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 In an important recent study, ‘The Relation between Town and Country in the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism’ (unpublished), John Merrington has effectively resolved this antinomy, by demonstrating the basic truth that European feudalism – far from constituting an exclusively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.
11. For cannons and galleons, see Carlo Cipolla, Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of European Expansion 1400–1700, London 1965. For printing, the most audacious recent reflections, although marred by a monomania familiar in historians of technology, are Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ‘Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought: a Preliminary Report’, Journal of Modern History, March-December 1968, pp. 1–56, and ‘The Advent of Printing and the Problem of the Renaissance’, Past and Present, No. 45, November 1969, pp. 19–89. The critical technical inventions of this epoch can be seen, in one respect, as variations in a common field, that of communications. They concern respectively, money, language, travel and war: in a later age, all among the great philosophical themes of the Enlightenment.
12. Anti-Dühring, Moscow 1947, p. 126: see also pp. 196–7, where correct and incorrect formulae are mixed. These pages are cited by Hill in his ‘Comment’ to exculpate Engels from the errors of the notion of ‘equilibrium’. In general, it is possible to find passages in both Marx and Engels where Absolutism is more adequately grasped than in the texts discussed earlier. (For example, in the Communist Manifesto itself, there is a straightforward reference to ‘feudal Absolutism’: Selected Works, p. 56; see also Marx’s article Die moralisierende Kritik und die kritisierende Moral of 1847, in Werke, Bd 4, pp. 347, 352–3.) It would be surprising if it were otherwise, given that the logical consequence of baptizing the Absolutist States as bourgeois or semi-bourgeois would be to deny the nature and reality of the bourgeois revolutions of Western Europe themselves. But there is no doubt that, amidst a recurrent confusion, the main drift of their comments was in the direction of the ‘counter-poise’ conception, with its concomitant slide towards that of the ‘corner-stone’. There is no need to hide this fact. The immense intellectual and political respect we owe to Marx and Engels is incompatible with any piety towards them. Their mistakes – often more revealing than the truths of others – should not be eluded, but located and surpassed. A further warning is necessary here. It has long been fashionable to depreciate the relative contribution of Engels to the creation of historical materialism. For those who are still inclined to accept this received notion, it is necessary to say calmly and scandalously: Engels’s historical judgements are nearly always superior to those of Marx. He possessed a deeper knowledge of European history, and had a surer grasp of its successive and salient structures. There is nothing in the whole of Engels’s oeuvre to compare with the illusions and prejudices of which Marx was on occasion capable in this field, such as the fantasmagoric Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century. (The supremacy of Marx’s overall contribution to the general theory of historical materialism scarcely needs to be reiterated.) Engels’s stature in his historical writings is precisely what makes it worth drawing attention to the specific errors in them.
13. See H. D. Hazeltine, ‘Roman and Canon Law in the Middle Ages’, The Cambridge Mediaeval History, V, Cambridge 1968, pp. 737–41. Renaissance classicism proper was consequently to be very critical of the work of the Commentators.
14. ‘Now when this law was transposed into entirely strange fact situations, unknown in Antiquity, the task of “construing” the situation in a logically impeccable way became almost the exclusive task. In this way that conception of law which still prevails today and which sees in law a logically consistent and gapless complex of “norms” waiting to be “applied” became the decisive conception for legal thought.’ Weber, Economy and Society, II, p. 855.
15. See the discussion in J-P. Lévy, Histoire de la Propriété, Paris 1972, pp. 44–6. Another ironic side-effect of the efforts towards a new juridical clarity inspired by mediaeval researches into Roman codes was, of course, the emergence of the definition of serfs as glebae adscripti.
16. For the import of the concept of seisin, see P. Vinogradoff, Roman Law in Mediaeval Europe, London 1909, pp. 74–7, 86, 95–6; Lévy, Histoire de la Propriété, pp. 50–2.
17. The relation of prior mediaeval law to Roman law in the cities still needs considerable investigation. The comparative advance of legal rules governing commenda-type operations and maritime trade in the Middle Ages is not surprising: the Roman world, as we have seen lacked entrepreneurial companies and comprised a unitary Mediterranean. Hence there was no reason for it to develop either. On the other hand, the early study of Roman law in the Italian cities suggests that what appeared by the time of the Renaissance as ‘mediaeval’ contract practice may well have often been originally informed by legal precepts derived from Antiquity. Vinogradoff had no doubt that Roman contract law exercised a direct influence on the business codes of urban burghers in the Middle Ages: Roman Law in Mediaeval Europe, pp. 79–80, 131. Urban real estate, with its ‘burgage tenures’, was always, of course, closer to Roman norms than rural property in the Middle Ages.
18. Wolfgang Kunkell, ‘The Reception of Roman Law in Germany: An Interpretation’, and Georg Dahm, ‘On the Reception of Roman and Italian Law in Germany’, in G. Strauss (ed.), Pre-Reformation Germany, London 1972, pp. 271, 274–6, 278, 284–92.
19. An ideal, but by no means the only one: we shall see that the complex practice of Absolutism was always very far from corresponding to Ulpian’s maxim.
20. Roman law was never naturalized in England, largely because of the early centralization of the Anglo-Norman State, whose administrative unity rendered the English monarchy comparatively indifferent to the advantages of civil law during its mediaeval diffusion: see the pertinent comments of N. Cantor, Mediaeval History, London 1963, pp. 345–9. In the early modern epoch, the Tudor and Stuart dynasties did introduce new juridical institutions of a civil-law type (Star Chamber, Admiralty, or Chancery), but were ultimately unable to prevail over common law: after sharp conflicts between the two in the early 17th century, the English Revolution of 1640 sealed the victory of the latter. For some reflections on this process, see W. Holdsworth, A History of English Law, IV, London 1924, pp. 284–5.
21. These were the two terms used by Weber to denote the respective interests of the two forces working for Romanization: ‘While thus the bourgeois classes seek after “certainty” in the administration of justice, officialdom is generally interested in “clarity” and “orderliness” of the law.’ See his excellent discussion, Economy and Society, II,
