Fellowship and the Civil Conversations of Temporary Equals

Britons governed, protested, prayed, played, politicked, drank, sang, learned, cheered, mourned, improved, moralized, discovered, gambled, credited, buried, and took care of one another. through associations of various kinds. Indeed, associations, clubs, societies, fellowships and the like figure into nearly every major change in British society from the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Yet, while the fellowship of these clubs created new kinds of cooperative social relationships, it did not incorporate women or racial others. Why should that be so? The answer lies in the historical context in which clubs and societies first proliferated. With a weak state and new classes of people competing for a claim to political authority, the question on the minds of philosophers and social commentators alike was how to produce a moral framework that would not devolve into the ideological warfare of the past and that could incorporate a new kind of elite and their wealth without destroying social hierarchy. In the urban world that meant embracing micro-level diversity. But diversity had to be contained within the club or society. Social and political theorists from Shaftesbury to Hume agreed that enhancing a person’s capacity for fellowship could produce a new moral order, dependent on neither the authority of the church nor the crown. Authority would be generated in the civil conversation of temporary equals pursuing a specific objective contained within the confines of the club, generally over a pint. Disagreements that civil conversation could not mend, alcohol might. But this associational framework, with clubbability, or the capacity for fellowship, as the at its heart integrated a new kind of elite into the ruling classes, while at the same time producing novel justifications for excluding the legally and culturally un-clubbable, women and racial others.