Why, then, end this volume here, in the middle of the fourteenth century? Its subject is a social history of political theory from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages; but the ‘medieval period, perhaps more than most, is subject to debate about its boundaries, and especially about when it properly ends. Histories of medieval political theory will often end a century later (or more) than this one does. The Cambridge History, for instance, spans roughly the years 350 to 1450, on the grounds that ‘somewhere around the middle of the fifteenth century we can detect enough of a decisive shift in the patterns of intellectual life to justify the claim that the principal movements of “medieval political thought” . . . were drawing to a significant close.’37 This is, of course, a difficult judgment to make, since there was, as there always is in historical processes, a continuity in change. Yet, the argument goes, while many medieval themes and ‘traditions’ of thought persist ‘with considerable vitality into the later fifteenth century and beyond . . . they survive increasingly in a situation of coexistence with other, newer (and no doubt at the same time older) ways of thinking.’ Renaissance ‘humanism’ coexisted, but came into conflict, with the ‘scholasticism’ of medieval philosophy, ‘and just as the great institutions of medieval society – the papacy, the empire, the “feudal monarchies”, the canon and civil lawyers – survived only in changed forms, so medieval political ideas survived to play a part in changed circumstances and were themselves changed in the process.’
This may not tell us much about epochal shifts, and readers may find it hard to imagine any moment in history that could not be described in similar terms, as a unity of change and continuity. It may, indeed, be impossible to formulate our temporal parameters much more decisively than this. Yet there is something more to be said. If we take seriously the concept of feudalism as laid out in the previous chapter, the boundaries may be just a bit less difficult to draw. If we focus our attention on feudalism, it is possible to situate some significant epochal moments in the mid-fourteenth century and beyond: a time of plague, demographic collapse, peasant revolts and the Hundred Years War. Taken together, these developments spell the crisis of parcellized sovereignty, and we can begin to speak of ‘transitions’ from feudalism.
From the middle of the fourteenth to the late fifteenth century, there is a period of canonical scarcity, which ends decisively with Machiavelli.38 When the story of the Western canon resumes, we are in a European world shaped by different relations between property and state. In the rising absolutist state, particularly in France, the monarchy is seeking to co-opt the nobility by replacing its feudal autonomy with privileges and perquisites of office. In England, where an already well-established central state had developed in tandem with a powerful landed aristocracy, we can begin to see the rise of agrarian capitalism. The city-states of northern Italy, for all the continuities in their communal forms, are now no longer battle grounds for conflicts between popes and Holy Roman emperors but for wars between French and Spanish monarchical states.
It was with one eye on these neighbouring states, which posed a wholly new challenge to civic autonomy in Italy, that Machiavelli reflected on the history and politics of Florence. In France, Jean Bodin, in support of monarchical centralization, would engage in philosophical disputes with constitutionalist thinkers defending the declining autonomous powers of provincial nobles and corporate entities; while in England, Thomas More (who served and eventually fell victim to a powerful monarch) observed – and participated in – the dispossession of small producers by enclosure as, in his own words, ‘sheep devoured men’.
These various ‘transitions’ from feudalism, and the diverse traditions of political theory that accompanied them, are the subject of another book. But if we can speak of a crisis – or crises – of feudalism, the mid-fourteenth century seems a natural place to end the medieval period. At the same time, we should keep in mind that the transitions which followed bore the marks of what preceded them. This is so not only in the sense that later developments in Western political thought inherited a powerful legacy but, more fundamentally, in the sense that the whole canonical tradition, in all its national variations, would continue to be shaped by the autonomy of property and distinctive tensions between property and state, which would play themselves out in all the various transitions.
The canon of Western political theory, while it includes some notably radical thinkers, is largely the work of members or clients of dominant classes. Popular voices are seldom heard in the canonical tradition. Yet it has been shaped by a complex three-way interaction between the state, appropriating classes and producers. Propertied classes have depended on the state to protect their property and dominance against the challenge from below, yet they have also been in conflict with the state and its intrusions from above. They have, in other words, always been compelled to fight on two fronts. This has also meant that challenge to political authority has come not only from resistance by subordinate classes to oppression by their overlords, but also from the overlords themselves in opposition to the state.
These complex interactions between the state and propertied classes have certainly sustained the traditions of Western political theory, raising fundamental questions about authority, legitimacy and obedience even when popular voices have been muted in their opposition to oppression. But this has generated certain ambiguities and paradoxes, which remain deeply ingrained in Western political theory and practice. It is, for example, significant that constitutional and even democratic doctrines in the West owe as much to the defence of aristocratic power and property as they do to popular struggles. The constitutive principles of Western liberal democracy, its ideas of limited and accountable government, have more to do with medieval lordship and its claims to autonomous power than with rule by the demos as conceived in ancient Athens.
It is not just that tensions have always existed between the idea of civic equality and the realities of class inequality. What is most ambiguous and paradoxical in the Western tradition of political theory, which was born in the civic community of ancient Greece, is that its foundational ideas of citizenship and civic equality have almost since the beginning been adapted to serve the cause of inequality and domination. We have seen, for example, how the idea of citizenship was used by the Romans as a hegemonic instrument of oligarchy and imperialism. Not only did the imperial idea of Roman citizenship replace civic agency with passive obedience, but even a republican thinker like Cicero found ways to finesse egalitarian ideas, turning democratic principles against themselves, by relegating equality to an abstract moral sphere beyond the inequalities of daily life and oligarchic rule.
Christian doctrine, too, would assert the equality of all human beings before God, while condoning profound inequality, oppression and even slavery in the mundane reality of life in this world. Early modern political theorists would declare that human beings (or at least men) were free and equal in the state of nature, and go on to construct arguments in favour of absolute monarchy (Hobbes) or rule by the propertied classes (Locke), not in opposition to but on the basis of natural equality, by applying the very elastic idea of consent. An emerging capitalist ‘economy’, with its purely ‘economic’ modes of class domination, would perfect the paradox, making it possible to relegate democracy to a formally separate ‘political’ sphere, while leaving intact the vast disparities of power between capital and labour in the market and the workplace and putting much of human life beyond the reach of democratic accountability, to be governed by market imperatives.
What is at issue here is not the familiar human inclination to profess one thing and do another. It is rather that such paradoxes lie at the very heart of Western political theory and practice. Ideas of limited and even democratic government have enjoyed a long and vigorous life in the Western tradition, not least because a particular formation of property, class and state power has made it possible for them to be adopted as ruling ideas, and not only expressions of popular power or resistance to dominant classes. But whatever this may have done for the longevity and vigour of such ideas, it has also restricted our conceptions of democracy. A more generous vision of human emancipation requires us to go beyond ruling ideas to a richer tradition of emancipatory struggle, in action and thought; but we can best reveal the limits of prevailing orthodoxies if we understand the canonical tradition and the historical experience in which it is rooted.
37 The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought: c.350–c.450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 652.
38 Nicolas of Cusa (1401–64), who falls within this period of canonical scarcity, is certainly an important figure, though his inconsistencies and changes of position make him hard to situate in the history of the canon. Identified by some commentators as a major theorist of conciliarism, he has also been accused of helping to destroy it, when he ended by siding with the pope against the council of the Church. It is, in any case, arguable that his story, like that of conciliar theory in general, belongs to the crisis of parcellized sovereignty and the process of state-centralization, which will be left for another volume. Conciliarism flourished in a period when divisions in the Church, leading to a major schism, were aggravated and even generated by rising secular states, and especially the French monarchy, which bolstered their own power by aligning themselves with this or that pope.