at stake were very much the stuff of his ideas.
There are certainly moments when history intrudes with special urgency into the dialogue among texts or traditions of discourse, when long-term developments in social relations, property forms and state-formation episodically erupt into specific political–ideological controversies that meet the requirements of the Cambridge School; and it is certainly true that political theory tends to flourish at times like this. But it is not enough to identify those moments; and we cannot get the measure of a thinker like John Locke if we fail to acknowledge the questions that were posed to him not just by this or that political episode but by larger social transformations and structural tensions, which made themselves felt beneath the surface of high politics.
Without in any way dismissing the importance of specific political moments in shaping ideas (which are often admirably covered by exponents of the Cambridge School), this book, and the social history of political theory it offers, will place more emphasis on the kinds of social contexts and historical processes commonly overlooked, if not explicitly discounted, by other modes of ‘contextualization’. Consideration of what might be called deep structural contexts and long-term social transformations does not in the least imply a neglect of historical specificities, including national differences. On the contrary, we shall in the following chapters be keenly attentive to such differences; and the chapters will be organized along these lines, exploring certain historical landmarks in the development of Western political thought in their varied political and social contexts. If anything, the social history of political theory is more attuned to historical specificities than is a mode of contextualization devoted to ‘language situations’ in which common vocabularies may disguise important historical differences. Despite the Cambridge School’s insistence on the specificity of every historical moment, its conception of linguistic contexts and their detachment from social conditions occludes all kinds of historical specificities, the differences of meaning that even common languages may have in different social contexts, not only giving different answers but posing different questions.
As we track the various Western traditions of discourse in the early modern period, it is nonetheless important to keep in mind that, for all the variations, the tension between two sources of power – the state and private property – and the complex three-way relations between state, property and the producing classes, had clear implications for the development of political thought throughout Western Europe and its colonial dependencies. If there is in this book a single overarching theme, it has to do with certain distinctive transformations in the relation between private property and public power that took place in our period. Earlier in this chapter, and at greater length in Citizens to Lords, the first volume of this social history, we traced the development of the relation between property and state from classical antiquity to ‘feudal’ society and took note of the very particular effects of Roman property, the privatization of public authority with the devolution of public functions to local lords and other autonomous powers. This volume deals with a period when fragmented sovereignty was giving way to more centralized states, and new tensions emerged between property and state. It is also a period in which, with the advent of capitalism, property and political power, dominium and imperium, became structurally disentangled in historically unprecedented ways.
In what follows we shall be especially attentive to the distinctive tensions between private property and public power in Western Europe. We shall also emphasize their national divergences. But for now, and as a general rule, we can say that appropriating classes, even when they were competing with the state for access to surpluses produced in the main by peasants, also relied on the state to maintain order, conditions for appropriation and control over the producing classes whose labour sustained and enriched them; yet they also found the state a burdensome nuisance, as a threat to their property or as a competitor for the wealth derived from subject labour. Propertied classes, in other words, were always fighting on two fronts; and the Western canon of political thought has always reflected this three-way relation.
Challenges to authority have come from two directions. Subordinate classes have resisted oppression by their overlords. But overlords themselves, while always looking over their shoulders for threats from their subordinates, have sought to protect their autonomy, their ‘liberties’, privileges, jurisdictions and properties, against intrusions from the state. This has meant that, even while the canon has generally been the work of ruling classes or their clients, and even when social and political hierarchies have been at their most rigid, there has been a continuous and vigorous tradition of interrogating the most basic principles of authority, legitimacy and the obligation to obey.
The canon of Western political thought has owed much of its vigour to the fact that the discourse of liberty has belonged to ruling classes asserting their mastery, no less than to those resisting oppression by their masters. One objective of examining the canon in its social context is to suggest that even – or especially – now that capitalism has decisively transformed relations between property and power, our conceptions of freedom, equality, rights and legitimate government are constrained by their roots in the defence of ruling-class power and privilege; and even ideas of democracy have been distorted by this complicated legacy.
2
THE RENAISSANCE CITY-STATE
It has been said that ‘one of the most essential factors separating Renaissance from later philosophy [is] its fully international character, based on the use of Latin as an almost universal language of scholarship’, not divided by modern linguistic or national boundaries.1 Yet this period is precisely the age in which territorial states, defined by national boundaries, were becoming the dominant political force in Western Europe. It is certainly true that these states were not the homeland of the cultural phenomenon called by convention the Renaissance (a convention often questioned by historians these days); but this international culture was born in an even more particularistic setting, the Italian city-states most fiercely attached to their local autonomy.
The poet and scholar Petrarch, who, for his recovery of ancient classics and his Latin writings, is often called the ‘father of humanism’, or even of the Renaissance itself, is also, by virtue of his Italian poetry, considered one of the principal founders of a national language and literature. His revival of antiquity appealed not only to philosophers but to princes, emperors and popes who were keen to invoke Italy’s glorious past for their own political purposes. ‘Humanism’ would become the discourse of thinkers who have come to be called ‘civic humanists’, in defence of civic liberty and of their city-states’ autonomy. Yet the Renaissance would flourish as the city-states were in decline, and civic humanism would reach its pinnacle when the political independence and economic prosperity of the major city-states were most severely threatened by a new world order of ‘national’ states.
Whether we call this period the ‘Renaissance’ or something else, the dichotomy of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ cannot help us very much to understand these paradoxes. It is far more trouble than it is worth to determine whether civic humanism – if it exists at all as a distinct and coherent body of thought (about which more in a moment) – partakes of the ancient because it resists the trend towards large territorial or national states and because it adopts an ancient Greco-Roman discourse, or whether it is more modern than ancient because it supports the principles of civic liberty against monarchical or feudal rule. Nor, for that matter, is it particularly useful to describe this cultural form as transitional, or even as a synthesis of contradictions. We can, and clearly should, take note of the discourses available to thinkers; but we can better understand the particular ways in which political theorists chose to exploit them not by locating them along some abstract continuum from ancient to modern but by situating them in very specific historical processes.
Renaissance City States
The medieval city-states of northern Italy (which were discussed in the first volume of this history) represented an exception to the Western feudal model of seigneurial domination. Landed aristocracies certainly existed and in some
