Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood

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      Calvin’s doctrine of predestination may seem to complicate the issue. After all, if human beings are damned or saved through no fault or virtue of their own, what can it mean to demand of them that they live according to the dictates of a godly discipline? Yet if we start not with predestination but with God’s sovereign will, the logic of Calvin’s argument may be easier to trace: the doctrine of predestination – the idea that our fate depends entirely, without condition, on God’s determination – follows directly from the notion of God’s total and unconditional sovereignty, as does the idea of godly discipline and the role of both jurisdictional spheres in maintaining it.

      It is almost as if Calvin arrives at his doctrine of predestination less because it expresses his deepest convictions than because it seems an unavoidable consequence of God’s total sovereignty, which is central to his views on the role of the Church and civil government. In the Institutes, the argument for predestination – the predestination of the damned no less than of the elect – comes down to this: we must believe in it, because to do otherwise is to detract from the glory of a totally sovereign God. But, in Calvin’s view, there is little to be gained by dwelling on it. Precisely because it represents God’s unconditional sovereign will, which cannot be understood or judged by any human standards, it must remain a mystery; and we should not attempt to penetrate God’s judgment on our own fate in the afterlife. The best that Christians can do, in their humility and unconditional obedience to God, is to act in this world with confidence in the goodness and generosity of God’s justification, proceeding in their earthly callings as if they and their fellows belonged to the elect, with faith that not only their souls but their works are justified by divine grace.

      Christians, then, must serve their community in accordance with the principles of godly discipline. This certainly elevates earthly callings to a new respectability and even grants an element of godliness to the most humble human labours. But, while Calvin’s idea of the calling, more than Luther’s, invites the faithful to take an active part in shaping the social and political conditions of their lives on this earth, it also means that civil governments must be regarded as representatives of God; and this carries with it a strong obligation to obedience: ‘When those who bear the office of magistrate are called gods, let no one suppose that there is little weight in that appellation. It is thereby intimated that they have a commission from God, that they are invested with divine authority and, in fact, represent the person of God, as whose substitutes they in a manner act’ (IV.20.4). It follows that Christians owe obedience to civil government, and even tyrants must be treated as the delegates of God: ‘even an individual of the worst character, one most unworthy of all honour, if invested with public authority, receives that illustrious divine power which the Lord has by his word devolved on the ministers of his justice and judgment, and that, accordingly, in so far as public obedience is concerned, he is to be held in the same honour and reverence as the best of kings’ (IV.20.25). Christians should obey secular government not simply out of fear ‘but because the obedience which they yield is rendered to God himself, inasmuch as their power is from God’ (IV.20.22).

      Nevertheless, if Calvin’s doctrine of obedience to civil authority seems hardly less, or even more, stringent than Luther’s, his roots in the free Protestant city do make a difference. When considering the various forms of government, he expresses a preference for collective governments instead of kings, if only on the grounds that human imperfections make it useful to have magistrates who can keep an eye on one another. The ideal might be a city like Geneva, governed by civic elites through the medium of magistrates and city councillors, who have an official duty to preserve the city’s liberty. This means that, on the whole, aristocracy is best, or perhaps a mixed constitution in which aristocracy is leavened by an element of popular government. There is nonetheless, Calvin tells us, no point in discussing which government is best, since that depends on circumstances; and, in any case, we must assume that, whatever the prevailing type of government in any given circumstance, it was decreed by God. While the Lord may take vengeance against ‘unbridled domination’, ‘let us not therefore suppose that that vengeance is committed to us, to whom no command has been given but to obey and suffer’ (IV.20 31).

      There seems to be no ambiguity in Calvin’s views on strict obedience, but here he introduces a qualification that would have major consequences for political theory. ‘I speak’, he says, ‘only of private men’; because there have existed public offices – presumably decreed by God – whose duty it has been ‘to curb the tyranny of kings’, such as the Ephori in Sparta, the tribunate in Rome, the Demarchs in Athens, and perhaps even the assembled three estates in a kingdom like France (IV.20.31). It has been the public duty of these ‘lesser magistrates’ to defend the people against the tyranny of rulers. Although Calvin himself would never go beyond the observation that there have existed public offices whose official duty is to represent the interests of the people as a check on princely power, the doctrine of the ‘lesser magistrate’ would become the basis of more wide-ranging and militant resistance theories.

      That doctrines supporting the power of temporal authorities, and even the need for obedience to them, could be mobilized in support of resistance to power and even popular rebellion is a peculiarity of Western culture. Other societies have certainly created doctrines of rebellion, but they took a very special form in Western Europe. The fragmentation of political power in feudal Europe, and the constant jurisdictional battles that followed from it for centuries thereafter, produced quite distinctive effects. The assertion of one jurisdiction against another could be formulated as a right to resist illegitimate power or tyranny. While this meant that ideas of resistance could be adopted and disseminated by ruling classes, landlords and civic elites, it also meant that their interests would shape and constrain Western conceptions of democracy, in ways that persist to this day.

      Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism?

      What, then, should we make of the proposition that Protestantism had something to do with the ‘rise of capitalism’? It is certainly true that Lutheranism became a powerful force when it established itself in great commercial centres. It is also true that, in some commercial cities, where urban patriciates had become rentiers instead of active merchants and where they restricted access to the political domain, burghers and new merchants without political privileges might use Protestant doctrine to challenge patrician dominance. It may even be true that Protestantism, and Calvinism in particular, removed ecclesiastical constraints on commercial activities, or that Protestant doctrine, and especially Calvin’s doctrine of the calling, called into question old verities about the unworthiness of commercial pursuits and the acquisition of wealth, or about work as a curse and simply a punishment for original sin. But, even if we accept that Protestantism promoted a ‘work ethic’ or that it had certain benefits for merchants, and even if we set aside its equal usefulness to nobles, princes and kings, its bearing on the ‘spirit of capitalism’ is another matter altogether.

      Let us first be clear about what is meant by capitalism and the conditions of its ‘rise’. Conventional wisdom – and, indeed, a great deal of scholarly work – treats the rise of capitalism as little more than the quantitative growth of commerce or exchange for profit. Capitalism, in other words, is ‘commercial society’ as understood by classical political economy, a society in which commercial practices that have existed since time immemorial have, with the expansion of cities, markets and trade, become the economic norm. Human beings have, time out of mind, engaged in profitable exchange, and capitalism is just more of the same. This means that, if the birth of capitalism requires any explanation, all that needs to be explained is the growth of market opportunities and the removal of obstacles to the expansion of commerce.

      Yet this understanding of capitalism takes no account of the very specific economic principles that came into being in early modern Europe, principles very different from anything that had existed before even in the most commercialized societies: not simply the growth of market opportunities with the expansion of vast trading networks, but the emergence of wholly new compulsions, the inescapable imperatives of competition, profit-maximization, constant accumulation and the endless need to reduce the costs СКАЧАТЬ