I want to acknowledge M. A. Bortner, Elizabeth Robinson, C. A. Griffith, and Brandon Proia for their wonderful suggestions and kind patience.
1. Robin D. G. Kelley, introduction to Walter Johnson with Robin D. G. Kelley, eds., Race, Capitalism, Justice: Boston Review, Forum 1 (2017): 5–8.
2. More than a material precondition, bourgeois advents here function much like a precognition—a prescience or future vision and what Foucault might call historical a priori. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972).
3. Here I am appropriating Robinson’s term. See Cedric J. Robinson, The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
4. The 1993 course reader and the Ashgate edition (2001) of The Anthropology of Marxism contain the same number of chapters, with identical chapter headings, and without extensive revision. The book version, however, contains a somewhat denser historical coverage of the medieval era. Also, as Elizabeth Robinson pointed out to me, in the early 1990s, no publisher was interested. See Cedric J. Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001).
5. See Avery F. Gordon’s preface to this book for an instructive exposition of Robinson’s historical materialism.
6. It should be noted that, if we were to consider the peoples and lands that exist outside the province of the West or that of Western-centric historiographers, this perspective is bizarre, at best. Take, for instance, what transpired among feminists of color at the I Am Your Sister Conference (Boston, 1992) celebrating the life and work of Audre Lorde, the noted “black, lesbian, feminist, warrior, poet.” At a forum where activists coalesced to create a vehicle for mass action, they fervently argued and insisted that “socialist” appear in the name of the new organization—as socialist, feminist, women of color revolutionaries.
7. The historian Robin D. G. Kelley recently noted Robinson’s immense influence and suggested that it was likely “greater than perhaps [Robinson] may have realized” (Kelley, “Introduction,” Boston Review, 2017, 1). Excluding the legions of Robinson’s readers and students in and out of academia, the special issues of Race & Class (“Cedric Robinson and the Philosophy of Black Resistance,” ed. Darryl C. Thomas, vol. 47, no. 2 [2005]), African Identities (“Black Ontology, Radical Scholarship, and Freedom,” ed. H. L. T. Quan and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, vol. 11, no. 2 [2013]), and Boston Review’s Forum (see note 1, above), as well as the collected essays in Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (New York: Verso, 2017), are only a few examples where Robinson’s countless contributions to radical thought and scholarship are enumerated.
8. Elsewhere I argue that the Robinsonian method is fundamentally democratic and transparency is essential to that approach. See H. L. T. Quan, “Emancipatory Social Inquiry: Democratic Anarchism and the Robinsonian Method,” African Identities 11, no. 2 (2013): 117–32.
9. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). Fukuyama first advanced his thesis in a 1989 essay, “The End of History?” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18. He argued that the developments associated with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc were greater than the ending of the Cold War, “but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Huntington’s thesis, first advanced at a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, later appeared in an essay titled “The Clash of Civilizations?” (Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 [Summer 1993]: 22–49) and was then expanded upon in the book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Huntington’s AEI lecture was a response to his former student (Fukuyama), in which he relied on Fukuyama’s central arguments about the “end of history” as the end of ideology, but pointed to cultural conflicts as new flashpoints of the new world order.
10. Wendy Brown (Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution [New York: Zone Books, 2015]) argues that one of the most insidious effects of neoliberalism is the extension of capitalist logic to the polity where the market “configures human beings exhaustively as market actors” (12) and where democracy is being unmoored and disemboweled (9). See also David Harvey, A Brief Introduction of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
11. Fukuyama, The End of History.
12. In the foreword to the reprinted The Terms of Order (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Erica Edwards astutely observes that Robinson’s very first monograph itself is “an act of faith in the truest sense: a deeply invested statement of belief in the power of language, of communal approaches to social organization, and of the rule of the people where the people … [is] the rabble, the mob, the motley crew” (x). I would argue that this act of faith is evident in Robinson’s entire body of work, and especially in Anthropology where Robinson gifted humans, especially the heretical, as “divine agents” (16).
13. Martin Jay, Fin de Siècle Socialism and Other Essays (New York: Routledge, 1988). In the title essay, the eminently sensible intellectual historian Martin Jay evokes a form of melancholia generally associated with left-leaning individuals, though he warns us that the term “fin de siècle” (end of century) itself “conjures up the anxious and despairing mood associated with the decadents of late nineteenth century bourgeois culture, while the socialism of that same era was still in the full flush of the exuberant youth” (1). However, as we were approaching “the fin of another siècle … socialism, both as a theoretical tradition and a body of practices, may well find the means to transcend the current mood of what was, appropriately called ‘left melancholy’ in the century to come” (1–2).
14. Here Anthropology is explicitly counterdistinct from Jacques Derrida’s arguments about Fukuyama’s end of history thesis and the relevance of Marxian radical critiques in Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994). Interestingly, while the first incarnation of Anthropology had difficulty getting published, the 1994 publication of Specters of Marx, a series of lectures by Derrida, was seen at the time as a necessary and radical counterpoint to Fukuyama and the other “neo-evangelese” of capitalist, liberal democracies. For Robinson and Anthropology, it is the specters of socialism, not necessarily of Marx and Marxism, that serve as counterpoints to neoliberalism and its vices. It should be noted that the 2001 printed version of Anthropology contains an epigram at the end of the book from the Specters of Marx, though the 1993 reader predates Derrida’s publication by a year and, as such, is without the epigram. In contrast to the reception of Derrida’s Specters, it is a matter of record that Anthropology was scantily reviewed and had limited circulation. With the exception of the reprint of Avery Gordon’s preface in Race & Class 47, no. 2 (2005): 23–38, the reception of the book was muted.
15. In Capitalism: A Ghost Story (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014), based on research on the functions of private foundations and the spreading of market fundamentalism and neoliberal economic restructuring, Arundhati Roy astutely suggests that “capitalism’s real ‘gravediggers’ may end up being its own delusional cardinals, who have turned ideology into faith” (46). As she argues, “despite having successfully powered through economic reforms, despite having waged wars and military occupied countries in order to put in place free market ‘democracies,’ Capitalism is going through a crisis whose gravity has not revealed itself completely yet” (45). This is so in part because these “cardinals of sin,” Roy suggests, are having “trouble grasping a simple fact: Capitalism is destroying the planet” because “the old tricks … War and Shopping will simply not work” (46). For a more systematic exposition of racial capitalism and the manufacturing of inequality, and racial capitalist logic, see Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). For information on wealth concentration and hoarding, see the Oxfam Report, Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More, 2016, http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/wealth-having-it-all-and-wanting-more-338125.
16. “Donald Trump Has Just Met with the New Leader of the Secular World—Pope Francis,” Independent, May 24, 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/donald-trump-pope-francis-trip-new-leader-of-free-world-a7753621.html.
17. http://w2.vatican.va/content/dam/francesco/pdf/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium_en.pdf.
18. “Unbridled Capitalism Is the ‘Dung of the Devil,’ Says Pope Francis,” The Guardian, July 9, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/10/poor-must-change-new-colonialism-of-economic-order-says-pope-francis. For further reference on the general cruelty and violence of capitalist development, see H. L. T. Quan, Growth against Democracy: Savage Developmentalism in the Modern World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2012).
19. Rosie Scammell, “Pope Recruits Naomi Klein in Climate Change Battle,” The Guardian, June 27, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/28/pope-climate-change-naomi-klein.
20. “Naomi Klein on Embracing Pope Francis’ Critique of Capitalism,” PBS News Hour, September 25, 2015, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/naomi-klein-popes-economics/.
21. Naomi Klein, “A Radical Vatican,” The New Yorker, July 10, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-visit-to-the-vatican.
22. Arundhati Roy, “Speech to a People’s University,” in Roy, Capitalism.
1. The phrase is from Herbert Marcuse, “The End of Utopia,” in Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970), 69. See also Avery F. Gordon, The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).
2. Cedric J. Robinson, The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership (originally published in 1980), with an introduction by Erica R. Edwards (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (originally published in 1983), with an introduction by Robin D. G. Kelley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York: Routledge, 1997); Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). In addition to these major books, Robinson has written many essays, some of which have been collected and edited by Elizabeth Robinson and H. L. T. Quan in a volume forthcoming from Pluto Press.
3. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 175.
4. Robinson, Black Marxism, 2.
5. Ibid. That revisionist history has been taken up and extended most directly and explicitly by Lisa Lowe in The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
6. Robinson, Black Marxism, 3.
7. Ibid., 72–73. It’s been my impression that often the title Black Marxism has been misconstrued as describing the identity of its author. In case it bears making more explicit, I do not think it is accurate to describe Robinson as a “black Marxist.”
8. The published origin of this critique is actually The Terms of Order. And, as H. L. T. Quan pointed out to me, despite its prior publication date, Black Movements in America is usefully read as an application of the themes and concerns explored in An Anthropology of Marxism, particularly in its attention to the signal role of women and the black church in the history of mass black political movements in America, and in its analytic focus on visions of social justice. It might be worth noting here one way in which An Anthropology of Marxism departs from Black Marxism. The departure is not, I think, to be located in what appears to be the obvious contrast between a black radical tradition conceived as “the negation of Western civilization” and a socialist tradition squarely located within it, although An Anthropology of Marxism’s object of analysis is a choice with tremendous significance for how we understand radical thought and movements today. The departure hinges on what appears to be a radical break in An Anthropology of Marxism with the dialectical power of racial capitalism to issue its most “formidable opposition.” In Gibson-Graham’s terms, An Anthropology of Marxism presumes “the end of capitalism (as we knew it)” not only as a future-oriented goal, but as a condition for recognizing, to quote Robinson from Black Marxism, that which “cements pain to purpose, experience to expectation, consciousness to collective action.” See J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), and Robinson, Black Marxism, 317.
9. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin, 1968), 9. Thompson’s definition of class as a “historical phenomenon”—not a “structure” or “even … a category,” but the mix of the “raw material of experience and consciousness … which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships”—is not unlike what Robinson means when he approaches the socialist tradition as a historical phenomenon.
10. When the preface was first written, this position was becoming increasingly popular. For its most succinct statement, see William Greider, “The Ghost of Marx,” chap. 3 in One World Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).
11. Robinson, Black Marxism, 170. This doubt is central to everything Robinson ever wrote, said, and did because it is always liberation or, as he eloquently put it in Anthropology, “the recovery of human life from the spoilage of degradation” (000) that motivates the critical excavations whether of the origin of Western civilization or the history of European socialism or of those racial regimes sutured by early Hollywood cinema to the making of a white supremacist capitalist nation.
12. Robinson, The Terms of Order, 214.
13. Ibid.
14. This method of critically examining discourse we commonly associate today with Michel Foucault. In both An Anthropology of Marxism (000) and The Terms of Order, Robinson notes the debt to Foucault for “the bold yet elegant turn by which he reinserted Marxism into bourgeois cosmology.” But there is only a superficial similarity between the two thinkers. For Robinson’s critique of Foucault, see The Terms of Order, chaps. 4 and 6; An Anthropology of Marxism, chap. 4; and Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, preface.
15. Robinson, The Terms of Order, xxiv–xxx.
16. Robinson, Black Marxism, 307.
17. What Robinson intends by the notion of reference is considerably broader than its colloquial meaning: “The total institutions of Western society: disciplines, modern political parties, State bureaucracies and the scientific establishment, are not merely the germinal arenas for these metaphysics but their reference as well—the analogy of their subsequent application.” The Terms of Order, 129 (emphasis added).
18. Toni Cade Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” in Bambara, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon, 1996), 255.
19. Robinson, Black Movements in America, 134.
20. See also Michael Taussig on the case of Roger Casement in Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
21. Karl Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1859), in Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Lucio Colletti (London: Penguin, 1975), 425.
22. Cedric J. Robinson and Elizabeth P. Robinson, preface to Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, eds., Futures of Black Radicalism (New York: Verso, 2017), 7.
23. Herbert Marcuse, “Philosophy and Critical Theory” (1937), in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: Free Association, 1988), 143. Angela Y. Davis brought this passage to my attention many years ago. See also Marcuse, “The End of Utopia.”
24. Marcuse, “Philosophy and Critical Theory,” 143. The phrase “breeder of illusions and … disillusions” is from Immanuel Wallerstein, Utopistics: or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century (New York: New Press, 1998), 1.
25. I am thinking here not only of what Toni Morrison has taken the beloved to mean, but also how A. Sivinandan delicately locates it in the interstices of home-based political education and anticolonial struggle in his magnificent novel When Memory Dies (London: Arcadia, 1997).
26. Marisela Marquez, executive director of associated students at the University of California Santa Barbara, read from this letter at the memorial service for Robinson held on June 16, 2016, in Santa Barbara.
27. This is Robinson’s description of the black radical tradition in Black Marxism, xxx.
28. Cedric J. Robinson, “Manichaeism and Multiculturalism,” in Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield, eds., Mapping Multiculturalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 122.
29. Cedric Robinson, introduction to Richard Wright, White Man, Listen! (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995), xx.
1. The proletariat was originally the term used to designate the large class of poor, free citizens of the early Roman empire. Cf. Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). According to Herman E. Daly, “The literal Latin meaning of ‘proletariat’ is ‘those with many offspring,’” and the full ancient Roman sense of the word is “the lowest class of a people, whose members, poor and exempt from taxes, were useful to the republic only for the procreation of children.” “A Marxian-Malthusian View of Poverty and Development,” Population Studies 25 (1971): 25.
2. William Reddy, Money and Liberty in Modern Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 26; for E. P. Thompson see his The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966).
3. Reddy, Money and Liberty in Modern Europe, 27. Cf. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); George Taylor, “Noncapitalist Wealth and the Origins of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review 72 (1967): 469–96; and Colin Lucas, “Nobles, Bourgeois and the Origins of the French Revolution,” Past and Present 60 (1973): 84–126.
4. Cf. Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978). Terrell Carver has persuasively argued that Engels borrowed this schema from Moses Hess’s The Triarchy of Europe. Cf. Carver, “Engels and the French Revolution,” paper presented at the American Political Science Association meetings, Atlanta, September 1989.
5. Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” 622.
6. Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (New York: Praeger, 1973), 245. This was, of course, not precisely the case even in Engels’s own lifetime. For accounts of Engels’s difficulties with alternative interpreters of Marxism, see Paul Kellogg, “Engels and the Roots of ‘Revisionism,’” Science & Society 55, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 158–74. Engels, of course, had a considerable advantage: not only was he Marx’s co-author (and sometimes actual stand-in), but he had often served as a publicist-reviewer of Marx’s published works (Engels, for example, anonymously published seven reviews of the first volume of Capital in English and German periodicals). Terrell Carver, Engels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 40–41. For a critique of Lichtheim’s treatment of Engels, see Alvin W. Gouldner, The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 250ff.
7. John Kautsky, “Karl Kautsky’s Materialist Conception of History,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 30, nos. 1–2 (1989): 80–92.
8. V. I. Lenin, “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” in Lenin: Selected Works, vol. 1 (New York: International, 1967), 41. George Lichtheim, one of the legion of writers who (sometimes reluctantly) have reiterated Engels’s formula for the analysis of Marx’s thought, asserted: “Our starting-point is not ‘dialectical materialism,’ or some such abstraction, but the French Revolution and its impact on Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century; along with the industrial revolution and its repercussions in the theoretical sphere, i.e., among the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century British and French writers who were then engaged in working out the analytical tools appropriate to the study of the new society” (Lichtheim, Marxism, xviii). This is clearly a paraphrase of Engels and Lenin. For a non-Marxian instance, see Albert S. Lindemann, A History of European Socialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 87ff.
9. V. I. Lenin, “Karl Marx,” in Lenin: Selected Works, 1:7.
10. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: International, 1970), 21.
11. E. J. Hobsbawm observes: “The economist of the 1780s would read Adam Smith, but also—and perhaps more profitably—the French physiocrats and national income accountants, Quesnay, Turgot, Dupont de Nemours, Lavoisier, and perhaps an Italian or two.” The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962), 47.
12. A. V. Anikin, A Science in Its Youth (New York: International, 1979), 8. Of course, a much earlier treatment of an economy as a natural system could be found in Aristotle’s The Politics, book 1.
13. For Marx’s consideration of Petty, see Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy; and for Petty and Franklin, Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International, 1987), 57n1.
14. Anikin, A Science in Its Youth, 55.
15. Frank Swetz, Capitalism and Arithmetic: The New Math of the 15th Century (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1987), 10ff.
16. Ibid., 234ff.
17. Technically, of course, this arithmetic had as its preconditions the introduction in twelfth-century Spain of the Hindu-Arabic system of numeration and computation through the Latin translation of al-Khwarizmi (c. 825). Ibid., 27–28.
18. John Mbiti maintains of traditional African cosmology: “Time is a two-dimensional phenomenon, with a long past, a present and virtually no future. The linear concept of time in western thought, with an indefinite past, present and infinite future, is practically foreign to African thinking.” African Religions and Philosophy (London: Heinemann, 1969), 17.
19. The early Greeks, for instance, anticipated our belief in a linear historical order but with a difference. Hesiod (Works and Days), for one, reversed our historical order: the perfect age, the Golden Age, came first; all subsequent history (the Age of Silver, the Ages of Iron and Bronze) was progressive deterioration marked by human degradation. Plato, in his Republic, echoed Hesiod. Among others, primarily peasant agrarian societies, history has often been conceptualized as a cyclical order.
20. Robert Nisbet, Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 71.
21. C. K. Barrett, ed., The New Testament Background: Selected Documents (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 316.
22. See Gouldner’s discussion of millenarianism and Marxism in The Two Marxisms, chap. 5.
23. Robert Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 34. As we shall see later, Kant’s dichotomy between the empirical (the “is”) and transcendent (the “ought”) anticipated by two centuries Freud’s later claim in Civilization and Its Discontents that civilization requires repression and therefore is coterminous with neurosis.
24. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth, 50.
25. Quote from John O’Malley’s introduction to Karl Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” ed. John O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), xxix.
26. Eric J. Hobsbawm, “Marx, Engels, and Pre-Marxian Socialism,” in E. J. Hobsbawm, ed., The History of Marxism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 6.
27. For biographical details on Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Owen, see Lindemann, A History of European Socialism.
28. Hobsbawm, “Marx, Engels, and Pre-Marxian Socialism,” 11.
29. Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” 689.
30. Ibid. The “noise” to which Engels refers continued into the twentieth century among Marxists. Lenin’s State and Revolution (1917) was much concerned with the controversy pertaining to the abolition of the state, and seems to have authoritatively resolved the issue. Lenin determined that what Marx maintained was that the abolition of the state was a process which first required the advent of a proletarian state.
31. Ibid., 690.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. See Marx’s “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Tucker, Philosophy and Myth, 62ff.
35. Three such instances in Marx’s writing concerning the historical identity and development of the proletariat are most glaring: in his Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” Marx refers to the proletariat as the “passive element” of radical philosophy (criticism); in The Holy Family he trivializes the voluntaristic impulses of the proletariat by declaring “It is not a matter of what this or that proletarian or even the proletariat as a whole pictures at present as its goal. It is a matter of what the proletariat is in actuality”; and in “The Manifesto of the Communist Party,” it was probably Marx who suggested that the formation of the proletariat was by a bourgeoisie acting as a sorcerer. While these are some of his earlier writings, each of these assertions raises serious issue with how Marx, even the mature Marx, understood the relationship between the proletariat and the radical intelligentsia, and the notion of the proletariat’s revolutionary role in history.
36. Marx, The German Ideology, in Ronald Meek, Studies in the Labour Theory of Value (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1973), 164.
37. Ibid., 154.
38. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International, 1987), 703. Though Marx acknowledged that capitalist production had appeared earlier in “certain towns of the Mediterranean” in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, he insisted that “the capitalistic era dates from the sixteenth century.” Ibid., 1:669.
39. “The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed.” Marx and Engels, “The Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, 476.
40. Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 106.
41. Gilbert Allardyce, “The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course,” American Historical Review 87, no. 3 (June 1982): 699.
42. Karl Kautsky, Thomas More and His Utopia (New York: Russell & Russell, 1959), 249.
43. Ibid., 1.
44. Thomas Müntzer was disqualified, in part because of the contrasting economic and intellectual conditions in Germany and England. Kautsky wrote of Germany: “The rudeness, the barbarism, the boorishness into which Germany sank to an increasing extent after the sixteenth century … rendered the maintenance of science in Germany possible only by its being completely divorced from active life” (ibid., 164). But of England, “Nowhere else in Europe … were the unfavorable reactions of the capitalist mode of production upon the working classes so immediately obvious as in England; nowhere did the unhappy workers clamor so urgently for assistance” (ibid., 168).
45. Ibid., 171.
46. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, 23.
47. Monty Johnstone, “Marx and Engels and the Concept of the Party,” in Ralph Miliband and John Saville, eds., The Socialist Register (London: Merlin, 1967), 130.
48. Quote from Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution in Gouldner, The Two Marxisms, 137.
49. J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London: Unwin University, 1965), 344. For the other socialist movements in the United States and Europe, see ibid., 341ff.
50. At the end of the eleventh century, for example, slaves represented some 9 percent of the population. Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free (London: Methuen, 1982), 57. This proportion in the labor force would continue to expand as Mediterranean Europe became enmeshed in long-distance trade largely dependent upon slave production. From the eleventh century, wars and crusades substantially reduced the percentages of men in Europe’s population. As such, women of all estates, peasant, bourgeois, noble, became more influential as economic and intellectual forces. See Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror (New York: Ballantine, 1978), passim.
51. See Nancy C. M. Hartsock, Money, Sex and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983); and Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism (London: Zed, 1983).
1. Norman Cohn, “Medieval Millenarism: Its Bearing on the Comparative Study of Millenarian Movements,” in Sylvia Thrupp, ed., Millennial Dreams in Action (New York: Schocken, 1970), 33.
2. Frederick Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (New York: International, 1966), 308.
3. In Christianity, for instance, the appearance of things as property or potential possessions precipitates the alienation of mankind from its creator. The Tree of Knowledge is a possession of God’s which Adam and Eve violate; the penalties are the alienation from the company of the garden and mortality.
4. A. E. Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1961), 212.
5. Aristotle, Metaphysics 983b, 6–11. See also Frank Leslie Vatai, Intellectuals in Politics in the Greek World: From Early Times to the Hellenistic Age (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 30–42; and Gregory Vlastos, “Slavery in Plato’s Thought,” in Vlastos, Platonic Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). The idealist tradition, with which later philosophers sought to displace materialism, included the works of Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato. It derived its designation as “Italian” from the fact that Pythagoras, originally from the island of Samos in the Eastern Mediterranean, immigrated to Croton, Sicily, to found his school.
6. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 968a I.
7. George Thomson, The First Philosophers (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1955), 159. Thomson (following on F. J. Cornford) reconstructed the narrative elements of primitive Greek myths—a primordial “undifferentiated mass” which eventually experiences strife due to a conflict of opposition—which appear in Anaximander’s cosmology from epic literature (e.g., the Hesiodic Theogony).
8. Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1987), 18–22. Stephen Mason further comments on the role of ideology among the Ionian naturalists: “The notion that there was a principle of retribution in natural processes was derived by analogy from the customs of human society in which the practice of vengeance preceded that of the due process of law. Thus the early meaning of the Greek word for cause, ‘aitia,’ was guilt. Such a notion was replaced ultimately by the conception that nature, like human society, was governed by laws.” A History of the Sciences (New York: Collier, 1962), 27–28.
9. “According to tradition, Greek philosophy began in 585 BC and ended in AD 529. It began when Thales of Miletus, the first Greek philosopher, predicted an eclipse of the sun. It ended when the Christian Emperor Justinian forbade the teaching of pagan philosophy in the University of Athens.” Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy, 9. Nearly three hundred more years would pass before the invention of Europe in the ninth century. Cf. Denis de Rougemont, The Idea of Europe (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 47–49; and Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism (London: Zed, 1983), 10ff.
10. Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 15–16. For a dramatic substantiation of the divinity of European kings, see the detailed description of the execution of the failed regicide of Damiens in Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 3–5.
11. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: International, 1970), 20–21.
12. S. H. Rigby, “Historical Causation: Is One Thing More Important than Another?” History 80, no. 259 (June 1995): 228.
13. Ibid. Rigby is quoting from R. Lovell’s Pictures of Reality.
14. The Grundrisse, in Robert C. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 4–5.
15. Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 34.
16. Ibid., 126.
17. Citation in ibid., from the 1806 edition of Millar’s The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 2–4.
18. Cf. Marx’s Grundrisse in Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, 229.
19. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, 128.
20. Ibid., 228.
21. Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History (London: Penguin, 1978), 21.
22. Ibid., 21–22.
23. C. Warren Hollister, Medieval Europe: A Short History (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974), 121–22.
24. Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 19.
25. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 3, The Perspective of the World (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 99.
26. Little, Religious Poverty, 8–9.
27. H. Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe (London: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), 72. The surviving long-distance commerce was dominated by the slave trade: “In the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries Western Europe had little to offer foreign traders except slaves, yet its privileged classes craved the luxuries and exotic goods which could be bought in the East.” Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997), 43.
28. Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe, 100.
29. The harsher characterization of Charlemagne is from Little’s biographical article in Microsoft’s Encarta ’95. In Religious Poverty, Little wrote: “All the characteristic traits of Germanic leaders, from the pillaging of the weak to the endowing of monasteries, are epitomized by Charlemagne (ca. 742–814). But the historical importance of his reign is less his traditional behavior than his attempts to have the Frankish crown take up what he saw to be some of the responsibilities of the Roman state” (6).
30. Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe, 88–89.
31. Walter Ullmann, Medieval Political Thought (London: Penguin, 1975), 68–69.
32. Ibid., 70.
33. “Byzantium preserved inviolate the secret of its political longevity and bureaucratic stability, and remained the lonely and intolerant guardian of a political and intellectual order which had elsewhere been destroyed. Western Europe was not at home with its past, had not identified itself with its past, as Byzantium had done; but this Byzantine sense of being one with the past shut out all the more rigorously those who had strayed away from or had never known this past. Byzantium in western eyes aroused wonder, envy, hatred, and malice, and a sense of perplexity at the difficulties which were raised by all attempts at reunion; but it did not arouse respect or encourage understanding.” R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 36.
34. Duby, The Three Orders, 14–15.
35. Ibid., 15.
36. Ullmann, Medieval Political Thought, 80ff and 23ff.
37. Earlier, in what would prove a futile gesture Charlemagne had opposed the sale of Christian slaves to Muslim infidels and heretics. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, however, with “renewed clashes with Islam in Spain and the Levant,” the Church appropriated Charlemagne’s position to negate the Muslim strategy of inciting slave revolts in Christendom, and to secure more constant loyalty to the Church among the servile population. Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 43–44.
38. Braudel, The Perspective of the World, 3:98–105; Oliver C. Cox, The Foundations of Capitalism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959).
39. Braudel, The Perspective of the World, 3:99.
40. Alexander Fuks discusses “quasi-capitalism” in “Patterns and Types of Socio-Economic Revolution in Greece from the Fourth to the Second Century B.C.,” Ancient Society 5 (1974): 54; and see the discussion of Aristotle in chap. 4 below.
41. G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 300ff and 340.
42. De Ste. Croix maintains “Rome’s port Ostia … stands out as perhaps the one Western city in which far more wealth came to the local notables from commerce than from land. … The leading ‘commercial city’ of the whole empire, Alexandria, undoubtedly had some rich merchants among its citizens. … In the east, the one certain example of a city which must surely have had a governing class consisting at least partly of merchants is Palmyra, which was of no great importance until well into the last century B.C., but then grew rapidly into a prosperous commercial city.” Ibid., 128–29. See also James Q. Whitman, “The Moral Menace of Roman Law and the Making of Commerce: Some Dutch Evidence,” Yale Law Journal 105, no. 7 (May 1996): 1841–89.
43. Janet Abu-Lughod proposed that the “pre-modern” world system of the thirteenth century consisted of four core areas: the Middle East, Central Asia and China, the Indian Ocean powers, and the Western Mediterranean city-states/Western European towns. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Elsewhere she writes: “Despite so promising a beginning, this incipient world-system began to unravel after the middle of the fourteenth century and, by the late fifteenth century, only small portions retained their former vigor. While historians have traditionally focused on local events to account for discrete declines, my analysis points to a set of causally-linked or ‘systemic’ forces set into motion by the Black Death … with commercially-linked core cities losing a third to a half of their populations within a few years. … Recovery in Europe shifted local power northward (away from Italy to formerly peripheral zones such as England).” Abu-Lughod, “Restructuring the Premodern World-System,” Review 13, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 276–77.
44. Michael Goodich, “The Politics of Canonization in the Thirteenth Century: Lay and Mendicant Saints,” Church History 44, no. 3 (1975): 295.
45. Little, Religious Poverty, 30.
46. The phrase is Alexander Murray’s characterization of the clergy; see his “What the Dwarfs Saw,” Times Literary Supplement, March 8, 1996, 3.
47. Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free (London: Methuen, 1973), 51–52.
48. According to Lester Little, in Italy, Milan and Venice had obtained populations around 100,000, with Florence, Genoa, Rome, and Bologna in the 50,000–75,000 range; in France, Paris had close to 100,000 by the mid-fourteenth century, followed by Narbonne (30,000) and Toulouse (25,000); in Spain, Barcelona, Cordova, and Seville each exceeded 35,000; in Germany, Cologne could boast 50,000; in the Low Countries, Ghent claimed 55,000, with Bruges and Brussels “close behind”; and in England, London (50,000) was followed by York and Bristol (each around 15,000). Religious Poverty, 22–23.
49. Ibid., 10–11.
50. “In the 1070s Pope Gregory VII referred to the many Italian merchants who went to France. … In 1127 there were ‘Lombards’ at Ypres. … There were Milanese merchants at the fairs by 1172, while during the thirteenth century this steady parade of Italians to northern Europe included a greater proportion of Tuscans.” Ibid., 12.
51. Ibid., 17.
52. Michel Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 62. The paragraph is a summary of ibid., 59ff.
53. Ibid., 57.
54. Ibid., 53.
55. Henry Treece, The Crusades (New York: Mentor, 1962), 88–93.
56. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 98.
57. Marcus Bull, “The Pilgrimage Origins of the First Crusade,” History Today, March 1997, 11.
58. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 76ff.
59. Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages, 82.
60. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1974), 24.
61. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 106–7.
62. Little, Religious Poverty, 110.
63. Ibid., 111.
64. R. I. Moore, The Birth of Popular Heresy (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1995), chap. 2.
65. Quoted by William Stearns Davis, Life on a Mediaeval Barony (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923), 271.
66. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 78–83.
67. Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages, 125–26.
68. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 112.
69. Ibid., 130.
70. R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 4, 8. In addition to Orléans (1022) and Milan (1028), Herbert Grundmann cites the interrogation of heretics at Arras in 1025. Religious Movements in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995 [orig. 1935]), 214.
71. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, 6–7.
72. Henry Treece maintains that 30,000 French children joined the 12-year-old Stephen of Cloyes, and thousands of them reached Algeria and Egypt—as slaves. Only one returned from the crusade. Among the slightly smaller number (20,000) of children crusaders who followed the German lad Nicholas to Genoa and then Rome, some 2,000 returned to their homes; others were enslaved by their Christian brethren. The Crusades, 182–85.
73. Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages, 187.
74. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 101.
75. David L. Jeffrey observes: “At first the heresies were largely non-doctrinal—that is, they were expressions of anti-clericalism and spiritual zealotism … [eventually] a real divergence of doctrinal positions did develop.” “Franciscan Spirituality and the Growth of Vernacular Culture,” in David L. Jeffrey, ed., By Things Seen (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1979), 144.
76. Jonathan Sumption, The Albigensian Crusade (London: Faber & Faber, 1978), 36.
77. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, 14. Plato’s most poetic renunciation of the physical and sensual on behalf of the soul is contained in his Phaedo.
78. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, 18.
79. Barbara Tuchman has commented on the medieval practical of mixing magic, mystery, and power: “The year was considered to begin at Easter and since this could fall any time between March 21 and April 22, a fixed date of March 25 was generally preferred … which leaves the year to which events of January, February, and March belong in the fourteenth century a running enigma—further complicated by use of the regnal year (dating from the reigning King’s accession) in official English documents of the fourteenth century and use of the papal year in certain other cases. Moreover, chroniclers did not date an event by the day of the month but by the religious calendar—speaking, for example, of two days before the Nativity of the Virgin, or the Monday after Epiphany, or St. John the Baptist’s Day, or the third Sunday in Lent.” A Distant Mirror (New York: Ballantine, 1979), xv.
80. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, 13.
81. Moore, The Birth of Popular Heresy, 2. Mani, a Persian noble, undertook his preaching mission throughout the Persian Empire and India around 242, when he was approximately 26 years old. He believed his revelation had called upon him to reconcile the teachings of Zoroaster, Buddha, and Christ. He was executed for heresy because of his doctrine of absolute dualism, the primal conflict between the gods of lightness and darkness. Augustine had been a Manichee for some nine years before he became an avowed anti-heretic. In the tenth century, Manichaeism reappeared, in Bulgaria, in the teachings of Bogomil. Bogomilism was first reported in the West in the mid-twelfth century. Jeffrey Richards, Sex, Dissidence, and Damnation (London: Routledge, 1990), 49ff.
82. Sumption, The Albigensian Crusade, 48.
83. See Edward Grant, “Celestial Matter: A Medieval and Galilean Cosmological Problem,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13, no. 2 (Fall 1982): 157–86.
84. Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 494–510.
85. Sumption, The Albigensian Crusade, 39; and Wakefield and Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages, 24–26.
86. “The chiliasm of the sectaries is always a mark of democratic claims and deep discontent; whenever it appears it betokens hatred of a secularized church and a foreign and selfish authority.” F. W. Bussell, Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages (London: Scott, 1918), 779.
87. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 97ff.
88. Berard Marthaler, “Forerunners of the Franciscans: The Waldenses,” Franciscan Studies 18 (1958): 133–42.
89. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thirteenth Century,” Women Studies 2 (1984): 179–214.
90. Jo Ann McNamara, “De Quibusdam Mulieribus: Reading Women’s History from Hostile Sources,” in Joel T. Rosenthal, Medieval Women and the Sources of Medieval History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 248.
91. Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, ed., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 276–90.
92. Bynum, “Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion,” 200–201.
93. Ibid., 194–95.
94. Caroline Bynum, “The Mysticism and Asceticism of Medieval Women,” in Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption (New York: Zone, 1992), 57.
95. John Coakley, “Gender and the Authority of Friars: The Significance of Holy Women for Thirteenth-Century Franciscans and Dominicans,” Church History 60, no. 4 (December 1991): 452, 450.
96. Caroline Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” in Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 195–96. Elsewhere, Bynum has asserted concerning medieval female emotionalism: “All but two documented cases of full and visible stigmata are female … and women account for all but two or three cases of what [Rudolph] Bell calls ‘holy anorexia’ (a self-starvation which is a kind of psychosomatic manipulation).” “The Mysticism and Asceticism of Medieval Women,” 56.
97. C. H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism (London: Longman, 1989), 216ff. Because these upper-class women and their male counterparts are largely the subjects of the research conducted by Caroline Bynum and Herbert Grundmann, both Bynum and Grundmann reject “Marxist” interpretations of the Poverty Movement. Bynum maintains: “As Herbert Grundmann pointed out many years ago, the Marxists were wrong to see medieval notions of the ‘poor of Christ’ as the revolt of either the economically disadvantaged or of the women; voluntary poverty can be a religious response only to those with some wealth to renounce.” “Women’s Stories, Women’s Symbols,” in Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 50. In the mid-1930s, Grundmann insisted: “Yet there is never anything in the heretic doctrines in favor of the social or economic demands of the lower classes, never a slogan of ‘class struggle.’ That ‘cursed gain’ and ‘ill-gotten goods’ were reprehensible was only more bluntly stressed and more seriously accepted by Arnold of Brescia, Waldes, and the others than by the ecclesiastical ban on usury and interest.” Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, 233.
98. Little, Religious Poverty, 131ff.
99. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, 103.
100. Ibid., 102. Some Beguine communities were suspected of sexual improprieties because of their practice of begging. There, too, was the “erotic imagery” of Hadewijch of Nivelles’s “bridal” mysticism. See Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism, 234–35. Medieval female prostitution was well “established.” Ruth Mazo Karras in her survey of research some years ago concludes: “Municipal authorities all over Europe recognized the social value of prostitution but tried to keep it as unobtrusive as possible, placing it under strict control without abolishing it totally. In many parts of medieval and early modern Europe this meant establishing licensed, or even municipally owned, brothels or official red-light districts. … Recent scholarship on municipal or municipally regulated brothels in Florence, Seville, Dijon, Augsburg, and the towns of Languedoc in the medieval and early modern periods agrees that regulated brothels were seen as a foundation of the social order, preventing homosexuality, rape, and seduction. They could also be important sources of income for the town itself or, in the case of licensed brothels, for wealthy individuals or institutions within the town.” “The Regulation of Brothels in Later Medieval England,” Signs 14, no. 2 (1989): 401; and Richards, Sex, Dissidence, and Damnation, 116ff.
101. Little, Religious Poverty, 144.
102. Fiona Robb, “The Fourth Lateran Council’s Definition of Trinitarian Orthodoxy,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 48, no. 1 (January 1997): 22–43.
103. Bernard McGinn, “The Abbot and the Doctors: Scholastic Reactions to the Radical Eschatology of Joachim of Fiore,” Church History 40, no. 1 (March 1971): 30–47.
104. Decima Douie, The Nature and the Effect of the Heresy of the Fraticelli (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1932), 6.
105. Douie describes the split thusly: “We find two parties growing up among the Franciscans even during the Saint’s lifetime—that of the Ministers or Superiors of the Order, headed by Elias, who desired some mitigation of the strictness of the rule of poverty, and a remodeling of the Order more on the lines of the Black Friars, and another, composed of certain of St. Francis’ most intimate companions, men generally drawn more to the contemplative life, who wished to adhere as closely as possible to the strictness and simplicity of the original manner of life. These two bodies were the forerunners of the two later parties, the Conventuals, and the Spirituals or Zealots.” Ibid., 2.
106. The Beguines of Provence were a Joachimite order of both sexes, and were not connected with the communities of holy women. Ibid., 248–58.
107. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 105; and McGinn, “The Abbot and the Doctors,” 34.
108. As Petroff recounts, Ubertino, at the age of forty, had been brought into the Spiritual Franciscan party by Angela. (Ubertino himself had written: “She restored, even a thousand-fold, all the gifts of my soul that I had lost through my sinfulness.”) Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, 237. Charles T. Davis, in his detailed treatment of Ubertino’s writings, indicates that Ubertino had incorporated Olivi’s apocalypsism in his 1305 work, Arbor vite crucifixe Jesu. Nevertheless, Ubertino had disagreed with Olivi regarding the papal privileges which absolved the Franciscan Order from the literal observance of poverty. While Olivi temporized, “Ubertino ultimately condemned the whole system.” With the accession of John XXII to the papacy in 1314, Ubertino reluctantly accepted the protection of Cardinal Napoleone Orsini and his transfer to the Benedictine Order, and was employed by Orsini “on diplomatic business, even in matter involving the Pope.” Notwithstanding, Ubertino was queried during the 1322 poverty debate; and his response, De altissima paupertate, is said by some to have precipitated his flight from Avignon in 1325, and perhaps his eventual execution. Cf. Charles T. Davis, “Ubertino da Casale and His Conception of ‘altissima papertas,’” Studi Medievali 17, no. 1 (1981): 1–56; and Theresa Coletti, Naming the Rose: Eco, Medieval Signs, and Modern Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 85.
109. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 109.
110. The words are those of Eco’s protagonist, William of Baskerville. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 119. For Eco’s historical authority, see Coletti, Naming the Rose, 4–9.
111. “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 1 (New York: International, 1975), 232.
112. Norman Cohn, “Medieval Millenarism,” 35.
113. Ibid., 37–38. “The fourteenth century was punctuated by desperate, sometimes terrible, peasant revolts. The peasants revolted in western Flanders from 1323 to 1328. In 1357 they revolted in France: it was the famous Jacquerie, which gave its name to all other purely peasant risings. In 1381 they revolted in England: it was the great Peasants’ Revolt of Wat Tylor and Jack Straw whose names remained bogeys to alarm the gentry in the seventeenth century.” Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe, 172. See also Roland Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth-Century France, Russia and China (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).
114. V. G. Kiernan may have had this in mind when he cautioned: “Marxists may have to ask whether they have turned their backs too decidedly in the past on the fact that socialism itself is in many ways the offspring of Christianity.” Kiernan, “Christianity,” in Tom Bottomore, Laurence Harris, V. G. Kiernan, and Ralph Miliband, eds., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 71.
115. Norman Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 89. Cohn has considerably revised his work for the 1970 version, replacing some of the more harsh attacks on Marxism.
116. Ibid., 89–91.
117. See Carolly Erickson, “The Fourteenth-Century Franciscans and Their Critics,” Franciscan Studies 36 (1976): 108–47.
118. David Jeffrey writes of “the emergent role of Franciscan spirituality, a great motive force in the transmission of late medieval popular culture.” Jeffrey, “Franciscan Spirituality,” 143. For examples of popular thought see Walter L. Wakefield, “Some Unorthodox Popular Ideas of the Thirteenth Century,” Medievalia et Humanistica 4 (1973): 25–35; and Austin P. Evans, “Hunting Subversion in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 33, no. 1 (January 1958): 22.
119. Rev. Theodore Anthony Zaremba, Franciscan Social Reform (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1947), 60–61. The Franciscans claimed to have amassed 3,000 friars by 1221 and 5,000 by the next year. Fr. Lazaro Iriarte, Franciscan History (Chicago: Franciscan Herald, 1982), 15.
120. According to Douie, this included the collection of property, money, and habits, as well as furnishings such as pictures, stained glass windows, and reredoses. Douie, The Nature and the Effect of the Heresy of the Fraticelli, 10.
121. Iriarte, Franciscan History, 130–31.
122. See chap. 4 and Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1, The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
123. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1:10–12.
124. John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 108ff.
125. “Curiously enough, given latter-day developments, the nearest historical parallel to the Jesuitism of Inigo de Loyola is to be found in the Leninism of Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov.” Malachi Martin, The Jesuits (New York: Linden, 1987), 182. The Jesuits, founded in the sixteenth century, pursued a form of communism into the late eighteenth century, particularly in their Latin American missions. The order was abolished in 1773 (and suppressed everywhere except in Russia and Prussia), only to be reinstituted at the beginning of the nineteenth century (1814). Cf. ibid., 216ff; and the Reverends Francis Xavier Talbot and Edward A. Tyan, “Jesus, Society of,” Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 12, 1965.
126. Magnus Morner, ed., The Expulsion of the Jesuits from Latin America (New York: Knopf, 1965), 9.
127. A. Lynn Martin, “The Jesuit Mystique,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 4, no. 1 (April 1973): 32, 35.
128. Quoted by James Schofield Saeger, “The Mission and Historical Missions: Film and the Writing of History,” The Americas 51, no. 3 (January 1995): 396.
129. Ibid., 406; Morner, The Expulsion of the Jesuits from Latin America, 13–14.
130. Morner, The Expulsion of the Jesuits from Latin America, 14.
131. See Ian Todd and Michael Wheeler, Utopia (New York: Harmony, 1978).
132. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws … ; G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), 81–82.
133. Magnus Morner, The Political and Economic Activities of the Jesuits in the La Plata Region: The Hapsburg Era (Stockholm: Library and Institute of Ibero-American Studies, 1953), 194–95.
134. Ibid.
135. Robert Southey, “The Guarani Missions—The Despotic Welfare State,” in Morner, The Expulsion of the Jesuits from Latin America, 57.
136. “Officially they acted only as chaplains, but in reality their authority over the Indians was unlimited in war and peace alike.” Morner, The Expulsion of the Jesuits from Latin America, 14.
137. Morner, The Political and Economic Activities of the Jesuits, 213.
138. The motives behind the expulsions and subsequent disbanding of the Jesuits (1773–1814) are multiple and disputed. They include the visibility of the Jesuits in the international political conflicts and internal politics of Spain; the perceived (and thought sinister) Jesuitical dominance of education in Spain and the New World; personal hatred of the Jesuits among eminent political personages in Portugal and Spain; the rumors of a Jesuit conspiracy to rule the world; doctrinal and intellectual support by Jesuits of anti-imperialist and nationalist sentiments in the Spanish New World; Jesuit support of New World natives against slavery; and even Jesuit teachings supporting democracy. Morner, The Expulsion of the Jesuits from Latin America, 19ff. There was, too, the rather immense wealth the Jesuits had accumulated as bankers in Europe, and “protectors” of peoples like the Guarani. Saeger reports that the seven Guarani missions to be transferred to the Portuguese in 1750 possessed lands, livestock, and buildings worth 7–16 million pesos; in 1754, the seven possessed 600,000 cattle and 500,000 horses; and in 1768, the Guarani possessed “700,000 cows, over 240,000 sheep, 73,850 mares and horses, 15,235 mules, and 8,063 asses.” Saeger, “The Mission and Historical Missions,” 399, 404, 404n43.
139. See note 121. From the medieval to the modern period, the histories of these orders are replete with cycles of dissident zeal and vigor, leading inevitably to confrontation with ecclesiastical authority, followed by submission and reformist schisms. From the fourteenth century, the Franciscans metamorphosed into the Spirituals/Fraticelli and Conventuals; the Observants in the fifteenth century; and the radical Capuchins of the sixteenth century. Cf. Rev. Michael David Knowles, “Franciscans,” Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 9, 1965.
140. For a useful treatment of medieval women, radical sects, and revolutionary movements, see Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages (New York: Methuen, 1983); and Cohn’s comments in “Medieval Millenaries.”
1. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: Mentor, 1962), 85.
2. John Edward Toews, Hegelianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 16. Michel Foucault has invented the concept of the episteme to describe “what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory.” “What Is Enlightenment?” in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 45.
3. According to J. V. Polisensky, “The Thirty Years’ War and the Crises and Revolutions of Seventeenth-Century Europe,” Past and Present 39 (1968): 35.
4. Christopher Friedrichs has written, “The debate between what has been called the ‘earlier decline’ and ‘disastrous war’ schools of thought has raged for many years. But the ‘earlier decline’ theory seems to be gaining ground, since German developments are increasingly placed in a pan-European context: it is now recognized that the seventeenth century represented a period of overall economic contraction in Europe after the boom years of the sixteenth century.” “The War and German Society,” in Geoffrey Parker, ed., The Thirty Years’ War (London: Routledge, 1997), 191.
5. Sheilagh C. Ogilvie, “Germany and the Seventeenth-Century Crisis,” Historical Journal 35, no. 2 (June 1992): 417–41.
6. Geoffrey Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), 413–14.
7. In the eighteenth century, the anarchy of the Germanies or “The Holy Roman Empire,” as they were known, was even more severe: “The Empire must be said to have consisted of 1,800 territories, ranging in size from quite large states, such as Austria, Bohemia, Bavaria, Brandenburg, Saxony, and Hanover, to tiny estates of only a few miles or less.” John Gagliardo, Reich and Nation: The Holy Roman Empire as Idea and Reality, 1763–1806 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 4–5.
8. Gagliardo distinguishes four types of territories: the ecclesiastical principalities, ruled by “prince-prelates of the German Catholic Church”; the secular principalities, whose rulers were the high nobility with titles “ranging from king … through duke, count, landgrave, margrave, and so on, down to simply ‘prince’”; the fifty-one imperial cities governed by “patrician oligarchies”; and the territories ruled by imperial counts and knights. Ibid., 5–15. Heinrich Heine, another German Jew who converted to Christianity (in 1825), and who wrote for Marx’s Forward, had anticipated Marx’s characterization of Germany in his own 1834–35 essay, “On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany.”
9. Gagliardo, Reich and Nation, 50.
10. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 23.
11. J. V. Polisensky, The Thirty Years’ War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 258. Cited by Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II.
12. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II, 24.
13. Cf. Henry Kamen, “The Economic and Social Consequences of the Thirty Years’ War,” Past and Present 39 (1968): 44–61; Gary Nichols, “The Economic Impact of the Thirty Years’ War in Habsburg Austria,” East European Quarterly 23, no. 3 (September 1989): 257–68. For some indication of the expansion of taxes, Nichols reports, “In 1624, a tax was levied on sweet and sour wines, beer, and brandy, followed by the chimney tax and a tax on guests staying overnight in inns. Meat was taxed in 1630, and coaches, horses, boats, shoes, slippers, skins of all kinds, wax, honey, silk wares, jewels, horse rentals, cheese, wood, floors and grounds, cultivated and uncultivated vineyards, shoe shops, and land were all taxed in 1645.” Nichols, “The Economic Impact of the Thirty Years’ War,” 258.
14. Kamen, “The Economic and Social Consequences of the Thirty Years’ War,” 48, 50.
15. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II, 32.
16. Ogilvie, “Germany and the Seventeenth-Century Crisis,” 421.
17. Ibid., 421–34.
18. Ibid., 441.
19. “The acquisition of Silesia [from Austria in 1748] by Prussia was thus a major event, aiding substantially the industrialization of the nineteenth century. It had been made possible by the creation of a Prussian army and state plus the needs of the English (and Dutch) to check Sweden and then frustrate Austria.” Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II, 236. Wallerstein stipulates that in the late seventeenth century, Sweden was the fourth significant military power in Europe. Ibid., 79. See also Gagliardo, Reich and Nation, chap. 5.
20. “The whole period from the Thirty Years’ War until the end of the Napoleonic era was an age of mercantilism (cameralism) in all the Germanies, indeed in all of central Europe.” Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II, 233.
21. Charles Moraze, The Triumph of the Middle Classes (New York: Anchor, 1968), 20.
22. Cf. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 3, The Perspective of the World (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 548ff.
23. See W. H. Bruford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century: The Social Background of the Literary Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), chap. 2.
24. Ogilvie, “Germany and the Seventeenth-Century Crisis,” 422.
25. See Braudel, The Perspective of the World, 3:175; and Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 28.
26. Peter Taylor, “Military System and Rural Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Hesse-Cassel,” Journal of Social History 25, no. 3 (Spring 1992): 482, 486.
27. Moraze, The Triumph of the Middle Classes, 21.
28. One evidence of the support of universities from above is the paradox that the number of universities expanded in the eighteenth century while student enrollments declined. At the beginning of the century, twenty-eight German universities (outside of Austria) enrolled 9,000 students (the largest enrollments were at Cologne, Leipzig, Wittenberg, and Halle); by midcentury, three new universities were established but enrollments were down to slightly more than 7,000. The universities at Cologne, Trier, and Strasbourg closed down in the 1790s. Charles McClelland notes: “The crisis in student enrollments was only the quantitative sign of a deeper qualitative malaise in the German universities. Scholasticism was the method and orthodoxy the content of most instruction. Medicine was openly ridiculed, natural science was almost exclusively the province of the new royal academies, and the movements in philosophy and law that later came to be labeled ‘enlightened’ faced great hostility.” State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700–1914 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 28–29.
29. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 294.
30. Laurence Dickey associates the appearance of German Pietism as one result of the Thirty Years’ War; a reform movement within German Lutheranism which sought the marginalization of theology and its replacement by the practice of piety. See Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 68ff.
31. Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250–1550 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 343ff. Martin Luther condemned the “mischievous rebellion” and celebrated the execution of Thomas Muntzer, the ex-Lutheran minister, in a work titled The Horrible History and Judgment of God upon Thomas Muntzer. Ibid., 285, 342.
32. The German universities drew students from the higher and lower middle classes (including artisans), classes from which their faculty were also drawn. Bruford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century, 246–53. Born in 1724, Kant was the son of a harness-maker. For Kant’s temerity towards public officials, see John Christian Laursen, “The Subversive Kant: The Vocabulary of ‘Public’ and ‘Publicity,’” Political Theory 14, no. 4 (November 1986): 584–603.
33. Heiner Bielefeldt, “Autonomy and Republicanism: Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy of Freedom,” Political Theory 25, no. 4 (August 1997): 549. The argument summarizing Kant’s philosophy of history and the emergence of the civil constitution is appropriated by Bielefeldt from Kant’s “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (1795), his “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (1784) and his Metaphysics of Morals (1797). Bielefeldt, “Autonomy and Republicanism,” 547ff.
34. Even Kant’s supporters acknowledge the dark side of his philosophy. “To emphasize the need to obey the law, as Kant did, could imply a bias in favor of authoritarianism. In Germany his theory has, indeed, been invoked to strengthen the executive prerogative in carrying out the law … the state in which obedience to political authority is writ large. In fact, his outlook was liberal. … But Kant’s influence has been greatest in shaping the doctrine of the Rechtsstaat, the state governed according to the rule of law.” Hans Reiss in the introduction to Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 11.
35. Michael Clarke, “Kant’s Rhetoric of Enlightenment,” Review of Politics 59 (Winter 1987): 60.
36. “On the Common Saying: ‘This May Be True in Theory, but It Does Not Apply in Practice’” in Kant’s Political Writings, 82–84.
37. Laursen, “The Subversive Kant,” 590.
38. Reiss, introduction to Kant’s Political Writings, 28.
39. In an attempt to disavow any intention of disobeying the Edict on Religion (1788) which forbade public expression of religious conscience, Kant wrote to the king that his essay was “not at all suitable for the public, to them it is an unintelligible, closed book, only a debate among scholars of the faculty of which the people take no notice.” The letter was published in 1798. Laursen, “The Subversive Kant,” 591–92.
40. Clarke, “Kant’s Rhetoric of Enlightenment,” 60.
41. James Schmidt, “The Question of Enlightenment: Kant, Mendelssohn, and the Mittwochsgesellschaft,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50, no. 2 (April–June 1989): 290–91. In his 1784 essay “An Answer to the Question: What Is the Enlightenment?” Kant had assured the State: “Only one who, himself enlightened, does not fear shadows, at the same time has at hand a numerous, well-disciplined army for the guarantor of public rest can say what a Republic is forbidden to risk: ‘Argue as much as you want and regarding what you want, only obey.’” Quoted by Clarke, “Kant’s Rhetoric of Enlightenment,” 63.
42. Laursen, “The Subversive Kant,” 591.
43. Moraze, The Triumph of the Middle Classes, 222.
44. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan, 1963), 472.
45. Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue (Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, 1964), 96ff.
46. Michel Foucault has suggested an explanation for the repression of sexuality (the negation of the body) which became emblematic of European society in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: “One of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the emergence of ‘population’ as an economic and political problem: population as wealth, population as manpower or labor capacity, population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded. Governments perceived that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a ‘people,’ but with a ‘population.’ … All this garrulous attention which has us in a stew over sexuality, is it not motivated by one basic concern: to ensure population, to reproduce labor capacity, to perpetuate the form of social relations: in short, to constitute a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative?” The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage, 1980), 25, 36–37.
47. Bielefeldt, “Autonomy and Republicanism,” 530.
48. “According to Kant’s conjectural psychology, morality begins with (sexual) refusal and self-denial. That this beginning is also a social moment only serves to emphasize the prominence of self-opposition as distinguished from social opposition. What makes sexual refusal a first moral moment is not the fact that one should deny another, but that one should accept that denial as binding on itself.” Susan Meld Shell, The Rights of Reason: A Study of Kant’s Philosophy and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 100.
49. Cited by ibid., 32.
50. Theodore Greene and Hoyt Hudson, eds., introduction to Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (New York: Harper, 1960), xli.
51. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 1, The Founders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 44–45.
52. Greene and Hudson, introduction to Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, xl.
53. Shell, The Rights of Reason, 173.
54. “Only a learned public which has lasted from its beginnings to our own day, can certify ancient history. Outside it, everything else is Terra incognita; and the history of peoples outside it can only be begun when they come into contact with it. This happened with the Jews in the time of the Ptolemies through the translation of the Bible into Greek, without which we would give little credence to their isolated narratives. … And so with all other peoples.” Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” in Lewis White Beck, ed., On History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 24.
55. Shell, The Rights of Reason, 177.
56. Ibid.
57. Patrick Riley, “The ‘Elements’ of Kant’s Practical Philosophy,” Political Theory 14, no. 4 (November 1986): 557.
58. Of this period, Karl Mannheim would write: “The rise of the bourgeoisie was attended by an extreme intellectualism. … This bourgeois intellectualism expressly demanded a scientific politics, and actually proceeded to found such a discipline.” Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, original 1936), 122. For Kant’s treatment of bureaucracy as the site of reason, see Michael J. Meyer, “Kant’s Concept of Dignity and Modern Political Thought,” History of European Ideas 8, no. 3 (1987): 326ff.
59. Toews, Hegelianism, 2. See also ibid., 370n2.
60. Dickey, Hegel, 35.
61. Quoted by ibid., 144.
62. Ibid., 143.
63. Ibid., 183–85.
64. Toews, Hegelianism, 33–34.
65. Referring to Hegel’s attitude towards Austria and Prussia, H. S. Harris argues: “Hegel … shows a marked preference for the Athenian model of the Hapsburgs as against the Spartan model of the Hohenzollerns.” Harris, Hegel’s Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 454. See also Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 48–49, 56.
66. Cited by Harris, Hegel’s Development, 472. Toews reminds us that Hegel was not Prussian. His parental home, Stuttgart, was in Old Württemberg, and his father “was an administrative official in the ducal bureaucracy, a secretary and later counselor in the Chamber of Accounts.” Toews, Hegelianism, 13.
67. In 1801, in his first published philosophical work, “The Difference between the Systems of Philosophy of Fichte and Schelling,” Hegel alluded to his new advocation in the context of the emergence of Prussia and the disintegration of Germany after the Thirty Years’ War: “The need for philosophy emerges when the power of reconciliation disappears from the life of men and opposites have lost their living relation and reciprocity and achieve independence.” Cited by Bernard Cullen, Hegel’s Social and Political Thought (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1979), 50.
68. This is the title given to Hegel’s unpublished manuscript (1799–1802) reviewing the imperialist constitution. Gagliardo, Reich and Nation, 338n24.
69. Ibid., 256–57.
70. “Hegel recognized and apparently approved (as productive of harmony) a certain tendency toward the assimilation of nobility with the bourgeoisie. But he thought of the monarchy, the ‘majestic principle,’ as a point of balance between these two classes, and he preferred to see it resting more on the nobility, as the Austrian monarchy did, than on the bourgeoisie, as was the case in Prussia and in revolutionary France.” Harris, Hegel’s Development, 472–73.
71. Ibid., 477. For the Final Recess, see Gagliardo, Reich and Nation, 193ff.
72. Cf. Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, 115–17.
73. This misrepresentation of Hegel as merely an idealist, and some of the then most prominent contributions to this Marxian characterization are rehearsed in George Boger, “On the Materialist Appropriation of Hegel’s Dialectical Method,” Science & Society 55, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 26–59.
74. Cullen, Hegel’s Social and Political Thought, 66.
75. Dickey, Hegel, 192.
76. Cullen suggests: “It is extremely likely that Hegel arrived at his own analysis by supplementing his study of the political economists with his constant reading of English newspapers and journals. These publications would have carried long and detailed reports of social conditions in Britain; and reports of parliamentary debates on the Poor Laws, the first Factory Act of 1802, and other new legislation.” Hegel’s Social and Political Thought, 71.
77. Joseph O’Malley, introduction to Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 33.
78. The phrase is from Cullen, Hegel’s Social and Political Thought, 4.
79. Paul Guyer, “Thought and Being: Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy,” in Frederick Beiser, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 180.
80. In his defense of Kant from Hegel’s claims that Kant’s dualisms stemmed from a failure of nerve, Guyer never mentions the theological grounds of Hegel’s work. Ibid., 171–210.
81. Christian theology and philosophy did not allow for history. For the Christian, the human experience held no mystery: the choice was between God and the ungodly. This is Christian eschatology: in the end, the world’s culmination will be in the division of human spoils between God and his opponent, the Devil. Christianity is premised on the existence of a Being who declares to its creations: “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.” All things are resolved, that is the message of the Apocalypse. There is no mystery, no problem to be resolved in human affairs.
82. See Dickey, Hegel, 221 and 245.
83. Dickey’s quote from Hegel’s System of Ethical Life, in ibid., 248.
84. Ibid., 199.
85. Cullen, Hegel’s Social and Political Thought, 58–59.
86. In the earliest version of his theory of social classes, Hegel employed a tripartite system somewhat reminiscent of the medieval model. Hegel stipulated an Absolute of Universal class (the nobility), a class of honesty (the Bürger), and a class of raw ethical life (the peasantry). Later (1805–6), Norbert Waszek maintains, Hegel augmented his canvas: “Firstly, the tripartite structure is replaced by an initial distinction between the lower classes … and the class of universality. … Since the lower classes are divided into the farmers, the craftsmen, and the merchants … we can now speak of a four-part class division. The previous emphasis on the merchants has thus been strengthened by raising this group to the level of a distinct class, defined by ‘pure exchange.’ Secondly, the universal class is no longer equated with the nobility, but is subdivided into the three sections of civil servants, scholars, and soldiers.” The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel’s Account of “Civil Society” (London: Kluwer, 1988), 173–74.
87. Hegel’s lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit, in Leo Rauch, ed., Hegel and the Human Spirit (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), 163–64.
88. Ibid., 165.
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid., 166.
91. Ibid.
92. Ibid. Hegel described that misery as including those who worked and “the rabble of paupers,” those who had no work at all. See Cullen, Hegel’s Social and Political Thought, 106.
93. Cullen remarks: “Even if we translate Klasse with an innocent, unloaded term such as ‘group,’ it seems to me to be undeniable that Hegel had an intuitive grasp—in an embryonic and unsystematic form, at least—of an institutionalized conflict within the manufacturing sub-Stand between the people who actually labor in the factories and those who own the factories and employ the laborers: groups that later came to be known as ‘proletariat’ and ‘bourgeoisie.’” Cullen, Hegel’s Social and Political Thought, 104. Hegel’s near elimination of a discussion of these classes in The Philosophy of Right is critiqued by Cullen in ibid., 110ff.
94. Quoted by Dickey, Hegel, 245.
95. Rauch, Hegel and the Human Spirit, 167.
96. O’Malley confirms: “Marx took seriously Hegel’s notion of a universal class, that is, a class within society whose interests are identical with the interests of society as a whole” (lii). Nevertheless, by the fall of 1843 Marx had not solved the problem of his universal class: “In the Critique [of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’] it remains to be seen whether a class can be found for which the identity is not imaginary. … It is a clear indication of the rapidity with which Marx’s thought developed during this period that by February 1844 [A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’] he can identify the proletariat as the class within modern society which satisfies the criteria of the genuine universal class.” O’Malley, introduction to Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” liii.
97. Rauch, Hegel and the Human Spirit, 170.
98. Ibid., 171.
99. Ibid.
100. H. S. Harris and T. M. Knox, in their edited and translated version of Hegel’s System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979), identified some of the ways Hegel differed from Plato: “Although Hegel’s language about death in battle is full of Greek overtones, he thinks of modern warfare … as being truly ethical, just as the religion of ‘the absolute grief’ is higher than Greek religion” (66). “The ‘absolute government,’ the governing function as it is distinctly articulated within the ‘absolute class,’ is the analog, in Hegel’s account, of the Rulers, in Plato’s Republic, as distinct from the Auxiliaries. But Hegel’s Guardians are ‘guardians of the law,’ like the governing class of Plato’s Laws; and this ‘absolute government’ is not recruited exclusively from the military nobility” (70).
101. Cullen, Hegel’s Social and Political Thought, 62.
102. This last notion is to be found in Marx as well. One reason for Marx’s insistence on the significance of industrial capitalism was its mastery of nature. Capitalist industrialism freed man from necessity, from the dictates of nature. Capitalism thus marked the last stage of mankind’s prehistory. And Marx was impatient. He announced, in effect, “We now have the means of human realization; only the bourgeois superstructure (private property and the State) stands in the way. Once we repossess the means of human reproduction, perfection is ours.” Marx acquired this sense of historical evolution from German Idealism: i.e., from Kant’s antinomial duality, and Hegel’s dialectic.
103. Quoted in Cullen, Hegel’s Social and Political Thought, 67–68. For Ferguson, Smith, and Schiller, see Dickey, Hegel, 254–55.
104. Cullen, Hegel’s Social and Political Thought, 63.
105. Harris and Knox, System of Ethical Life, 170–71. Harris interjects: “Hegel speaks rather glibly of ‘sacrificing one part of the bürger class to mechanical and factory work and abandoning it to barbarism.’ But he was actually much more disturbed by the emergence of an urban proletariat than his words here indicate.” Ibid., 75.
106. O’Malley, introduction to Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” xxxiv and 9ff.
107. Ozment, The Age of Reform, 104.
108. Ibid., 105.
109. Toews, Hegelianism, 52–53.
110. Paradoxically, though Hegel’s lectures on The Philosophy of History justified African slavery (“The peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend for the very reason that in reference to it, we must quite give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas—the category of Universality”), the very terms by which he condemned Africa, exorcising it from History (“At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit”), became the basis of Marx’s history. Hegel observed: “But even Herodotus called the Negroes sorcerers: now in Sorcery we have not the idea of a God, of a moral faith; it exhibits man as the highest power, regarding him as alone occupying a position of command over the power of Nature.” Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 93ff. And like Kant and many other German intellectuals, Hegel also consigned Jews to historical refuse: Judaism is “marked by the absence of the principle of the Western world, the principle of individuality.” Amy Newman, “The Death of Judaism in German Protestant Thought from Luther to Hegel,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 472–73.
111. See Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism (London: Zed Press, 1983), pt. 1.
112. Quoted by Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, 232. See also Walter Kaufmann, Hegel: A Reinterpretation (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1965), 263.
113. Cited in Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, 230.
114. Harris and Knox, System of Ethical Life, 133. Hegel mentioned by name Genghis Khan and Tamerlane.
115. Toews, Hegelianism, 50.
116. Ibid., 59. “In stark contrast to Schleiermacher, Hegel welcomed Napoleon’s victories as a triumph of the principle of modern rational politics over the irrational and obsolete social and political forms of the old regime. The ‘great political scientist’ from Paris would finally teach Germans, by force if necessary, how to organize a ‘free monarchy’ on the basis of universal law and a rational administrative and constitutional structure.” Ibid., 58. See also Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, 189.
117. Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, 116.
118. Ibid., 177.
119. Marx suggested: “If socialist writers attribute this world-historical role to the proletariat, this is by no means, as critical criticism assures us, because they regard the proletarians as gods. … It is not a matter of what this or that proletarian or even the proletariat as a whole pictures at present as its goal. It is a matter of what the proletariat is in actuality and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do.” Robert C. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 134–35.
120. O’Malley, introduction to Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” 131.
121. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), 25.
122. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 236–38.
123. Ibid., 238. Commenting on Marx’s appropriation of Hegel, David Lamb insisted that for Marx: “Just as the object is not an independent pre-given entity, the human subject is not given a once and for all fixed set of cognitive faculties bestowed by nature. The cognitive faculties are the result of a long process of self-creation within and through technical activity.” “Hegelian-Marxist Millenarianism,” History of European Ideas 8, no. 3 (1987): 280.
124. See note 64.
125. Kant was a personally rigid man—“the citizens of Koenigsberg could set their watch by Kant.” Kant’s biographers chant this repeatedly (noting the two exceptions: when he obtained a copy of Rousseau’s Emile; and when he heard of the fall of the Bastille). Kant was obsessed with the necessity of dominating the human body as a precondition for achieving a higher destiny. And in this he anticipated Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents by a hundred years. There Freud argued that civilization requires repression: neuroses, unhappiness. Freud recognized in the family a structure of domination and repression, and as such the primal unit of civilization. And for Freud, the necessary repression occupies the subconscious, the very intuition of the civilized individual.
1. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970), 261–62.
2. Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: Verso, 1979), 158. Althusser criticized Mark Rosenthal, Antonio Gramsci, and Galvano Della Volpe as examples of “the more talkative and self-important discourses which deport Marx the philosopher entirely into the very ideology which he fought and rejected” (90). Concerning his student, Foucault, for the time being (1969) Althusser had only praise. See “A Letter to the Translator,” ibid., 323–24.
3. Foucault, The Order of Things, 263.
4. See Scott Meikle, “Making Nonsense of Marx,” Inquiry 29 (March 1986): 29–43.
5. William J. Barber, A History of Economic Thought (New York: Penguin, 1967), 17–18; and Terence Hutchison, Before Adam Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), chap. 1.
6. John Kenneth Galbraith, A History of Economics (London: Penguin, 1987), 10.
7. Ibid., 19.
8. Ibid., 25.
9. Moses Hadas, ed., The Complete Plays of Aristophanes (New York: Bantam, 1988), 348. Property now held in common would include wives, children, and slaves.
10. See Hadas’s introduction to the play, ibid., 417; and K. J. Dover, Aristophanic Comedy (Berkeley: University of California, 1972), 200–201.
11. A similar understanding must have been shared by many of Aristophanes’s contemporaries since Plato recalled at Socrates’s trial in 399 BC that the latter took great pains to distinguish himself from the portrait found in Aristophanes’s Clouds (423 BC).
12. Gilbert Murray, Aristophanes, a Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933), 180.
13. See H. D. Westlake, “The Lysistrata and the War,” Phoenix 34, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 38–54.
14. Sue Blundell, Women in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 74ff.
15. Ibid., 129.
16. Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 98ff.
17. Susan Guettel Cole, “Oath, Ritual, and the Male Community at Athens,” in Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick, eds., Demokratia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 238.
18. Jane Gardner, “Aristophanes and Male Anxiety,” Greece & Rome 36, no. 1 (April 1989): 51–62. It may be surmised that there were many more widows than widowers in late fifth-century Athens, for one because of the war, and secondly, because at the time of marriage females tended to be much younger (14–18) than husbands (around 30). Thus the anxiety among men of ritual observances after their deaths. See Blundell, Women in Ancient Greece, 119–20.
19. Plato, The Laws, 805a.
20. “A few years ago the fact suddenly dawned upon me that Athenian women in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.—apart from a handful of expensive prostitutes … were quite remarkably devoid of effective property rights and were worse off in this respect than women in many (perhaps most) other Greek cities of the period, Sparta in particular.” De Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, 100.
21. Blundell maintains politai “signifies citizens with full political rights, who were always male” (Women in Ancient Greece, 128), while de Ste. Croix states that poletai designated officials in Athens (The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, 189).
22. Blundell, Women in Ancient Greece; Sarah B. Pomeroy in Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves (New York: Schocken, 1975), and Eva C. Keuls in The Reign of the Phallus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) have all explored these ambiguities in the Athenian male imaginary.
23. For Solon and Cleisthenes, see de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, 278ff. In the fourth century, Isocrates proposed a pan-Hellenic campaign against Persia to distract the Greek poor from their civil war against the rich. See Peter G. Van Soesbergen, “Colonisation as a Solution to Social-Economic Problems in Fourth-Century Greece: A Confrontation of Isocrates with Xenophon,” Ancient Society 13/14 (1982/83): 131–45. See also de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, 295. For Thucydides and Pericles, see Cynthia Farrar, who argues from Thucydides’s presentation of Pericles’s speech to the assembly after the plague and the second Spartan invasion: “Pericles seeks to prevent the indulgence of exclusive, partial, interests by showing that such behavior, based on a narrow perspective, is inimical to the continued well-being of the polis, and that the public interest does genuinely embody the real interests of all citizens.” The Origins of Democratic Thinking: The Invention of Politics in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 161.
24. David Whitehead, “Sparta and the Thirty Tyrants,” Ancient Society 13/14 (1982/83): 105–30.
25. De Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, 284.
26. Ibid., 64–65.
27. Ibid., 66.
28. Cf. Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), and Thomas W. Africa, The Ancient World (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1969).
29. Francis MacDonald Cornford, ed., The Republic of Plato (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 165–66.
30. For Xenophon’s Socrates, see “The Estate Manager” (or “Oeconomicus”) in Hugh Tredennick and Robin Waterfield, eds., Xenophon: Conversations of Socrates (New York: Penguin, 1990), 289–94.
31. Xenophon’s The Constitution of the Athenians in J. M. Moore, ed., Aristotle and Xenophon on Democracy and Oligarchy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 40.
32. “The practice of physical exercises and the pursuit of culture has been brought into disrepute by the common people as being undesirable because they realize that these accomplishments are beyond them.” Ibid., 39.
33. “The propertied classes in the Greek and Roman world derived their surplus … mainly from unfree labor of various kinds. … But in general slavery was the most important form of unfree labor at the highest periods of Greek and Roman civilization.” De Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, 39.
34. Aristotle, The Politics, 1252b9–10 and 1277b30. Earlier, Xenophon’s Socrates had queried Critobulus: “Don’t you entrust more of your affairs to your wife than to anyone else?” “The Estate Manager,” 299. The Greek oikos refers to the household, i.e., women, children, and domestic slaves.
35. David Schaps mentions that “Plato describes the Athenian custom as ‘piling up whatever one gathers into some one house, (where) we give all the money over to the women to manage.’” And that “Xenophon in the Oeconomicus recommended turning all the affairs of the house over to the wife, but he made no pretense of describing the normal situation.” Schaps, Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1979), 15. Maurice Balme, “Attitudes to Work and Leisure in Ancient Greece,” Greece & Rome 31, no. 2 (October 1984): 149–52.
36. Aristotle, The Politics, 1256b40–1258b8. Aristotle insisted: “The most hated sort [of moneymaking], and with the greatest reason, is usury. … For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest.” Ibid., 1258a38–b8.
37. Steve Fleetwood, “Aristotle in the 21st Century,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 21, no. 6 (1997): 731–32.
38. Aristotle, The Politics, 1257b10–1257b25. Scott Meikle’s exposition of this notion of Aristotelian metaphysics as it relates to money is prescient. See Meikle, Aristotle’s Economic Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 20ff.
39. Galbraith writes: “Discussion of economic questions of this era is principally to be found in the writings of Aristotle, and there is not a rich yield … very few of the questions with which economics later became concerned applied to the society of which Aristotle spoke.” A History of Economics, 10. As Scott Meikle indicates, Galbraith’s presumption—following on M. I. Finley’s work—that in the absence of wages and interest, Aristotle could only inquire into the fairness of prices is incorrect. “The Ethics chapter is not about the justice of each having his own. It is about how goods can possibly be commensurable, as somehow they must be since in every single daily act of exchange a relation of equality is established between one proportion of one good and some proportion of another. … The circuit M-C-M,’ kapelike, with its profits from non-equivalent exchange, is a particular form of exchange activity. It makes its appearance only when exchange relations have, or rather when the particular form C-M-C has, reached a certain point of social and historical development. Aristotle is aware of that, and makes the point explicitly in the Politics.” Meikle, “Aristotle and the Political Economy of the Polis,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 99 (1979): 65. For Finley, see “Aristotle and Economic Analysis” in Finley, Studies in Ancient Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).
40. Meikle, “Aristotle and the Political Economy of the Polis,” 67.
41. Schaps, Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece, 97. For Engels’s very different reading of female seclusion in Athens, see The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, vol. 1 (New York: International, 1972), 500–502; and de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, 98ff.
42. Aristotle, The Politics, 1259b26–1260c14.
43. Schaps observes: “Most of the characters in the history books are male, not simply because it is men who write the books, but because the interests of history—politics, warfare, law, commerce—have in most times and places been the domain of men. … Social, cultural, and economic history, on the other hand, can hardly ignore women, who constitute half of society.” Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece, 1.
44. Aristotle, The Politics, 1254b16–1254b32.
45. Galbraith, A History of Economics, 11.
46. Cf. Robert Schlaifer, “Greek Theories of Slavery from Homer to Aristotle,” and Geoffrey Vlastos, “Slavery in Plato’s Thought,” in M. I. Finley, ed., Slavery in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: W. Heffer, 1960).
47. “I am myself convinced that [in addition to the French Revolution] another seminal influence in the development by Marx of a theory of class struggle was his reading during his student years of Aristotle’s Politics, a work which shows some striking analogies to Marx in its analysis of Greek society.” De Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, 55–56.
48. Liberal and Marxist treatments of the household exclusively focus on the family as a site of capitalist or noncapitalist production rather than as a locus of female authority. Cf. Jane Humphries, “Class Struggle and the Persistence of the Working-Class Family,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 1 (1977): 241–58; and Joan Wallach Scott, “Women in History: The Modern Period,” Past and Present, no. 101 (1983): 141–57.
49. Alan Gewirth, Marsilius of Padua and Medieval Political Philosophy, vol. 2, The Defensor pacis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), 4.
50. Ibid., 2:5.
51. Without citing any historical documentation, Galbraith asserts that the one hundred years between Aquinas (1225–1274) and Nicole Oresme (1320–1382) constituted a “sea change,” resultant from the development of “merchant capitalism” from a marginal (Aquinas) to a central (Oresme) concern. See Galbraith, A History of Economics, 28. Galbraith ignores Jean Buridan (1300–1358), one of the more creative monetarists of the period, who revolutionized mechanics and optics, and was the nearer contemporary of Marsilius as well as Oresme’s probable teacher. Buridan’s commentaries on Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics in the midst of a condemnation of a prince who would debase money (he “is only called a Prince, and he is not a Prince”) also reflected an awareness of the market. Cf. André Lapidus, “Metal, Money, and the Prince: John Buridan and Nicholas Oresme after Thomas Aquinas,” History of Political Economy 29, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 37ff.
52. J. K. Hyde, Society and Politics in Medieval Italy (New York: Macmillan, 1973).
53. J. K. Hyde, Padua in the Age of Dante (New York: University of Manchester and Barnes & Noble, 1966), 202ff.
54. Ibid., 217.
55. Ibid., 193.
56. Nearly a century ago Ephraim Emerton suggested: “It is almost impossible not to connect Marsiglio’s treatment of this question [whether there ought to be one single government for the whole civilized world] with the De Monarchia of Dante. … Marsiglio says that the subject is open to discussion, but is not pertinent to the present treatise. He does, however, go so far as to deny that the unity of the world is the model for the constitution of civil society. … The analogy, therefore, on which Dante bases his chief argument is expressly denied by Marsiglio.” Emerton, The Defensor Pacis of Marsiglio of Padua: A Critical Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), 20. Concerning Aquinas, Nicolai Rubinstein points out: “The newly translated Politics had provided ample evidence to show that Aristotle was by no means as favorable to monarchy as might have been assumed from the Ethics; but St. Thomas continued to refer to its classification of constitution in support of his arguments in favor of monarchy. … But then St. Thomas, who belonged to the family of the counts of Aquino in the kingdom of Sicily, and had spent much of his life in Paris, viewed politics from the angle of the European monarchies.” Rubinstein, “Marsilius of Padua and Italian Political Thought of His Time,” in J. R. Hale, H. R. L. Highfield, and B. Smalley, eds., Europe in the Late Middle Ages (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 52.
57. Malcolm D. Lambert, Franciscan Poverty (London: Church Historical Society, 1962), chap. 10. Known as the “Fraticelli” in Italy, the outcast spirituals were still being persecuted by the authorities in the fifteenth century. Decima Douie, “Some Treatises against the Fraticelli in the Vatican Library,” Franciscan Studies 38 (1978): 10–11.
58. Conal Condren, “Rhetoric, Historiography and Political Theory: Some Aspects of the Poverty Controversy Reconsidered,” Journal of Religious History 13, no. 1 (June 1984): 20.
59. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thirteenth Century,” Women Studies 2 (1984): 193ff. Compulsory celibacy in the Catholic priesthood, with its consequent estrangement of women, was established between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries: “The first of these came in 1139, when Pope Innocent II proclaimed that ordination was an impediment to marriage … the leaders of the Church fashioned another instrument of control at the Council of Trent (1545–63), which introduced an obligatory form [marriage before a qualified priest and witnesses] for the solemnization of matrimony.” Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church (London: Andre Deutsch, 1990), 85. For the role of women as priests in the early Church and leaders of its heresies, see Carolly Erickson, The Medieval Vision: Essays in History and Perception (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 184ff.
60. Much of the energies of Innocent III (1198–1216)—described by C. Warren Hollister as “history’s most powerful pope”—and of his immediate successors in the thirteenth century were devoted to building the political and financial power of the papacy. C. Warren Hollister, Medieval Europe (New York: John Wiley, 1968), 202ff.
61. Condren, “Rhetoric, Historiography and Political Theory,” 21. John’s opposition to the Spirituals became inquisitorial: “Convents had been seized by force, litigation had been undertaken, secular rulers had been involved, men had been burnt.” Ibid., 24.
62. “That peasant revolts became widespread in western Europe from the thirteenth century to the fifteenth century seems to be in little doubt … in northern Italy and then in coastal Flanders at the turn of the fourteenth century; in Denmark in 1340; in Majorca in 1351; the Jacquerie in France in 1358; scattered rebellions in Germany long before the great peasant war of 1525. Peasant republics sprang up in Frisia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and in Switzerland in the thirteenth century.” Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York: Academic Press, 1974), 24. Wallerstein adds famines and epidemics to the list of causes for the Wustungen: “the recession of settlements from marginal lands, the disappearance of whole villages sometimes” (25).
63. Hollister, Medieval Europe, 204ff.
64. Rubinstein, “Marsilius of Padua,” 54; for Ptolemy, Remigio, and Mussato, see ibid., 51ff.
65. Ibid., 58.
66. Alan Gewirth insisted: “The permanent significance of Marsilius’s ideas is to be found not merely in his opposition to the papal and ecclesiastic institutions of medieval Christendom, but in the entire doctrinal structure which he adduces in support of such opposition.” Gewirth, Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of Peace, vol. 1, Marsilius of Padua and Medieval Political Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 9.
67. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1, The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 19.
68. Ibid., 1:56ff.
69. Ibid., 1:19–22. As Plato and Aristotle had done, Marsilius also attached himself to a powerful patron, Ludwig (Louis) of Bavaria. In 1328, Ludwig momentarily deposed John XXII through military force legitimated by pronouncements written by Marsilius. Marsilius was then named “spiritual vicar” of Rome and suppressed loyalist clergy. Gewirth, Marsilius of Padua, 1:22.
70. Condren, “Rhetoric, Historiography and Political Theory,” 25.
71. H. S. Harris, “Toward the Modern State,” in Wallace Ferguson, ed., Renaissance Studies 2 (London: University of Western Ontario, 1963), 148.
72. Gewirth, Marsilius of Padua, 2:205.
73. Ibid., 2:210 and 208–9.
74. In the late fourteenth century, in her “conversations” with God, Catherine of Siena also took up Marsilius’s socialist discourse. Though she was a Dominican nun, Catherine’s father was a Franciscan tertiary, and she herself a “mystic activist.” In her Dialogue (1378), Catherine recorded God’s judgment of the apostasies of wealth which had beset the Franciscan and Dominican orders in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: “Thus you see that when the orders blossomed with the virtues of true patience and familial charity, they were never lacking in temporal sustenance but had more than they needed. But as soon as stinking selfishness and noncommunal living entered in and obedience fell by the wayside, they found themselves wanting in temporal goods.” God spoke of “Queen Poverty” as the “bride” of Francis and Dominic, and condemned those who live “not like religious but like nobles.” Suzanne Noffke, ed., Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 9, 336–38, 341. Catherine’s “household” lived on alms; she died in 1380 at the age of 33 after several months when she “could no longer eat or even swallow water.”
75. Gewirth comments: “Now Marsilius, as we have seen, refers to Aristotle for corroboration of his position that the legislator is the ‘people’ (populous). But Marsilius defines the people in the Roman sense, as the universitas civium; he views it as comprising not only the vulgus (equivalent to the [demos] or plebs), that is, farmers, artisans, and the like; but also the honorabilitas, ‘who are few. …’ The Marsilian constitution is thus rather a ‘polity,’ in which ‘every citizen’ shares power.” Gewirth, Marsilius of Padua, 1:180–81.
76. Lapidus, “Metal, Money, and the Prince,” 41.
77. For Buridan, see ibid., 40; and for the quotes from Oresme, ibid., 41.
78. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2, The Age of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 114.
79. Walter Klaassen, “Michael Gaismair: An Early Proponent of Social Justice,” in Hans-Jürgen Goertz, ed., Profiles of Radical Reformers (Kitchener, ON: Herald, 1982), 92.
80. Ibid., 95. Ironically, the fugitive Gaismair was assassinated at his estate in Padua, Marsilius’s birthplace.
81. For certain, the authorized translation was “with the inconvenient passages on the popular origins of political authority judiciously omitted.” Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:101. Cf. Harry S. Stout, “Marsilius of Padua and the Henrician Reformation,” Church History 43, no. 3 (September 1974): 308–18.
82. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:114.
83. Ibid., 179–80. “Although there are many radical elements in the political outlook of the counter-reformation theorists, and although these undoubtedly contributed to the later development of constitutionalist thought, it still seems a considerable overstatement to think of these writers as the chief originators of a modern ‘democratic’ view of politics. … One of their concerns was of course to repudiate Marsiglio of Padua’s heretical suggestion that all coercive power must be secular by definition, and thus that the Church cannot be regarded as a jurisdictional authority at all.” Ibid., 178–79.
84. Ibid., 117ff. “Locke … was the recipient of a sophisticated and more recent conceptual inheritance of property debate predicated in part on the arguments generated in the thirteenth century. … It is, however, not unfair to modern theorists who have given Locke and his contemporaries so much attention to say that they have ignored or tended to simplify vaguely as ‘Thomist’ the legacy of the poverty controversy which helped to provide the circumscribing conceptual vocabulary with which Locke, Pufendorf, Grotius and others struggled in the seventeenth century.” Condren, “Rhetoric, Historiography and Political Theory,” 26n45.
85. “Foucault tells us that the episteme of the Western world from the end of the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century … differed radically from that of the sixteenth century before it and that of the modern world after it. … Foucault shows that in the sixteenth century the order of the world could be known only through the practice of ‘reading’ the world and discovering the forms of resemblance or similitude marked, as signs, on the face of all things.” Jack L. Amariglio, “The Body, Economic Discourse, and Power: An Economist’s Introduction to Foucault,” History of Political Economy 20, no. 4 (1988): 587.
86. “With an appeal to the fact that the law of the Decalogue ‘expressly forbids us to steal’ … [Bodin took this] to show that the holding of private property is in fact presupposed by the law of nature, and thus that Plato’s ideal of ‘a community of all things’ must be founded on a mistake.” Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:296.
87. Foucault, The Order of Things, 174.
88. Ibid., 173.
89. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:137ff.
90. Charles Knight, “The Images of Nations in Eighteenth-Century Satire,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 22, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 501–2.
91. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:168. True to his populist and democratic sympathies, Cardinal Bellarmine was one of the first Jesuit scholars to challenge the temporal authority of the pope. Ibid., 174 and 179–80. Eventually, his last treatise, The Supreme Pontiff, “was treated by Pope Sixtus V as heretical, and was actually placed on the Index of Prohibited Books.” Ibid., 180.
92. Ibid., 153–54.
93. Even Stephen Neill’s sympathetic treatment avers: “Life was peaceful, happy, and well-ordered. Discipline was strict and harsh, but not cruel, Indians were appointed as overseers and headmen, but they had little authority. In reality, the Jesuit was master of all he surveyed.” A History of Christian Missions (New York: Penguin, 1984), 172.
94. A. V. Anikin, A Science in Its Youth (New York: International, 1979), 70. Also Tony Aspromourgos, “The Life of William Petty in Relation to His Economics,” History of Political Economy 20, no. 3 (1988): 337–56.
95. Pierre Jeannin, Merchants of the Sixteenth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 111.
96. Frank Swetz, Capitalism and Arithmetic: The New Math of the 15th Century (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1987), 10ff. The first printed arithmetic book was the Treviso Arithmetic, a practica for “those who look forward to mercantile pursuits.” Published in 1478, the manuscript was named for its origins at Treviso city, a Venetian dependency. Ibid., 40.
97. Though Anikin refers to the Physiocrats as a “bourgeois essence … disguised in feudal clothing” (A Science in Its Youth, 163), Physiocracy was identified by Marx in a draft of The German Ideology “as being directly ‘the economic dissolution of feudal property.’” Cited by Ronald Meek in his Studies in the Labour Theory of Value (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1973), 139. Meek concluded that the Physiocrats were contradictory: suspended between their insistence on agriculture as the sole source of surplus and their formulation of a theoretical system which was a “capitalist system.” The Economics of Physiocracy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1962), 297–98.
98. M. C. Howard and J. E. King, The Political Economy of Marx (New York: Longman, 1975), 67.
99. Tracking the “new math,” the technical basis of political economy, to the rise of mercantilism and industrialization, Swetz reports: “Italy’s commercial progress is reflected by the publication of the Treviso book in 1478, Borgi’s work (1484), followed by that of Calandri (1491), Pacioli (1494), and Tartaglia (1556). Hanseatic League trade opened the commercial possibilities of Germany and writers such as Weidman (1489), Riese (1518), and Rudolff (1530) responded to the increased demand for mathematical knowledge. In the sixteenth century, the spirit of commercial adventure entered France, and Savonne (1553) expounded on the techniques of merchant arithmetic. The Netherlands awoke to her maritime potential and practical arithmetic appeared in the works of Van der Schuere (1600) and Raets (1580). England’s merchants, reacting to the continental tempo of trade, sought to establish their own markets and the writings of Recorde (1542) and Baker (1568) became popular.” Capitalism and Arithmetic, 294–95.
100. “The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure: political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas, also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.” Engels, “Letter to Joseph Bloch,” in Robert C. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 760.
101. “The first class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamian marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male.” Engels, The Origin of the Family, 503.
102. Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in T. B. Bottomore, ed., Karl Marx, Early Writings (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 156n1.
103. Engels, The Origin of the Family, 510.
104. Susan Himmelweit, “Domestic Labour,” in Tom Bottomore, Laurence Harris, V. G. Kiernan, and Ralph Miliband, eds., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 135–37.
105. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were many among the scientific elite who insisted that women were incapable of rigorous thought. Locke, for one, ascribed to female deceit and ignorance the origins of pernicious ideas and the source of human monstrosities. Cf. William Walker, “Locke Minding Women: Literary History, Gender, and the Essay,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 23, no. 3 (Spring 1990): 245–68. According to Genevieve Lloyd (The Man of Reason), “In Bacon’s metaphors the control of the feminine became explicitly associated with the very nature of knowledge.” Cited by Walker, “Locke Minding Women,” 247–48. Also Sue Curry Jansen, “Is Science a Man? New Feminist Epistemologies and Reconstructions of Knowledge,” Theory and Society 19 (1990): 235–46.
106. “The Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, 481 (my emphasis).
107. Ibid., 475.
108. Foucault, The Order of Things, 225.
109. Ibid., 255ff.
110. Ibid., 259.
111. Ibid., 261.
112. Ibid., 262.
113. “[Marxism’s] pursuit of scientificity has been synonymous with an acceptance of the institutions and the effects of power that invest scientific discourses, or to put the matter in a more familiar form, its embrace of scientificity has been synonymous with the exercise of a form of domination, rather than with a construction of the preconditions for emancipation and liberation.” Barry Smart, Foucault, Marxism and Critique (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 80.
114. Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 283.
115. Ibid., 284.
116. Ibid., 316. For other treatments of Marx as tragedian, see Robert Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972); and Charles Frankel, “Theory and Practice in Marx’s Thought,” in Marx and Contemporary Scientific Thought: Papers from the Symposium on the Role of Karl Marx in the Development of Contemporary Scientific Thought, Organized by UNESCO (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), 31.
117. White, Metahistory, 316.
118. Ibid., 29.
119. Ibid., 40. This is the basis of what Gouldner called the “two Marxisms,” i.e., “critical” and “scientific” Marxism. Cf. Alvin W. Gouldner, The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
120. White, Metahistory, 289ff, and Hayden White, “Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground,” History and Theory 12, no. 1 (1973): 49n11.
121. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959), 206; cited in S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 287.
122. Prawer, Karl Marx, 295–96.
123. Ibid., 292.
124. Ibid., 301.
125. Ibid., 25.
126. Ibid., 320–47. “What Marx looks for, in Shakespeare and Sophocles, is the forceful expression, or suggestion, of an outlook which is the exact opposite of that which he attributes to the modern capitalist.” Ibid., 330.
127. For Engels, utopian socialism consisted of “theoretical enunciations corresponding with the revolutionary uprisings of a class not yet developed.” Among the utopians he included Morelly and Mably, Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen—all of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” in Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, 400–401.
1. V. G. Kiernan, “Christianity,” in Tom Bottomore, Laurence Harris, V. G. Kiernan, and Ralph Miliband, eds., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 71.
2. The claim is still made that “the core normative ideal underlying the Marxist emancipatory project is classlessness.” Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine, and Elliott Sober, Reconstructing Marxism: Essays on Explanation and the Theory of History (London: Verso, 1992), 188. This is not a historical issue for Wright, Levine, and Sober, but a theoretical one. As Lesley Jacobs observes, “They believe that Marxists should concede that oppression has all sorts of different causes, including not only class but also race, gender, religion, and culture. Their point is that this concession does not defeat the Marxist emancipatory project because … what distinguishes Marxism is not the insistence that class explains everything, but rather for explaining certain phenomena, class is the most important but not sole cause.” Jacobs, “The Second Wave of Analytical Marxism,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 26, no. 2 (June 1996): 288.
3. Theodor Mommsen, a contemporary of Marx and Engels and a materialist in his own right, had persuasively argued in his History of Rome (1854–56), for instance, that the Roman republic had been bourgeois and capitalistic despite an economy dependent on slave labor and a “reserve army” of rural proletariats. G. H. Mueller, “Weber and Mommsen: Non-Marxist Materialism,” British Journal of Sociology 37, no. 1 (1986): 1–20. Marx replied: “In encyclopedias of classical antiquities we find such nonsense as this—that in the ancient world capital was fully developed, ‘except that the free laborer and a system of credit was wanting.’ Mommsen also, in his ‘History of Rome,’ commits in this respect, one blunder after another.” Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International, 1967), 168n1.
4. Beginning with Hegel and then Engels, there is a Marxist literature which argues that in the logic of the dialectic, State bureaucracies, whether civilian or military, may evolve into social powers “for themselves,” to paraphrase Hegel.
5. Marx wrote: “It is not a matter of what this or that proletarian or even the proletariat as a whole pictures at present as its goal. It is a matter of what the proletariat is in actuality and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do.” “Alienation and Social Classes,” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 134–35.
6. “When we say that most economic discourse is ‘capitalocentric,’ we mean that other forms of economy … are often understood primarily with reference to capitalism: as being fundamentally the same as (or modeled upon) capitalism, or as being deficient or substandard imitations; as being opposite to capitalism; as being the complement of capitalism; as existing in capitalism’s space or orbit.” J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 6.
7. Ibid., 117.
8. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, 477.
9. Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 331.
10. Ibid., 169.
11. Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 64–66.
12. Ibid., 84.
13. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York: Routledge, 1997).
14. Marx, The German Ideology, in Ronald Meek, Studies in the Labour Theory of Value (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1973), 169.
15. “What I did that was new was to prove: 1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production, 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, 3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.” Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852, in Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, 220.
16. Engels, “Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx,” in Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, 681.
17. In 1877, in a biographical sketch of Marx, Engels had made identical remarks. Cf. “Karl Marx” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works, vol. 1 (New York: International, 1972), 369–78.
18. Quite early in his intellectual development, Marx insisted that religion and socialism were incommensurable: “Socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness no longer mediated through theindex annulment of religion.” The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, 93. And with Engels, he was equally caustic towards “Feudal Socialism” and “Christian Socialism”: “As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism. … Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.” “The Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in ibid., 1:492.
19. “Christianity was in its initial stages undoubtedly a movement of the propertyless, of the most diverse sorts, whom we may lump together under the name of proletarians if we do not mean thereby only wage-workers.” Karl Kautsky, Foundations of Christianity (New York: S. A. Russell, 1963), xiii. See also ibid., 272ff.
20. Ibid., 355. Of necessity, Plato and Aristotle had an earlier claim to the enunciation of the moral authority behind slavery.
21. Ibid., 361.
22. Ibid., chap. 5.
23. Karl Kautsky, Thomas More and His Utopia (New York: Russell & Russell, 1959), 47ff. In Foundations of Christianity (34–42), Kautsky considerably moderated the racial narrative animating the Marxism of the More study. In the latter, when the Teutons, originally a “democratic” people, invaded the “Roman world empire,” they provided the proletariat and the communist ethos of early (i.e., medieval) Christianity. Seduced by Rome’s wealth and the superior crafts and agricultural methods monopolized by the Church, the Teutons were corrupted by private property and first experienced poverty. The Church itself fell under the domination of the Franks in a vain attempt by the “King of the Franks” at creating Western Christianity as a permanent union of secular and spiritual authorities. “No feudal king, whatever his race, could perform this task, which required an organization stronger than the monarchy—vis., the centralized Church.”
24. Kautsky, Thomas More and His Utopia, 67.
25. Ibid., 72.
26. Ibid., 53.
27. Ibid., 78.
28. Ibid., 223. Leszek Kolakowski’s remarks on Thomas More (“More’s Utopia owed its origin to reflection on the first symptoms of capitalist accumulation”) reiterated Kautsky’s allegiance to the Marxian distinction between the pre-capitalist and capitalist eras. Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 1, The Founders (New York: Oxford University, 1978), 183–84.
29. Kautsky, Thomas More and His Utopia, 224.
30. Marx, Capital, 82n1.
31. Cornel West, “Religion and the Left,” Monthly Review, July–August 1984, 12.
32. Engels, “To Joseph Bloch,” in Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, 760–65.
33. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), 30.