Citizens to Lords. Ellen Wood

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СКАЧАТЬ and competing jurisdictions, in the hands not only of lords and kings, but also of various autonomous corporations, to say nothing of Holy Roman emperors and popes.¹⁵ Feudal relations – between king and lords, between lords and vassals, between lords and peasants – were both a political/military relation and a form of property. Feudal lordship meant command of property, together with control of legally dependent labour; and, at the same time, it was a piece of the state, a fragment of political and military imperium.

      The feudal resolution of the tension between property and state could not last forever. In their relations with the peasantry, lords would inevitably turn to the state for support; and parcellized sovereignty, in turn, gave way, yet again, to state centralization. The new form of state that would emerge in the late Middle Ages and develop in the early modern period would forever be marked by the underlying conflict between monarchy and lordship – until capitalism completely transformed the relation between politics and property.

      At each stage in this history of political practice, there were corresponding changes in theory and variations on old themes to accommodate new social tensions and political arrangements. The contradictory relations between property and state acquired new complexities, giving rise to new ideas about relations between monarchs and lords, the origins and scope of monarchical power, constitutional limits on state power, the autonomous powers of various corporate entities, conceptions of sovereignty, the nature of obligation and the right to resist. Developments in Christianity and the rise of the Church as an independent power introduced yet more complications, raising new questions about relations between divine and civil law and about the challenge posed by the Church to secular authority. Finally, the advent of capitalism brought its own conceptual transformations, in new ideas of property and state, together with new conceptions of ‘public’ and ‘private’, political and economic, state and ‘society’, and a resurrection of ‘democracy’, not in its ancient Greek form but in a new and distinctively capitalist meaning, which no longer represented a fundamental challenge to dominant classes.

      Throughout this ‘Western’ history, there were also, as we shall see, significant theoretical variations among diverse European states, not just because of linguistic and cultural differences but because social and political relations varied too. Not only were there several European feudalisms, but the dissolution of feudalism gave rise to several different transformations, producing forms as diverse as the city-states of Italy, the principalities of Germany, the absolutist state of France, and the commercial republics of the Netherlands, while the so-called ‘transition from feudalism to capitalism’ occurred only in England. For all the commonalities of European culture, and all the shared social issues that continued to make the Western tradition of political theory a fruitful common legacy, each of these transformations produced its own characteristic ‘traditions of discourse’.

      One further point is worth making. The ambiguous relation between ruling class and state gave Western political theory certain unique characteristics. Even while propertied classes could never ignore the threat from below, and even while they depended on the state to sustain their property and economic power, the tensions in their relations with the state placed a special premium on their own autonomous powers, their rights against the state, and also on conceptions of liberty – which were often indistinguishable from notions of aristocratic privilege asserted against the state. So challenges to authority could come from two directions: from resistance by subordinate classes to oppression by their overlords, and from the overlords themselves as they faced intrusions by the state. This helped to keep alive the habit of interrogating the most basic principles of authority, legitimacy and the obligation to obey, even at moments when social and political hierarchies were at their most rigid.

      The Canon

      A final introductory word needs to be said about why we should concern ourselves with the classics of Western political theory at all. Why select a few ‘classic’ works or ‘great books’, written by ‘Dead White Males’, largely confined to Western Europe and its cultural offshoots? Is it not true that, with very few exceptions, the ‘canon’ neglects the life experience of most of the world’s population, the male domination of women, the oppression of racial and national minorities, the endemic violence in social relations, the whole history of colonialism and imperialism – when it does not actively support such domination and oppression?

      For that matter, is it even meaningful to talk about the ‘Western’ tradition at all? The days are long gone when courses on ‘Western Civilization’ were taken for granted, particularly in US universities, as a necessary introduction to higher education. Even the division between ‘East’ and ‘West’ is now recognized as problematic. What, for instance, does it mean to identify ancient Greek culture as belonging to the ‘Western’ tradition? ‘East’ versus ‘West’ is an artificial historical construct, and even ‘Europe’ is a concept that emerged fairly late. It is even more artificial to detach ancient Greece from, say, Egypt or Persia, as if the Greeks were always ‘European’, living a separate history, and not part of a larger Mediterranean and ‘Eastern’ world. Besides, the ‘East’ is even more diverse than Europe or the ‘West’, so there is no justification for treating it as some kind of residual category, encompassing everything not ‘Western’ or ‘European’. And even if we accept the ‘West’ as a kind of shorthand, without lumping together the rest of the world as an undifferentiated ‘other’, which Western tradition are we talking about? Are there not, for instance, working class traditions as well as ruling class ideologies?

Let me offer at least a partial reply to these important doubts. First, for the purposes of this study, the main justification for using the shorthand ‘Western’ political theory has to do with the particularities of political life, since classical antiquity, within the geographic area we now call Europe. For all its internal diversity – which should be evident throughout this work – this ‘Western’ world has been marked by certain social and political peculiarities, which have been briefly outlined in this chapter and which have produced certain distinctive patterns of political thinking. The justification for treating ancient Greece and Rome as part of this ‘tradition’ is simply that we can trace the ‘West’s’ political divergence back to Greco-Roman antiquity, and with it the development of political theory.¹⁶

      The classic texts of political theory considered in this book, then, focus upon the Western state. Generally conceived by powerful minds and often written by first-rate literary stylists, they give us unparalleled access to the West’s political history; and whether we like it or not, these works have indelibly stamped our modern culture and the world today. They have, in general, been the ruling ideas of ruling classes; and this also means, of course, that the imperial powers which have spread their tentacles throughout the world have taken these ideas with them. The spread of the West’s ruling ideas, it must be said, has had its benefits, but they have also been invoked to justify colonial oppression. For better or worse, they have, in various ways, governed the world.

      It is also true that, since classical antiquity, the Western state has been marked by a systemic inequality and domination of the many by a few. This reality, too, is reflected in the canon, since the voices we hear tend to be those of the ruling classes, propertied men (it is indeed men) and those who speak for them. Although we occasionally hear dissent from below, the peasants who have made up the majority of the population throughout most of the relevant history are largely silent. Yet this silence is not a reason for neglecting the voices of the masters. On the contrary, they are often our best access to the voiceless majority, to their grievances and the challenges they posed to those who dominated and exploited them. We are able, of course, to learn a great deal more when we can also listen directly to the words of those who opposed and resisted; but even when those words are unavailable, a careful and contextual reading of the canonical texts will tell us much about what dominant classes expected from their subordinates as well as what they feared from them.

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