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MARX’S CONTEXT George C. Comninel1 Abstract: The method of interpreting political theory in relation to its specific his- torical contexts offers particular insight into the work of Karl Marx. When pre-capitalist societies are understood in relation to Marx’s rigorously conceived capi- talist mode of production, it is apparent that the context in which Marx produced his very earliest work was itself pre-capitalist. It can then be recognized that Marx began by making a significant contribution to an existing framework of critical political theo- ry but also that, following a critical confrontation with English political economy in 1844, he opened new avenues of thought in relation to a new context: capitalism. Neal Wood has demonstrated that when considering historical works of politi- cal theory, there is much to be gained from situating them in the specific social and political contexts in which they were written.2 Despite certain philosophi- cal stances that flatly reject such a view, it seems, on the face of it at least, to be uncontroversial. Still, much hinges on what is meant by ‘context’. Many scholars of the history of political thought lavish attention on the ‘discursive context’ of an author’s work, situating the text in the bodies of literature that provided, or helped to shape, particular themes or arguments. But while this approach can be very helpful in comprehending a text as it was intended to be (and was in fact) understood by contemporaries, it sheds little light on the social and political concerns that underpinned the purposive arguments advanced in historical works on political theory. For example, while it is evident that Jean Bodin’s Six Livres de la République owes much to a variety of discursive sources, ranging from Aris- totle to the Renaissance humanists, to debates both within and against the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, Bodin’s rejoinders to the Huguenot resistance theorists cannot be understood adequately by exclusive reference to them. It is also necessary for scholars of his work to take account of Bodin’s political purposes in articulating the position of the politiques in support of absolute monarchy during the Wars of Religion. There is nothing exceptional about this case in the history of political thought. From the Socratics’ princi- pled opposition to the policies and practices of democratic Athens; to Machiavelli’s consideration of what was possible, and to be preferred, as the Medicis brought the Florentine republic to an end; to the raging debates engendered by (very different) revolutions in seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-century France, the history of political thought has been 1 Department of Political Science, York University, Toronto, Canada M3J 1P3. Email: [email protected] 2 The introductory chapter, ‘A Question of Method’, to Neal Wood’s John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984) offers a particularly illuminating discussion of the historical approach to political theory. HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXI. No. 3. Autumn 2000 Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005 For personal use only -- not for reproduction 468 G.C. COMNINEL dominated by purposive interventions issued in contexts of social and politi- cal conflict. It should be recognized, however, that political confrontations must them- selves be considered in relation to the distinctive features of historically spe- cific social forms. This means that when studying early modern and modern political thought it is important to take account of the distinctive character of pre-capitalist3 and capitalist societies, particularly with respect to their differ- ent relations between economic and political spheres. In these terms, there are very different paths of development to be found among Western European societies. An appreciation of this point requires some clarification of the meaning of ‘capitalism’. Though the term may be given many different and arbitrary meanings, the key point for our purposes is to distinguish between societies in which market exchanges and commercial profit-making undoubtedly existed, and those ‘capitalist’ societies in which basic social production is market- dependent and market-regulated. Societies of this kind have patterns of social property relations and give rise to relationships between state and society that differ fundamentally from those found in pre-capitalist societies. These dif- ferences mean that while early modern historical texts must be understood in relation to particular political purposes, these must in turn be related to under- lying social objectives that differ from those associated with capitalist society. The social and political context for Bodin’s work is one case in point. As Ellen Meiksins Wood has observed, the political thought of early modern France was profoundly influenced by a very different relationship between state and society than that characteristic of capitalism.4 Fundamental to the structure of capitalist social relations is an apparent separation of the political and the economic, forming seemingly distinct spheres of state and civil soci- ety — a separation that is absent even in principle from pre-capitalist societ- ies.5 Indeed, a crucial ‘economic’ fact of early modern France was what 3 On the face of it, ‘pre-capitalist’ would appear to be a problematically teleological term. The point, however, is that capitalism truly is unique as a social form, qualitatively different from all the forms of society that preceded it, however different those various forms may have been from each other. Thus, ‘pre-capitalist’ is not a teleological usage, but a historical one: it was only possible to identify what all pre-capitalist societies had in common relative to capitalism after the latter actually developed as a novel social form. 4 Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘The State and Popular Sovereignty in French Political Thought: A Genealogy of Rousseau’s “General Will” ’, in History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rudé, ed. F. Krantz (Montreal, 1985), pp. 117–39. 5 Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘The Separation of the “Economic” and the “Political” in Capitalism’, in Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 19–48. Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005 For personal use only -- not for reproduction MARX’S CONTEXT 469 Robert Brenner has characterized as ‘politically constituted property’.6 This comprised claims to residual benefits from possession of formerly feudal parcellized political jurisdictions, outright ownership of venal offices in an expanding monarchical state apparatus and various other calls upon state-centred income and power. These claims were the subject of endless negotiation and struggle between the architects of the ‘absolute’ monarchy and the national and regional aristocracies of the nobility.7 In this social context, the polemical opposition between the Huguenot resistance to central authority and the absolutist political project of the politiques necessarily takes on a social and economic significance that is wholly absent from any comparable debate over constitutional authority in a capitalist society. In articulating the rights of ‘lesser magistrates’, i.e. seigneurs, against claims that the monarchy enjoyed the ‘absolute’ power of undivided sovereignty, Huguenot tracts transparently expressed the interests of regional nobles who were being excluded from the processes of co-optation, reallocation and elevation by which a new ‘absolutist’ structure of politically constituted property was constructed in early modern France. This structure became firmly entrenched in the eighteenth century, following the Fronde’s last spasm of de-centralizing resistance. By 1787, when aristo- crats pressed their own interests against those of the king, they articulated their opposition to the ‘absolute’ monarchy wholly in terms of rights which they claimed within the central state, no longer in basic opposition to it. The prevailing form of politically constituted property had by then been defini- tively transformed into claims upon the centralized power and centrally col- lected revenues of the monarchical state. This new constellation of aristocratic political interests was promoted by Montesquieu. In striking con- trast to the Huguenots’ position, Montesquieu defended the rights of noble magistrates such as himself (a President of the parlement of Bordeaux) to counter royal prerogative through the ‘separation of powers’ within the state.8 It is essential to recognize that the historical context for French political ideas continued to be defined by pre-capitalist social interests, based pri- marily upon the role of the state as a locus for careers and a principal source of income. Capitalism did not emerge in France until well into the nineteenth century and, as shown elsewhere, this point is of great significance in under- standing the French Revolution and political thought in the revolutionary and 6 In his original formulation, Brenner termed this ‘private property in the political sphere’ in ‘The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism’, reprinted in The Brenner Debate, ed. T.H. Aston and C.P.E. Philpin (Cambridge, 1985), p. 290. 7 See particularly William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1985). Also, see my discussion of the politics of class interests in the ancien régime, in G.C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution (London, 1987). 8 Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the
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