Liberty and Property
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From Machiavelli to Rousseau, reading theorists as responding to the conflicts of their time. The formation of the modern state, the rise of capitalism, the Renaissance and Reformation, the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment have all been attributed to the “early modern” period. Nearly everything about its history remains controversial, but one thing is certain: it left a rich and provocative legacy of political ideas unmatched in Western history. The concepts of liberty, equality, property, human rights and revolution born in those turbulent centuries continue to shape, and to limit, political discourse today. Assessing the work and background of figures such as Machiavelli, Luther, Calvin, Spinoza, the Levellers, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, Ellen Wood vividly explores the ideas of the canonical thinkers, not as philosophical abstractions but as passionately engaged responses to the social conflicts of their day.
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LIBERTY AND
A Social History of Western Political Thought
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While the Revolution may have been ‘bourgeois’, then, there was little that was ‘capitalist’ about it. If, in its political principles and in its legacies it went far beyond the ‘bourgeois’ impulses that first set it in motion, there remained strong continuities between the ancien régime and the post-revolutionary state. What is so striking about the post-revolutionary period, throughout much of the nineteenth century in France, is the persistence of the tax/office structure, in which appropriation took the form of direct exploitation of peasant producers by the state through taxation. Not only did the economy continue to be based on small-scale agricultural production, but the state continued to relate to that production as a primary exploiter of direct producers through the medium of taxation, for the benefit of office-holders.
One has only to read Marx’s account of nineteenth-century France in the 18th Brumaire to see how persistent this formation was. He speaks of the ‘immense bureaucratic and military organization’, a ‘frightful parasitic body’, in which the ‘material interest of the French bourgeoisie is most intimately imbricated. It is that machine which provides the surplus population with jobs, and makes up through state salaries for what it cannot pocket in the form of profits, interest, rents and fees.’ This bourgeois tradition would continue well into the twentieth century, if not until today, in a culture where state office would remain the highest career, with a tradition of mandarinism, dominated by a hereditary elite of office-holders and their exclusive academies.
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