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 city-state with a minimal government. While peasants were part of the civic community, they remained subordinate to the propertied classes; and as the empire expanded, with the help of conscript peasant soldiers on military service far from home, many peasants were dispossessed. Land was increasingly concentrated in the hands of the aristocracy, much of it – at least in Roman Italy – worked by slaves. When the republic was replaced by an imperial state with its own structure of office, the landed aristocracy continued to amass huge properties; and, while in China great riches were typically derived from office in the central state, in the Roman Empire land remained the only steady and secure source of wealth. Even at its height, the imperial state was, by comparison with China, ‘undergoverned’, administered through a vast network of local aristocracies.
The Roman Empire represents the first known example of a strong imperial state combined with strong private property. This powerful, if sometimes uneasy, partnership is expressed in the Roman concepts of imperium and dominium. The Roman concept of dominium, when applied to private property, articulates with exceptional clarity the idea of private, exclusive and individual ownership, with all the powers this entails, while the imperium defines a right of command attached to certain civil magistrates and eventually the emperor himself. While, in the history of Western legal and political thought, the distinction between private property and public jurisdiction would not always be so clear, the Romans certainly did break new ground in distinguishing between the public power of the state and the private power of property, in both theory and practice. In contrast to China, where there was a direct relationship between the state and the peasants whose labour it appropriated, in Rome the primary relation between appropriators and producers was not between rulers and subjects but between landlords and subject labour of one kind or another, whether slaves or peasants exploited as tenants and share-croppers. When the empire disintegrated, what remained was this primary relationship, which would survive as the foundation of the social order for centuries to come.
The existence of two poles of power, the state and strong private property, together with a mode of imperial rule dependent on propertied classes with a substantial degree of local self-government, had created a tendency to fragmentation of sovereign power even in the Roman Empire. In the end, the tendencies towards fragmentation prevailed, leaving behind a network of personal dependence binding peasants to landlords. When the empire disintegrated, and after several attempts at recentralization by the Merovingian monarchy, the Carolingian empire and the successor states, the autonomy of landed aristocracies asserted itself in what might be called the privatization of public authority, the feudal ‘parcellization of sovereignty’,4 with the devolution of public functions to local lords and various other independent powers. This devolved public power was at the same time a power of appropriation, the power to command the labour of producing classes, appropriating its fruits in rent or in kind, in particular from peasants who remained in possession of land but worked in political and legal subjection to lords. We can, for lack of a better term, apply the much-disputed concept of feudalism, or ‘feudal society’, to this specifically Western parcellization of sovereignty, which invested private property with public power in historically distinctive ways. The ‘medieval’ period for our purposes is roughly marked out by the dominance of that distinctive configuration and its decline.5
This feudal parcellization existed in various forms and to varying degrees. Feudal monarchies were stronger in some places than in others; and parts of Europe were in varying degrees under the sway of higher authorities, the Holy Roman Empire or the papacy. But political parcellization affected even European political entities that did not conform to the model feudal system. Italy, for instance, has been called the ‘weak link’ of European feudalism because, especially in the north, urban patriciates were dominant, in contrast to seigneurial landed classes elsewhere. Yet, not only did the city-states of northern Italy have their own fragmented governance – what might be called a kind of urban feudalism – but the great commercial centres like Florence and Venice were what they were in large part because they served a vital function as trading links in the fragmented feudal order.
Wherever we choose to place the dividing line between the ‘medieval’ and the ‘early modern’, we can, by the late fifteenth century, identify a new configuration of political power, with new relations between property and state different from feudal parcellized sovereignty. Lords and autonomous corporate bodies did, to be sure, continue to play a prominent role; but centralizing monarchies – especially in England, France and the Iberian peninsula – were now taking centre stage, imposing a new political dynamic even on different political forms, such as the Italian city-states or German principalities. While northern Italy, for instance, had been a battleground for rivalries between the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy, the challenge to the autonomy of city-states was increasingly coming from the territorial ambitions of monarchical states such as France and Spain.
Many explanations have been offered for the decline of feudalism. Some historians have argued that, just as the emergence of feudalism was marked, or even caused, by a contraction of trade, commercial expansion and the growth of the money economy inevitably brought feudalism to an end; while others have persuasively argued that trade and money were very much part of, and not intrinsically inimical to, the feudal order. Much is often made of the demographic collapse that occurred in the time of the Black Death, the pandemic that affected Western Europe in the 1340s; and it has been argued that the relationship between lords and peasants was fundamentally transformed as the drastic decline in population gave peasants an advantage in bargaining with lords in need of labour. Peasants, according to some historians, may have had yet another bargaining advantage, an escape route provided by the growth of urban centres as commerce expanded. Popular rebellions of various kinds were then provoked by the efforts of lords to reimpose and intensify peasant dependence; and, though rebellions in the West were successfully suppressed, the feudal order was effectively dead.
The development of the modern nation state may be attributed to the needs of landed aristocracies for a stronger central power to maintain order against the threat of rebellion, or – and perhaps at the same time – feudal monarchies may have been under greater pressure to consolidate their positions, as revenues derived from peasants became more precarious and the competition with landlords for access to peasant labour became more intense. The pressures became that much greater when aristocratic rivalries spilled over into wars between aspiring territorial states, as happened most dramatically in the Hundred Years’ War, which began as a dynastic struggle over the monarchy in France and continued as a battle over the territorial boundaries of the French and English states. The incentive to consolidate centrally governed territorial states was further intensified by the commercial and geopolitical challenge of the growing Ottoman Empire, which made deep incursions into Europe and commanded east–west trade routes.
Yet, however important any or all of these factors may be, this cannot be the whole story. Commercial expansion, plague and demographic changes, peasant revolts and dynastic conflicts occurred in various parts of Europe; and we may even accept, as a very general principle, that all of them played a part in
