At the deepest level of Western knowledge, Marxism introduced no real discontinuity; it found its place without difficulty … within an epistemological arrangement that welcomed it gladly … since it rested entirely upon it. Marxism exists in nineteenth century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else.1—MICHEL FOUCAULT
In the service of a liberationist project, Marxism proposes itself as a radical and antagonistic break with the epistemological assumptions and ideological pretensions of its “bourgeois” competitors. The disavowal is a part of the revolutionary project since it exposes what is otherwise concealed: the historical tendency of capitalism to offend Just Order by the expropriation from the many and the accumulation of wealth by the few. As its opposition, Marxism, we are assured, is the expression of the oppressed, a forensic science to capitalism’s profound criminality. And with respect to (bourgeois) political economy, Althusser insisted: “Marx’s critique of Political Economy is therefore a very radical one: it queries not only the object of Political Economy, but also Political Economy itself as an object.”2 We are indebted to Foucault, on the other hand, for the bold yet elegant turn by which he reinserted Marxism into bourgeois cosmology. Foucault’s pointed description of Marxism bears a strong resemblance to the conventional intellectual provenance which situates Marxist economics as a critique of and, at the same time, a successor to political economy. However, unlike other accounts—whether Marxian, non-Marxian, or anti-Marxian—Foucault’s observation contains a certain ironic inflection. His assertion suggests that Marxism constituted no luminous break; no fugitive tributary, no renegade apostasy to the discursive substructure of bourgeois economics. Instead, he suggested, Marxism “rested entirely upon it.”
Foucault maintained that once David Ricardo had installed the recentering notion that all value is produced by labor, the halting advances of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century bourgeois anthropologies surged forward, seizing every ideational terrain as their spoils. In consort with the emphasis on an economics of production rather than circulation, bourgeois and “revolutionary economics” instanced a conception of “continuous” history, the forbidding specter of scarcity, and the certain knowledge that the end game of all human activity is to suspend the descent of the species into oblivion. “The great dream of an end to History,” he wrote, “is the utopia of causal systems of thought.”3 Foucault thus opposed the then and still reigning interpretation of the relationship between Marxism and political economy.
Notwithstanding Foucault’s intervention, the liturgy of a Marxian rupture is difficult to avoid in the history of nineteenth-century economics. No matter from which approach its achievements are subsequently evaluated, both radical and liberal observers accept the proposition that Marxism intercepted a fledgling economics. And this presumptive genealogy has quite important implications for both socialism as an ethical and political inference and economic discourse in general. While neo-classicist political economists were prone to quarantine Marxism as an astrology of economics, Marxist economists characterized the rupture with classical political economy as a profound discovery of the secrets of value or historical change.4 By the positing of Marxism as the radical alternative to political economy, it privileges this conjuncture as the emblematic opposition of the capitalist world-system, and as such, the modern world’s injustices. If we accept as evident that political economy was the inaugural expression of capitalist and bourgeois ideology, Marxism assumes a similar position in socialist discourse. The historical development of socialism is consequently foreshortened. Socialist thought becomes possible, then, only under the social and historical conditions put in place by the occurrence of the capitalist organization of production. As historical materialism maintains, without the preconditions of capitalist relations and productive organization, socialist ideology (no less socialist movements) is impossible. Such a conceptualization substantiates the authority of the Hegelian philosophy of history and its dialectic of negation.
Alternatively, if a socialist discourse can be recovered from earlier (“precapitalist”) eras, such a discovery would rupture the epochal confines of bourgeois epistemology sacred to both Liberalism and Marxism. More pointedly, with respect to socialist discourse itself, such a revelation would throw into doubt the preclusiveness of a revolutionary program whose singular historical agencies were the industrial laboring classes and a renegade bourgeoisie. The demonstration of an older and enduring oppositional discourse on poverty and property might then emancipate socialism from the ideological regime rigidly circumscribed by an attenuated and bourgeois construction of class struggle. The resistance to capitalism could then be understood as a derivative oppositional discourse whose origins suggest a submerged and perhaps more profound historical crisis.
For reasons best known to themselves but not wholly private, the West’s scholars have agreed to mark the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the historical locations of the appearances of economics as a system of thought. In this fashion, “Classical Economics” has been determined to be the direct issue of the efforts of possibly the mercantilists and Physiocrats and most definitely Adam Smith.5 John Kenneth Galbraith, who has shown at least some inclination to inspect the economic ideas of earlier thinkers, broadly concurs: before the seventeenth century there is little worthy of the name economics; even the patriarchs of Western scientific thought are negligible on the subject. Concealed in Aristotle’s ethics, for instance, Galbraith suspects there lies “a certain measure of eloquent incoherence on economics.”6 From the Romans, Galbraith consents that the yield is, if possible, even more “slight.”7 And after surveying what he divines as the paltry contributions of the medievalists (specifically Thomas Aquinas and Nicole Oresme), Galbraith proposes an explanation. The general absence of an economics in the millennia before the “era of merchants” (beginning in the mid-fifteenth century) is owed to the fact that “Economics in all modern manifestations centers on the market; in a world in which the market was a subsidiary, even esoteric, aspect of life, economics as now known still did not exist.”8 Galbraith’s certitude obviates a search for the discursive intuitions of modern economists among their non-existent predecessors.
Notwithstanding the concerted confidence of academic opinion, the anticipation of the socialist discourse on economics is recognizable in the surviving works of Aristophanes (ca. 445–388 BC), Plato (429–347 BC), Xenophon (ca. 420–388 BC), and Aristotle (384–322 BC).
In his comic poem Ecclesiazusae (392 BC), Aristophanes’s spokesperson was Praxagora, the leader of the conspiracy of women. By cunning (rather than by force), the women of Athens have enfranchised themselves, and enacted radical reforms (including a total sexual liberation with primacy awarded to the old and ugly). One reform, however, lacks the broad, vulgar humor with which Aristophanes so frequently leavened his political objectives. Praxagora announced:
Briefly my scheme is: mankind should possess
In common the instruments of happiness.
Henceforth private property comes to an end—
It’s all wrong for a man to have too much to spend,
While others moan, starving; another we see
Has acres of land tilled prosperously,
While this man has not enough earth for his grave. …
That’s over: all things are owned henceforth by all.9
While Moses Hadas has insisted that Aristophanes’s “introduction of communism” could only be interpreted as an ironic expression of a malaise in a defeated and impoverished Athens at the start of the fourth century BC, K. J. Dover insisted that there is good reason to suppose that Aristophanes (and, later, Plato) had appropriated notions of communism “anticipated by fifth-century intellectuals.”10 Dover seems to have the weight of argument on his side. For generations, scholars have recognized that Aristophanes took on serious issues in his comedies.11 Concerning an earlier work (411 BC), for instance, Gilbert Murray had maintained “The Lysistrata has behind it much suffering and a burning pity.”12 And respecting war, one of Aristophanes’s most constant subjects, recent scholars have assured us of the social consciousness and political acuity in Aristophanes’s thought.13 There is also sufficient reason to believe that Aristophanes was not relying on mere imagination in selecting citizen women as his radical reformers.
Sue Blundell notes an apparent paradox: that concomitant with the appearance of democracy was the deterioration of rights among the most privileged women, those of the aristocracy and propertied classes. Blundell attributes this erosion to the profound changes in the Greek economy which marked the end of the Archaic Age: the transition from pastoralism to agrarianism, the displacement of the estate by the polis and the oikos, and in repressive legislation the designation of women as a source of threat to the stability of the polis (population control) and the oikos (transmission of property).14 Ushering in with it the societal forces which in Athens prepared the way for democracy, the oikos became the central economic unit. “Democracy might also be said in a very real sense to have robbed some women—those belonging to the aristocratic families—of the influence which they had exercised in former times. More pervasively, since democracy created a growing dichotomy between activities which were public and collective, and those which were private and individual, it accelerated the disparity between males and females. Increasingly, men in the democratic state were defined by their active involvement in political life, and women were defined by their exclusion from that sphere.”15
The prodigious classicist Geoffrey de Ste. Croix has surmised that women of the Athenian propertied class, because of their lack of property rights, their roles in the reproduction of their class, and domination by their male relatives and spouses, constituted a distinct class of their own.16 Susan Guettel Cole relates that “ritual responsibility in the priesthoods of the city’s public cults … was the only context in which women were designated as ‘Athenian,’ because this was the only place where a woman could represent the polis.”17 And from the works of Aristophanes as well as civic documents surviving from classical Athens, Jane Gardner discerned that Athenian males worried that their wives—the strangers they brought into their oikos—might betray their households to lovers, steal their goods, forge the paternity or citizenship of children, or expose their husbands to indifferent care in old age or ritual neglect in death.18 These were the acts of an enemy, one, as Plato would put it in The Laws, characterized by “undue secrecy and craft.”19 Little wonder, then, that Aristophanes might hear rumors or surmise that behind the walls of traditional seclusion, resenting their peculiar exclusion, adult women conspired.20
That the wives and daughters of the politai (the males who had preserved political rights for themselves)21 might be credited with a foolish communist agenda is not surprising. Women occupied what must have been a most irksomely liminal existence, somewhere between being property, a form of securities, and being a necessary but sinister complement to the oikos.22 It is also possible that in addition the attribution of this program served to defuse a more powerful social origin for communism and to distract attention of Aristophanes’s audience from the disastrous consequences of class warfare in Athens. Aristotle had sensed that political disaster lurked in the real economic disparities of his corporate society. Thucydides, never so candid as Aristotle as to undertake the naming of the problem, nevertheless seemed to approve of Pericles for his genius at dramatizing an imaginary Athens, mobilizing the city to the threshold of actual existence. But as the long debilitating war during the second half of the fifth century persisted, Aristophanes (and much later Isocrates and Aristotle) realized that the old conflict between the poor and the rich (penia kai ploutos) had not been extinguished by Solon’s compromise, then simply camouflaged by the radical social reorganization of Cleisthenes, and only momentarily abated by Pericles’s patriotic theater.23 It would be quite possible, then, after the abortive and brutal coups by the aristoi in 411 BC and 404 BC, their traitorous collaborations with Sparta, and their role in the defeat of Athens that Aristophanes would seek to contribute to the morale of his class by assaulting two enemies with a single stone.24 By transferring the communist impulse of poorer citizens to women he could expect his audience to revel in the mix of ribald gender character assassination with class conflict. The demos, now subsumed under the identity of cunning yet sexually depraved females, possessed no moral or political authority. The demos as badly formed women held no civic stature upon which a sustained indictment of the upper classes could be warranted. For certain, these women and the unpropertied classes were not slaves but any regime, like that of democracy, which tended to extend to them political credit was as absurd as the notion of rule by slaves.
In classical Athens, the surplus labor extraction which provided the propertied class the basis of its wealth was slave labor. Indeed, by most accounts the slave population of the polis substantially exceeded that of the citizenry. Notwithstanding, de Ste. Croix informs us that the most disruptive political conflict was between the propertied class and the poor citizenry, the demos. Democracy, he proclaims, “played a vital part in the class struggle by mitigating the exploitation of poorer citizens by richer ones.”25 He approvingly recounts that “[M. M.] Austin and [Pierre] Vidal-Naquet, following Aristotle, are at any rate willing to accept the existence of what they call class struggles in the Greek world, in the sense of ‘antagonism … between the propertied and the non-propertied’; and they go on to say that ‘the antagonism between the propertied minority and the non-propertied majority was fundamental in Greek class struggles,’ although ‘class struggles could be expressed between citizens only.’”26 Taking his cue from another ancient source, de Ste. Croix concurs but with a difference, noting that between slave owners and slaves though “an unceasing struggle” occurred, “only the masters could carry it on effectively: they would always be united, and be prepared to act, as Xenophon says in the Hiero (IV.3), ‘as unpaid bodyguards of each other against their slaves’ … in my picture the masters conduct a permanent struggle, if sometimes an almost effortless one, in the very act of holding down their slaves.”27
Until the beginnings of the sixth century when the archon Solon had immunized Athenians by abolishing the practice of giving the body as security, slavery had been the ultimate fate of the indebted poor. But still in the fifth and fourth centuries, the ambition of the poor to preserve their legal status from the predations of the wealthy had continued. Indeed, as Aristotle himself observed in the mid-fourth century, it was in the nature of the propertied class to reduce the poor to slavery. Consequently, Aristotle insisted, no ethical Greek polis could be exclusively ruled by the wealthy. His mentor, Plato, disagreed.
In The Republic (457b–466d), Plato imagined a communist utopia for the ruling elite as a prescription against the Athenian aristocracy’s historical tendency towards factionalism.28 Thus inoculated from private vice, his new aristocracy would rule a Just State quite different from the degraded spectacle of democracy. Communal property (including “wives” and children), the physical evasion of gold and silver, and state-directed breeding and education, Plato proclaimed, would sever the best citizens of Athens from those appetites which fueled tyranny and division and left them vulnerable to democracy and its demagogues. “Only so will they keep to their true character. … They will not rend the community asunder by each applying that word ‘mine’ to different things and dragging off whatever he can get for himself into a private home, where he will have his separate family, forming a center of exclusive joys and sorrows.”29
And if it is objected that this is moral philosophy and not economics, it is only necessary to cite Xenophon, another and perhaps the more literal of Socrates’s student-biographers, who credited his mentor with an understanding of use-values and the artifice of scarcity.30 Speaking for himself, Xenophon ventured further into the critique of democracy by suggesting that it was the material resources required by the Athenian democrats for their imperial appetites which had induced war and the social disintegration occasioned at the end of the fifth century BC. The common people, he argued, “realize that it is inevitable that an imperial power will be hated by its subjects, but that if the rich and respectable elements in the subject states are strong, the rule of the Athenian people will only last for a very brief period; that is why they disfranchise the respectable elements, and fine, exile and kill them, but support the masses. … To the common people it seems more advantageous for individual Athenians to possess the wealth of their allies and for them to retain enough to live on, and to work without being in a position to plot.”31 Both Plato and Xenophon employed economic analyses against the democracy: Plato imagining a new oligarchy preserved by its own communist discipline; and Xenophon resorting to the old aristocratic charge that the greed and indolence of the demos required an empire.32
But of all the ancients, it is Aristotle who is of singular interest for his thoughts on commodity exchange and the social consequences of money, his attempt to achieve a theory of value and price, and particularly his designation of the managerial role of women in what was to be designated in the eighteenth century as cottage industry. Finally, it was Aristotle’s negligent handling of slave labor—the major source of income for the dominant classes33—which anticipates the marginalization of Third World labor in modern liberal economics as well as in Marx’s construction of the significance of “primitive accumulation” in the development of capitalism.
In the context of natural law theory and on the basis of his testimony concerning the polis, Aristotle established that in its etymological origins economics (oikos-nomy)—the routine management of the classical Greek household—was a female function: “Thus it was out of the association formed by men with these two, women and slaves, that a household was first formed. … Men and women have different parts to play in managing the household: his to win, hers to preserve.”34 Further, with respect to ancient Athens, he distinguished economics from commerce and capitalism—the former falling within the realm of citizen wives, the latter, largely the activity of male metics (resident Greek aliens).35 In a related fashion, he also segregated the rational, naturalness of household-management (“self-sufficiency”) from the irrational, unnaturalness of unfettered acquisitiveness which he associated with money-lending and the exchange of (“surplus”) goods mediated through money.36 This judgment, Steve Fleetwood reminds us, was based on Aristotle’s metaphysics which distinguished between entities and activities: “This ought to alert one to the fact that exchange value is not just a matter for ‘value theory’ but is inextricably connected with the ethics of society. Whether a society that pursues exchange value is one that is just and tends to pursue good ends is something Aristotle is keen to pursue. He argues that should exchange not be based upon some principle of justice, then it will not ‘hold the city together.’”37
The polis, as Aristotle conceived it, had a natural form of development which could only be deflected by accident. Exchange-value was such a potential accident. Use-value as transmuted by money as a means of exchange opened the door to the overtaking of natural needs by artificial ones:
Sometimes on the other hand coinage (nomisma) is regarded as so much convention (nomos) and artificial trumpery having no root in nature, since, if those who employ a currency system choose to alter it, the coins cease to have their value and can no longer be used to procure the necessities of life. And it will often happen that a man with wealth in the form of coined money will not have enough to eat: and what a ridiculous kind of wealth is that which even in abundance will not save you from dying with hunger! … Coinage both limits the exchange and is the unit of measurement by which it is performed; and there is indeed no limit to the amount of riches to be got from this mode of acquiring goods.38
Already beset by penia kai ploutos, how could any polis be expected to survive the appearance of men pursuing unlimited wealth? Aristotle’s revulsion from such men was total: “They are eager for life but not for the good life” (The Politics 1257b40).
For some critics (Schumpeter, Finley, Galbraith) Aristotle’s unwillingness to grant to nascent capitalist commerce an acceptable or natural role in the social order disqualified him as an economic thinker in the modern sense. Alternatively, for others, Aristotle’s characterization of early Greek capitalism, and his eventually unsuccessful attempts to discern a basis of commodity exchange through the construction of a theory of value, are the very grounds for his nomination as an economist.39 Scott Meikle queries: “Within which school of modern analysis, if any, does the nature of Aristotle’s efforts … become comprehensible? The answer, to cut a long story short, is the school of Marxian Political Economy.”40 If this is, indeed, the crux of the ambivalence towards Aristotle’s economic thought, it has had ambiguous consequences.
The Aristotelian disjuncture between a praxis of economics localized in the household and frequently dominated by women and a male preserve of public commerce is routinely camouflaged in histories of economics. The proper domain of economics—the distribution of value or prices, international trade, state regulation, commodity production, exchange and distribution, the circulation of capital—is now understood to either exclude or envelop the household. Likewise, economics as a science or as a historical subject discounts whatever contributions or knowledge female household management might have accumulated. That just such a field of feminine intellect existed is affirmed by Schaps’s observation that “the early upbringing of children, the management of domestic slaves, and the production of food and clothing were matters of great importance to Greek women.”41 Aristotle, however, achieved his concealment of the influence of women by portraying their domain as inhabited by beings of inferior nature (females, slaves) or development (children).42 And modern economists marginalize most women by privileging wage labor, commonly supposed to be a largely male preserve. Whichever is designated as its starting points—Aristotle, the Roman law’s dominium (property rights) or the French mercantilists—the history of the scientific development of economics is preoccupied by those activities presumably male and dominated by the interrogations of males.43
A second consequence for the modern practice of economics of the attention drawn by Aristotle was the conceptual division of labor between visible (human) and invisible (animal) workers. For Aristotle, the bulk of the Greek labor force, slaves, was nugatory: “The use made of slaves hardly differs at all from that of tame animals: they both help with their bodies to supply our essential needs.”44 In Aristotle’s thought, as John Kenneth Galbraith observes, the concealment and disassociation of slave laborers from the moral body of the Greek community was a compelling and momentous force. “The most important reason that ethical questions were addressed to the exclusion of economic ones in the ancient world was the existence of slavery.”45 Galbraith is on firmer ground here than when he postulates an epistemic explanation (the absence of the market) for what he imagined as an ignorance of economics among the ancient Greeks. He is still, however, only partially correct. It was not that economic questions were obliterated by a slave-economy but that they were transcribed by a social context which de Ste. Croix characterized as an “almost effortless” class struggle. Such were the discursive protocols which permitted Plato and Aristotle (and Thucydides and Aristophanes) to discuss property, the possession of women, and the mastery of labor as the traditional or natural attributes of the aristoi. In this fashion, the forms and origins of wealth could be presented as derivative of virtue; an embedded and largely unassailable dimension of the best regime and the best of the regime.
In the ancient world, if Plato and Aristotle are any measure,46 political and ideological considerations obliterated the real and necessary significance of slaves, and in the modern world, similar sensitivities segregated the manufacturing and industrial workforces of the metropole from the extractive workers of the periphery. A labor granted visibility by wage-capital relations and production-consumption priorities served, for example, as the genotype for Marx’s industrial workers or the national workforces treated in bourgeois economics. Invisible labor, the slaves to whom Aristotle and Plato infrequently referred when ruminating on the objectives of virtue or justice, became the rationale among modern economic thinkers (including Marx)47 for the dismissive treatments of slaves, peasants, coerced laborers, colonial workers, and others (the lumpen-proletariat) who presumably lacked agency. Paradoxically, in their pursuit of a critical economics, Marx and Engels embraced the exclusivist precepts of a market economics while resolving to recenter their venture on the activity of the lower classes.48
In sum, then, despite the disclaimers so frequently voiced by historians of science, it may be surmised that the empirical, conceptual, and moral precepts of the ancients did have consequences for modern economic thought. From those ancients genetic discursive faults can be traced to socialist imaginings as well as to economic constructions pertaining to the domains of women and workforces presumed “extraneous” by virtue of location, politics, divisions of labor, and race.
As we have observed earlier (chapter 2), Aristotle’s naturalistic teleology, inductive method of inquiry, and system of ethics provided some small epistemological and philosophical foundation to several varieties of subversive claims made by socio-religious dissidents and rebels in the Middle Ages. Yet it was not until the fourteenth century that Aristotle’s thought was encompassed by a monumental work which articulated the epistemic ground for the premodern socialist imagination. At the end of the first quarter of that century, Marsilius dei Mainardini boldly and unapologetically imported Aristotle into a theory of political authority and governance which not only refuted papal and ecclesiastical privilege but as well translated the experience of the Italian commune into a political science. Born in Padua (and thus in the custom of the day known as Marsilius of Padua), Marsilius envisioned a “perfect regime” which eschewed utopianism by founding his proposed community on what he supposed as the history of human development and the observations recorded by Aristotle, “the foremost of philosophers in his Civil Science [the Politics].”49 Copiously citing Aristotle, Marsilius candidly transferred the ancient thinker beyond his original ken (“Neither Aristotle nor any other philosopher of his time or before could have discerned the origin and species of this cause [of discord and strife]”), appropriating the Ancient into the spiritual and political controversies of the fourteenth century so as to authorize a radical democratic proposal.50 Essentially contractual, Marsilius’s proposal asserted that the natural end of human society, the perfect regime, is a community governed through communal justice.
The persistence of a socialist discourse in Europe’s Middle Ages was largely contingent upon what Galbraith might represent as an inadvertent defect in medieval thought: the inability to distinguish ethical and religious issues from economic, specifically market, concerns. Confining himself to the market as the source of economic thought, Galbraith donates some small attention to Thomas Aquinas’s speculations on the religious authority which obligated exchanges of goods based on the just price, prohibited the sale of defective goods, and condemned the taking of interest, and takes note of Nicole Oresme’s preoccupation with the prince’s proper management of money and the minting of coin. Suspended in this discursive regime, Galbraith has no time for Marsilius of Padua, arguably the most radical political and religious thinker of the period. As Galbraith might rejoin, the market was not a concern for Marsilius;51 instead, he concentrated on the contradictions of power, property, and poverty, what I propose signified an alternative economic discourse. In so doing, Marsilius enunciated a socialist ethic against the Church of Rome, the most audacious form of privilege of his era.
Marsilius’s preoccupations with peace and governance quite directly reflected the crises and the achievements of northern Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Civil strife and factualism in the regnum Italicum had degraded the politics of the communes. Founded in the mid-twelfth century, within two generations they had become the most powerful regimes of the region. In the stead of republican and proto-democratic constitutions, in the thirteenth century most of the city-states had been transfigured into autocratic states ruled by Signori. Notwithstanding, they had remained prosperous.52 Padua, however, had proven exceptional on several scores. In the middle of the thirteenth century (1256), Padua had successfully rebelled against its tyrant, Ezzelino, ending nineteen years of despotic rule. The restored commune would survive for sixty years, ruled by parties consisting of nobility, artisans (tailors, skinners, shoemakers, etc.), and an administrative class.53 Excluded from governance were the very poor (the vast majority of the population), and, interestingly, the magnate and potentiores (“They were those nobles and non-nobles who were believed to be too powerful or insufficiently reliable to be allowed to participate in the government of the commune”).54 And it was unlike the Florence commune, where an urban economy dominated by bankers, tradesmen, and merchants authorized conceits dividing town and country and the social exclusion of alien businessmen: “In Padua, commerce, manufacturing and even finance were relatively undeveloped, so that the purely merchant classes were comparatively unimportant; the international bankers and the great merchants of the Lana and the Calimala guilds had no equivalent in Padua … [and] the most powerful elements in Paduan society were the landowning magnates and the inflated administrative class, dominated by the professionally trained notaries and judges.”55 Thus the social and intellectual matrices for Marsilius’s thought primed his pursuit of peace in directions radically different from the monarchism of Dante (De Monarchia, ca. 1312), the Florentine, and Aquinas, the Sicilian.56
By the time that Marsilius had finished his Defensor Pacis (The Defender of Peace) in 1324, the Franciscan Spirituals—due to their insistence on what they believed to be the authoritative poverty of Christ and St. Francis—had again resumed their position outside the Church as an official heresy.57 Under the leadership of Peter Olivi (d. 1298), the Spirituals had disposed themselves towards a more publicly resolute aggressive stance on the obligatory nature of Christian poverty and the renunciation of property, rallying against their “pragmatist” Conventional brothers within the Order. Indeed, Olivi’s argument that “the denial of poverty was a sign of Antichrist” and that Christendom was entering an apocalyptic age in which Christ and St. Francis would overturn the established church, breached the boundaries of the Order, transporting the Spirituals into a confrontation with papal authority.58 As a consequence of the public denunciations by Olivi and Marsilius, the critique of a corrupt clergy which had earlier been quarantined in dualist heresies, and in the thirteenth century commonly assigned as “the special responsibility of religious women” claiming “clerical” authority for themselves,59 now threatened the Church’s highest political officials. This apostasy provided ideological support and spiritual comfort to the movements among the urban and rural poor which swelled into rebellions between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Innocent III, Nicholas III, and Clement V each had actively intervened on the side of the Spirituals. Unlike his more sympathetic, or perhaps otherwise preoccupied, predecessors, Pope John XXII (1316–34) was impatient with any further compromise with the radical clerics.60 John threw his papal weight behind the Conventionals and initiated the persecution of the Spirituals as subversives. Between 1317 and 1323, John branded Olivi as a heretic, and “in a rapid series of bulls punctuated by Franciscan protest (1322–23), John, no fearful angel, rejected Bonaventura’s distinction between use and ownership, dismissed as a legal fiction the poverty of the Franciscan movement, and refused to let the papacy take the responsibility of fictive ownership for the Order’s lands and convents. … He denied also the primacy of Apostolic poverty. … Finally in Cum inter nonnullos (November 1323) he deemed the attribution of absolute poverty to Christ and the Apostles to be erroneous and heretical.”61 In the surge of the deep social and institutional crises which occupied papal and temporal authorities in the early fourteenth century: the persistent increase of peasant revolts and war-induced economic recessions,62 the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, the continuing conflict between the papacy and the French monarchy, the suppression of the Knights Templar, the maturing rivalries between the Italian city-states63—the assumption of radical intellectual leadership fell to Marsilius of Padua.
Marsilius had had several predecessors in the realms of letters, political theory, and, of course, Aristotelianism. A dozen years or so before Marsilius’s Defensor Pacis, Albertino Mussato, his friend and fellow Paduan, had written a tragedy, Ecerinis, which denounced the tyrant Ezzelino, and championed the republican traditions of Padua. Ptolemy of Lucca and the Florentine Remigio dei Girolami had each written and/or sermonized about the common good in audacious terms; Remigio declaring: “The commune must be loved more than oneself.”64 But where Mussato ambivalently sought to distinguish between wealth and avarice (Nicolai Rubenstein characterized Mussato’s argument as “What is evil is not wealth itself, but the inordinate desire for it”65), Marsilius, as we shall see, constructed a powerful justification for poverty.
Conal Condren’s study of Marsilius considerably alters the consensus treatment of the latter as a political theorist.66 Condren disputes the interpretation that Marsilius’s primary concern was with providing what Quentin Skinner terms “exactly the sort of ideological backing which the City Republics of the Regnum Italicum most needed at this juncture in order to defend their traditional liberties against the Pope.”67 Skinner, for one, by emphasizing the factious political context and by his allusion to the influence on Marsilius of the Aristotelian principle that political faction produces tyranny, substantially explains only the first of the Defensor Pacis’s two principal Discourses. That Discourse presumes peace as the necessary condition for “sufficiency of life,” and reiterates Aristotle’s contention that their shared basis is good government. What Marsilius had in mind was a constitutional polity founded on consensus and popular sovereignty.68 In the much longer Second Discourse, Marsilius insists that the Church’s “despotic” rulers have misunderstood the nature of the Church; that the Church as a voluntary gathering of the faithful possesses no coercive or any other jurisdiction; that the Church can claim no coercive authority; that the rightful chief executive power of the Church lies in “a General Council composed of all Christians” (Conciliarism); and that the Church cannot make the doctrinal claim to ecclesiastical immunity from taxes or to the right to interfere with coercive secular judgments. This body of opinion, Skinner characterizes as a “Congregationalist theory of the Church,” arguing that it reflected the genuine outrage which compelled Marsilius to transfer the supremacy of the popes to secular authority, “the faithful human legislator.”69 But Marsilius’s concerns for good government and the good life were more subversive, and his justifications far exceeded a warrant for a prince or a king.
Notwithstanding the hatred that Pope John and many of his thirteenth-century predecessors had inspired in Marsilius and his contemporaries, Condren persuasively argues that Marsilius was profoundly affected by the Franciscan-Spiritual legacy. In the Second Discourse, borrowing from Bonaventura’s defense of poverty (Apologia Pauperum), from Olivi’s attack on the corruption of the papacy, and the Spirituals’ radical condemnation of the Church’s material covetousness, Marsilius asserted that poverty was a principal spiritual value; that ownership (in opposition to use), in conferring the power of command, was foreign to the Christian life; and that the corollary to the Christian congregation was equality with the poor. In universalizing the Franciscan “heresy,” Marsilius sought to extend his reach beyond the dispute within the Order and the Church. “Rather than restricting his argument to the paradigmatic topoi of Franciscan controversy … the force of Marsilius’s argument is to make the connection, simply and consistently, between the claims to secular power by the Church (be it direct or indirect) and the economic independence and legal status necessary to sustain them.”70
Marsilius’s relentless pursuit of the good life, the just social order, the “sufficiency of life,” had brought him to the point of absolute opposition to the established Church, the most evil repository of earthly possessions. In the place of congregation and an equality of mind and body, the rulers of the Church had exchanged material wealth, despotic coercive authority, and political power (Wallace Ferguson succinctly comments: “The Popes ruled a territorial state stretching right across the center of the [Italian] peninsula”).71 For Marsilius, the Christian faith was not a divine foundation for the proper regulation of market relations. The true apostle of Christ would embrace poverty and equality, not property and privilege. In contradistinction to John XXII, and citing scripture and glosses, Marsilius constructed a juridical right and moral justification for what he termed “virtuous,” “meritorious,” and “supreme poverty.” This status, Marsilius insisted, was necessary for “evangelical perfection,” and he continued: “This mode of meritorious poverty, or this status of a person who does not have possessions in private … or even in common with another … we shall henceforth, for the sake of brevity, call ‘supreme poverty,’ and the person who wishes to have this status we shall call, in keeping with the custom of theologians, ‘perfect.’”72 And as he would later proclaim, “No perfect person can acquire the ownership … of any temporal thing”; a proscription which applied to the Church as well: “We have said that the surplus must be given to any poor person; for a community of men who save or have goods for certain definite persons only, such as the community of monks, canons, and the like, is not a perfect community; for the perfect community, like that of Christ and his apostles, extends to all the faithful, as is clear from the Acts, Chapter 4.”73
As Condren insists, Marsilius’s concern was not merely for the political threat which the Church represented to the temporal princes of the Regnum Italicum. He was even more agitated by the “vicious” effect a “heretical pope” might exact on the whole body of Christendom and on the soul of each Christian. For that reason he magnified the discourse on poverty undertaken by the Franciscans to one on power. Marsilius hurled at the papacy and its supporters a moral and political challenge packed with socialist and democratic presumptions.74 He contradicted their greed, arrogance, and despotism not only with the exemplary poverty and humility of Christ but with the argument that, according to the traditions of the primitive church, scriptural and legislative authority and a moral intuition for the just order had been divinely invested in the congregation of faithful ordinary men and women.75 Marsilius’s conciliarist rationale stripped from the rulers of the Church any pretense that their office granted them greater jurisdictional authority than that residing in the community. It was the pope’s, and particularly John XXII’s presumptive claim to supreme legislative and juridical power in his dispute with the Spirituals, which most disturbed Marsilius’s communal sensibilities.
Marsilius, of course, was condemned and his works banned. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern some immediate reflection of his primacy of community in contemporary economic thought, specifically in the property right argument employed by Oresme in the mid-fourteenth century. In his Treatise on Money, Oresme declared that “money is a property of the community.” And he justified this position on grounds which “anticipated” a labor theory of value: “If someone gives his bread, or the labor of his own body in exchange for money, this money belongs to him when he receives it, as much as his bread or the labor of his body he was free to use as he wanted, supposing he was not a serf.”76 Oresme had studied at Paris where Marsilius and then Buridan had been rectors (and even later Oresme a bursar), so it is entirely possible that Oresme’s resolve that the prince was merely a convenience (“And since the Prince is a more public person, and of a higher authority, it is convenient that, for the community, he should have money made”) devolved from Buridan’s radical political theory (where the prince’s authority was at the pleasure of his subjects) and Marsilius’s communalism.77
But for later political theorists in the West who would almost exclusively emphasize the tenets of the First Discourse, Marsilius’s original intention to reinstitute the primitive church was concealed by historical events and ideological priorities. In the sixteenth century, however, in the wake of the Lutheran Reformation and the beginnings of absolutist doctrine, Marsilius’s denunciations were used to justify constitutionalism, what Skinner reckoned as absolutism’s “greatest theoretical rival, the theory that all political authority inheres in the body of the people.”78 And it was Marsilius’s original message which reached Michael Gaismair, the Tyrolean radical reformer who led a peasant army during the Reformation two centuries later. When in 1526 Gaismair issued his revolutionary program for a “Christian order from which the godless exploiters, mainly the clergy but also the nobility as well as the sovereign will be excluded” and the confiscation of church property for the “common good,”79 he found his justification in the writings of Marsilius.80
The source of the influence of Marsilius’s work two hundred years after its appearance can be traced to the critical part conciliarism played in the extrication of the Church from the Great Schism of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. It is, then, somewhat ironic that in 1535 Thomas Cromwell commissioned an attenuated English translation of Defensor Pacis as part of his campaign to establish the secessionist claims of Henry VIII to authority over the English Church (the Henrician Reformation or schism).81 For political theorists, however, Marsilius’s more enduring influence was as a spokesman for conciliarism, which, according to Skinner, was “the most significant strand of radical political theory in the later Middle Ages.”82 Marsilius thus became a radical champion to those political and intellectual formulators of constitutionalism while, alternately, standing in as a heretical target to the Thomist apologists for the Counter-Reformation.83 And it was on the strength of these interests that Marsilius’s contemplations on poverty, property, and power survived into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, influencing contract theorists like John Mair and John Locke who made good on the Franciscan distinction between the use and ownership of property to reason the answerable basis of legitimate government.84
Foucault would likely have located Marsilius’s socialist discourse in an epistemic period which Foucault imagined represented the world through similitude and resemblance, the quest for the Same in the Different.85 Marsilius’s employment of natural law rested largely on the belief that a true Christian social order, both spiritually and politically, should reiterate and recapitulate the perfection of God. This “chain of similitude” proceeding from divine law and through each soul, the Christian congregation, and Christendom’s temporal and ecclesiastical institutions and offices was a prerequisite even for those who would later oppose Marsilius’s socialist vision. In the sixteenth century, its most prominent Western philosopher, Jean Bodin, appropriated the Decalogue for an identical nomological principle in order to privilege monarchy while insisting on the primacy of private property.86 And in the fledgling discourse on economy—a proto-political economy—which Bodin and others were then initiating, it is unremarkable to discover that the “correct” relations between metallic money and price were predicated on the essential “preciousness” of metals—appropriate measures because in their “buried brightness” they were “the visible signature of all the wealth of the world.”87 For Bodin’s economic discourse (as it might be said for Marsilius’s heretical philosophy), the authority for human agency was derivative. Money signified the heavens (“because metal resembles the stars”88) and not the processes of exchange nor those of labor it would come to represent, respectively, in what Foucault imagined as the later Classical and Modern Ages.
Of course, just as happened with his opinions on popular sovereignty, the more radical implications concerning property found in Marsilius’s evocation of the vita apostolica were left unexplored. This was the fate of Marsilius’s socialist predilections, at least in the secular debates. But in the besieged Roman Church itself, the explosive discursive contests concerning power, jurisdiction, and sovereignty had a different consequence. As had occurred in the thirteenth century, a radical social discourse became manifest within the Catholic Church in institutional form. Paradoxically, the most significant expression of internal radicalism in the Roman Church was concomitant to the appearance of the Jesuit Order, an expression of the Counter-Reformation.
For certain, the Order begun by Ignatius Loyola in 1534 and formally recognized by Pope Paul III in 1540 bound its members to a rigid obedience of the pope. Nevertheless, the philosophical disputations undertaken by adjutant Jesuit intellectuals in support of papal authority and the Counter-Reformation led them to a number of radical arguments. Through the formidable scholarship of sixteenth-century Thomist philosophers like Luis de Molina, Francisco Suárez, and Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, the Jesuits not only politically superseded their rival Dominican scholars (e.g., Ginés de Sepúlveda, Bartolemé de las Casas, Francisco de Vitoria, and Domingo de Soto) but also enunciated a superior theory of the origins of political society and natural justice.89 Under the signification of natural law, these Counter-Reformation theorists and philosophers eviscerated the domain of heretical interpretation: counterposing the authority of natural law against, for instances, Sepúlveda’s Aristotelian thesis that the Spanish conquest of Indians (“slaves by nature”) was an instance of just war; against Machiavelli’s (and Martin Luther’s) contention that the state was obligated only to its own self-conservation; against the jurisdiction assigned to humanist reason; and against the right of property as an instance of positive human law. And as Voltaire slyly averred in Candide, the contradictions of Jesuitical conservatism were never more acute than in their opposition to Spanish and Portuguese imperial ambitions in Paraguay.90
Positing a state of nature grounded on the universal instinct towards a natural community governed by the law of nature, the Jesuit Thomists argued that the natural condition of all (“men”) was that of natural freedom, equality, and independence. On these grounds the Jesuits (as had Vitoria and De Soto) supported de las Casas’s defense of the Indians from Spanish conquest and enslavement: “All men are equally made in the image of God with a mind and reason,” as Bellarmine puts it in The Members of the Church, so that “infidels, who possess this nature” must “without doubt be able to have true dominion.”91 Thus, when Jesuit missionaries instituted communal property among the Indians in their missions in Paraguay, they did so on the basis of natural law:
This enabled them to suggest that while the communal as opposed to the private holding of property may in a sense be an injunction of the law of nature, it is only a negative injunction which serves the function of reminding us that (as Suárez puts it) “all property would be held in common by the force of this law if it had not happened that men decided to introduce a different system.” This allowed them to argue that the law of nature can be used to sanction either the continuation or the abolition of communal ownership.92
The socialist tenets of the primitive church were reiterated in the Jesuit missions as a practice consistent with both the traditions of Christianity and the “natural community” composed by the natives. Notwithstanding, while the missions helped to preserve and transmit a socialist impulse, in reality they were never idyllic or democratic.93
As we have observed in chapter 2, the legends incited by the existence of these missions inspired the imaginations of bourgeois Europeans in the eighteenth century. Socialist utopia reappeared in the writings of secular philosophers, novelists, playwrights, and pamphleteers, extending socialist principles into the consciousness of the new middle classes. And as these classes increased in self-confidence and social ambitions, socialist ideals served as a basis for the critique of the classes which dominated them and the state structures which nurtured their formation.
Paradoxically, while romantic elements of the new middle classes appropriated the socialist imagination, other representatives of these same classes began the development of an alternative economic discourse, one, as William Petty insisted, expressed not in “superlative words, and intellectual arguments” but “in terms of number, weight or measure.”94 Pierre Jeannin tells us that “merchandising, bookkeeping, a more quantitative mentality, and, finally, the elaboration of a mathematical world view” were the legacies of the sixteenth century’s merchant classes.95 And by the eighteenth century, commercial arithmetic, only three centuries earlier the near exclusive monopoly of Venetian merchants and reckoning masters, now provided lexical protocols and a discursive practice for state functionaries, bankers, commercial agents, manufacturers, university mathematicians, scholars, and social critics in Western Europe and England.96 These quantified descriptors provided their practitioners not only the means of ensuring their position and influence in the financial, revenue, and policy apparatuses of those states contesting for hegemony in the expanding world-system, but even more critically, established the paradigmatic regiment for determining the superfluidity and redundancy of their social and political superiors, the landed aristocrats.
Thus long before the French Revolution obliterated the old world of aristocratic privilege, for the Mercantilists, “number, weight or measure” had preemptively subverted the conservative apologetics of the Physiocrats, the defenders of landed wealth.97 As Howard and King insist: “Two related problems formed the core of the classical theory of value. One concerned the historical and analytical origins of non-wage incomes … surplus value. The other dealt with the perfection of a measure of value in terms of which both social output and the surplus product could be quantified.”98 Obsessed with bullion accumulation, grants of commercial monopolies, and state protections against competition, the Mercantilists invented a calculus whose mystique justified the privileging of incomes from trade, manufacturing, and finance above the economic consequences and social priorities of inherited wealth. If statism and eventually nationalism were their creeds, political economy was the catechism of the ascendant capitalist classes.99 And it was as an antagonist within this discourse rather than in adherence to medieval socialism that Marxian socialism arose.
For Engels and Marx, classical political economy was a signifier of abundant and overlapping meanings. As an ideologeme, the appearance of the proto-science of political economy signified the eminence of an empirical organization of knowledge which would evacuate superstition, religion, and moral philosophy—the dead weight of cultural life. As a historical coda, political economy signified the commercial triumph of capitalist industrial production, the social domination of a self-confident bourgeoisie, and the social oppression which would eventually end with the rule of the proletariat. And as a politics, political economy privileged Great Britain as the site at which the forces of production had objectified the rapprochement of history and philosophy. England was the womb of the industrial proletariat, the modern world’s universal class and its eventual master. And based upon the paradigm of English society, all fabulist social theory would be vanquished by scientific materialism.
Marxian economics constituted thus a science of history upon which a revolutionary political agenda might be based. And though Engels did eventually hint at its limitations, it does not appear that either he or Marx seriously entertained the possibility that in part their science was composed of autogenic, paradigmatic, and syntagmatic materials.100 But in truth, embedded in the rational fabric and the positivity of their “science” were hidden moral judgments (e.g., their revulsion to greed, their abhorrence of irrationality) and presumptive narratives (alienation as a motor of history, progressively higher stages of history, etc.). Inevitably, the several contours of meaning in their work, representing compelling and perhaps antonymous desires, propelled discrete and sometimes competing systems of significations.
One such conflict is inscribed on Engels’s and Marx’s musings on the social and economic relations affecting women. In 1884, Engels claimed that Marx had agreed that the first instance of class oppression in history was coincident with the appearance of monogamy with its intensification of the antagonism between men and women, and its concomitant sexual (and primordial) division of labor for “child breeding.”101 Forty years earlier, Marx himself identified the prostitution of women in bourgeois society as “only a specific expression of the universal prostitution of the worker” under capitalism.102 As the first class, then, women had signified for both Engels and Marx the state of repression associated with the private possession of labor power as property. Women were thus the archetype for the dispossessed subject. There was, however, a dialectical distortion in the oppression of women, or alternatively, a flaw in Marx’s theory of the basic motive-forces of history. For unlike the self-empowering classes which would eventually appear in history—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—women were incapable of liberating themselves. As a class, the liberation of women was dependent upon their absorption into the proletariat. As Engels put it: “The first premise for the emancipation of women is the reintroduction of the entire female sex into public industry.”103 As a class women shared this characterological lack of historical agency with workers ensnared in “precapitalist” relations of production by the capitalist world-system. Just as “primitive accumulation” (slavery, peasantry, forced labor, etc.) inoculated Marxian historical space from any social desires embedded in labor beyond the metropole, domestic labor, in removing women from commodity (value) production and wage labor, provided a support for the notion of capitalism as a historical epoch, i.e., an independent self-reproducing mode of production.104 Clearly, however, in their treatments of women and “invisible” labor, Marx and Engels exhibited the persistence of the discursive practices of the ancients and their modern predecessors.105
Moreover, from its cultural and intellectual origins, Marxism absorbed the conceits of bourgeois historical consciousness: a formal (mathematical), rationalist epistemology costumed in a teleological historicity which, in turn, gave primacy to commerce. Objectivity and necessity (the dialectical development of successive organizations of production) displaced tradition and the vagaries of creativity, imposing on historical movement the logic of the dialectic (the relations of production). And in bestowing the bourgeois narrative of class upon the proletariat, Marx and Engels inserted the working class into their own more familiar historical system. Ironically, however, with the assumption of the primacy of class as the social agency, Marx and Engels were themselves exposed. They acknowledged as much in a self-referential passage in The Communist Manifesto: “Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour … a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.”106 By this proclamation Marx and Engels sought legitimation for their own political intervention. But just how a scientific political economy privileged a select and self-anointed group of “bourgeois ideologists” remained unfathomed. Nevertheless, this social and historical anomaly was of substantial import to the historical development of a Marxian political economy.
In essence the radical political project with which Marx and Engels enveloped themselves was the consequence of a moral conviction and not, as they insisted, a historical dialectic. They rejected “voluntarism,” however, preferring to cast their political vision and ambitions in the guise of a nomothetical social universe. Codified in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their domain was the new history formulated by bourgeois intellects, a terrain at once mechanistic and economistic. In the wake of this reassuring conceit the originating discourses in Western socialism became subjugated knowledges. In their place, socialism acquired an alternative and secularized natural history, one drawn from the discursive practices of scientific discourse and bourgeois hagiography. Marx and Engels justified this invention by declaring that the advent of the bourgeoisie had “drowned” all previous ideologies (“the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism”) in individualism (“the icy waters of egotistical calculation”).107 And though for generations (of Marxists) this astounding claim resisted inquiry, the special pleading of these two bourgeois ideologists could not be entirely concealed. Paradoxically, Marxist economics was vulnerable on its own terms.
In Foucault’s genealogy of Marxian discourse, when Ricardo insisted that labor was more than a measure but, indeed, the source of all value, he disrupted the discourse of classical political economy, the “analysis of wealth.” By displacing “circular and surface causality” with “continuous, historical time” (“a great linear, homogeneous series” of “successive productions”) Foucault claimed that Ricardo had imagined an alternative ontological domain to that of Adam Smith’s, one with a different paradigmatic regimen: a historical economics. While Smith had unearthed that “what is actually circulating in the form of things is labor—not objects of need representing one another, but time and toil, transformed, concealed, forgotten,”108 Ricardo had envisioned work in a temporal series: modes of production. Consequently, Foucault declared, when Ricardo transferred the understanding of scarcity from the classical assumption of increasing needs to one presuming decreasing sufficiency (“humanity is henceforth laboring under the threat of death”), this different “empiricity” (data) summoned forth its own imaginary calculus of higher costs of production and declining rates of profit. Encapsulated in this alternative economic domain, it was foreclosed that Ricardo would logically contrive a suspension of history, a predictable immobilization of human activity determined by a point of equilibrium between the size of the labor force and “a nature that in itself is inert.”109 In Ricardo’s estimation history would petrify. Foucault discerned: “History does not allow man to escape from his initial limitations. … We perceive that his anthropological situation never ceases its progressive dramatization of his History, never ceases to render it more perilous, and to bring it closer, as it were, to its own impossibility.”110 In acquiring a history, the cognition of the economic activity of the human animal formally forfeited all pretensions to a more magnificent destiny. To the contrary, Foucault insisted, Marx rejected Ricardo’s pessimism, substituting an alternative inheritance.
For Marx, history was the negation, the accumulation of successive forms of production and concomitant alienations which would compel a “whole class of [impoverished] men” to “re-apprehend this truth of the human essence.” “But,” Foucault maintained, Marx argued that “this can be achieved only by the suppression, or at least the reversal, of History as it has developed up to the present: then alone will a time begin which will have neither the same form, nor the same laws, nor the same mode of passing.”111 Marx appropriated Ricardo’s history and then converted it into a “prehistory,” a chamber of horrors from which the human animal was predestined to escape. For Foucault, however, the opposition between Ricardo’s anguished dystopia and Marx’s revolutionary utopia were “derived differences.” The constructs of Ricardo and Marx co-existed within a “new arrangement of knowledge … which accommodated simultaneously the historicity of economics … the finitude of human existence … and the fulfilment of an end of History.”112 Marxian economics was not a radical political economy or a new science. Marxism occluded with the same discursive rules of formation and power/knowledge relations which nurtured and were the conditions for being of “bourgeois” political economy.113
A similar indifference to (or, in this instance, innocence respecting) authorial intention is apparent in Metahistory, Hayden White’s prescient critique of nineteenth-century Western historical consciousness. Arguing that all historical writing takes the form of narratives (Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, Satire), White assays that “history” is a “plenum of documents that … can be put together in a number of different and equally plausible narrative accounts.”114 Marxism is no exception: “The Marxist view of history is neither confirmable nor disconfirmable by appeal to ‘historical evidence,’ for what is at issue between a Marxist and a non-Marxist view of history is the question of precisely what counts as evidence and what does not, how data are to be constituted as evidence, and what implications for the comprehension of the present social reality are to be drawn from the evidence thus constituted.”115 White reads Marx’s representation of political economy as imagined within the genre of Tragedy (the transformation of production increases misery and intensifies class conflict), and Marx’s strategy of representation as metonymic—taking the part for the whole (modes of production are the sources of history). And in the place of Foucault’s utopia as the sign of history’s end, White suggested that Marx’s revolutionary theory unconsciously instantiated Comedy (conflicts dissolve into harmony). Eventually, however, in his own terms White achieves an approximation of Foucault’s location of Marxism: “The bourgeoisie becomes, in Marx’s emplotment of history, the Tragic hero through whose fall the proletariat is raised to consciousness of its uniquely Comic destiny in world history.”116 Though this appears to be a reluctant concession on White’s part (“because of the special place given to the proletariat, Marx was forced to endow the bourgeoisie itself with a special role in the historical drama”),117 the privileging of the bourgeoisie by Marx and Engels still serves as substantiation of their self-reflectivity as bourgeois ideologists.
What Foucault and White imply is that Marxian economics was neither a progression from nor a negation of classical or bourgeois political economy. For both, such a reading would be naïve if not complicitous. White has distilled that “the work of every master historian usually arises from an effort to wed a mode of emplotment with a mode of argument or of ideological implication which is inconsonant with it,”118 which is in part how we might approach Marx. Marx’s socialist vision (Comic) was joined with a mechanistic historical system which sprung itself from commercial and bureaucratic imaginings. Revolted by a civil order which claimed a superior historical, moral, and cultural position while simultaneously exposing masses of humanity to numbing material degradation and spiritual repression, Marx collided explanatory tropes (modes of thought) embedded in its own epistemic imagination and narrative strategies. Marx, in white’s words, “attempted to combine the Synecdochic strategies of Hegel with the Metanymical strategies of the political economy of his time in order to create a historical vision that was at once ‘dialectical’ and ‘materialistic’—that is to say, ‘historical’ and ‘mechanistic’ simultaneously.”119 The conceptual disruption consequent to the juxtaposition of metaphorical forms was no more evident than in Capital, where in the same chapter Marx interrupted his metonymically driven treatment of the sources of exchange and use values in commodities in order to contend with the “mystical character,” the fetishism, of commodities.120
But Foucault and White entirely neglected the fact that Marx’s thought was also shaped by the retrieval of mythic, poetic, dramatic, and economic discourses crafted in antiquity. From the works of Homer and its reiteration in what Mircea Eliade termed the “Asiatico-Mediterranean world,” Marx appropriated the notion of the “redeeming role of the Just”; and in Hesiod he found one of the first poetic expressions of the myth of the Golden Age which “many traditions put at the beginning and the end of history.”121 As a student of Greek philosophy, drama, and poetry as well as German metaphysics, Marx could hardly escape these recurring emplotments and their influence on his poetics of agency and the writing of history. And just as White, himself, would draw on ancient literary forms, Marx experimented with forms of organic metaphor which S. S. Prawer notes “have a distinguished history in European cultural theory from Plato and Aristotle to Goethe.”122 Marx was not only familiar with Aristotle’s economic thought but, as Prawer informs us, “the works of Homer, Hesiod, and Lucretius [were] searched for evidence of commercial and financial beliefs, practices, and conditions in the ancient world.”123 And for similar purposes, Marx cited the thoughts of Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Xenophon, Virgil, and Horace.124 Persuaded that “different cultures, different periods, may have stages that correspond to one another,” Marx insisted that such a correspondence existed between the philosophic developments of post-Aristotelian Hellenism and his own post-Hegelian period.125 In both style and substance, Marx found much to attract him among the ancients.
A more profound discontinuity existed between the inspirations of earlier Western socialist discourse and Marxism. Where once the dispositions of power, property, and poverty had been viewed as affronts to God’s will and subversions of natural law, for Marx they were the issue of historical laws and personal and class ambition. Thus, though Marx was familiar with heretical rebelliousness (Martin Luther, the Anabaptists, etc.), in his economic works he more frequently drew upon secular dramatists (Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe) and pre-Christian literature (Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle) as sources of ideas contrary to bourgeois thought.126 By evacuating radical medieval philosophy from socialism’s genealogy, Marx privileged his own ideological rules of discursive formation, providing a rationale for distinguishing the scientific socialism concomitant with the appearance of capitalist society from the lesser (“utopian”) and necessarily inadequate articulation of socialism which occurred earlier.127 So doing, he deprived his own work of the profound and critical insights exemplified in Marsilius’s writings. Both the ancients and his own immediate predecessors, for instance, contributed to an inferior, more ambiguous, and misogynist consciousness of female liberation to that constituted in medieval radicalism. Similarly, the elevation of natural law philosophy by renegade medieval scholars into a formidable opposition to private property, racism, and imperialist excess was neglected. The alternative discourses, both of the ancient world and of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were directly implicated in the legitimation of slave economies, slave labor, and racism. Democracy, too, fueled by centuries of popular resistances, had acquired its better champions among medieval socialists. Notwithstanding their keen appetites for history, Marx and Engels had chosen to obliterate the most fertile discursive domain for their political ambitions and historical imaginations. Possibly even less troubling for them, they displaced a socialist motivation grounded on the insistence that men and women were divine agents for the fractious and weaker allegiances of class.