the British positioned themselves to think and talk about their inequality and immobility more garrulously than the denizens of any other country, and did so precisely by endowing themselves with "a larger repertoire of surviving vernacular models" for the purpose than most other countries dispose of. As explanation this is on the thin side, and might well not hold up if the history of Britain were contrasted with, for example, that of France or Russia or India or Java, or even Morocco or Ashanti. But as historiography it does nothing to impede orderly investigation of past conversational activities or political enterprises and is more a challenge to professional zeal and patience than a deficit in analytical insight.

What is more questionable is the political upshot of all this. Here the American perspective clearly dominates. If the British, under New Labour or its successors, at long last snap out of their feudal residues, then they could, if they chose, become just like the Americans. They could think of themselves no longer as divided deeply by function or interest, or united in somewhat implausibly graded deference, but united instead, culturally, politically and rationally, in resolute equality. The "general relaxation of reverence" that Samuel Johnson somewhat prematurely discerned could reign at last without challenge, and the Britons, as John Major forlornly hoped, might all try to be nicer to one another.

The history of America's society and economy is in many ways a most extraordinary historical achievement. But it is not necessary to be a British chauvinist to see America's politics in the epoch in which class has been effectively erased from them as a most unappetising model for the future politics of anywhere else. Who will gain and who will lose among Britain's inhabitants if that is indeed the model which comes to rule here? Who has gained and who has lost there since Lyndon Johnson's presidency ended? If the history of class in Britain is increasingly the history of a category deployed by politicians to mobilise (or demobilise) voters for their electoral convenience, we should certainly be on our guard for how any set of professionals or amateurs encourages us to view our interactions with one another. But, then, as Cannadine's story consistently reminds us, so we all always should have been. There is no innocent account of what a society really is.

John Dunn is professor of political theory, University of Cambridge.