Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood

to which we shall return in later chapters), with the rise of agrarian capitalism; but England is at first a fairly minor player in the global trading network compared to, say, Venice or Portugal; so which of them is more modern? If we try to identify a uniquely modern complex of a rational state, a ‘rational’ economy, and a culture of ‘reason’, where, if anywhere, did it exist?

      If the notion of the modern state conceals as much as it reveals, what does it mean to speak of modern political thought? There seems to be an irresistible temptation among historians of political thought to identify the first modern political thinker in the Western canon. Pride of place is commonly awarded to Hobbes or Machiavelli. The reasons for selecting Hobbes may have to do with his theory of government, grounded in a systematically secular, materialistic account of epistemology, human psychology and morality. Or the reason may be that, however ambiguously, he bases his theory of politics on a conception of individual freedom and rights. Or it may simply be that, by elaborating a definitive conception of sovereignty, he best represents the triumph of territorial monarchies, or even ‘nation states’, over medieval forms of governance. Hobbes has even been called a ‘bourgeois’ thinker, an exponent of a ‘possessive individualism’ associated with a modern market society.

      If Machiavelli is chosen, with or without denouncing his ‘Machiavellian’ amorality, it is likely to be on the grounds that he, before Hobbes, gave an account of politics divorced from moral or religious principles, or even that he is the first political scientist, on the side of the ‘empirical’ instead of the ‘normative’ study of politics, ‘facts’ rather than ‘values’. Or it may be on the grounds that his republicanism, albeit more visible in the Discourses than in his most famous work, The Prince, mobilizes ancient ideas of civic autonomy against feudal hierarchies and in support of more modern conceptions of liberty and citizenship, a pivotal moment – as in John Pocock’s ‘Machiavellian moment’ – in the development of modern republican ideas. Or at least, it might be said, if he has one foot in the ancient world, he is a ‘transitional’ figure; and, even if the city-state of Florence that produced him fails to fit the model of a modern nation state, it was, after all, a centre of commerce, which is supposed to be a prelude to a modern capitalist economy.

      The Cambridge School, which dominates the field of early modern political theory in the Anglo-American academy, may have muddied the waters – making it harder to award the modernity prize to any one thinker – by eschewing the very idea of a ‘canon’ and replacing it with discursive contexts that include a host of not-so-canonical writers who have in their various ways contributed to language ‘situations’. This approach certainly has its advantages, but it may – as we have seen in the case of Quentin Skinner – simply shift the question to which political language or discourse represents a modern break from ancient or medieval precedents. The conventional language of ancient and modern persists even when traditions of discourse span centuries of historical change, indeed even when ancient and modern languages of politics are allowed to coexist in historical time, in conflict or in paradoxical unity – as in the notion of ‘civic humanism’ or, for that matter, ‘republicanism’.

      But whether applied to a single major thinker or to a collective ‘discourse’, the concept of modernity, in all its conflicting forms, is loaded with assumptions that shed little light on historical processes. Might it not be better to look for historic transformations, even ruptures, without being obliged to define them as breakthroughs to modernity? And what kinds of transformations might we find if we set aside the elusive search for modernity? In particular, what significant changes would we find in the discourse of politics in the era we are exploring here?

      During the medieval period, at the height of ‘parcellized sovereignty’, there scarcely existed a distinct political sphere.14 The elaborate feudal network of competing jurisdictions, bound together – when not in open conflict – by a complex apparatus of legal and contractual relations, meant that the boundaries of the ‘political’ were ill-defined and fluid. The main ‘political’ agent was not the individual citizen but the possessor of some kind of secular or ecclesiastical jurisdiction, or a corporate entity with its own legal rights, a degree of autonomy and often a charter defining its relation to other corporations and superior powers. Legal and political thinking was preoccupied not, as ancient political philosophy had been, with portraying the political transactions among citizens within a civic community, but with mapping out the spheres of authority among overlapping and competing jurisdictions or negotiating interactions among them. The emergence of territorial states in the early modern period would change these conditions (though, as we shall see, we should not exaggerate the speed or degree of these transformations), creating a new political domain, new political identities, and new political ideas to suit them.

      Among the most significant developments were new conceptions of individual rights in relation to political authority. Although there has been much debate about when and how the concept of ‘subjective’ rights originated, the idea of rights inherent in the person, prior to and independent of civic authority or positive law, certainly had roots in the Middle Ages, in the writings of canon lawyers and philosophers. The very idea of a Christian conscience, for instance, presupposed a human capacity for understanding principles of right (in the ‘objective’ sense, as ‘what is right’) and a responsibility to follow them.15 That responsibility implied both a moral obligation and a certain individual autonomy, the capacity to disregard the principles of right no less than to respect them. From that individual autonomy it was possible to deduce a notion of individual freedom from which followed certain entitlements – which might include a ‘right’ to be free of enslavement, or a ‘right’ of self-preservation and self-defence; and it also entailed respect for the same entitlements in others, if only on the basis of the Golden Rule.

      These principles of right did have some implications for political thought. An insistence on individual autonomy or natural freedom seemed, for instance, to require an acknowledgement that civil authority is constituted by consenting individuals – which was consistent with the prominent role of contractual relations in the feudal order. But none of this had any necessary implications for the rights of individuals in relation to the state, once established. As long as the central category of political thought remained not citizenship but jurisdiction, and as long as the principal political agent was not the individual citizen but the bearer of some jurisdictional authority – a feudal lord, perhaps, or some corporate entity endowed with legal rights and liberties – there was no obvious connection between individual rights and limitations on the state, nor, indeed, any need to demonstrate by systematic argument that individual rights do not preclude almost unlimited civil power.

      A monarch might, for instance, invoke a doctrine of consent, based on rights, to buttress his own authority against the claims of popes or emperors. What may look to us like a paradox seemed to medieval thinkers not so paradoxical. The creation of the body politic was quite distinct from the conditions of rule. The idea that civil authority is constituted by the ‘people’ (typically conceived as a corporate body) was perfectly consistent with the view that such authority was almost unconditional – not least because the right of resistance to illegitimate authority, if it existed at all, was typically vested not in individual citizens but in jurisdictional authorities. Even in the ‘early modern’ period, there would continue to be doctrines of resistance in which the right to resist civil authority was not a right of private individuals or citizens but an attribute of office, the authority of one jurisdiction pitted against another.

      A right of private property might be emphatically acknowledged; but even that right was conceived in the context of competing jurisdictions, typically to assert lordly autonomy or to mark out a domain of private power, the power of the head of the household over his family and possessions, or perhaps the remnant of jurisdictional authority construed as a right of dominium, against some higher imperium.

      If the universal possession of natural rights and natural liberty did not guarantee universal entitlements to full political rights, much the same can be said about notions of natural equality. It is, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, a striking characteristic of Western political thought throughout much of its history that ideas of natural equality among men did not rule out the unequal distribution of political rights; and elaborate arguments have been constructed to legitimate relationships of rule and domination among naturally