In what follows we shall be especially attentive to the distinctive tensions between private property and public power in Western Europe. We shall also emphasize their national divergences. But for now, and as a general rule, we can say that appropriating classes, even when they were competing with the state for access to surpluses produced in the main by peasants, also relied on the state to maintain order, conditions for appropriation and control over the producing classes whose labour sustained and enriched them; yet they also found the state a burdensome nuisance, as a threat to their property or as a competitor for the wealth derived from subject labour. Propertied classes, in other words, were always fighting on two fronts; and the Western canon of political thought has always reflected this three-way relation.
Challenges to authority have come from two directions. Subordinate classes have resisted oppression by their overlords. But overlords themselves, while always looking over their shoulders for threats from their subordinates, have sought to protect their autonomy, their ‘liberties’, privileges, jurisdictions and properties, against intrusions from the state. This has meant that, even while the canon has generally been the work of ruling classes or their clients, and even when social and political hierarchies have been at their most rigid, there has been a continuous and vigorous tradition of interrogating the most basic principles of authority, legitimacy and the obligation to obey.
The canon of Western political thought has owed much of its vigour to the fact that the discourse of liberty has belonged to ruling classes asserting their mastery, no less than to those resisting oppression by their masters. One objective of examining the canon in its social context is to suggest that even – or especially – now that capitalism has decisively transformed relations between property and power, our conceptions of freedom, equality, rights and legitimate government are constrained by their roots in the defence of ruling-class power and privilege; and even ideas of democracy have been distorted by this complicated legacy.
2
THE RENAISSANCE CITY-STATE
It has been said that ‘one of the most essential factors separating Renaissance from later philosophy [is] its fully international character, based on the use of Latin as an almost universal language of scholarship’, not divided by modern linguistic or national boundaries.1 Yet this period is precisely the age in which territorial states, defined by national boundaries, were becoming the dominant political force in Western Europe. It is certainly true that these states were not the homeland of the cultural phenomenon called by convention the Renaissance (a convention often questioned by historians these days); but this international culture was born in an even more particularistic setting, the Italian city-states most fiercely attached to their local autonomy.
The poet and scholar Petrarch, who, for his recovery of ancient classics and his Latin writings, is often called the ‘father of humanism’, or even of the Renaissance itself, is also, by virtue of his Italian poetry, considered one of the principal founders of a national language and literature. His revival of antiquity appealed not only to philosophers but to princes, emperors and popes who were keen to invoke Italy’s glorious past for their own political purposes. ‘Humanism’ would become the discourse of thinkers who have come to be called ‘civic humanists’, in defence of civic liberty and of their city-states’ autonomy. Yet the Renaissance would flourish as the city-states were in decline, and civic humanism would reach its pinnacle when the political independence and economic prosperity of the major city-states were most severely threatened by a new world order of ‘national’ states.
Whether we call this period the ‘Renaissance’ or something else, the dichotomy of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ cannot help us very much to understand these paradoxes. It is far more trouble than it is worth to determine whether civic humanism – if it exists at all as a distinct and coherent body of thought (about which more in a moment) – partakes of the ancient because it resists the trend towards large territorial or national states and because it adopts an ancient Greco-Roman discourse, or whether it is more modern than ancient because it supports the principles of civic liberty against monarchical or feudal rule. Nor, for that matter, is it particularly useful to describe this cultural form as transitional, or even as a synthesis of contradictions. We can, and clearly should, take note of the discourses available to thinkers; but we can better understand the particular ways in which political theorists chose to exploit them not by locating them along some abstract continuum from ancient to modern but by situating them in very specific historical processes.
Renaissance City States
The medieval city-states of northern Italy (which were discussed in the first volume of this history) represented an exception to the Western feudal model of seigneurial domination. Landed aristocracies certainly existed and in some city-states continued to play a prominent role; but urban concentrations which had survived the collapse of the Roman Empire, together with landholding patterns that preserved a free peasantry in contrast to the serfdom that had emerged elsewhere, produced a distinctive configuration: more or less autonomous city-states, governed by urban elites, often – as in the case of Florence – exercising what has been described as a collective lordship over the surrounding countryside, the contado. Some developed into prosperous commercial centres, serving a fragmented feudal Europe as trading links, providing goods to landed aristocracies and offering financial services to kings and popes.
But, if these city-states departed from seigneurial patterns of lordship, they had their own forms of parcellized sovereignty. The civic communes were always fairly loose associations of patrician families, factions, parties and corporate entities with their own liberties, organizations, jurisdictions and powers. In the Middle Ages, they were also battlegrounds for larger temporal authorities. In particular, they were caught up in struggles between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, which conducted their rivalries through the medium of factions within the civic commune – most notably, the infamous battles between Guelf (papal) and Ghibelline (imperial) factions, which typically, though not always, coincided with divisions between merchant classes and landed signori. These self-governing cities were, on the whole, oligarchies; and even when more effective republican governments came to power, they never succeeded in overcoming their internal fragmentation. Still later, even the most centralized Renaissance kingdoms continued to be divided by party, privilege and competing jurisdictions. For all the talk of civic humanism, the civic order never marked out a clearly defined public sphere detached from private corporate powers of various kinds.
Nor did the commercial activities of the civic communes mark a significant departure from feudal economic patterns. Their commercial success depended not, in the capitalist manner, on cost-effective production and enhanced labour productivity, in a market driven by price competition, but rather on ‘extra-economic’ factors, that is to say, factors external to the ‘economic’ transactions of production and exchange: not just the quality of goods but political power, monopoly privileges, sophisticated financial techniques, and military force. In external trade, which was the most lucrative economic activity for a major commercial centre like Venice, success clearly depended on military power and a symbiotic connection between commerce and war. Venice’s command of east–west trade required control of eastern Mediterranean sea routes, no less than rivers and mountain passes on the Italian mainland. To maintain that control, the Venetians developed a powerful military force, which itself became a marketable commodity, as Venice offered military aid to other powers – notably the Byzantine Empire – in exchange for commercial privileges and rights to trading posts.2
In general, economic rivalries took the form of power struggles among merchants, cities or states over direct control of markets; and city-states were constantly at war with one another. The major centres such as Florence and Venice consolidated their commercial dominance by forcibly