Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood

It seems, on the face of it, a fairly innocent, if imprecise, descriptive label indicating rough chronological boundaries, somewhere between the middle ages and full-blown modernity. We shall use the label here in that more or less neutral sense, just for the sake of simplicity and for lack of anything better. But there is more at issue than chronology. Whatever dates we settle on – let us say approximately 1500 (or 1492?) to 1800, or maybe 1789 or even 1776 – the early modern presupposes an idea of the modern, as distinct from the ancient, the medieval or at least the ‘pre-modern’, an idea of modernity that raises questions of its own.

      Much intellectual effort has been expended on clarifying the idea of ‘modernity’, and we shall, in what follows, have occasion to confront some of the questions it poses. For the moment, it is enough to say that, although there has been disagreement about what exactly constitutes the ‘modern’ and whether it is good, bad or morally neutral, there is, in ‘Western’ culture, a deeply rooted and tenacious conception that cuts across divergent schools of thought which may agree on very little else. Even when sharp distinctions are made among various national histories, there remains a single, overarching narrative of European history and the advent of modernity, a narrative defined by discontinuities and at the same time transitional processes, passages from one age to another marked by fundamental transformations.

      In that narrative, the modern era, whatever else it may be, is a composite of economic, political and cultural characteristics, uniting capitalism (what classical political economists liked to call ‘commercial society’), legal-rational political authority (perhaps, but not necessarily, with a preference for its liberal democratic form), and technological progress – or ‘rationalization’ in its various aspects as manifest in markets, states, secularism and scientific knowledge. Emphases or causal primacies may vary, and different balances may be struck among the factors of modernity, economic, cultural or social. There may be fierce dispute about the processes of transformation that produced the modern age. The critical transition may be defined as a passage from feudalism to capitalism, the rise of the bourgeoisie, the forward march of liberty, a destructive rupture from tradition, and much else besides. But it is difficult to find a notion of the modern in which the culture of ‘rational’ inquiry, advances in technology, the market economy and a ‘rational’ state are not, in one way or another, for better or worse, inextricably connected.1

      In recent years the lines between the early modern and the modern have been more sharply drawn in some historical accounts, as the early modern has tended to merge with the ‘late medieval’. Among historians of political thought in particular, there are those who question the idea of an early modern period, on the grounds that there was no significant rupture between medieval thinkers and those described as early modern. Political ideas, in this account, remained strikingly consistent throughout the historic transformations that brought the ‘middle ages’ to an end. But even here, the concept of modernity, and the conventional narrative associated with it, have been remarkably persistent.

      There are, to be sure, those who reject the very idea of modernity. It makes some people uneasy because of its association with conceptions of progress, which smack of teleology or, after the horrors of the twentieth century, appear in questionable taste. Others are opposed to ‘grand narratives’ of any kind and prefer to discard the longue durée in favour of a focus on the local, the particular and the contingent. Since ‘modernity’ implies a very long historical sweep from ancient to modern, with at least implicit explanations of how one led to the other, this refusal of a longer view makes it hard to sustain an idea of the modern.

      Yet, these controversies notwithstanding, the notion of modernity is rarely challenged from a vantage point that, while systematically questioning the conventional paradigm, still takes a longer view of history. The most influential ‘grand narratives’ – from Enlightenment conceptions of progress, to Marxist or Whig interpretations of history or Weberian historical sociology, and all their varied legacies – have tended to leave the conventional composite portrait of the modern era fundamentally intact, however divergent their judgments of modernity have been. The challenge to the standard story of modernity has more often come from various kinds of disconnected or fragmented history, ‘postmodernist’ or ‘revisionist’ accounts with no long view and little explanation of historical causality or, indeed, historical process – though even then the stubborn concept of the modern has tended to return through the back door.

      Early Modern Europe?

      What, then, does it mean to speak of early modern political thought? The growth of the ‘modern’ state, with its entrenchment of national boundaries, political, economic and cultural, is certainly a central feature of the early modern period; and, in one way or another, it affected all forms of political organization that came within its field of force. But the canon of Western political thought, which is the subject of this book, was in that period also shaped by political forms as diverse as the city-states of Italy, the bewildering variety of German jurisdictions, and the commercial republics of the Netherlands – to say nothing of the Holy Roman Empire, simultaneously a self-conscious throwback to imperial antiquity and an aspiring if ultimately unsuccessful nation state, in constant tension with all other claimants to sovereignty, secular and ecclesiastical. The concept of the early modern encompasses not just the early manifestations of the modern state or the modern economy but cultural and intellectual developments rooted in very different, and not conspicuously modern, social and political forms, such as the Italian city-states in which the Renaissance came to fruition or the Electorate of Saxony where Martin Luther, at least according to historical convention, launched the Reformation.

      These cases differed not only in their political form but in the particular interactions among public power, private property, and the producing classes; and these differences would give rise to distinctive traditions of political discourse. This was true even among the city-states and principalities joined at one time or another under the rule, however tenuous, of the Holy Roman Empire: the Germans and the Spanish, the Italians and the Dutch. To be sure, Italians and Germans, Spanish and Dutch, or, for that matter, English and French, all shared a common cultural legacy; and our period begins at a moment of particular cultural unity, manifested in the Latin that united Western European scholars, the whole apparatus of Christian theology, the revived Greek classics of political philosophy, the ‘republic of letters’ constituted by European humanism. Yet this common intellectual vocabulary simply makes the variety of national traditions that much more striking. The inherited languages of Western political theory have been remarkably flexible in their adaptation to varying contextual circumstances; and, as each specific historical form has posed its own distinctive problems, the same traditions of discourse have been mobilized not only to give different answers but in response to different questions.2

      Is there, nonetheless and despite all these divergences, a sense in which it is meaningful to speak of ‘early modern Europe’, or, more particularly, does it make sense to think of Western Europe as an entity distinct from other regions, which is, in the period covered by this book, experiencing a pattern of historical development that distinguishes it from others? In what follows, there will be much emphasis on the specificities of national development, but let us for the moment consider the common foundations.

      In the first volume of this social history of political thought, it was argued that Western political theory, in all its variations, has been shaped by a distinctive tension between two sources of power, the state and private property. All ‘high’ civilizations have, of course, had states, and some have had elaborate systems of private property; but developments in what would be Western Europe, with roots in Greco-Roman antiquity and especially the Western Roman Empire, gave property, as a distinct locus of power, an unusual degree of autonomy from the state.

      Consider, for instance, the contrasts between the Roman Empire and the early Chinese imperial state. A strong state in China established its power by defeating great aristocratic families and preventing their appropriation of newly conquered territories, which were to be administered by officials of the central state.3 At the same time, peasants came under the direct control of the state, which preserved peasant property as a source of revenue and military service, while ensuring the fragmentation of landholdings. Rome, by contrast, achieved imperial expansion without a strong state, governed instead by amateurs, an oligarchy of landed aristocrats, in a small