ABSTRACT
We have to be careful in looking at the importance of changing ideas not to underestimate the extent to which their force only becomes manifest when they interact with changing material and political conditions. If we turn our attention towards England, where the Industrial Revolution was later to occur, we see a rising bourgeoisie challenging the old order in such a way that, by 1688, their political action and parliamentary triumph had brought about a bourgeois revolution. The wealth of this rising class was made possible in part by other aspects of the decay of feudalism. Massive rural changes were displacing increasing numbers from the land (as many as half a million by the mid-seventeenth century) and from traditional crafts. People were thus made available as wage labour for employment or as domestic manufacturers to be exploited by merchants. These commercial groups were not unopposed in their ascendancy, of course, and it was the very opposition of established groups to their interests which helped mould them into, effectively, a coalition of interest. England had a relatively permeable class structure by general European standards and this encouraged aspirations towards advancement (Israel 1966). The Crown, however, pursued a policy of suppressing middlemen and the ‘proto-industrialists’ in ways which increased the revolutionary challenge to the established order. This threat was increased by the driving of various proto-industrial cliques into a united front, their consolidation being ‘promoted by this clear perception of a common foe, the Establishment’ and they were helped in their new solidarity by Puritanism which was, as Israel puts it, ‘the only available ideology that could effectively legitimise opposition to church and state simultaneously’. Here again we see the dialectical interplay of interests and ideas.
