Ellen Meiksins Wood’s provocative book offers a distinct challenge to the dominant academic narratives of the emergence of modernity. In place of an emphasis on discourse, speech acts, or other hermeneutic devices that confine themesleves to intertextual data, she argues for a “social-contextual” approach, which encompasses the social processes that are shaped by property relations and which occur outside of the formal political sphere, and how it “is constituted by social processes, relations, conflicts and struggles outside the political space” (p. 28). Her contention is that the essence of Western political thought’s development lies in the social context of property relations. What defines the feudal order is a conception of property tied to fragmented, localized political authories, what Wood calls, borrowing a term from Perry Anderson, the “parcellization of sovereignty.” The rise of modernity is tied to the disintegration of this form of social-political power and the emergence of a centralized state that overcomes the various factions, orders, and privileges that went with it.
Machiavelli’s political theory is seen as defined by the social context of the Italian city-state and its personalized form of authority. What are generally seen as “modern” in Machiavelli’s political theory—his realism, his move toward a scientific approach to politics, a seperation of ethics from politics, and so on—“have more to do with his grounding in the political realities of his city-state, with its military civic culture and the immediate dangers it confronted, than with any modern conception of the state or some affinity to scientific methods” (p. 53). Machiavelli is, in fact, entrenched in the parcellized sovereignty of sixteenth-century Florence, not an advocate of individual rights or a centralized, rationalized state.
Nor can the seed of modernity be found in the Reformation. Although Luther’s doctrine provided the rationale for resistance, this did not apply to private citizens, only to temporal authorities against one another and the Pope, who sought to violate the division between the sacred and secular. More essential to the doctrine of Lutheranism for Wood is its rationale for obedience to secular authority, not for rebellion. What is needed for a modern conception of politics is the articulation of individual rights, and not simply the rights of orders and jursdictions against one another. In Spain, although ideas about individual rights and popular sovereignty are developed by neo-Thomists, they did so not for the purposes of setting the stage for a rebellion against secular authority but in order to support royal power against the intrusions of the papacy. With its spreading empire, royal authority needed legal and ethical arguments to be able to legitimate its dominion over its subjects and its new colonial holdings against external powers.
The context of the Dutch Republic affords a development toward modernity, but not in the sense that many modern scholars have claimed. The social context of the commercial republic in Holland was one ruled by an oligarchic elite that sought to defend commercial interests against the imperial designs of other powers. But the concept of individual rights makes its first genuine appearance, in Wood’s view, in Grotius’s attempt to defend the rights of private corporations to engage in military ventures to protect and open new world markets against other national powers. As a result, “the conceptual consequence was to place rights residing in the private person, the sovereign individual, on par with the sovereign rights of the state” (p. 130). Wood then reads Spinoza as defending an oligarchic republic that wedded wealth with public office as a means to achieve political stability. But she quotes from the tenth chapter of his Political Treatise (PT) to maintain this view, which is still considering aristocracy and not democracy. For Wood, “his definition of democracy itself … does not rule out exclusion of the plebs (to say nothing of women … )” (p. 144). But this seems unfair; although he explicitly excludes women (and slaves), Spinoza does not have a property requirement for any citizens “to demand for themselves the right to vote in the supreme council and to fill public offices” (PT, XI. 1). Wood misses a more problematic, Hobbesian position in the final chapter of the Theological-Political Treatise (TPT), where individuals are to possess freedom of thought, but not of political action: “[T]he individual justly cedes the right of free action, though not of free reason and judgment. … [N]o one can act against the authorities without danger to the state” (TPT, XX). Spinoza may be a liberal in thought, but not a radical in politics or in action.
In France, aristocrats were not absorbed into the state, but separate from and in competition with the monarchy. Since both accumulated their wealth and power through rents and taxes appropriated from an exploited peasantry, the problem that plagued French politial thought was defined by these parameters. Bodin’s theory of absolutism is an attempt to solve this problem by vesting sovereignty in monarchy while preserving the corporate, feudal bodies of a fragmented, competing aristocracy, just as Montesquieu’s republicanism “approved of a strong central power and would even advocate a kind of unified national system of law,” while still identifying “liberty with the preservation of autonomous powers invested in the nobility” (p. 185). It is only in Rousseau that change occurs. Since the structure of French thought was to look for a single place to invest sovereignty in order to overcome social fragmentation, his general will grounds sovereignty not in elites but in the people. Rousseau’s rejection of intermediate political bodies is not a move toward totalitarian democracy; it shows a “concern for transforming the state into a truly ‘public’ thing which derives its public or general character from the people” (p. 201).
In England, nobility and monarchy did not compete over fragmented jurisdictional sovereignties but were both incorporated into the state. Nobles derived profit through direct exploitation of landed commoners; Englishmen therefore confronted the exploitation of landlords who were unified with the monarchy, not detached from it. As Wood sums up the difference between French and English social contexts: “Englishmen asserted their individual rights; Frenchmen defended their corporate and regional privileges” (p. 151). This means a more radical environment for individual rights, something that occurs during the course of the English Civil War’s Putney Debates. The Levellers are pivotal, for they wed the ideas of private rights with political action, for “[t]hey argued that every man in England, even the poorest, had a right not to be governed except by his own consent, and that right was attached to the person, and not to property” (p. 236). This movement, however, is not only doomed to failure; its arguments get appropriated for opposite political interests in the theories of Hobbes and Locke. Hobbes utilizes the conceptual language of the radicals—of individual rights inhering naturally in individuals—but in order to defend a theory of absolutism. In Locke, the idea of natural rights becomes tied not to the person but to property and, more specifically, to the improvement of property, the one thing that can allow the exclusion of the natural rights that inhere in the individual.
Wood’s emphasis on property relations as a constraining and enabling factor in the explanation of political ideas is powerful, and shows the truly political underpinnings of political ideas, something that too much of current intellectual history has bled out of our interpretation of the history of political thought. Her narrative forces us to call into question the assumptions and conclusions of the dominant paradigms of political and intellectual history, only to reveal a much more complex, much more tortured movement toward modernity. It is not the Enlightenment ideas of rights and progress that have won out as definining modernity, but the “formation of an ‘economic’ sphere distinct from the political domain” (p. 316). Now, capitalism becomes the social context within which we conceive not only rights and politics but also the history of political thought itself. What in their own period were attempts to constrain popular authority and political action, to legitimate propertied interests over common interests, become, for Wood, mistaken today as forerunners of truly democratic ideas. And lest we think that Enlightenment ideas are so fundamental to political “radicalism,” Wood asks us to consider the extent to which “the advance for productivity for profit seems to overtake the improvement of humanity as the main criterion of progress” (p. 311).
