Elie Halevy Research Paper

1. Biography

Elie Halevy was born at Etretat to wealthy, artistic parents on September 6, 1870, which marked a turbulent period in French history, with the origins of the Third Republic, France’s defeat by Prussia, and the collapse of the Paris Commune. His father, of Jewish descent, was a successful librettist for such composers as Bizet and Offenbach, while his mother was of Swiss Calvinist origins. Both Elie and his brother Daniel were brought up as Protestants under her strong moral influence: like Elie’s contemporary Max Weber there was a strong familial influence on the study of religious—and especially Christian Protestant—ideas. Halevy’s grandfather had been a disciple of Saint-Simon and succeeded Comte as his secretary for a time. Though the family had important connections in French political life, Elie remained distant from, but also keenly concerned with, political affairs.

While still a student at the Lycee Condorcet he planned, with his brother and other associates, the Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, a journal with which he was associated for the whole of his life. At the Ecole Normale Superieure he studied philosophy, completing a thesis on Platonism. Already his political and moral principles had become established as liberal, individualist, rationalist, and secular—principles that were to characterize him for the rest of his career. In 1898 Halevy was invited to lecture at the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, which had been founded after France’s defeat in 1871 with the goal of diagnozing French political instability, and he remained there all his professional life. The Ecole Libre was much admired in Britain by the group of Fabians and their associates who founded the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Halevy came to know them well as he moved in British intellectual circles.

The Dreyfus affair and the defense of the Third Republic were issues which united Halevy with Emile Durkheim, though on a philosophical level he rejected Durkheim’s positivism and collectivism. On the other hand he attributed his initial interest in socialism, to which he devoted half of his scholarly life, to Durkheim’s lectures on socialism at Bordeaux in 1895. The affinity that Halevy perceived between communist and fascist regimes—since he viewed 1914 as the start of an ‘era of tyrannies’—was an unpopular stance in the intellectual climate of the interwar years, but he persisted in his opinion until his death at Sucy-en-Brie on August 21, 1937. The enthusiasm of the Webbs and Shaw for fascist or communist experiments in no way surprised him, and he ended his life firmly committed to the liberal, rational, democratic ideals of his youth.

2. Intellectual Contributions

In his thesis, published in 1896 as La theorie platonicienne des sciences, Halevy explicated a dialectical approach, which he labeled Platonic, by means of which the contradictions in a subject were stated as systematic dichotomies. By exposing the core assumptions and practical implications behind a doctrine or belief system, which usually involved logical conflicts, his own analysis of it could proceed. This fundamental principle of methodology was deployed in his subsequent studies of Bentham’s thought, of Wesleyan doctrine, and finally of socialism. In his study of the English utilitarians he found just such a contradiction between Bentham’s political and economic theories and argued that ‘the contradiction was continually breaking out in the current formulae of Benthamism’ (Halevy 1952, p. 489). In his political theory, Bentham postulated the necessity of a legislator who would reconcile conflicts of interest and thus secure the greatest good of the greatest number: this he called the artificial identity of interests. In his economic theory, however, Bentham assumed with Adam Smith and his successors that there was a spontaneous identity of interests and that individual interests were naturally harmonious. Halevy’s book is a reminder that the Bentham who designed the Panopticon—‘a new application of the principle of the artificial identification of interests, the idea of which he had found in Helvetius’ (Halevy 1952, p. 82)—also propagated a belief in laissez-faire and the ‘hidden hand.’

Soon after the completion of The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, Halevy’s interest turned to Methodism in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England. Sometimes regarded as the complete antithesis of utilitarianism, he regarded Methodism as an ally of utilitarianism in shaping the social morality of modern England. In 1905 he traveled to England to work on material relating to the early history of Methodism and it was at this time that he expressed his intention of writing a history of England in the nineteenth century. The Methodism project had a more immediate outcome, however, in two articles on La naissance du Methodisme en Angleterre in the Revue de Paris in 1906. With very few exceptions these articles went unremarked by historians until their translation into English in 1971 (Halevy 1971).

The fundamentals of Halevy’s interpretation of the role of Methodism in La naissance correspond with his later treatment in A History of the English People in 1815 (Halevy 1924)—the first volume of his fivevolume A History of the English People which was published in French between 1912 and 1926 and in English between 1912 and 1932—but the focus and detail of the earlier work provide a particularly strong statement of the ‘Halevy thesis.’ He traces the earliest development of manufacturing industry in the first three decades of the eighteenth century and points to the growth of pauperism in the industrial centers. By the late 1730s this was compounded by a commercial crisis of overproduction accompanied by working class agitation, and it was this that stimulated the ‘eruption,’ in 1739, of Methodism. He argues that working class despair was transformed by Methodist doctrine and discipline into a religious and mystical movement of a conservative nature.

In this process Halevy gave a key role to the bourgeoisie, a class which he saw as an essential component of leadership in harnessing the enthusiasm of the proletariat. Had the bourgeoisie in 1739 been fired by revolutionary ideals there might well have been the conditions for social revolution, but the English bourgeoisie retained a strong element of Puritanism and a revulsion against the excesses of the seventeenth-century Civil War. In Halevy’s words, ‘There was the raw material for a general revolt. But popular discontent took the form the discontent of the bourgeoisie wanted to give it: a religious and conservative form’ (Halevy 1971, p. 75).

On this foundation is constructed the broader thesis with which Halevy is more generally known. In A History of the English People in 1815 he stated the problem as that of explaining ‘the extraordinary stability which English Society was destined to enjoy throughout a period of revolutions and crises; what we may truly term the miracle of modern England, anarchist but orderly, practical and businesslike, but religious, and even pietist’ (Halevy 1924, p. 339). The explanation he gives is complex and is focused not exclusively on Methodism, nor solely on the working class, for Methodism’s impact is traced first on Nonconformity, then on the Evangelical wing of the Church of England, and through them on the ruling class, and finally on secular thought. In contrast to the view of religion as an ‘opiate’ which Marxian critics of Halevy such as E. P. Thompson have employed, the thesis is better interpreted as a version of embourgeoisement. Halevy did not attribute the influence of Methodism to the depths of the working class but saw it as having an impact on upwardly mobile workers. Methodism, originating in the Church of England, occupied an interstitial position between that Church and Nonconformity, offering a means of passage between the two: ‘Puritan nonconformity thus tended to become a transitional creed, a stage in the history of an English family. The unskilled laborer becomes in turn a skilled workman, an artisan, the head of a small business, a businessman possessed of a modest capital, and as he rises out of the barbarism in which the working class was plunged, he becomes a Nonconformist. If he himself rises still higher on the social ladder, or if his children rise after his death, he, or they go over to the Church of England’ (Halevy 1924, p. 371). Wesleyan Methodism, he claimed, rendered the transition imperceptible. Paradoxically, as the religious institutions facilitated such upward social mobility they also served to sharpen status distinctions, for while the middle-class Nonconformist might be despised by members of the Church of England, to which his family might one day belong, compensation could be found in contempt shown towards the working class from which the family had come. Hence, Halevy’s opinion that ‘the elite of the working class, the hard-working and capable bourgeois’ had been instilled with values which did not threaten the existing order of society.

Wesleyan Methodism had originated in the Church of England among a group of conservative High Church clergy. In preaching an egalitarian doctrine of salvation for all it had successfully mobilized an important segment of the rising working class. Here is an excellent example of Halevy’s utilization of systematic dichotomy at the core of a belief system. He goes on to demonstrate the influence which Methodism had on establishment opinion by proposing that Wesley had left a ‘rear-guard’ in the Church of England in the form of the Evangelical movement, which sought to realize his original goal of Church regeneration: ‘If the Wesleyan sect, with its hierarchic constitution, and frank political conservatism, constituted the High Church of Nonconformity, the new Low Church or evangelical party was a species of Anglican Methodism’ (Halevy 1924, p. 379). With powerful representatives at the University of Cambridge, and with wealthy and influential advocates in the ‘Clapham sect’ (which was comprised principally of Members of Parliament like William Wilberforce), the Evangelicals were in a position to influence not only ecclesiastical reform but also to campaign for a wider reform of morals—including those of the ruling class. In these several ways, argued Halevy, the influence of Wesleyan Methodism had permeated throughout English society and had helped establish the temper of Victorian England. By contrast, no comparable institution or creed had existed in eighteenth-century France.

Halevy’s Histoire du socialisme europeen (1948) and L’ere des tyrannies (1938) are the most cited of his works in France. They further extend the central theme of his work on English ideas, where the contrast between reform and revolution provided his comparative focus. Just as the contradiction between natural and artificial interests had been identified in utilitarianism, and that between egalitarian salvation and hierarchical discipline in Wesleyanism, so the contradiction in socialism derived from the conjoint goals of human emancipation and the zeal to organize society. The decisive event in Halevy’s view of socialism, which changed from a skeptical liberalism to a critical pessimism, was the First World War. The growth of the power of the state and the spread of bureaucracy were seen not only as threats to parliamentary democracy but also as evidence of the dominance of the organizational over the emancipatory principle in socialism.

Halevy’s central thesis is clearly stated: ‘Since its beginnings, in the early years of the nineteenth century, socialism has suffered from an internal contradiction. On the one hand, its partisans often present it as the outcome and fulfilment of the Revolution of 1789, a revolution of liberty, a liberation from the last remaining subjection after all the others have been destroyed: the subjection of labor by capital. But, on the other hand, it is also a reaction against individualism and liberalism; it proposes a new compulsory organization in place of the outworn institutions destroyed by the Revolution …’ (Halevy 1966, p. 265). It is known that the pessimistic conclusions he drew from this diagnosis surprised many in his intellectual circle at the Societe Francaise de Philosophie, and arrangements were being made for a further debate on his propositions when he died in 1937.

3. Impact And Controversy

Halevy’s work continues to be a focus of research and debate among social scientists. Two biographies have appeared, the first relating him to the French and European contexts of his time and the second emphasizing the major themes of his work: both characterize the 40-year span of his writing with the same term, ‘unity’ (Bramsen 1978, p. 348, Chase 1980, p. 3). In Chase’s work there is a particularly clear exposition of the ‘Halevy thesis’ which gives effective treatment to aspects of his argument which have sometimes been obscured in subsequent debate, such as the broader significance of Nonconformity and his portrayal of the ‘hard-working and capable bourgeois’ as the ‘elite of the working class.’ The republication in 1995 of a French edition of his book on English utilitarianism has stimulated critique of a work that had been widely accepted as a definitive analysis of its subject. Thus, Halevy has been taken to task for allegedly interpreting the principle of utility, or seeking of pleasure, as both a positive and a normative statement—as both an ‘is’ and an ‘ought’ (Vergara 1998).

Even more extensive has been the attention paid to his claim that the Methodist and Evangelical movements were responsible for England’s remarkable stability during a period of political ferment in Europe. Shortly after the publication of the first volume of A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, the Hammonds offered their portrayal of Methodism as having a repressive and intolerant stance towards the working class. In 1957, in History Today, E. J. Hobsbawm questioned Halevy’s claims of the extent to which Methodism penetrated the working class and offered an alternative explanation of England’s political stability deriving from the ruling classes’s ability to retain control. E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class in 1963, however, attributed even more influence to Methodism in subduing the working class than had Halevy. In a ‘Postscript on the Halevy Thesis’ in Victorian Minds, Himmelfarb (1968) commented on the curious status of the thesis in current historical literature, where it was often assumed that the thesis had been discredited or greatly modified while in reality there had been no substantial exploration of it. After reviewing the main features of the debate she concluded by paraphrasing Halevy: ‘Will Halevy defeat Marx as the interpreter of this crucial period in English history?’ (Himmelfarb 1968, p. 299).

Himmelfarb’s postscript became the preface to two decades of research into ‘the Halevy thesis.’ Semmel’s 1971 translation of Halevy’s 1906 articles The Birth of Methodism in England (Halevy 1971 was published with an introduction which noted that ‘the full dimensions of the thesis, as Halevy stated them, have been imperfectly understood’. This was because the 1906 articles had gone virtually unread. The thesis was further explored in The Methodist Revolution (Semmel 1973), which began by noting that in the major discussions of the ‘Halevy thesis’ the role of Methodist theology had been afforded little significance, in contrast to social scientific discussions of seventeenth century Calvinism. Semmel devoted several chapters to the elements which contributed to the synthesis of Methodist beliefs, restating Halevy’s observation of an underlying contradiction between the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary elements of Wesleyan doctrine.

The thesis continued to be the subject of discussion throughout the 1970s and attracted the attention of sociologists examining religion and social change: in this context the ‘Halevy thesis’ has been described as ‘the political corollary, applied in a more restricted historical and geographical context, of the broader thesis put forward by Weber’ (Hill 1973, p.183). As closer attention has been paid to Halevy’s work, some of his specific historical observations—and their interpretation by more recent writers—have provided further stimulus for debate. One such area has been the role of foreign missions, and specifically of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society. Did such activity provide a safety valve for social and religious tensions, rechanneling potentially disruptive enthusiasm by exporting it, or was there equal concern for home missions? These questions have been addressed in a revisiting of Halevy’s original account (Piggin 1980).

In a wide-ranging review of the debate, Itzkin, like Himmelfarb before her, has noted that many of the contentious issues remain unresolved. While Halevy’s antagonists have succeeded in revising some of his claims, the central thesis has remained viable and continues to constitute a ‘working historical hypothesis’ (Itzkin 1975, p. 56). In the work of revision, attention has focused on the numerical strength of Methodism together with its geographical distribution; on the nature and political stances of the variety of bodies which came within the overall rubric of Methodism; and on the way in which moderate political deviance can make ‘an important contribution to public order and political stability’ (Gilbert 1979, p. 392).

With the culmination of two decades of lively debate over the ‘Halevy thesis,’ a collection of most of the important statements was published in Olsen (1990). Extracts from Halevy, from historians of Methodism and Evangelicalism such as Maldwyn Edwards, John Walsh, and Kiernan, and from critics like the Hammonds, Hobsbawm, and E. P. Thompson provide a striking testimony to the continuing vitality of a thesis first advanced in 1906. The parallel with the ‘Weber thesis,’ first published in 1904–5, is too close to ignore.

Halevy’s lectures on the history of socialism, reconstructed from his students’ notes and published posthumously as Histoire du Socialisme Europeen in 1948, remains untranslated into English. The Era of Tyrannies, first published posthumously in French in 1938, has, however, been translated and published in English (Halevy 1966). In the latter work the author provides not only a summary account of socialism but also a treatment of the era of tyrannies—using the term in the classical Greek sense of a group of armed men who seize the state—under Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini. At the end of World War One Halevy had written: ‘… I recognize that socialism holds the key to the secret of the future. But I cannot decipher this secret nor can I say whether socialism will lead us to a Swiss-type, universalized Republic or to European Caesarism’ (Aron 1984, p. 407). In the last years of his life he took an increasingly pessimistic view of Europe’s future in the event of another war, which he thought likely. For him, that would represent the final blow to liberal traditions; but for this judgment Aron has criticized him. While cautioning against over-confidence, Aron thought Halevy had ‘sinned through over-pessimism’ (Aron 1984, p. 422). With the benefit of hindsight Aron’s criticism may be justified, but it should be recalled that in the era of the 1930s Halevy was not alone among social scientists who believed that the capitalist elite were becoming ‘highly placed bureaucrats.’

Bibliography:

1. Aron R 1984 Elie Halevy. Government and Opposition 19(4): 407–22
2. Bramsen M B 1978 Portrait D’Elie Halevy. Gruner, Amsterdam
3. Chase M 1980 Elie Hale y: An Intellectual Biography. Columbia University Press, New York
4. Gilbert A D 1979 Methodism, dissent and political stability in early industrial England. Journal of Religious History 10(4): 381–99
5. Halevy E 1924 A History of the English People in 1815 [trans. Watkin E I, Barker D A]. Fisher Unwin, London
6. Halevy E 1952 The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism [trans. Morris M]. Faber and Faber, London
7. Halevy E 1966 The Era of Tyrannies [trans. Webb R K]. New York University Press, New York
8. Halevy E 1971 The Birth of Methodism in England (trans. Semmel B). University of Chicago Press, Chicago
9. Hill M 1973 A Sociology of Religion. Heinemann Educational, London
10. Himmelfarb G 1968 Victorian Minds. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London
11. Itzkin E 1975 The Halevy thesis—A working hypothesis? Church History 44(1): 47–56
12. Olsen G W (ed.) 1990 Religion and Revolution in Early-industrial England: The Halevy Thesis and its Critics. University Press of America, Lanham, MD
13. Piggin S 1980 Halevy revisited: The origins of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 9(1): 17–37
14. Semmel B 1973 The Methodist Revolution. Basic Books, New York
15. Vergara F 1998 A Critique of Elie Halevy. Philosophy 73(283): 97–111