André Béteille and Alexis de Tocqueville

ALAN MACFARLANE

[From Institutions and Inequalities; Essays in Honour of André Béteille (Oxford Univ. Press, Delhi, 1999), eds. Ramachandra Guha and Jonathan P.Parry]

p.284

There is an old Chinese saying that it is unlikely to be a fish that

discovered water or a bird that discovered air. Most of us live in a

world where we take our culture as 'natural', and seldom more so

than in relation to the ideology and actual distribution of rank and power.

Occasionally, however, a dramatic change or set of contrasts leads one or

more thinkers to question these basic and largely unquestioned assumptions.

One famous occasion was in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment when,

for example in the work of John Millar, Adam Ferguson and Jean Jacques

Rousseau and others a systematic analysis of equality and inequality was

undertaken.

Another formidable attempt to understand equality and inequality was

made by Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-58). There were a number of conditions

which seem to have played an important part in directing Tocqueville's

attention to the question of equality and which gave his analysis an unusual

depth. First there was his family background. An aristocratic pedigree

contrasted with an upbringing within a post-Revolutionary France formally

dedicated to equality and the abolition of privileged ranks. Then there were

his travels from a land so recently hierarchical to the most dramatically free

and equal civilization in the world, America, as well as to England. Finally

there were the revolutionary changes in France itself, as an inegalitarian system

tried to adapt to the new ideology of equality. All this made equality his

obsession and his life's work was concerned with trying to reconcile liberty

and equality. He was a man divided between two worlds, caught in an endless

struggle between his head and his heart. As he put it in a discarded note,

there were standing against each other 'Mon Instinct, Mes Opinions'. 'I have

an intellectual taste for democratic institutions, but I am an aristocrat by

instinct . . .' (Drescher 1964: 15). Out of this clash emerged his great works

on Democracy in America and the Ancien Regime.

It is attractive to see Andre Beteille as someone in a similar position,

reflecting deeply on the essence of equality and inequality partly because of

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his personal circumstances, partly through the changing and contrasting world

he experienced. With his French father and Indian mother, Beteille is an heir

to diverse philosophies and traditions. I As an academic who never permanently

left India, yet frequently spent periods in Europe and America, he is deeply

aware of the contrasts of 'East' and 'West'. As someone who participated in

the rapid changes in India over the period since Independence, he could see

the battle of ideologies based on inequality and equality on his own doorstep.

It is thus no surprise to find that his lifelong obsession has been with equality

and inequality. His Ph.D. thesis was published under the title of Caste, Class

and Power; Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village (1965)

and was soon followed by his influential edited set of readings

on Social Inequality (1969), and then by Inequality among Men (1977) and The Idea

of Natural Inequality and Other Essays (1983).

There is not merely a resemblance between these two thinkers. There is

clearly a very great amount of continuity. In some ways Beteille can be seen

as one of the heirs of Tocqueville, as someone who has applied Tocqueville's

earlier insights and broadened and updated his analysis. His debt and the

way in which his work complements Tocqueville's can be seen if we consider

first some of his explicit comments on Tocqueville's writings and the way in

which they provide a framework for his own comparative analysis.

THE FIRST DISTINCTION: HIERARCHICAL AND

EGALITARIAN SYSTEMS

As a first step, Beteille follows Tocqueville in proposing a simple binary

model in space and time which suggests that until the eighteenth century all

the world was based on the premise of natural inequality, but after that western

Europe and America moved rapidly to the premise of natural equality, leaving

India and much of Asia to 'catch up' later. It can also be shown in certain

parts of Beteille's earlier work. Let us briefly examine this use of Tocqueville's

ideas and the way Beteille proposes an initial binary opposition between two

systems of equality. Beteille wrote that

For Tocqueville there were two kinds of societies, aristocratic society with its fixed

and stable hierarchy of estates or castes, and democratic society which allowed or

even encouraged the free movement of individuals across its classes. Aristocratic

societies prevailed in Europe prior to the nineteenth century; and America in the

first half of that century was the best example of democratic society. (1983: 39)

Beteille reiterates the contrast many times.

The first feature that strikes us is that the major civilisations of the past were all

hierarchical by design, although the logic of the hierarchy was not everywhere the

same. The design was most elaborately and consistently worked out in the case of

traditional India, although it was very much in evidence in medieval Europe and also

in China from the time of Confucius onwards. (1977: 25)

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Thus until the eighteenth century, all the world was 'hierarchical'.

It is not as if the principle of hierarchy enjoyed legitimacy only in traditional Indian

society; in this matter India was not unique among the civilisations of the past. In pre-

industrial Europe also society was not only divided into unequal ranks., orders or

estates, but these divisions were broadly accepted in principle. There also the social

hierarchy was invested with a measure of unity and coherence so that what existed

was considered to be by and large right, proper and desirable. (Ibid.: 150)

Beteille shows how this was elaborated in relation to the legal structure.

As is well known, feudal society in Europe was divided into estates. This division did

not just exist as a fact of experience, it was supported by legal sanctions. The same

laws did not apply to all, and there were separate courts to deal with cases relating to

persons of different estates; for a person of a superior estate to be tried in an inferior

court would have been a violation of honour. (Ibid.: 43)

It was enshrined in the value system.

The civilizations of Europe and Asia were in pre-modern times marked by the

prominence of ranked social divisions and by the attention paid to rank in the various

spheres of life. The attention to rank was carried over into legal rules and religious

beliefs which are in such societies closely intertwined. Moreover, as Tocqueville points

out, different standards of right conduct and different conceptions of honour, virtue

and even morality are associated with the different ranks or orders into which society

is divided. (1983: 56-7)

According to Beteille, all this changed in the West somewhere between the

mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. The timing of this revolutionary

change also gives us a clue as to the causes of the dramatic shift.

Many things contributed to the kinds of change which Tocqueville and others

witnessed and foresaw. Foremost among these were the Industrial Revolution and

the French Revolution which both began in the second half of the eighteenth century.

They set about in a hundred different ways to destroy the material as well as the

moral foundations of the traditional social order with its old hierarchies and myths.

In Europe people were not only being imbued with new aspirations, but new

opportunities were being created by and for them on an unprecedented scale.

(1977: 147)

It is a familiar story and one which has deeply influenced sociological thought:

the birth of the 'modem' in the West, separating off a certain part of the

globe from the rest in the 'revolution' of the later eighteenth century. Beteille

specifically locates the argument in Tocqueville's work and links it to

Tocqueville's own personal position as torn between the two worlds.

The first and in some ways still the most outstanding contrast between the hierarchical

social order of the past and the emerging social order with its commitment to equality

was the one made by Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville's contrast between aristocracy

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and democracy is not confined to two modes of political organization; it extends to

patterns of social distinction, forms of religious experience and consciousness, and

types of aesthetic sensibility. Although born a few years after the French Revolution,

he came from an aristocratic family, one which had suffered by it, and he spoke of the

life and ideals of the aristocracy with the insight of personal knowledge. On the other

hand, democracy still lay largely in the future, although the promise of that future

infused his writing with an astonishingly vivid quality. (1983: 74)

Or again, Beteille writes

Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to bring out the full significance of the normative

order of the new society that was emerging in the United States. A European, steeped

in the traditions of aristocracy, he could not but be impressed by the pervasive influence

of the principle of equality in every sphere of life. The idea that people should be

permanently divided into ranks invested with unequal rights and obligations was,

according to Tocqueville, contrary to the spirit of American society; it was of equality

and not hierarchy that custom religion all spoke in one voice. Tocqueville

maintained further that the spirit of equality would come to prevail over the spirit of

hierarchy, in Europe , and in the world as a whole. (1977: 151)

THE SECOND DISTINCTION: HARMONIC AND

DISHARMONIC SYSTEMS

Beteille is not content to stop here and is again guided by Tocqueville to

search for a more complex formulation. He argues that dichotomized thinking,

except in terms of 'ideal types' is dangerously misleading. Thus he writes,

I find it false to represent the opposition between equality and inequality as a contrast

between two societies in two different parts of the world. On the contrary, each society

is an arena within which the two interplay, and if we fail to examine this interplay

within societies, the comparisons we make between societies will be shallow and

misleading. (1983: 38)

He praises Tocqueville himself for breaking Out of just such dichotomized

thinking.

The attraction of Tocqueville's work lies in his refusal to be a prisoner of his own

dichotomy. While he dwells at great length on the opposite natures of aristocratic and -

democratic societies, he leaves room for considering the contradictions "-]thin each

type of society. (ibid.: 41)

Indeed some of Beteille's best insights come out of his recognition of the

contradictions within systems.

This uneasiness at the over-simple dichotomizing of' Past: Present, and

West: Rest is shown in certain passages where Beteille questions some of his

own earlier assumptions about the 'hierarchical' nature of 'the West' before

the eighteenth century. He writes that 'The more closely one examines the

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old order in the West the less plausible the argument appears that it knew

nothing of equality as a value' (ibid.: 43). ',"his is a summary of an earlier

passage where he points to one contradiction, also noted by Tocqueville

It is clear that equality as an ideal and a value was never wholly alien to Western

civilization even when its organization \\/as most elaborately hierarchical. No institution

within that civilization was more hierarchical than the Catholic church, and indeed

the concept of hierarchy 1, in its meaning a Christian concept. Tocqueville

recognized and noted this-, at the same time he did not fall to point out that 'Christianity,

which has declared that all men are equal in the sight of God, will not refuse to

acknowledge that all citizens are equal in the eye of the law.' It Is as if a value and an

ideal that had lain dormant under a hierarchical organization came into its own when

external conditions favoured its awakening, and then invested these external conditions

with a new significance. (ibid.: 41-2)

Thus Beteille picks up Tocqueville's idea that all systems are mixed: that

I pure' hierarchy or equality only exists as an ideal type, and that in reality

any society at any point in time will be the result of a dynamic and moving

equilibrium between incompatible and ever-varying forces. Systems are

neither static nor consistent and Beteille has often pointed this out in relation

to the Indian past.

In trying to proceed beyond unsatisfactory dichotomies, Beteille has

proposed a distinction between two kinds of social system which he calls

'harmonic' and 'disharmonic' He defines a 'harmonic' system as follows: it is

one in which there is consistency between the normative order and the existential

order: society is divided into groups which are placed high and low, and the divisions

and their ordering are considered as right, proper and desirable or as a part of the

natural scheme of things. (ibid.: 54)

He then describes India as a good example of such a system; there is a premise

and a practice of inequality, there is no fundamental contradiction (ibid.: 57-

64).

A second form of 'harmonic' system can be envisaged 'in which there is

equality in both principle and practice'. Beteille does not give any worked

examples of such a harmonic system, though he does consider the question

generally (1977: ch. 7). The most obvious examples are some of the very

simplest hunter - gatherer bands (Woodburn 1982), but once mankind

established settled agrarian civilizations it is difficult to see examples. We

know too much to believe that communism, where all are in theory equal but

some more equal than others, has produced durable instances. 'America' as

encountered by Tocqueville came closer than most instances, for a time, to

this condition, as Tocqueville himself noted. In America Tocqueville found a

land which had explicitly enthroned the premise of equality, rather than of

inequality. It made it a central tenet that man was born free and equal. This

was still a peculiar way of looking at things and Tocqueville consequently

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noted that 'No novelty in the United States struck me more vividly during

my stay there than the equality of conditions' (Tocqueville 1968a: 1, 5).

Equality, or democracy as he often called it, became the key to understanding

America. 'So the more I studied American society, the more clearly I saw

equality of conditions as the creative element from which each particular

fact derived, and all my observations constantly returned to this nodal point'

(ibid.). There had been some early attempts to take inequality over from the

Old World, but they had failed. 'Laws were made there to establish the

hierarchy of ranks, but it was soon seen that the soil of America absolutely

rejected a territorial aristocracy' (ibid: 1, 37).

Beteille does not stop here, however, for he suggests a further distinction,

that is the idea of 'disharmonic' systems which 'by contrast show[s] a lack

of consistency between the existential and the normative orders'. One form

is where 'the norm of equality is contradicted by the persuasive existence of

inequality'. This seems to characterize much of modern 'western' civilization,

including America in its later history, where 'Despite the idealization of

equality, the class structure continues to be an important part of Western

social reality, some would say its most important part' (1983: 76). Beteille

quotes Raymond Aron to the effect that 'Modem industrial societies are both

egalitarian in aspiration and hierarchical in organization' and adds the comment

that 'Modem societies are in this sense disharmonic: there is in them a lack of

consistency between the normative and the existential order' (1977: 15 1). The

clash between ideology and practice, and even within the ideology, is shown

even more clearly when the 'West' dominated much of Asia and elsewhere.

Those who trace the historical conditions of the emergence of homo equalis in the West

generally overlook the adventures of the same homo equalis abroad. As if the destruction

of aboriginal society in Australia and America, the enslavement and brutal use of millions

of Blacks, or the imposition of the most unequal conditions between European and

natives throughout Asia took place in another epoch or on another planet. (1983: 52-3)

This is written with feeling by someone brought up in the shadow of the Raj.

We may summarize the theoretical structure which Beteille has suggested

in a diagram (see Fig. 1).

A DISHARMONIC SYSTEM IN THE 'WEST'

Beteille is in many ways most interested in the 'disharmonic' case (D), where

a civilization proclaims equality but practises inequality, for this, in essence,

is the modern situation.

The great paradox of the modem world is that everywhere men attach themselves to

the principle of equality and everywhere, in their own lives as well as in the lives of

others, they encounter the presence of inequality. The more strongly they attach

themselves to the principles or the ideology of equality the more oppressive the reality

becomes. (1977: 1)

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INSERT FIGURE HERE

FIG. 1. Four types of stratification

When did this contradiction emerge and what are its deeper features? Here

Beteille can only set us on the path.

Beteille notes at several places that within the general harmonic ancien

regime of western Europe before the French Revolution, there seems to have

been something unusual about England which hints at 'disharmony'. For

instance he notes that England seems to have been different in certain respects.

Moreover, the system varied considerably from one region to another even within

Western Europe not only in its formal arrangement but also in its course of growth,

maturity and decay. The contrast between France and England-the 'exceptional case

of England'-is a commonplace of medieval European history. (1983: 65)

Or again Beteille writes that

Even between France and England, neighbours who shared many things in common,

there were important differences. The nobility never acquired in England the array of

privileges it enjoyed in France, and English historians frequently point to the antiquity

of their own traditions of equality.

He continues, however, by qualifying this remark by noting that 'for all its

distinctiveness, England also developed a social hierarchy, many elements of

which lasted longer there than in other West European countries' (ibid.).

Beteille's hints of an unusually early disharmonic system in England lead us

straight back to Tocqueville.

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On his first visit to England in 1833 Tocqueville wrote as follows:

But what distinguishes it [the aristocracy of England] from all others is the ease, with

which it has opened its ranks ... with great riches, anybody could hope to enter into

the ranks of the aristocracy. Furthermore since everybody could hope to become rich,

especially in such a mercantile country as England, a peculiar position arose in that

their privileges, which raised such feeling against the aristocrats of other countries,