has persisted ever since Engels, in a famous dictum, pronounced them to be the product of a class equilibrium between the old feudal nobility and the new urban bourgeoisie: ‘By way of exception, however, periods occur where the warring classes balance each other (Gleichgewicht halten) so nearly that the State power, as ostensible mediator, acquires, for the moment, a certain degree of independence of both. Such was the absolute monarchy of the 17th and 18th centuries, which held the balance (gegeneinander balanciert) between the nobility and the class of burghers.’2 The multiple qualifications of this passage indicate a certain conceptual unease on the part of Engels. But a careful examination of successive formulations by both Marx and Engels reveals that a similar conception of Absolutism was, in fact, a comparatively consistent theme in their work. Engels repeated the same basic thesis elsewhere in more categorical form, remarking that ‘the basic condition of the old absolute monarchy’ was ‘an equilibrium (Gleichgewicht) between the landowning aristocracy and the bourgeoisie’.3 Indeed, the classification of Absolutism as a political balancing-mechanism between nobility and bourgeoisie frequently glides towards an implicit or explicit designation of it as fundamentally a type of bourgeois State as such. This slippage is most evident within the Communist Manifesto itself, where the political role of the bourgeoisie ‘in the period of manufactures proper’ is characterized in a single breath as ‘serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise (Gegengewicht) against the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone (Hauptgrundlage) of the great monarchies in general’.4 The suggestive transition from ‘counter-poise’ to ‘corner-stone’ is echoed in other texts. Engels could refer to the epoch of Absolutism as the age in which ‘the feudal nobility were made to understand that the period of their social and political domination had come to an end’.5 Marx, for his part, repeatedly asserted that the administrative structures of the new Absolutist States were a peculiarly bourgeois instrument. ‘Under the absolute monarchy,’ he wrote, ‘bureaucracy was only the means of preparing the class rule of the bourgeoisie.’ Elsewhere Marx declared that: ‘The centralised State power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy and judicature – organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labour – originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle-class society as a mighty weapon in its struggles against feudalism.’6
These reflections on Absolutism were all more or less casual and allusive: no direct theorization of the new centralized monarchies which emerged in Renaissance Europe was ever made by either of the founders of historical materialism. Their exact weight was left to the judgement of later generations. Marxist historians, in fact, have debated the problem of the social nature of Absolutism down to this day. A correct solution of it is, indeed, vital for any understanding of the passage from feudalism to capitalism in Europe, and of the political systems which distinguished it. The Absolute monarchies introduced standing armies, a permanent bureaucracy, national taxation, a codified law, and the beginnings of a unified market. All these characteristics appear to be preeminently capitalist. Since they coincide with the disappearance of serfdom, a core institution of the original feudal mode of production in Europe, the descriptions of Absolutism by Marx and Engels as a State system representing either an equilibrium between bourgeoisie and nobility, or even an outright dominance of capital itself, have often seemed plausible. A more careful study of the structures of the Absolutist State in the West, however, inevitably infirms such judgements. For the end of serfdom did not thereby mean the disappearance of feudal relations from the countryside. Identification of the two is a common error. Yet it is evident that private extra-economic coercion, personal dependence, and combination of the immediate producer with the instruments of production, did not necessarily vanish when the rural surplus ceased to be extracted in the form of labour or deliveries in kind, and became rent in money: so long as aristocratic agrarian property blocked a free market in land and factual mobility of manpower – in other words, as long as labour was not separated from the social conditions of its existence to become ‘labour-power’ – rural relations of production remained feudal. In his properly theoretical analysis of ground-rent, Marx himself made this clear in Capital: ‘The transformation of labour rent into rent in kind changes nothing fundamental in the nature of ground-rent. . . . By money-rent we here mean the ground-rent which arises from a mere change in the form of rent in kind, just as the latter in turn is but a modification of labour rent. . . . The basis of this type of rent, although approaching its dissolution, remains the same as that of rent in kind, which constitutes its point of departure. The direct producer as before is still possessor of the land, either through inheritance or some other traditional right, and must perform for his lord, as owner of his most essential condition of production, excess corvée-labour, that is, unpaid labour for which no equivalent is returned, in the form of a surplus-product transformed into money.’7 The lords who remained the proprietors of the fundamental means of production in any pre-industrial society were, of course, the noble landowners. Throughout the early modern epoch, the dominant class – economically and politically – was thus the same as in the mediaeval epoch itself: the feudal aristocracy. This nobility underwent profound metamorphoses in the centuries after the close of the Middle Ages: but from the beginning to the end of the history of Absolutism, it was never dislodged from its command of political power.
The changes in the forms of feudal exploitation which supervened at the end of the mediaeval epoch were, of course, far from insignificant. Indeed, it was precisely these changes which changed the forms of the State. Absolutism was essentially just this: a redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination, designed to clamp the peasant masses back into their traditional social position – despite and against the gains they had won by the widespread commutation of dues. In other words, the Absolutist State was never an arbiter between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, still less an instrument of the nascent bourgeoisie against the aristocracy: it was the new political carapace of a threatened nobility. The consensus of a generation of Marxist historians, from England and Russia, was summed up by Hill twenty years ago: ‘The absolute monarchy was a different form of feudal monarchy from the feudal-estates monarchy which preceded it; but the ruling class remained the same, just as a republic, a constitutional monarchy and a fascist dictatorship can all be forms of the rule of the bourgeoisie.’8 The new form of noble power was in its turn determined by the spread of commodity production and exchange, in the transitional social formations of the early modern epoch. Althusser has in this sense correctly specified its character: ‘The political regime of the absolute monarchy is only the new political form needed for the maintenance of feudal domination and exploitation in the period of development of a commodity economy.’9 But the dimensions of the historical transformation involved in the advent of Absolutism must in no way be minimized. It is essential, on the contrary, to grasp the full logic and import of the momentous change in the structure of the aristocratic State, and of feudal property, that produced the new phenomenon of Absolutism.
Feudalism as a mode of production was originally defined by an organic unity of economy and polity, paradoxically distributed in a chain of parcellized sovereignties throughout the social formation. The institution of serfdom as a mechanism of surplus extraction fused economic exploitation and politico-legal coercion at the molecular level of the village. The lord in his turn typically owed liege-loyalty and knight-service to a seigneurial overlord, who claimed the land as his ultimate domain. With the generalized commutation of dues into money rents, the cellular unity of political and economic oppression of the peasantry was gravely weakened, and threatened to become dissociated (the end of this road was ‘free labour’ and the ‘wage contract’). The class power of the feudal lords was thus directly at stake with the gradual disappearance of serfdom. The result was a displacement of politico-legal coercion upwards towards a centralized, militarized summit – the Absolutist State. Diluted at village level, it became concentrated at ‘national’ level. The result was a reinforced apparatus of royal power, whose permanent political function was the repression of the peasant and plebeian masses at the foot of the social hierarchy. This new State machine, however, was also by its nature vested with a coercive force capable of breaking or disciplining individuals and groups within the nobility itself. The arrival of Absolutism was thus, as we shall see, never a smooth evolutionary process for the
