请将“In France, it could happen that a very old and thus very eminent family of the noblesse d'épée continued to enjoy seigneurial judicial competence even though it could no longer compete in terms of wealth with certain peasant families, to whom it might even have leased seigneurial rights. Father and sons might have regularly buckled on their swords, and mothers and daughters rightfully expected the respectful greeting of Sunday churchgoers, but it did not remain unnoticed that the number of their servants was reduced, that they no longer sent out widespread invitations, and that their daughters had to accept being married without a dowry. By the end of the ancien régime, some 11,000 noble families are supposed to have lived in material conditions that did not 
allow for any kind of luxury, scarcely any servants, no dinner parties and only rarely even new frocks for the ladies. A further 5,000 families were actually impoverished, and some nobles had even sunk into destitution.2 Leaving aside this category, almost all noble families disposed of seigneurial rights that could be used for appropriation, i.e. they were still in a dominant class position over many peasant families, labourers and even townsmen. This did not necessarily make them part of the materially dominant strata. For, in the course of the ancien régime, the unity of estate membership and economic dominance had increasingly dissolved. The richest in the land continued to be noble, and the poorest in the land were noble only in exceptional cases. But, in the middle strata of wealth and access to class-type power of appropriation, social rank did not necessarily correspond to material position. Right to the end of the ancien régime, wealth in France brought access to nobility by pur-chase of an office or letters patent (no one was ennobled who did not possess the means to live a noble life; even those ennoblements that rewarded services cost 6,000 livres for the registration of letters patent, not to mention the costs required to bring a person's services to the king's attention), but - apart from the purchase of the office of a royal secretary - ennoblement only granted ‘nobility in waiting'. Whilst service was increasingly respected in the second half of the eighteenth century, this did not go so far as to displace the criteria of length of nobility in determining social rank.
It was indeed the case, in France, that the crown's control of defining the social hierarchy was more extensive than in England, yet its reach was not so great that it could distribute social ranks according to political power within the ruling estate. To this extent, the hierarchy of social ranks within the nobility remained contested, despite all the connections between families of the ‘sword' and the 'robe'. Still more relevant is the fact that the guarantee (in effect almost unconditional) of permanence of nobility once acquired caused the estate hierarchy sanctioned by the ruling power to depart in certain areas from the hierarchy of material position. This, together with the fact that the noble hierarchy was represented in court ceremonial in a manner that scorned the emerging ideal of virtue, led to a situation in which noble ranks lost their unambiguous anchorage in socially prevailing values - though they certainly remained attractive. 
There was no comparable development in England, since rise into the nobil-ity was first of all socially sanctioned. Similarly to the French case, possession of certain office competences seen as ennobling was decisive. The decisive hurdle to be overcome on the ascendant path, the qualification for Justice of the Peace, while it presupposed a fairly large landholding - at least if it was to provide proof of nobility - also presupposed recognition of membership by the local nobility. This could sometimes be achieved within a single generation, but often it was a gradual process, taking two or three generations, to achieve social integration into the upper strata of ‘landed society'. Wealth made possible investment in land, and was also the prerequisite to finance an appropriate lifestyle. But only if a family was socially accepted did it come to form part of the gentry, let alone of the ‘county' (i.e. a gentry family with influence at the county level). The outward feature of such membership, a family coat of arms, could indeed be bought. But, if this was done too soon, it demonstrated only the intent to seek a future rise into the noble estate. This intent had to be realised by participation in estate ruling practice. Because the estate was self-recruiting in this way, and only needed confirmation from the crown, the reproduction of estate rule in the course of time came increasingly to be realised in cultural hegemony: the ideal of a noble life. In their efforts to acquire a landed property, or simply build a villa in the country, even those town-dwellers who consciously renounced the attempt to integrate into ‘landed society' paid obeisance to the dominant cultural pattern. So long as rich landowners in the provinces could decide on membership of the nobility, the privileged income sources of landed property and office power and the demand of a certain style of behaviour remained the most important selection criteria. This excluded very many of the well-to-do in practice, without any formal barrier being imposed. What is decisive however for the political importance of estate boundaries is not a statistical comparison of successful and unsuccessful attempts at social advance, or even those merely undertaken, but rather the degree to which the prevailing criteria of selection were accepted by those who hoped to rise into the gentry. In England, moreover, there certainly was a de facto restriction on access to high office, even if this was not formalised, and so there was a regular process of ‘sideways' movement into the nobility, i.e. social advance that within a single generation led from plain gentleman to peer. This enabled the service nobility that from the Middle Ages was a characteristic element of the English nobility, based on a granting of titles to individuals that was broadly accepted, to be reconciled with those ideals of achievement that raised the hopes of many aspirants to advance. No matter how violent political criticism of the peers or even the entire system of estate privileges sometimes grew, after the brief interlude of the republic in the mid-seventeenth century there never again developed in England an influential social basis for the demand to abolish the nobility.
The lowest strata of the gentry, however, did in practice lose their noble status in the course of the eighteenth century. As increasing numbers of urban bourgeois became rich and respected enough to style themselves Gentleman or Esquire and expect their wives and daughters to be addressed as Lady, an entire social stratum pressed forward in a certain sense into the social status of ‘plain gentleman' without the selection and cooptation procedures of formerly established nobles being applied. The effect of this advance was a general social devaluation of the position of ‘plain gentlemen'. Because of this, the fact that there were ever more urban bourgeois who were both richer and more educated than many of the simple landed nobility could no longer lead to social conflict. The offspring of the former ‘parish gentry' still had de facto advantages - for example, if their sons wanted to become army officers - but, taken as a whole, a coincidence between estate hierarchy and wealth hierarchy was once again established. Nobility now began only at the level of the ‘county gentry', a social group that had no problem in competing in material terms with the urban ‘gentlemen'. Nobility in England was the preserve of those who managed to maintain themselves even in conditions of changed practices of appropriation and new ideas of value.
4.	From ancien régime to bourgeois state power: reasons for the ‘special roads’
In societies of the ancien-régime structural type, the dominant forms of rule were personal. Ruling competences were the possession of individuals - through inheritance, purchase or transmission. The constitution of bourgeois state power presupposed the expropriation of these individuals - and, moreover, without compensation! Such a process of expropriation did indeed take place over the duration of the ancien régime: by the limitation or abolition of seigneurial competences, for example, or the regulated connection of royal ruling practice to specific forms of participation. Yet the implementation of bourgeois forms of political organisation required not just attacks on venerable traditions and privileges, but also on property in the full sense of the term, and the interpretation of ‘established interests' as property. Since it is notoriously far from easy for proprietors to recognise the justification of demands that aim at their expropriation, the ‘French road' of structural revolution is, in a certain sense, the most obvious. For this reason, we shall focus here on the question of the structural preconditions for the ‘English road'.
It is only to a limited extent that the specific course of the bourgeois revolu-tion can be explained in terms of structural preconditions. Charles I did not have to oppose demands for constitutionalisation, and the financial crisis of the French monarchy could have been overcome yet again by the reform pro-posals that Loménie de Brienne proposed to the assembly of notables in 1787 - hard as it is to imagine their being accepted. Numerous examples can be given for the successful effects of decisions by individuals or small groups. The way in which such decisions come to be made can generally be understood if the socialisation conditions of the individuals in question are investigated, the specific forms and material preconditions of their individual practice of life, along with the actual decision situations. At the level of the structural analysis undertaken in this work, however, decisions of this kind have to be seen as historical accidents. This line of argument can be illustrated by a particularly striking example: the stabilisation of estate rule that was achieved in England in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and above all the first half of the eighteenth, was a structural precondition for the depersonalisation of royal ruling practice, for its far-reaching integration into generalised and dominant estate interests. But the fact that this process took place without any hint of revolution - even though it was much more extensive than the limitations on his power that Charles I had found unacceptable - rested on the readiness of William III to concede to Parliament large parts of the rule conveyed to him in 1689, in return for the financing of ‘his' war on the Continent. This readiness can be perfectly well explained in terms of the rank order of interests of the new king, but in relation to the structural preconditions of the development of ruling power it is just as contingent as the political crisis that provoked a change of dynasty.
Taking into account considerations of this kind, and the exaggerations that are unavoidable in such comparisons, it is possible to establish different structural preconditions in France and England for the forms of practical criti-cism of the ancien régime, which I shall now go on to explain. ”翻译为中文