Citizens to Lords. Ellen Wood

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СКАЧАТЬ was a highly litigious society, in which political discourse derived much of its method and substance from legal disputation, with all its predilection for hairsplitting controversy.

      Greek political theorists were self-conscious about the uniqueness of their specific form of state, and they inevitably explored the nature of the polis and what distinguished it from others. They raised questions about the origin and purpose of the state. Having effectively invented a new identity, the civic identity of citizenship, they posed questions about the meaning of citizenship, who should enjoy political rights and whether any division between rulers and ruled existed by nature. They confronted the tension between the levelling identity of citizenship and the hierarchical principles of noble birth or wealth. Questions about law and the rule of law; about the difference between political organization based on violence or coercion and a civic community based on deliberation or persuasion; about human nature and its suitability (or otherwise) for political life – all of these questions were thrown up by the everyday realities of life in the polis.

      In the absence of a ruling class whose ethical standards were accepted by the whole community as its governing principles, it was no longer possible to assume the eternity and inviolability of traditional norms. They were inevitably subjected to theoretical scrutiny and challenge. Defenders of traditional hierarchies were obliged to respond not by repeating old proverbs or reciting epics of aristocratic hero-kings but by constructing theoretical arguments to meet theoretical challenges. Questions arose about the origin of moral and political principles and what makes them binding. From the same political realities emerged the humanistic principle that ‘man is the measure of all things’, with all the new questions that this principle entailed. So, for instance, the Sophists (Greek philosophers and teachers who will be discussed in the next chapter) asked whether moral and political principles exist by nature or merely by custom – a question that could be answered in various ways, some congenial to democracy, others in support of oligarchy; and when Plato expressed his opposition to democracy, he could not rely on invoking the gods or time-honoured custom but was obliged to make his case by means of philosophic reason, to construct a definition of justice and the good life that seemed to rule out democracy.

      Political Theory in History: An Overview

      Born in the polis, this new mode of political thought would survive the polis and continue to set the theoretical agenda in later centuries, when very different forms of state prevailed. This longevity has not been simply a matter of tenacious intellectual legacies. The Western tradition of political theory has developed on the foundations established in ancient Greece because certain issues have remained at the centre of European political life. In varying forms, the autonomy of private property, its relative independence from the state, and the tension between these foci of social power have continued to shape the political agenda. On the one hand, appropriating classes have needed the state to maintain order, conditions for appropriation and control over producing classes. On the other hand, they have found the state a burdensome nuisance and a competitor for surplus labour.

      With a wary eye on the state, the dominant appropriating classes have always had to turn their attention to their relations with subordinate producing classes. Indeed, their need for the state has been largely determined by those difficult relations. In particular, throughout most of Western history, peasants fed, clothed, and housed the lordly minority by means of surplus labour extracted by payment of rents, fees, or tributes. Yet, though the aristocratic state depended on peasants and though lords were always alive to the threat of resistance, the politically voiceless classes play little overt role in the classics of Western political theory. Their silent presence tends to be visible only in the great theoretical efforts devoted to justifying social and political hierarchies.

      The relation between appropriating and producing classes was to change fundamentally with the advent of capitalism, but the history of Western political theory continued to be in large part the history of tensions between property and state, appropriators and producers. In general, the Western tradition of political theory has been ‘history from above’, essentially reflection on the existing state and the need for its preservation or change written from the perspective of a member or client of the ruling classes. Yet it should be obvious that this ‘history from above’ cannot be understood without relating it to what can be learned about the ‘history from below’. The complex three-way relation between the state, propertied classes and producers, perhaps more than anything else, sets the Western political tradition apart from others.

      There is nothing unique to the West, of course, about societies in which dominant groups appropriate what others produce. But there is something distinctive about the ways in which the tensions between them have shaped political life and theory in the West. This may be precisely because the relations between appropriators and producers have never, since classical antiquity, been synonymous with the relation between rulers and subjects. To be sure, the peasant-citizen would not survive the Roman Empire, and many centuries would pass before anything comparable to the ancient Athenian idea of democratic citizenship would re-emerge in Europe. Feudal and early modern Europe would, in its own way, even approximate the old division between rulers and producers, as labouring classes were excluded from active political rights and the power to appropriate was typically associated with the possession of ‘extra-economic’ power, political, judicial or military. But even then, the relation between rulers and producers was never unambiguous, because appropriating classes confronted their labouring compatriots not, in the first instance, as a collective power organized in the state but in a more directly personal relation as individual proprietors, in rivalry with other proprietors and even with the state.

      The autonomy of property and the contradictory relations between ruling class and state meant that propertied classes in the West always had to fight on two fronts. While they would have happily subscribed to Mencius’s principle about those who rule and those who feed them, they could never take for granted such a neat division between rulers and producers, because there was a much clearer division than existed elsewhere between property and state.

      Although the foundations of Western political theory established in ancient Greece proved to be remarkably resilient, there have, of course, been many changes and additions to its theoretical agenda, in keeping with changing historical conditions, which will be explored in the following chapters. The Romans, perhaps because their aristocratic republic did not confront challenges like those of the Athenian democracy, did not produce a tradition of political theory as fruitful as the Greek. But they did introduce other social and political innovations, especially the Roman law, which would have major implications for the development of political theory. The empire also gave rise to Christianity, which became the imperial religion, with all its cultural consequences.

      It is particularly significant that the Romans began to delineate a sharp distinction between public and private, even, perhaps, between state and society. Above all, the opposition between property and state as two distinct foci of power, which has been a constant theme throughout the history of Western political theory, was for the first time formally acknowledged by the Romans in their distinction between imperium and dominium, power conceived as the right to command and power in the form of ownership. This did not preclude the view – expressed already by Cicero in On Duties (De Officiis) – that the purpose of the state was to protect private property or the conviction that the state came into being for that reason. On the contrary, the partnership of state and private property, which would continue to be a central theme of Western political theory, presupposes the separation, and the tensions, between them.

The tension between these two forms of power, which was intensified in theory and practice as republic gave way to empire, would, as we shall see, play a large part in the fall of the Roman Empire. With the rise of feudalism, that tension was resolved on the side of dominium, as the state was virtually dissolved into individual property. In contrast to the ancient division between rulers and producers, in which the state was the dominant instrument of appropriation, the feudal state scarcely had an autonomous existence apart from the hierarchical chain of individual, if conditional, property and personal lordship. Instead СКАЧАТЬ