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The political nature of Absolutism has long been a subject of controversy within historical materialism. Developing considerations advanced in Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, this book situates the Absolutist states of the early modern epoch against the prior background of European feudalism. It is divided into two parts. The first discusses the overall structures of Absolutism as a state-system in Western Europe, from the Renaissance onwards; and the difficult question of the relations between monarchy and nobility institutionalised by it, for which it suggests a general periodization. It then looks in turn at the trajectory of each of the specific Absolutist states in the dominant countries of the West – Spain, France, England and Sweden, set off against the case of Italy, where no major indigenous Absolutism developed.
The second part of the work sketches a comparative prospect of Absolutism in Eastern Europe. It begins with an enquiry into the reasons why the divergent social conditions in the more backward half of the continent should have produced political forms apparently similar to those of the more advanced West. The peculiarities, as well as affinities, of Eastern Absolutism as a distinct type of royal state, are examined. The variegated monarchies of Prussia, Austria and Russia are surveyed, and the lessons asked of the counter-example of Poland. Finally, the structure of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans is taken as an external gauge by which the singularity of Absolutism as a European phenomenon is assessed. The work ends with some observations on the special position occupied by European development within universal history, which draws themes from both Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State together into a single argument – within their common limits – as materials for debate.
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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, by demonstrating the basic truth that European feudalism – far from constituting an exclusively agrarian economy – was the first mode of production in history to accord an autonomous structural place to urban production and exchange. The growth of towns was in this sense as ‘internal’ a development as the dissolution of the manor, in Western European feudalism.
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