Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood
would continue to be different for a long time thereafter. French thinkers who, like Montchrétien, extolled the benefits of le doux commerce took for granted that the necessary condition for the positive effects of trade was a forceful monarchy to integrate and harmonize particular interests and transform private vices into public benefits. This assumption is rooted in the realities of absolutist France, a society in which there is still no integrated market or competitive capitalism, and where the polity is still fragmented by a welter of corporate entities and privileges. French thinkers were bound to look, as the English were not, for ways of dealing with this structural divisiveness when they reflected on the replacement of virtue by commerce.16
In the eighteenth century, the same assumptions are present in Montesquieu’s views on monarchy. Unlike republican government, he tells us, monarchy has the advantage of making it possible to promote the common good with minimal virtue or self-sacrifice. Private interests can be the source of public benefits. But, while Montesquieu is less convinced than some of his contemporaries that commerce among nations need be a zero-sum game, this is not because he imagines that the common good will emerge naturally out of the interplay of private interests through an autonomous market mechanism. On the contrary, the monarchy must play that harmonizing role. Even the physiocrats, who most admired English agrarian capitalism and held it up as a model for France, shared classic French assumptions about the primary role of the state in harmonizing particular and corporate interests; and heavy traces of that view are still visible even in post-revolutionary France, in Napoleonic conceptions of the state.
The English – or, more precisely, the Anglo-Scottish – argument proceeds on the basis of different social and economic conditions. In the Anglo-Scottish version of le doux commerce in the eighteenth century, the burden of harmonizing private interests falls much more heavily on the market, on the discipline of competition in organizing production. The state, to be sure, plays a critical role in producing and maintaining the conditions for commercial development; but the purpose of the state is not to impose harmony on competing private interests. On the contrary, its role is to facilitate the operations of the market, which has that integration as its primary object.
What is critical, then, is not that commerce is presented as a substitute for civic virtue (more on this in a later chapter) but rather that commerce itself is conceived in new ways, in practice no less than in theory. We are now dealing with a competitive national market far more integrated than any other in Europe, and this market has a dynamic completely different from old forms of trade. The old forms of profit on alienation in transactions between separate markets really do look like a zero-sum game which inevitably leads to conflict. But the new dynamic of England’s economy allows Adam Smith, for instance, to regard competition as itself an integrative force. It is precisely the discipline required to keep self-interested commercial classes in check.
The state undoubtedly plays a vital part in Smith’s economy, above all to ensure that the market mechanism operates as it should – which seems to include, among other things, protection against employers combining to drive down wages. He also believes firmly in the importance of education for the lower classes. He does, to be sure, make debatable assumptions about the role of market mechanisms not only in advancing general prosperity but also in enhancing a more equitable distribution of wealth, which is, for him, a major reason for advocating free markets (in sharp contrast to our contemporary ‘neoliberals’, who may acknowledge that markets are more likely to increase inequality but regard that as a fruitful outcome). The freedom of the market that Smith has in mind requires intervention by the state to sustain it; and he does indeed believe that merchants lack the moral fibre or traditions of the landed classes, though concentrations of landed property represent a danger too. But the solution is not to find some kind of counterweight to commerce. On the contrary, the solution must be sought in commerce itself. The market imperatives that come with a mature commercial society impose their own discipline on all the participants, and it is not the function of the state to counteract them. Intervention by the state is necessary to sustain the mechanisms of the market; but its purpose is not to suppress or to lessen but to intensify the imperatives of competition – against, for example, the monopolistic inclinations of merchants.
Smith’s analysis of market mechanisms certainly owed much to the French and particularly to the physiocrat Quesnay (more in Chapter 6). But this debt makes even more striking the differences between the French and the Anglo-Scottish views on what is required to ensure the proper functioning of the ‘invisible hand’. Both regard a stable social order as a necessary precondition of a prosperous economy, and for both this requires interventions by the state. But Smith not only takes for granted a new form of commerce, such as already exists in England, but a unitary state with a unitary representative, while Quesnay assumes the need for a politically constituted integrating force, a kind of ‘legal despotism’, to deal with the fragmented system of estates and corporate bodies; and this kind of state, according to physiocratic doctrine, is needed not only to sustain but to create a new form of economy, which exists in English agrarian capitalism but not in France.17
The different patterns of ‘political economy’ in English capitalism and French absolutism would continue to have implications in the realm of ideas, in what many historical narratives depict as the age of ‘Enlightenment’. But, even while it has become fashionable to acknowledge national differences by speaking of ‘Enlightenments’ in an ever-proliferating plural, the very idea of ‘Enlightenment(s)’ has tended to obscure some critical divergences – which will be explored in the concluding chapter of this book.
A Social History of Political Thought
The purpose of this book is not to enlarge the canon or to argue for a more inclusive canonical literature that does justice to popular or democratic forces. It will confine itself largely to political thinkers who are most typically regarded as ‘canonical’, or who have had substantial influence on thinkers more generally included in the canon, particularly for their ideas on legitimate rule and domination. Like any other survey of this kind, this one will, if only for reasons of space, leave out or briefly summarize the ideas of thinkers who may, in their various ways, be no less important than are the major figures treated here at greater length. Even major philosophers like David Hume, whose work belongs to the philosophical canon but for whom political theory was a more marginal concern, will get short shrift. We shall not, in general, deal with theorists best known for their theories of relations among states, with the notable exception of Grotius, whose views on private property and public jurisdiction are especially germane to our main themes. The primary aim of this study is to illustrate our social–contextual approach, and how it differs from others, by applying it to major thinkers whose status in the canon of political thought has been accepted by convention.
It should already be clear that the ‘social history’ of political thought on offer in this book departs from other accounts of Western political theory in the ‘early modern’ period, not least because it is based on a historical narrative that questions the conventional story of modernity. It aims, among other things, to disentangle the disparate threads of the ‘modern’. For example, it distinguishes ‘bourgeois’ from ‘capitalist’; it seeks to detach the culture of ‘reason’, or what postmodernists call the ‘Enlightenment project’, from the development of capitalism; it suggests that there was not just one overarching historical trajectory but several ‘transitions’ in the Western European passage to ‘modernity’, which have shaped divergent traditions of political thought; and it puts in question some fairly conventional wisdom, but also recent scholarship, on what it means to speak of ‘modern’ states and ‘modern’ ways of thinking about politics.
To those interested in the arcana of the discipline, it will also be clear that this social history departs from other contextual approaches not only in substance but in form and method. Like other modes of ‘contextualism’, it requires us not only to decipher texts but also to situate them in their specific historical contexts. Yet it entails an idea of ‘context’ that differs from others, in particular the school of contextualism that, in the Anglo-American academy, has dominated the history of political thought and especially the study of the early modern period, the so-called Cambridge School.
Both the Cambridge approach and our social history start from the premise that, to understand the ideas of political thinkers,