Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood

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СКАЧАТЬ particular formation of the state, the distinctive relation between aristocracy and monarchy, the unity of Parliament and Crown, the evolution of a unified system of law on which the ruling class depended to sustain its property and power, meant that political conflict did not in general take the form of jurisdictional disputes among fragments of sovereignty. It also meant that corporate principles were weak. From early on, the relation between state and individual was not mediated by corporate entities, and political rights were vested in the individual rather than in corporate bodies.

      In England, where the primary political relation was not among competing jurisdictions but between individual and state, the idea of individual rights was bound to have different implications than it did elsewhere in Europe. It is significant, as we shall see, that the first systematic discussion of the relation between individual rights, the rights of private individuals, and sovereign power was produced by an English theorist, Hobbes, though not in defence of individual rights against the state but in favour of absolute sovereignty. At the same time, any theory of resistance or popular sovereignty would, in that context, represent a greater challenge to the power of propertied classes than did the French resistance tracts. When such theories did emerge in England, they effected a revolution in political thought – as, for instance, when the Levellers in the English Civil War insisted that consent to government, on which freedom depends, must be given not only once in a single transfer of power but continuously, and by a multitude of individuals, the people outside Parliament, not by some corporate entity which claims to represent them.

      The differences between England and France are visible, too, in conceptions of the relation between state and economy. We are accustomed to associating ‘political economy’, in the tradition of Adam Smith, with the development of ‘commercial society’ in its Anglo-Scottish mode. Yet the very first writer to use the term ‘political economy’ in the title of his work was a Frenchman, Antoine de Montchrétien. Already in the early seventeenth century, as we shall see in Chapter 6, he elaborated an idea of commerce as a means of harnessing private interests and passions to the public benefit, so that civic virtue was no longer necessary. In his Traité de l’économie politique, published in 1615, he insists that selfish passions and the appetite for gain, far from threatening the common good, can be its very foundation, without any reliance on virtue or benevolence. But his argument was critically different from what followed in Britain, and French arguments would continue to be different for a long time thereafter. French thinkers who, like Montchrétien, extolled the benefits of le doux commerce took for granted that the necessary condition for the positive effects of trade was a forceful monarchy to integrate and harmonize particular interests and transform private vices into public benefits. This assumption is rooted in the realities of absolutist France, a society in which there is still no integrated market or competitive capitalism, and where the polity is still fragmented by a welter of corporate entities and privileges. French thinkers were bound to look, as the English were not, for ways of dealing with this structural divisiveness when they reflected on the replacement of virtue by commerce.16

      In the eighteenth century, the same assumptions are present in Montesquieu’s views on monarchy. Unlike republican government, he tells us, monarchy has the advantage of making it possible to promote the common good with minimal virtue or self-sacrifice. Private interests can be the source of public benefits. But, while Montesquieu is less convinced than some of his contemporaries that commerce among nations need be a zero-sum game, this is not because he imagines that the common good will emerge naturally out of the interplay of private interests through an autonomous market mechanism. On the contrary, the monarchy must play that harmonizing role. Even the physiocrats, who most admired English agrarian capitalism and held it up as a model for France, shared classic French assumptions about the primary role of the state in harmonizing particular and corporate interests; and heavy traces of that view are still visible even in post-revolutionary France, in Napoleonic conceptions of the state.

      The English – or, more precisely, the Anglo-Scottish – argument proceeds on the basis of different social and economic conditions. In the Anglo-Scottish version of le doux commerce in the eighteenth century, the burden of harmonizing private interests falls much more heavily on the market, on the discipline of competition in organizing production. The state, to be sure, plays a critical role in producing and maintaining the conditions for commercial development; but the purpose of the state is not to impose harmony on competing private interests. On the contrary, its role is to facilitate the operations of the market, which has that integration as its primary object.

      What is critical, then, is not that commerce is presented as a substitute for civic virtue (more on this in a later chapter) but rather that commerce itself is conceived in new ways, in practice no less than in theory. We are now dealing with a competitive national market far more integrated than any other in Europe, and this market has a dynamic completely different from old forms of trade. The old forms of profit on alienation in transactions between separate markets really do look like a zero-sum game which inevitably leads to conflict. But the new dynamic of England’s economy allows Adam Smith, for instance, to regard competition as itself an integrative force. It is precisely the discipline required to keep self-interested commercial classes in check.

      The state undoubtedly plays a vital part in Smith’s economy, above all to ensure that the market mechanism operates as it should – which seems to include, among other things, protection against employers combining to drive down wages. He also believes firmly in the importance of education for the lower classes. He does, to be sure, make debatable assumptions about the role of market mechanisms not only in advancing general prosperity but also in enhancing a more equitable distribution of wealth, which is, for him, a major reason for advocating free markets (in sharp contrast to our contemporary ‘neoliberals’, who may acknowledge that markets are more likely to increase inequality but regard that as a fruitful outcome). The freedom of the market that Smith has in mind requires intervention by the state to sustain it; and he does indeed believe that merchants lack the moral fibre or traditions of the landed classes, though concentrations of landed property represent a danger too. But the solution is not to find some kind of counterweight to commerce. On the contrary, the solution must be sought in commerce itself. The market imperatives that come with a mature commercial society impose their own discipline on all the participants, and it is not the function of the state to counteract them. Intervention by the state is necessary to sustain the mechanisms of the market; but its purpose is not to suppress or to lessen but to intensify the imperatives of competition – against, for example, the monopolistic inclinations of merchants.

      Smith’s analysis of market mechanisms certainly owed much to the French and particularly to the physiocrat Quesnay (more in Chapter 6). But this debt makes even more striking the differences between the French and the Anglo-Scottish views on what is required to ensure the proper functioning of the ‘invisible hand’. Both regard a stable social order as a necessary precondition of a prosperous economy, and for both this requires interventions by the state. But Smith not only takes for granted a new form of commerce, such as already exists in England, but a unitary state with a unitary representative, while Quesnay assumes the need for a politically constituted integrating force, a kind of ‘legal despotism’, to deal with the fragmented system of estates and corporate bodies; and this kind of state, according to physiocratic doctrine, is needed not only to sustain but to create a new form of economy, which exists in English agrarian capitalism but not in France.17

      The different patterns of ‘political economy’ in English capitalism and French absolutism would continue to have implications in the realm of ideas, in what many historical narratives depict as the age of ‘Enlightenment’. But, even while it has become fashionable to acknowledge national differences by speaking of ‘Enlightenments’ in an ever-proliferating plural, the very idea of ‘Enlightenment(s)’ has tended to obscure some critical divergences – which will be explored in the concluding chapter of this book.

      A Social History of Political Thought

      The purpose of this book is not to enlarge the canon or to argue for a more inclusive canonical literature that does justice to СКАЧАТЬ