gave way to more than one ‘transition’. Serfdom, for instance, ended in Western Europe, while Eastern Europe saw what has been called the ‘second serfdom’. Even in Western Europe, which is our main concern here, relations between landlords and peasants turned out to be very different in, say, England than in France; and these differences were associated with divergent paths of state-formation. In England, where the monarchy had developed in cooperation with an unusually united aristocracy, lords had gained control of the best land, including properties left vacant by the demographic collapse. In France, the monarchical state, which consolidated the dominance of one aristocratic family against its rivals, helped to ensure that peasants remained in possession of by far the most land, as a vital source of tax revenues for the centralizing state.
In these different contexts, commercial expansion, too, had divergent effects. All the major Western European states, to say nothing of the highly developed economies of Asia and the Arab Muslim empire, were very much engaged in trade, both domestic and international; but a distinctively capitalist ‘commercial society’ arose ‘spontaneously’ only in England and produced a historical dynamic unlike any other, even in the most commercialized societies.6 Capitalism, as it emerged in England, was not simply more of the same, more trade and more expansive commercial networks. The ‘rise of capitalism’ cannot be explained as just a quantitative process, ‘commercialization’ approaching some kind of critical mass. England, indeed, was very far from being the dominant commercial power in Europe when its economic development began to take a distinctive turn, giving rise to something different from traditional modes of commerce, the old forms of profit on alienation or ‘buying cheap and selling dear’. English capitalism, which was born in the countryside, produced a new kind of society, with an economy uniquely driven by compulsions of competitive production, increasing labour productivity, profit-maximization and constant capital accumulation. When other European economies later developed in a capitalist direction, they were in large part responding to military and commercial pressures imposed by English capitalism.
Which ‘Modern’ State?
In the following chapters, we shall look at various distinctive patterns of development in Western Europe as they affected national ‘traditions of discourse’; but for the moment, and to illustrate the contextual history proposed in this book, we can concentrate on the one overarching development that had effects on all of them: the evolution of the ‘modern’ state, especially in England and in France.
Quentin Skinner, in his Foundations of Modern Political Thought, tells us that in the period from the late thirteenth century to the end of the sixteenth, ‘the main elements of a recognizably modern concept of the state were gradually acquired.’ He goes on to elaborate his definition of the modern state in terms derived, as he acknowledges, from Max Weber:
The decisive shift was made from the idea of the ruler ‘maintaining his state’ – where this simply meant upholding his own position – to the idea that there is a separate legal and constitutional order, that of the State, which the ruler has a duty to maintain. One effect of this transformation was that the power of the State, not that of the ruler, came to be envisaged as the basis of government. And this in turn enabled the State to be conceptualized in distinctively modern terms – as the sole source of law and legitimate force within its own territory, and as the sole appropriate object of its citizens’ allegiances.7
The elements of this modern state, Skinner explains, were by the sixteenth century visible at least in England and in France. The transition to a modern discourse of the state, he suggests, ‘first appears to have been accomplished in France’. This was so not only because the intellectual preconditions were present – inherited from Italian humanism – but because ‘the material preconditions’ were more fully developed in France: ‘a relatively united central authority, an increasing apparatus of bureaucratic control, and a clearly defined set of national boundaries’.8 ‘The next country in which the same fundamental conceptual shift took place’, Skinner continues, ‘appears to have been England’, where, by the 1530s, ‘a similar set of material as well as intellectual preconditions for this development had been achieved: an increasingly bureaucratic style of central government, together with a growing interest amongst English humanists in the problems of “politics” and public law.’9
This formulation obscures a wealth of differences between the two cases, both in the nature of their states and the forms of ‘discourse’ they engendered. Those differences also cast doubt on some other standard conventions about ‘modernity’ and especially about the connections between the capitalist economy – or ‘commercial society’ – and the ‘rational’ state. In subsequent chapters, we shall look more closely at the varying traditions of political discourse that emerged out of divergent patterns of historical development; but a broad preliminary sketch of the differences between England and France will serve to illustrate the ‘social history’ on offer here.
The story begins at least as early as the Middle Ages, at a time when the Frankish empire was disintegrating while the Anglo-Saxon state was the most effective centralized administration in the Western world.10 Medieval Europe was generally characterized by what we have called a ‘parcellization of sovereignty’, the fragmentation of state power, as feudal lordship and other autonomous powers took over many of the functions performed in other times and places by the state, combining the private exploitation of labour – typically the labour of peasants – with the public role of administration, jurisdiction and enforcement. Yet England, for all the power of the barons – and, in some ways, precisely because of it – never really succumbed to parcellized sovereignty, while France never completely overcame it, even under the absolutist monarchy; and the centralizing project of the state remained on the agenda to be completed by the Revolution and Napoleon.
This meant, too, that there were major differences between England and France in the relations between state and dominant classes. In England, even at a time when English law was at its most ostensibly feudal and the manorial system was at its height, the process of state centralization continued. The Norman Conquest, when it brought feudal institutions with it from the Continent, also, and above all, brought a military organization, which vested power in a central authority and built upon the foundations of a centralized state that already existed in England. The Normans established themselves in England as a more or less unified ruling class, a conquering army that imposed itself as both a dominant class of great landholders and a governing power; and the central state was always its instrument. Thereafter, the centralization of the post-feudal state would remain a cooperative project between monarchy and landed aristocracy. This certainly did not rule out fierce dynastic rivalries; and, though some historians have questioned the very existence of, for example, the ‘Wars of the Roses’, there certainly were powerful incentives for battles over control of an already well-established central state. When, in the sixteenth century, the Tudor monarchy embarked on a programme of state-centralization, which has (controversially) been described as the ‘Tudor revolution’, it was not inventing but building on a long-standing unified state apparatus, which, when the Reformation came to England under Henry VIII, would have the added strength of a state Church.
This centralizing project was cooperative not only in the sense that the central state would develop as a unity of monarchy and the landed class in Parliament, nicely summed up in the old formula ‘the Crown in Parliament’. The cooperative project also took the form of a division of labour between the central state and private property. As legislation and jurisdiction were increasingly centralized, the aristocracy would increasingly depend for its wealth on modes of purely economic exploitation. Recent scholarship has shown that smallholders may not have disappeared from the English countryside as completely as historians have sometimes suggested; but the fact remains that lords in England, while lacking some of the jurisdictional powers enjoyed by their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, had control of the best land, which was concentrated in the hands of large landholders to a greater degree than in France, where peasant property prevailed. When feudalism experienced its crisis throughout Europe, and serfdom declined in the West, English landlords were in a uniquely favourable position to exploit the purely
