Lineages of the Absolutist State. Perry Anderson
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political order contained within them was not a false promise. The bourgeoisie in the West was already strong enough to leave its blurred impress on the State, under Absolutism. For the apparent paradox of Absolutism in Western Europe was that it fundamentally represented an apparatus for the protection of aristocratic property and privileges, yet at the same time the means whereby this protection was promoted could simultaneously ensure the basic interests of the nascent mercantile and manufacturing classes. The Absolutist State increasingly centralized political power and worked towards more uniform legal systems: Richelieu’s campaigns against the Huguenot redoubts in France were typical. It did away with a large number of internal barriers to trade, and sponsored external tariffs against foreign competitors: Pombal’s measures in Enlightenment Portugal were a drastic example. It provided lucrative if risky investments in public finance for usury capital: 16th century Augsburg bankers and 17th century Genoese oligarchs could make fortunes from their loans to the Spanish State. It mobilized rural property by seizure of ecclesiastical lands: dissolution of the monasteries in England. It offered rentier sinecures in the bureaucracy: the Paulette in France ordained stable tenure of them. It sponsored colonial enterprises and trading companies: to the White Sea, to the Antilles, to Hudson Bay, to Louisiana. In other words, it accomplished certain partial functions in the primitive accumulation necessary for the eventual triumph of the capitalist mode of production itself. The reasons why it could perform this ‘dual’ role lie in the specific nature of merchant or manufacturing capital: since neither rested on the mass production characteristic of machine industry proper, neither in themselves demanded a radical rupture with the feudal agrarian order which still enclosed the vast majority of the population (the future wage-labour and consumer market of industrial capitalism). In other words, they could develop within the limits set by the reorganized feudal framework. This is not to say that they everywhere did so: political, religious or economic conflicts could well fuse into revolutionary explosions against Absolutism after a certain period of maturation, in specific conjunctures. There was, however, always a potential field of compatibility at this stage between the nature and programme of the Absolutist State and the operations of mercantile and manufacturing capital. For in the international competition between noble classes that produced the endemic warfare of the age, the size of the commodity sector within each ‘national’ patrimony was always of critical importance to its relative military and political strength. Every monarchy thus had a stake in gathering treasure and promoting trade under its own banners, in the struggle against its rivals. Hence the ‘progressive’ character that subsequent historians have so often conferred on the official policies of Absolutism. Economic centralization, protectionism and overseas expansion aggrandized the late feudal State while they profited the early bourgeoisie. They increased the taxable revenues of the one by providing business opportunities for the other. The circular maxims of mercantilism, proclaimed by the Absolutist State, gave eloquent expression to this provisional coincidence of interests. It was appropriately enough the Due de Choiseul, in the last decades of the aristocratic ancien régime in the West, who declared: ‘Upon the navy depend the colonies, upon the colonies commerce, upon commerce the capacity of a State to maintain numerous armies, to increase its population and to make possible the most glorious and useful enterprises.’41
Yet, as the final cadence of ‘glorious and useful’ implies, the irreducibly feudal character of Absolutism remained. It was a State founded on the social supremacy of the aristocracy and confined by the imperatives of landed property. The nobility could deposit power with the monarchy, and permit the enrichment of the bourgeoisie: the masses were still at its mercy. No ‘political’ derogation of the noble class ever occurred in the Absolutist State. Its feudal character constantly ended by frustrating and falsifying its promises for capital. The Fuggers were eventually ruined by Habsburg bankruptcies; English nobles appropriated most of the monastic lands; Louis XIV destroyed the benefits of Richelieu’s work by revoking the Edict of Nantes; London merchants were plundered by the Cockayne project; Portugal reverted to the
Methuen system after Pombal’s death; Parisian speculators were defrauded by Law. Army, bureaucracy, diplomacy and dynasty remained a hardened feudal complex which governed the whole State machine and guided its destinies. The rule of the Absolutist State was that of the feudal nobility in the epoch of transition to capitalism. Its end would signal the crisis of the power of its class: the advent of the bourgeois revolutions, and the emergence of the capitalist State.
1. See the discussion in Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, London 1974, which precedes this study.
2. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in Marx-Engels, Selected Works, London 1968, p 588; Marx-Engels, Werke Bd 21, p. 167
3. Zur Wohnungsfrage, in Werke, Bd 18, p. 258.
4. Marx-Engels, Selected Works, p. 37; Werke, Bd 4, p. 464.
5. Uber den Verf all des Feudalismus und das Aufkommen der Bourgeoisie, in Werke, Bd 21, p. 398. ‘Political’ domination is expressly staatliche in the sentence cited here.
6. The first formulation is from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Selected Works, p. 171; the second is from The Civil War in France, in Selected Works, p. 289.
7. Capital, III, pp. 774, 777. Dobb’s exposition of this fundamental question in his ‘Reply’ to Sweezy in the famous debate of the fifties on the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism is trenchant and lucid: Science and Society, XIV, No. 2, Spring 1950, pp. 157–67, esp. 163–4. The theoretical importance of the problem is evident. In the case of a country like Sweden, for example, standard historical accounts still claim that ‘it had no feudalism’ because there was an absence of serfdom proper. In fact, of course, feudal relations predominated in the Swedish countryside throughout the late mediaeval era.
8. Christopher Hill, ‘Comment’ (on the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism), Science and Society, XVII, No. 4, Fall 1953, p. 351. The terms of this judgement should be treated with care. The general and epochal character of Absolutism renders any formal comparison of it with the local, exceptionalist regimes of fascism inappropriate, of course.
9. Louis Althusser, Montesquieu, Le Politique et l’Histoire, Paris 1969, p. 117. This formulation is selected as recent and representative. Belief in the capitalist or quasi-capitalist character of Absolutism can still, however, occasionally be found. Poulantzas commits the imprudence of so classifying Absolutist States in his otherwise important work Pouvoir Politique et Classes Sociales, pp. 169–80, although his phrasing is vague and ambiguous. The recent debate on Russian Absolutism in Soviet historical journals revealed isolated similar instances, although chronologically more nuanced; see for example, A. Ya. Avrekh, ‘Russkii Absoliutizm i evo Rol’ v Utverzhdenie Kapitalizma v Rossii’, Istoriya SSSR, February 1968, pp. 83–104, who deems Absolutism the ‘prototype of the bourgeois State’ (p. 92). Avrekh’s views were heavily criticized in the debate which followed, and were not typical of the general tenor of the discussion.
10. The celebrated debate between Sweezy and Dobb, with contributions by Takahashi, Hilton and Hill, in Science and Society 1950–3, remains to this day the only systematic Marxist treatment of the central problems of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In one important respect, however, it revolved on a false issue. Sweezy argued (following Pirenne) that the ‘prime mover’ in the transition was an ‘external’ agent of dissolution – the urban enclaves which destroyed the feudal agrarian economy by their expansion of commodity exchange in the towns. Dobb replied that the impetus to the transition must be located within the contradictions of the agrarian economy itself, which generated social differentiation of the peasantry and the rise of the small producer. In a subsequent essay on the subject, Vilar explicitly formulated the problem of the transition as that of defining the correct combination of ‘endogenous’ agrarian and ‘exogenous’ urban-commercial changes, while himself emphasizing the importance of the new Atlantic trading economy in the 16th century: ‘Problems in the Formation of Capitalism’, Past and Present, No. 10, November 1956, pp. 33–4. In an important recent study, ‘The Relation between Town and Country in the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism’ (unpublished), John Merrington has effectively resolved this antinomy,