For the Cambridge School, contexts are ‘discourses’, utterances or ‘language situations’. Social relations and processes are visible only as either literary and theoretical conversations, or the discursive transactions of high politics. A Cambridge School historian like Skinner is, to be sure, concerned with what theorists were ‘doing’ and why, given the range of political vocabularies available to them, they chose specific languages and strategies of argumentation, in the specific political circumstances of their own time and place and often for very specific political purposes. But the social conditions in which words were deployed are deliberately excluded. The period covered by Skinner’s history of political thought was marked by major social and economic developments that loomed very large in political theory and practice, yet he tells us virtually nothing about them. We learn little, if anything, about – for instance – relations between aristocracy and peasantry, about agriculture, land distribution and tenure or disputes over property rights, about urbanization, trade, commerce and the burgher class, or about social protest and conflict. John Pocock is generally more interested than is Skinner in the languages of civil society and political economy, not simply in the discourses of formal political theory; but his subject remains discourse and language. Social relations, if they are visible at all, appear in the form of conversations among literate elites.
The social history of political thought raises questions about how the political sphere itself is constituted by social processes, relations, conflicts and struggles outside the political space – producing, for instance, different patterns of state-formation in England and France and different traditions of political discourse, even while sharing common languages of politics. It raises questions about how social conflicts set the terms of political controversy – as, for example, in England, conflicts over property rights and even the very definition of property were playing themselves out between landlords and commoners before they reached debates in Parliament, philosophy or classical political economy.
It is not here simply a matter of attending to popular voices as distinct from, or in addition to, elite conversations. No one can deny that subordinate classes have tended to be voiceless in the historical record. To be sure, even when there remains no record of their discourse, if we are attentive we can detect their interactions with dominant classes in the great theoretical efforts devoted by their masters to justifying social and political hierarchies, and, of course, in theories of property. But the principal question is where we should look to discover the meanings and motivations of discourses, whether popular or dominant.
For the social history of political thought, it is not enough to track relations among thinkers, their utterances and texts; but nor is it enough to situate them in the historical context of very specific political episodes, such as the Engagement Controversy in which Hobbes may have sought to intervene (see below, p. 242) or the Exclusion Crisis, in which Locke was almost certainly engaged (see below, p. 256). There is no doubt that such historical moments may have far-reaching consequences in shaping political languages – as the revolutionary crisis of the Exclusion controversy shaped Locke’s political ideas. But for the social history of political theory, the questions confronting political thinkers are framed not only at the level of philosophy, political economy or high politics but also by the social interactions outside the political arena and beyond the world of texts.
To identify these questions is likely to require greater attention to long-term historical processes of a kind the Cambridge approach eschews altogether. We might, for example, situate Locke not only in the context of the Exclusion Crisis but also in the context of a long-term process like ‘the rise of capitalism’. This is not to enlist him as an advocate of the system we now know as capitalism, nor to attribute to him a kind of supernatural prescience about the eventual development of a mature industrial capitalism, nor even to credit him with anything like an idea of a ‘capitalist’ economy. The point is rather that a process of transformation in the property regime (the development of ‘agrarian capitalism’ discussed here in this chapter and in Chapter 7) was being contested in Locke’s own time and place, and was generating conflicts over the definition of property. We are much more likely to discern the issues at stake if we observe them, as it were, in the process of becoming, as existing social forms are being challenged or displaced.
Whether we choose to call the new property regime ‘agrarian capitalism’ or something else altogether, we may wish to point out that it had some bearing on what came after, not least on the emergence of ‘commercial society’, which figures very prominently in Cambridge School accounts of eighteenth-century England. But even if we choose to abstract Locke’s brief historical moment from any longer processes of social transformation, the least that can be said is that these social transformations generated conflicts over property in Locke’s own time and place; and the issues at stake were very much the stuff of his ideas.
There are certainly moments when history intrudes with special urgency into the dialogue among texts or traditions of discourse, when long-term developments in social relations, property forms and state-formation episodically erupt into specific political–ideological controversies that meet the requirements of the Cambridge School; and it is certainly true that political theory tends to flourish at times like this. But it is not enough to identify those moments; and we cannot get the measure of a thinker like John Locke if we fail to acknowledge the questions that were posed to him not just by this or that political episode but by larger social transformations and structural tensions, which made themselves felt beneath the surface of high politics.
Without in any way dismissing the importance of specific political moments in shaping ideas (which are often admirably covered by exponents of the Cambridge School), this book, and the social history of political theory it offers, will place more emphasis on the kinds of social contexts and historical processes commonly overlooked, if not explicitly discounted, by other modes of ‘contextualization’. Consideration of what might be called deep structural contexts and long-term social transformations does not in the least imply a neglect of historical specificities, including national differences. On the contrary, we shall in the following chapters be keenly attentive to such differences; and the chapters will be organized along these lines, exploring certain historical landmarks in the development of Western political thought in their varied political and social contexts. If anything, the social history of political theory is more attuned to historical specificities than is a mode of contextualization devoted to ‘language situations’ in which common vocabularies may disguise important historical differences. Despite the Cambridge School’s insistence on the specificity of every historical moment, its conception of linguistic contexts and their detachment from social conditions occludes all kinds of historical specificities, the differences of meaning that even common languages may have in different social contexts, not only giving different answers but posing different questions.
As we track the various Western traditions of discourse in the early modern period, it is nonetheless important to keep in mind that, for all the variations, the tension between two sources of power – the state and private property – and the complex three-way relations between state, property and the producing classes, had clear implications for the development of political thought throughout Western Europe and its colonial dependencies. If there is in this book a single overarching theme, it has to do with certain distinctive transformations in the relation between private property and public power that took place in our period. Earlier in this chapter, and at greater length in Citizens to Lords, the first volume of