Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood
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Название: Liberty and Property

Автор: Ellen Wood

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Зарубежная публицистика

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isbn: 9781781684283

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СКАЧАТЬ or domestic, is to win, in conformity with moral principles if possible but with cruel violence, deceit and stratagem if not. Machiavelli’s military model was, in the context of Florentine realities and the culture of civic humanism, a relatively small change of perspective; but it was enough to shift the focus away from the just political order or the virtuous prince to the means of seizing and maintaining power, pure and simple. Especially when cast in Machiavelli’s vivid and uncompromising prose, that seemed a shocking innovation.

      It is, then, precisely his commitment to a practically defunct political form that produced what many commentators have interpreted as Machiavelli’s most ‘modern’ political ideas. His views on governance, on how to achieve and maintain power, on relations among citizens and even between princes and their subjects, are steeped in the conditions of the city-state. It is the city-state that for Machiavelli defines the political terrain. This affects his military model of politics, which gives his political theory the aura of ‘realism’ that to some commentators seems distinctly modern; but it also produces a conception of civic liberty that gives his ideas a flavour in some ways more familiar to modern audiences than political ideas emanating from the rising territorial monarchies that would shape the new world order of modern nation states.

      In the classics of sixteenth-century French political thought, for example, the political domain is not a civic community, a community of citizens. It is a contested terrain among various competing jurisdictions: the monarchy, the nobility, local magistrates and various corporate bodies. When Jean Bodin outlined an argument in favour of an ‘absolutist’ monarchy and devised a theory of sovereignty that has been called a landmark in the evolution of the modern state, he was addressing the position of the monarchy in relation to various corporate powers with varying degrees of autonomy. Even the anti-absolutist arguments of, say, the Huguenot resistance tracts, had little to do with the rights and powers of citizens. Instead, when they asserted the rights of the ‘people’ against the centralizing monarchy, they were asserting not the rights of citizens but the autonomous powers of various office-holders, ‘lesser’ magistrates, the provincial nobility, urban corporations and other corporate powers.

      In England, which had long before become the most effective centralized administration in Europe, corporate powers were weaker than in France; and even at moments of the greatest tension between monarch and nobility, from Magna Carta to the Civil War, the issue was not jurisdictional disputes of the kind that defined the political terrain in France. Yet the political sphere was typically conceived as a partnership of Crown and Parliament, and the English were slow to formulate the tensions between these two partners in terms of popular sovereignty. We shall return to the peculiarities of England in a later chapter and to the radical ideas that challenged the prevailing wisdom; but for now it suffices to say that, even when royalists and parliamentarians came to blows, the English were, for their own distinctive reasons, disinclined to conceptualize a political domain defined by the rights and powers of citizens as distinct from the rights and powers of Parliament. Even ‘republicans’, as we shall see, did not always make clear that citizenship meant something more than the right to be (actually or ‘virtually’) represented by Parliament – which did not necessarily entail the right to vote for it.

      By contrast, the Renaissance city-republics extended corporate principles and corporate autonomy to the civic community as a whole; and this produced something more ostensibly akin to modern ideas of popular sovereignty, the sovereignty of citizens, in contrast to the discourse of territorial monarchies. We are, in today’s liberal democracies, accustomed to thinking of citizens’ rights as a hallmark of a truly modern politics. That, among other things, is what allows some commentators to identify ‘civic humanism’ or even Renaissance ‘republicanism’ as a window to the modern world. But it may be misleading to describe membership in the civic corporation in medieval and Renaissance Italy as ‘citizenship’, since it vests political rights in corporate bodies and not individual citizens, while the republican discourse has less to do with the advent of the ‘modern’ state (unless it is as a threat to the survival of city-republics) than with the distinctive unity of civic, commercial and military principles in a political form that would not survive modernity.

      3

      THE REFORMATION

      Martin Luther is one of very few, even among canonical thinkers, for whom a persuasive case can be made that, had he never been born, history would not have unfolded as it did. He may, for this reason alone, seem to present a special challenge to a social-contextual history like this one. If the ideas of one man can seem to change the course of history in such dramatic ways, must we not reconsider the primacy of discourse? Yet to ask the question in this way would be to misunderstand what is entailed by the kind of contextualization proposed in this book. Whatever doubts we may have about the decisive role of this or that historic figure, the social history of political theory does not require us to denigrate the creativity or world-historic influence of individuals. It does not oblige us to think that a Protestant movement would have emerged more or less in the form that it did with or without Martin Luther, nor does it suggest that if Martin Luther had never existed he would have had to be invented, or, for that matter, that Protestantism had no significant effects on the truly ‘basic’ processes of history.

      How, then, should we pose the question? We shall certainly want to ask how the particularities of Luther’s time and place shaped the particular configuration of problems he sought to resolve; and we shall want to consider how it came about that the same ideas were mobilized so differently, to such divergent purposes, in different contexts. But in the case of Luther more than most other thinkers, we are compelled to ask how a conceptual shift in the realm of ideas could have had such massive historical consequences; and it may turn out that the greater the world-historic effects we claim for Luther’s ideas, the more – not the less – we must appeal to a contextual explanation.

      The Roots of Reformation

      Some historians have questioned the very existence of a Reformation conceived as a radical discontinuity in Christian dogma and reactions to it. The ideas of Luther and other major Protestant thinkers, they point out, were deeply rooted in the medieval Church, which was already alive with debate and projects for internal reformation; and there had long been heresies to challenge the institutions, no less than the theological orthodoxies, of the Catholic Church. Conflicts in the Church had been vastly aggravated by geopolitical rivalries among rising territorial states, as the papacy at Avignon had increasingly come under the influence of the French monarchy, and competing papal claimants in Avignon and Rome became embroiled in inter-state rivalries between France and its European neighbours. In the late fourteenth century, these rivalries produced the so-called Western Schism, which would last for decades and helped to generate a climate of reform and outright heresy.

      The conciliar movement, which flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, elaborated the idea that it was not the pope but the corporate body of Christians in the form of a general Church council that held ultimate authority in spiritual matters. While the movement would give way to a revived papal dominance, its influence remained alive, even if more as a model for secular theories of constitutional government than as a programme for reform of the Church. More scathing attacks on the papacy, as well as on the abuses and corruptions of the Church, would come from the Englishman John Wycliffe (1330–84) and, most importantly, from the Bohemian Jan Hus (1369–1415), whose influence on Luther would run very deep. Both Wycliffe and Hus denied that the ecclesiastical hierarchy, from pope to cardinals to priests, constituted the Church; and both called on secular rulers to initiate reform of the Church. They even demanded that ecclesiastical possessions should be subject to secular rule, on the grounds that the Church did not enjoy ownership but only use rights conditional on good behaviour.

      Renaissance humanism, too, played a critical part. Indeed, there may be something artificial about distinguishing the ‘Reformation’ from ‘Christian humanism’. The humanist preoccupation with ancient texts would be extended to the Bible, encouraging theologians to mobilize scripture in challenging СКАЧАТЬ