Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood

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СКАЧАТЬ but also opened the former Napoleonic empire to the purely economic pressures of British capitalism in unprecedented ways. The state responded to those external imperatives by bringing about a state-led development of the economy. In a sense, the development of capitalism preceded social transformation; and, in contrast to England, capitalist class relations were more a result than a cause of industrialization.

      Modern Political Thought?

      It is certainly true that the emergence of national states with clear territorial boundaries and a more or less unified sovereign power created conditions for new developments in Western political thought – but perhaps not quite in the ways that Skinner has suggested. It does make sense to identify the rise of territorial states in Europe as a major historical development, a departure from the parcellized sovereignty of previous centuries; but it helps very little to describe these states as ‘modern’ if that label disguises important historical differences, such as those we have already observed between England and France. Is absolutist France more modern because of its elaborate bureaucracy, the sign of a ‘rational’ state? Or should we give the prize to England, because its centralized state, however ‘irrational’ in Weberian terms, has more completely asserted its sovereignty against autonomous powers of various kinds and has largely ceased to be a form of property?

      It also makes sense to single out the rise of the ‘market economy’ as a critical development, but what precisely makes a market ‘modern’ as distinct from ‘ancient’? There were vast commercial networks in various parts of the world long before the advent of ‘modernity’, and it is not at all clear that the trade we see in ‘early modern’ Europe is operating on significantly different principles, the age-old practices of buying cheap and selling dear. It cannot be simply a matter of scale, or else why should Europe in the sixteenth century be more modern than India or China even centuries before? If there is a fundamental rupture in the age-old pattern of commercial exchange, it occurs in England (a point to which we shall return in later chapters), with the rise of agrarian capitalism; but England is at first a fairly minor player in the global trading network compared to, say, Venice or Portugal; so which of them is more modern? If we try to identify a uniquely modern complex of a rational state, a ‘rational’ economy, and a culture of ‘reason’, where, if anywhere, did it exist?

      If the notion of the modern state conceals as much as it reveals, what does it mean to speak of modern political thought? There seems to be an irresistible temptation among historians of political thought to identify the first modern political thinker in the Western canon. Pride of place is commonly awarded to Hobbes or Machiavelli. The reasons for selecting Hobbes may have to do with his theory of government, grounded in a systematically secular, materialistic account of epistemology, human psychology and morality. Or the reason may be that, however ambiguously, he bases his theory of politics on a conception of individual freedom and rights. Or it may simply be that, by elaborating a definitive conception of sovereignty, he best represents the triumph of territorial monarchies, or even ‘nation states’, over medieval forms of governance. Hobbes has even been called a ‘bourgeois’ thinker, an exponent of a ‘possessive individualism’ associated with a modern market society.

      If Machiavelli is chosen, with or without denouncing his ‘Machiavellian’ amorality, it is likely to be on the grounds that he, before Hobbes, gave an account of politics divorced from moral or religious principles, or even that he is the first political scientist, on the side of the ‘empirical’ instead of the ‘normative’ study of politics, ‘facts’ rather than ‘values’. Or it may be on the grounds that his republicanism, albeit more visible in the Discourses than in his most famous work, The Prince, mobilizes ancient ideas of civic autonomy against feudal hierarchies and in support of more modern conceptions of liberty and citizenship, a pivotal moment – as in John Pocock’s ‘Machiavellian moment’ – in the development of modern republican ideas. Or at least, it might be said, if he has one foot in the ancient world, he is a ‘transitional’ figure; and, even if the city-state of Florence that produced him fails to fit the model of a modern nation state, it was, after all, a centre of commerce, which is supposed to be a prelude to a modern capitalist economy.

      The Cambridge School, which dominates the field of early modern political theory in the Anglo-American academy, may have muddied the waters – making it harder to award the modernity prize to any one thinker – by eschewing the very idea of a ‘canon’ and replacing it with discursive contexts that include a host of not-so-canonical writers who have in their various ways contributed to language ‘situations’. This approach certainly has its advantages, but it may – as we have seen in the case of Quentin Skinner – simply shift the question to which political language or discourse represents a modern break from ancient or medieval precedents. The conventional language of ancient and modern persists even when traditions of discourse span centuries of historical change, indeed even when ancient and modern languages of politics are allowed to coexist in historical time, in conflict or in paradoxical unity – as in the notion of ‘civic humanism’ or, for that matter, ‘republicanism’.

      But whether applied to a single major thinker or to a collective ‘discourse’, the concept of modernity, in all its conflicting forms, is loaded with assumptions that shed little light on historical processes. Might it not be better to look for historic transformations, even ruptures, without being obliged to define them as breakthroughs to modernity? And what kinds of transformations might we find if we set aside the elusive search for modernity? In particular, what significant changes would we find in the discourse of politics in the era we are exploring here?

      During the medieval period, at the height of ‘parcellized sovereignty’, there scarcely existed a distinct political sphere.14 The elaborate feudal network of competing jurisdictions, bound together – when not in open conflict – by a complex apparatus of legal and contractual relations, meant that the boundaries of the ‘political’ were ill-defined and fluid. The main ‘political’ agent was not the individual citizen but the possessor of some kind of secular or ecclesiastical jurisdiction, or a corporate entity with its own legal rights, a degree of autonomy and often a charter defining its relation to other corporations and superior powers. Legal and political thinking was preoccupied not, as ancient political philosophy had been, with portraying the political transactions among citizens within a civic community, but with mapping out the spheres of authority among overlapping and competing jurisdictions or negotiating interactions among them. The emergence of territorial states in the early modern period would change these conditions (though, as we shall see, we should not exaggerate the speed or degree of these transformations), creating a new political domain, new political identities, and new political ideas to suit them.

      Among the most significant developments were new conceptions of individual rights in relation to political authority. Although there has been much debate about when and how the concept of ‘subjective’ rights originated, the idea of rights inherent in the person, prior to and independent of civic authority or positive law, certainly had roots in the Middle Ages, in the writings of canon lawyers and philosophers. The very idea of a Christian conscience, for instance, presupposed a human capacity for understanding principles of right (in the ‘objective’ sense, as ‘what is right’) and a responsibility to follow them.15 That responsibility implied both a moral obligation and a certain individual autonomy, the capacity to disregard the principles of right no less than to respect them. From that individual autonomy it was possible to deduce a notion of individual freedom from which followed certain entitlements – which might include a ‘right’ to be free of enslavement, or a ‘right’ of self-preservation and self-defence; and it also entailed respect for the same entitlements in others, if only on the basis of the Golden Rule.

      These principles of right did have some implications for political thought. An insistence on individual autonomy or natural freedom seemed, for instance, to require an acknowledgement that civil authority is constituted by consenting individuals – which was consistent with the prominent role of contractual relations in the feudal order. But none of this had any necessary implications for the rights of individuals in relation to the state, once established. As СКАЧАТЬ