Citizens to Lords. Ellen Wood
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in the next chapter) asked whether moral and political principles exist by nature or merely by custom – a question that could be answered in various ways, some congenial to democracy, others in support of oligarchy; and when Plato expressed his opposition to democracy, he could not rely on invoking the gods or time-honoured custom but was obliged to make his case by means of philosophic reason, to construct a definition of justice and the good life that seemed to rule out democracy.
Political Theory in History: An Overview
Born in the polis, this new mode of political thought would survive the polis and continue to set the theoretical agenda in later centuries, when very different forms of state prevailed. This longevity has not been simply a matter of tenacious intellectual legacies. The Western tradition of political theory has developed on the foundations established in ancient Greece because certain issues have remained at the centre of European political life. In varying forms, the autonomy of private property, its relative independence from the state, and the tension between these foci of social power have continued to shape the political agenda. On the one hand, appropriating classes have needed the state to maintain order, conditions for appropriation and control over producing classes. On the other hand, they have found the state a burdensome nuisance and a competitor for surplus labour.
With a wary eye on the state, the dominant appropriating classes have always had to turn their attention to their relations with subordinate producing classes. Indeed, their need for the state has been largely determined by those difficult relations. In particular, throughout most of Western history, peasants fed, clothed, and housed the lordly minority by means of surplus labour extracted by payment of rents, fees, or tributes. Yet, though the aristocratic state depended on peasants and though lords were always alive to the threat of resistance, the politically voiceless classes play little overt role in the classics of Western political theory. Their silent presence tends to be visible only in the great theoretical efforts devoted to justifying social and political hierarchies.
The relation between appropriating and producing classes was to change fundamentally with the advent of capitalism, but the history of Western political theory continued to be in large part the history of tensions between property and state, appropriators and producers. In general, the Western tradition of political theory has been ‘history from above’, essentially reflection on the existing state and the need for its preservation or change written from the perspective of a member or client of the ruling classes. Yet it should be obvious that this ‘history from above’ cannot be understood without relating it to what can be learned about the ‘history from below’. The complex three-way relation between the state, propertied classes and producers, perhaps more than anything else, sets the Western political tradition apart from others.
There is nothing unique to the West, of course, about societies in which dominant groups appropriate what others produce. But there is something distinctive about the ways in which the tensions between them have shaped political life and theory in the West. This may be precisely because the relations between appropriators and producers have never, since classical antiquity, been synonymous with the relation between rulers and subjects. To be sure, the peasant-citizen would not survive the Roman Empire, and many centuries would pass before anything comparable to the ancient Athenian idea of democratic citizenship would re-emerge in Europe. Feudal and early modern Europe would, in its own way, even approximate the old division between rulers and producers, as labouring classes were excluded from active political rights and the power to appropriate was typically associated with the possession of ‘extra-economic’ power, political, judicial or military. But even then, the relation between rulers and producers was never unambiguous, because appropriating classes confronted their labouring compatriots not, in the first instance, as a collective power organized in the state but in a more directly personal relation as individual proprietors, in rivalry with other proprietors and even with the state.
The autonomy of property and the contradictory relations between ruling class and state meant that propertied classes in the West always had to fight on two fronts. While they would have happily subscribed to Mencius’s principle about those who rule and those who feed them, they could never take for granted such a neat division between rulers and producers, because there was a much clearer division than existed elsewhere between property and state.
Although the foundations of Western political theory established in ancient Greece proved to be remarkably resilient, there have, of course, been many changes and additions to its theoretical agenda, in keeping with changing historical conditions, which will be explored in the following chapters. The Romans, perhaps because their aristocratic republic did not confront challenges like those of the Athenian democracy, did not produce a tradition of political theory as fruitful as the Greek. But they did introduce other social and political innovations, especially the Roman law, which would have major implications for the development of political theory. The empire also gave rise to Christianity, which became the imperial religion, with all its cultural consequences.
It is particularly significant that the Romans began to delineate a sharp distinction between public and private, even, perhaps, between state and society. Above all, the opposition between property and state as two distinct foci of power, which has been a constant theme throughout the history of Western political theory, was for the first time formally acknowledged by the Romans in their distinction between imperium and dominium, power conceived as the right to command and power in the form of ownership. This did not preclude the view – expressed already by Cicero in On Duties (De Officiis) – that the purpose of the state was to protect private property or the conviction that the state came into being for that reason. On the contrary, the partnership of state and private property, which would continue to be a central theme of Western political theory, presupposes the separation, and the tensions, between them.
The tension between these two forms of power, which was intensified in theory and practice as republic gave way to empire, would, as we shall see, play a large part in the fall of the Roman Empire. With the rise of feudalism, that tension was resolved on the side of dominium, as the state was virtually dissolved into individual property. In contrast to the ancient division between rulers and producers, in which the state was the dominant instrument of appropriation, the feudal state scarcely had an autonomous existence apart from the hierarchical chain of individual, if conditional, property and personal lordship. Instead of a centralized public authority, the feudal state was a network of ‘parcellized sovereignties’, governed by a complex hierarchy of social relations 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