industrialization in nineteenth-century europe, tom kemp
(2): world market --> forces of change and disturbance (as solvent) [too much of this, in kemp's argument]
(4): Britain was unique because development was not part of a preconceived program ('organic' or 'autonomous')
(5): the 'advantages' of lateness -- ability to 'leap over' stages
(7): key--existence of a free labour force as a vital condition of industrialization
(7): merchants becoming industrialists [a bit too much of the orthodox narrative, again]
(8): key--traditional agrarian structure as block
(9): considerable unnevenness--wide regional differences across parts of Europe
(10): resource endowments were quite important, when you look at regions that were developing across the continent
(10-11): pithy answer to 'Why Europe?' is the nature of European feudalism ('looser, more individualist, etc.')
(11): key--it was the productive relations which were decisive (not trade)
(12): key--the creation of a class of landless wage-earners was critical
(13): suggesting that the political revolutions were crucial, in preparing the environment (political-juridical) [but how does this sit with his other arguments?]
(14): again, market forces as a 'dissolvent'
(15): emancipation from customary restrictions in the 1700s was important [how do we make sense of this? didn't take a 'State', but it did take a 'political revolution'? was this the inevitable outcome of the transformation of the agrarian structure?]
(16): the limitations of putting-out became clear by the 1700s -- couldn't realize further economies of scale, needed the factory
(17-18): imp--core of innovations took place in textiles, but this was driven by what was happening to demand and supply outside of textiles (important to note that inventive capacity was equally well-developed in other parts of Europe, but they suffered because they lacked England's reformed agrarian structures)
(20): development of credit networks was important; the Continent had them, but there the power of banks/finance was overweening (in England, most investment was from profits)
(21): sluggishness after a time, b/c of headstart?
(22-23): imp--protectionism was a widespread response -- but a more successful response was to search for niche markets, where Britain was not a competitor
(24): slow progress was not due to 'cultural preferences'/luddism
(24): they had to figure out a strategy to fit the period of British dominance
(25): capital goods industries were more important to late developers, than they were to British at comparable stages
(26): there were also differences in firm patterns (size, integration, etc.) (though he recommends against exaggerating this)
(27): imp-- rural artisans are understood as 'feudal relics', dead once the mass market emerges
(28) int--stressing the importance of links to the international division of labour, without which industrialization in Britain would have been slowed down
(29): 1848-1873 was a period of liberalizing markets, but 'free trade' was dealt a blow by the depression (industrialists sided with agrarian interests demanding protectionism)
(29): Britain didn't need protectionism, though, partly on account of her large formal and informal empire ('colonial development' as a substitute) [though presumably the dominance of her industry was sufficient?]
(30): lack of State in Britain was quite exceptional
(30-31): advantages of lateness need to be put in perspective -- they derive advantages only really in interindustry comparisons, but until 1914 nationally are inferior
(34): weakness of central powers in European feudalism [how to make sense of 'absolutist reaction' to declining seigneural revenues after the crisis of the 14th and 15th centuries, then? surely this disrupts the attempt to read European development back into a 'weak feudalism'?]
(35): towns as 'dissolvents'
(36): village cultivation as a 'collective effort'
(37): external forces --> disintegration
(38): critical -- reforms/revolution of basic agrarian structure was required, in order to give peasant cultivators incentives to pursue technical improvements
(39): emergence of a landless class
(40): labour force starting to develop in England by late Middle Ages; in France by 1700s; in Germany by 1700s; in E. Europe and Russia by late 1800s. this marks the development of capitalism.
(42): the old agrarian structures prohibit accumulation, imposing a brake upon the rate of economic progress
(43): consolidated power of the village community was also a block
(45): reciprocity in agrarian and industrial spheres [how to make (theoretical) sense of this more precisely, given the primacy of the impetus given by agrarian transformation?]
(46): importance of the potato, which was introduced in the 1700s
(47-48): imp-- French Rev was successful in safeguarding the rights of the French peasantry, which would act as a block on French development
(49): two pressures on French peasantry, after revolution: (1) modernization; (2) Napoleonic 'reform from above'. but this didn't change the basic story.
(50): imp-- story about the encroachment of the market breaking down old rural self-sufficiency, and bringing peasant/farmer into the market economy [again, this needs interrogation. how can this happen, if not 'from above'?]
(51): necessity of extra-European supplies of food
Showing posts with label french revolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label french revolution. Show all posts
Monday, February 7, 2011
Monday, November 15, 2010
jack goldstone, revolution and rebellion in the early modern world (1991)
(xxv): 1850 as pivot point (in most of world, England earlier) -- economic innovation in org. of labour and the tools of production make population pressures moot [this is important, insofar as it spells out the nature of the social institutions that will alleviate the pressures felt by early modern states]
(1-2): concerned, against Eurocentrism, with world-wide problems in (1) late 1500s to mid 1600s, and then again between (2) 1770 and 1850
(5, 8): definition of State Breakdown -- not all political institutions, but a breakdown of central authority's ability to dominate in a confrontation with the elite [using this, rather than revolution, because the latter term doesn't really fit many of the early modern state crises -- as in 'new institutions' new status structure, etc. ]
(11): the binary notations
(13-15): revisionists re: English revolution -- not long-term social causes (unlike Hill, Moor, Anderson, Wallerstein), but conjunctural ('large-scale historical accidents'). noting that this is unsatisfying, insofar as we're not content abandoning explanation.
(19): Skocpol doesn't help
(20): incidence of war (unlike Chorley) doesn't help -- the Second Thirty Years War (1688-1714, under Louis XIV) nor the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815) wrought revolution in Europe. 1830 and 1848 saw revolutions in places that were relatively free of war
(21): imp. caveat: wars can matter through costs -- military pressures depend on the scale and cost of war
(24): short summary of demographic-structural model -- large agrarian states of this period were not equipped to deal with the impace of steady growth fo population that began throughout N. Eurasia. this led to persistent price inflation, and tax revenues lagged behind these prices because most early modern states were based on fixed rates of taxation. expansion of armies eld to rising real costs. attempts to increase state revenues led to elite resistance, and rarely succeeded. hence (1) fiscal crisis. (2) elite also struggled secure their own relative position--increasing rivalry and factionalism. (3) and population growth also led to popular struggles: rural mistery, urban migration, falling real wages--and an expanding youth cohort.
(25-26, 28): source of population increase was exogenous -- combination of favorable climate and receding disease
(26, 36): key question -- certain States were able to streamline expenses/expand incomes (England and Prussia, during the favorable interlude of 1660-1760). why? [Goldstone has a conjunctural explanation] /"institutional flexibility"
(31): not crude Malthusianism -- 'popular control' kept populations well below the Malthusian limit; moreover, population is not driven merely by births ((1) epidemic disease, (2) growth of food supplies gen. exceeds population increase; (3) distributional effects most important (before Malthusian limits))
(33): population increase has nonlinear effect on marginal groups
(35): earthquake metaphor
(37): a new synthesis:
(64, 65-67): challenging the Marxist vs. Revisionist frame on the Eng. Revolution
(65): Goldstone's argument on , from 1500 - 1830s: (1) ecological crisis eroded royal authority and social stability, resulting in State Breakdown in 1640 (recovery after 1660s -- this is why 1688-1689 was 'painless'); (2) period from 1660-1750 one of relief; political struggles did not threaten the State; (3) from 1750 -1832, another period of ecological crisis, but moderated by the new resources created by the Industrial Rev.
(68): 1640 vs. 1688-1689
(68-69): classic Marxist position of 'bourgeois revolution' undermined by finding that most conflicts were intra-class fights, not cross-class; neo-Marxist position that difficusion of capitalist economic relations undermined traditional life, producing sharp conflicts also doesn't find support--neither enclosures ((1) the Crown was largest encloser in England, and (2) most popular disturbances were not led by enclosure victims, but by rural artisans and squatters) nor overseas trade ((1) Eng. not net exporter of grain, most gentry wealth came from elsewhere; (2) timing of grain expansion doesn't coincide with revolution'; (3) many of the 'new capitalists' were not enemies of the Crown but rather its allies) can do the explaining they want them to do.
(82): Skocpol, Wolf, Paige don't apply here: artisans and uban groups, not peasants, were key in English revolution. Nor does international competition with more powerful states really work (re: Skocpol)
(87): price revolution was not a silver bullion problem
(95): inflation hit the State--the Crown was not well-placed to deal with inflation (cost of maintaining army, etc.)
(109, 123): intra-elite conflict
(125, 128): high mobilization potential
(129-130, 132): also wants to add radical Puritanism to the mix -- but makes it clear, also, that this had material origins ('scapegoats were sought for the decay of the economic/social order')
(137): youthfulness of population
(140): cities
(141): English Rev., in sum
(107): Stuart financial crisis arose from inability to cope with cumulative inflationary pressures due to inflexibility in the early modern English tax system [key question, here, is whence the 'inflexibility'? can the old explanations help us account for inflexibility?]
(150-151): imp--the reason that the crisis didn't hit immediately (and pressures built up) had to do with the flexibility of English institutions (Crown could survive rising prices by selling assets, could borrow, had to sell offices, etc.) -- again, a path back to structure? / 'psi' as a political measure
(157, 161-162): the Fronde -- though this wasn't as radical as in England b/c no cross-class coalition could be built [to some extent the explanation is ideology, which is just silly; and more to the point, it is immediately question-begging -- why, if France was no less capable of absorbing stress, was cross-class coalition not possible?]
(167): why no crisis in Spain of comparable magnitude? peripheral crises, but the heartland was intact
(171): sum of French Rev. historiography (parallels developments in English Revolution debates)
(172): three problems with Skocpol:
(191): most Frenchfolk did not benefited from growth in industry/trade, as they were in agriculture
(193): Louis XIV had been fine, because of stable prices and fine agicultural sector; this was to change.
(197, 199, 202, 207, 208-209, 214, 218, 317): key--French tax system and the 'mysterious' fiscal crisis of 1999 -- too much emphasis on land taxes, viz-a-viz indirect taxes on industry/trade [again, is the explanation for this simply 'accidental'? to do this the State would have had to move against its elite--p. 214, 218; it couldn't do this in France, but managed to do this in England. why? given the work that the 'structural' is doing, then the Rev will not be much more than a 'large-scale historical accident'. we have to ask why the State didn't move to impose 'indirect taxes' on industry/trade; comparison with England and Prussia.
(227, 238): not social immobility, but social mobility -- there is no distinct, disenfranchised 'bourgeois class' to be found, in France. wealthy nobles and wealthy commoners were indistinguishable, re: sources of their wealth
(249): popular element in French Rev
(251): Skocpol re: peasants -- grievances always present; Goldstone after a more dynamic understanding of the causes behind rebellion than collapse in State authority)
(253): mention of Brenner on France (as nation of smallholders)
(259): in NE during French Rev, peasants were particularly vulnerable to population pressures (b/c of cash tenancy and wage labor) [this might be another way to get at the defects of his position that 'capitalism' solves population pressures; there is no doubt that there is a grain of truth in his argument, but it needs to be properly specified: what about capitalism?]
(261): French agriculture not 'backward'
(271): army's disintegration was important [but in this entire way of thinking about State breakdown, this is relegated to the background -- it depends on the larger price movements, and the question of when it is no longer possible to afford an army]
(272): both nobility and revolutionaries used the language of the Enlightenment
(287-288): vs. Marx on capitalism's advance, re: 1830 and 1848 -- most backward areas should have been most rebellious, etc.
(296-297, 299): Napoleonic stability, which was temporary
(313): 1848 wasn't 1789 primarily because of the relative health of State finances
(314): interesting -- a different way to understand the 'treachery' of the 'bourgeoisie' in 1848, which had to do with the fact that there was 'much displacement, but little turnover' (counterrevolution from the Right was, thus, not a big threat -- there wasn't a large cohort of disgruntled surplus sons calling for a return to more tradition). and there were continued threats on the Left.
(322): periodization of the poor laws -- the 'calm', 1660 - 1750, didn't need them
(332-333): again, interrogate -- we have a contingent explanation for why 1830-1832 was a 'reform crisis', rather than a revolution (William called Parliament)
(333): Eng 1848 vs. France 1848 was really a question of industrial 'take-off'
(335-337): key--Elbe avoided revolt, in Germ, unlike Southwest [in the explanation, though, this doesn't seem to have too much to do with 'capitalism' (almost the opposite) -- rather, down to the availability of land and the fact that peasants were 'better off' b/c of the requirements of Junker landlords (they gave peasants independent access to their means of subsistence, in effect)]
(362): in Ottoman and Ming states, bulk of income was drawn from fixed, land taxes -- which left them vulnerable when the ecological crisis hit
(389): interesting parallels between discussions of Puritanism, 'Sufism' and heterodox Confucian strands [hints at a kind of ideological flexibility that he's going to turn around and wholehartedly deny in the post-breakdown phase]
(399): failure of leadership in the Taiping rebellion made revolution impossible? (didn't cast its ideological net wide enough... odd]
(414): key difference in Japanese case was the fact of 'in-kind' taxes, which made stable population growth crisis producing; this affirms position that he's not a crude Malthusian, but a demographic-structuralist
(426): no marginal elites in the East (b/c they had been more fairly organized at the top?), who could attack the very principles of Ottoman and Confucian rules (those broad-based attacks that did emerge, as in the Taiping rebellion, alienated too many elites to have much hold). no 'clear alternative' was produced.
(429): profoundly odd and anti-theoretical approach to the relation of ideas to structure
(434): summary of his very bad ruminations on ideas in the course of revolution -- a wide mix in the first phases, but then an elite group has to emerge to build a cross-class coalition, post-revolution
(436): in England in 1640 and France in 1789 you got profound 'ideological' breaks with the past; in Ottoman and Ming-Qing transition you got lots of institutional change (more, in fact), but you didn't get 'ideological' breaks with the past [and I, thanks to you, am profoundly disgusted and confused, in equal measure]
(438): not an argument about the degree/scope of institutional change, which was more in the Asian cases
(443-444): odd argument that revolutionary ideology and revolutionary results don't go together (ranks the revolutions by ideological radical-ness, and results radical-ness, and notes a disconnect) [but how do you measure the former? seems completely arbitrary. subordinate groups? elite groups? pamphlets? speeches? what?]
(446-448): [and here we get the WTF moment] Westerners had an 'eschatalogical' view of history, whereas Easterners were locked in a 'cyclic' view of time [incidentally, the proof for this is quoting a couple of Westerners and a couple of Easterners (oh, and Chinese peasant revolts looked backed to "idealized past dynasties" -- French peasant revolts?)]
(448): ridiculous! they smashed everything, but their smashing everything (b/c it occurred with non-eschatalogical framing) was restorative, not progressive.
- - - - - -
[1] conjunctural explanation of institutional reform -- if it's a demographic-structural model, can we afford a contingent explanation for structural change? alternatively, can old structural models explain these specific patterns? (p. 26, p. 36, p. 107, p. 150, p. 175, p. 202)
[2] take on the Fronde vs. English revolution explanation, which is tied to the above but distinct. why was it that no cross-class alliance could arise in Fr? ideology? come off it. [the Moores review makes this point. when demographic trends are similar, then culture is called in, as an exogenous factor, to explain things. but why not structure? Moores notes that in France there were real-material ties to the king that didn't exist in England, where instead you had a group of self-confident agrarian capitalists (does this hold up to historical evidence?)] (p. 161-162)
[2b] we can add to this the contingent explanation of the 'reform crisis' of 1830-1832. didn't erupt because William called Parliament?
[3] capitalism solves the problems of population pressure? (1) this needs to be properly specified [what does it mean to say that 'capitalism' has or hasn't arrived? Junker 'agribusiness' estates -- was it 'wage-labour'? see p. 335] ; (2) what is related, this requires an inability to think holistically, in contrast to his aims, which comes out obviously in his treatment of China and Russia ('combined and uneven development'). in other words: yes, some features you see in other capitalist economies haven't arrived (productivity, namely--'capitalism as productive forces,' almost), but this is not because capitalism hasn't arrived.
[4] confusion of variables in the Psi measure [as per the Arjomand review -- using what he wants to prove as a measure that is supposed to prove it]
[4] not even worth taking the ideological crap at the end seriously, but still. the causal argument can be undermined (1) at the level of the argument itself; (2) at the level of the empirical 'facts' he summons to justify each link in the causal chain
the argument:
marginal elites who want to change the principles = C1 (structural)
cultural framework posesses an eschatalogical element = C2 (ideological)
C1 + C2 --> 'symbolic transformation and revolutionary political reconstruction'
absence of C1 + C2 --> 'conservative state reconstruction'
(some of) the problems:
1. the marginal elites come from unfairness in State construction. correct? if not, then where and why? structural explanation?
2. marginal elites --> revolution link [surely this is contingent? what about claims around 1848, and treachery?]
3. absurdity of the claim around West as uniquely 'eschatalogical'. [quote a bunch of bigots, or quote a couple of Westerners to make your point. ]
4. absurdity of the C2 --> transformative settlement [setting aside the problems in measurement, what is a defensible mechanism for this? elites mobilize a radical language and, voilah!, you have ideological dynamism?]
5. arbitrariness of what's being measured [how do you measure ideological dynamism?]
6. idiocy of explandum --> rise of the west link [ideological dynamism is supposed to produce the rise of the West? this is unvarnished idiocy!]
7. it's worth going through the counterfactuals, which clarify the transparent stupidity of this argument: (a) marginal elite and/or(?) eschatalogical cultural framework in Ming-Qing transition/Ottoman State breakdown would have produced ideological dynamism/institutional innovation, which would have produced the rise of the East; (b) absence of marginal elite and/or(?) eschatalogical cultural framework in Eng/France would have produced absence of ideological dynamism/institutional innovation, which would have presented the rise of the West.
(xxv): 1850 as pivot point (in most of world, England earlier) -- economic innovation in org. of labour and the tools of production make population pressures moot [this is important, insofar as it spells out the nature of the social institutions that will alleviate the pressures felt by early modern states]
(1-2): concerned, against Eurocentrism, with world-wide problems in (1) late 1500s to mid 1600s, and then again between (2) 1770 and 1850
(5, 8): definition of State Breakdown -- not all political institutions, but a breakdown of central authority's ability to dominate in a confrontation with the elite [using this, rather than revolution, because the latter term doesn't really fit many of the early modern state crises -- as in 'new institutions' new status structure, etc. ]
(11): the binary notations
(13-15): revisionists re: English revolution -- not long-term social causes (unlike Hill, Moor, Anderson, Wallerstein), but conjunctural ('large-scale historical accidents'). noting that this is unsatisfying, insofar as we're not content abandoning explanation.
(19): Skocpol doesn't help
(20): incidence of war (unlike Chorley) doesn't help -- the Second Thirty Years War (1688-1714, under Louis XIV) nor the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815) wrought revolution in Europe. 1830 and 1848 saw revolutions in places that were relatively free of war
(21): imp. caveat: wars can matter through costs -- military pressures depend on the scale and cost of war
(24): short summary of demographic-structural model -- large agrarian states of this period were not equipped to deal with the impace of steady growth fo population that began throughout N. Eurasia. this led to persistent price inflation, and tax revenues lagged behind these prices because most early modern states were based on fixed rates of taxation. expansion of armies eld to rising real costs. attempts to increase state revenues led to elite resistance, and rarely succeeded. hence (1) fiscal crisis. (2) elite also struggled secure their own relative position--increasing rivalry and factionalism. (3) and population growth also led to popular struggles: rural mistery, urban migration, falling real wages--and an expanding youth cohort.
(25-26, 28): source of population increase was exogenous -- combination of favorable climate and receding disease
(26, 36): key question -- certain States were able to streamline expenses/expand incomes (England and Prussia, during the favorable interlude of 1660-1760). why? [Goldstone has a conjunctural explanation] /"institutional flexibility"
(31): not crude Malthusianism -- 'popular control' kept populations well below the Malthusian limit; moreover, population is not driven merely by births ((1) epidemic disease, (2) growth of food supplies gen. exceeds population increase; (3) distributional effects most important (before Malthusian limits))
(33): population increase has nonlinear effect on marginal groups
(35): earthquake metaphor
(37): a new synthesis:
- synthesis of economic and political history (against Marxism)
- synthesis of new social/demographic history with old political history
- world-wide/holistic
- cyclic forces, rather than secular [not entirely, of course, insofar as this is demographic-structural]
- structure + culture [shameful!]
- methodological
(64, 65-67): challenging the Marxist vs. Revisionist frame on the Eng. Revolution
(65): Goldstone's argument on , from 1500 - 1830s: (1) ecological crisis eroded royal authority and social stability, resulting in State Breakdown in 1640 (recovery after 1660s -- this is why 1688-1689 was 'painless'); (2) period from 1660-1750 one of relief; political struggles did not threaten the State; (3) from 1750 -1832, another period of ecological crisis, but moderated by the new resources created by the Industrial Rev.
(68): 1640 vs. 1688-1689
(68-69): classic Marxist position of 'bourgeois revolution' undermined by finding that most conflicts were intra-class fights, not cross-class; neo-Marxist position that difficusion of capitalist economic relations undermined traditional life, producing sharp conflicts also doesn't find support--neither enclosures ((1) the Crown was largest encloser in England, and (2) most popular disturbances were not led by enclosure victims, but by rural artisans and squatters) nor overseas trade ((1) Eng. not net exporter of grain, most gentry wealth came from elsewhere; (2) timing of grain expansion doesn't coincide with revolution'; (3) many of the 'new capitalists' were not enemies of the Crown but rather its allies) can do the explaining they want them to do.
(82): Skocpol, Wolf, Paige don't apply here: artisans and uban groups, not peasants, were key in English revolution. Nor does international competition with more powerful states really work (re: Skocpol)
(87): price revolution was not a silver bullion problem
(95): inflation hit the State--the Crown was not well-placed to deal with inflation (cost of maintaining army, etc.)
(109, 123): intra-elite conflict
(125, 128): high mobilization potential
(129-130, 132): also wants to add radical Puritanism to the mix -- but makes it clear, also, that this had material origins ('scapegoats were sought for the decay of the economic/social order')
(137): youthfulness of population
(140): cities
(141): English Rev., in sum
(107): Stuart financial crisis arose from inability to cope with cumulative inflationary pressures due to inflexibility in the early modern English tax system [key question, here, is whence the 'inflexibility'? can the old explanations help us account for inflexibility?]
(150-151): imp--the reason that the crisis didn't hit immediately (and pressures built up) had to do with the flexibility of English institutions (Crown could survive rising prices by selling assets, could borrow, had to sell offices, etc.) -- again, a path back to structure? / 'psi' as a political measure
(157, 161-162): the Fronde -- though this wasn't as radical as in England b/c no cross-class coalition could be built [to some extent the explanation is ideology, which is just silly; and more to the point, it is immediately question-begging -- why, if France was no less capable of absorbing stress, was cross-class coalition not possible?]
(167): why no crisis in Spain of comparable magnitude? peripheral crises, but the heartland was intact
(171): sum of French Rev. historiography (parallels developments in English Revolution debates)
(172): three problems with Skocpol:
- France was not a laggard; in fact, its output in trade and industry was larger than England's; American War of Independence was France's least costly.
- Skocpol tells us little about why conflicts within the elite were so intense
- understates the importance of urban unrest in Paris
(191): most Frenchfolk did not benefited from growth in industry/trade, as they were in agriculture
(193): Louis XIV had been fine, because of stable prices and fine agicultural sector; this was to change.
(197, 199, 202, 207, 208-209, 214, 218, 317): key--French tax system and the 'mysterious' fiscal crisis of 1999 -- too much emphasis on land taxes, viz-a-viz indirect taxes on industry/trade [again, is the explanation for this simply 'accidental'? to do this the State would have had to move against its elite--p. 214, 218; it couldn't do this in France, but managed to do this in England. why? given the work that the 'structural' is doing, then the Rev will not be much more than a 'large-scale historical accident'. we have to ask why the State didn't move to impose 'indirect taxes' on industry/trade; comparison with England and Prussia.
(227, 238): not social immobility, but social mobility -- there is no distinct, disenfranchised 'bourgeois class' to be found, in France. wealthy nobles and wealthy commoners were indistinguishable, re: sources of their wealth
(249): popular element in French Rev
(251): Skocpol re: peasants -- grievances always present; Goldstone after a more dynamic understanding of the causes behind rebellion than collapse in State authority)
(253): mention of Brenner on France (as nation of smallholders)
(259): in NE during French Rev, peasants were particularly vulnerable to population pressures (b/c of cash tenancy and wage labor) [this might be another way to get at the defects of his position that 'capitalism' solves population pressures; there is no doubt that there is a grain of truth in his argument, but it needs to be properly specified: what about capitalism?]
(261): French agriculture not 'backward'
(271): army's disintegration was important [but in this entire way of thinking about State breakdown, this is relegated to the background -- it depends on the larger price movements, and the question of when it is no longer possible to afford an army]
(272): both nobility and revolutionaries used the language of the Enlightenment
(287-288): vs. Marx on capitalism's advance, re: 1830 and 1848 -- most backward areas should have been most rebellious, etc.
(296-297, 299): Napoleonic stability, which was temporary
(313): 1848 wasn't 1789 primarily because of the relative health of State finances
(314): interesting -- a different way to understand the 'treachery' of the 'bourgeoisie' in 1848, which had to do with the fact that there was 'much displacement, but little turnover' (counterrevolution from the Right was, thus, not a big threat -- there wasn't a large cohort of disgruntled surplus sons calling for a return to more tradition). and there were continued threats on the Left.
(322): periodization of the poor laws -- the 'calm', 1660 - 1750, didn't need them
(332-333): again, interrogate -- we have a contingent explanation for why 1830-1832 was a 'reform crisis', rather than a revolution (William called Parliament)
(333): Eng 1848 vs. France 1848 was really a question of industrial 'take-off'
(335-337): key--Elbe avoided revolt, in Germ, unlike Southwest [in the explanation, though, this doesn't seem to have too much to do with 'capitalism' (almost the opposite) -- rather, down to the availability of land and the fact that peasants were 'better off' b/c of the requirements of Junker landlords (they gave peasants independent access to their means of subsistence, in effect)]
(362): in Ottoman and Ming states, bulk of income was drawn from fixed, land taxes -- which left them vulnerable when the ecological crisis hit
(389): interesting parallels between discussions of Puritanism, 'Sufism' and heterodox Confucian strands [hints at a kind of ideological flexibility that he's going to turn around and wholehartedly deny in the post-breakdown phase]
(399): failure of leadership in the Taiping rebellion made revolution impossible? (didn't cast its ideological net wide enough... odd]
(414): key difference in Japanese case was the fact of 'in-kind' taxes, which made stable population growth crisis producing; this affirms position that he's not a crude Malthusian, but a demographic-structuralist
(426): no marginal elites in the East (b/c they had been more fairly organized at the top?), who could attack the very principles of Ottoman and Confucian rules (those broad-based attacks that did emerge, as in the Taiping rebellion, alienated too many elites to have much hold). no 'clear alternative' was produced.
(429): profoundly odd and anti-theoretical approach to the relation of ideas to structure
(434): summary of his very bad ruminations on ideas in the course of revolution -- a wide mix in the first phases, but then an elite group has to emerge to build a cross-class coalition, post-revolution
(436): in England in 1640 and France in 1789 you got profound 'ideological' breaks with the past; in Ottoman and Ming-Qing transition you got lots of institutional change (more, in fact), but you didn't get 'ideological' breaks with the past [and I, thanks to you, am profoundly disgusted and confused, in equal measure]
(438): not an argument about the degree/scope of institutional change, which was more in the Asian cases
(443-444): odd argument that revolutionary ideology and revolutionary results don't go together (ranks the revolutions by ideological radical-ness, and results radical-ness, and notes a disconnect) [but how do you measure the former? seems completely arbitrary. subordinate groups? elite groups? pamphlets? speeches? what?]
(446-448): [and here we get the WTF moment] Westerners had an 'eschatalogical' view of history, whereas Easterners were locked in a 'cyclic' view of time [incidentally, the proof for this is quoting a couple of Westerners and a couple of Easterners (oh, and Chinese peasant revolts looked backed to "idealized past dynasties" -- French peasant revolts?)]
(448): ridiculous! they smashed everything, but their smashing everything (b/c it occurred with non-eschatalogical framing) was restorative, not progressive.
- - - - - -
[1] conjunctural explanation of institutional reform -- if it's a demographic-structural model, can we afford a contingent explanation for structural change? alternatively, can old structural models explain these specific patterns? (p. 26, p. 36, p. 107, p. 150, p. 175, p. 202)
[2] take on the Fronde vs. English revolution explanation, which is tied to the above but distinct. why was it that no cross-class alliance could arise in Fr? ideology? come off it. [the Moores review makes this point. when demographic trends are similar, then culture is called in, as an exogenous factor, to explain things. but why not structure? Moores notes that in France there were real-material ties to the king that didn't exist in England, where instead you had a group of self-confident agrarian capitalists (does this hold up to historical evidence?)] (p. 161-162)
[2b] we can add to this the contingent explanation of the 'reform crisis' of 1830-1832. didn't erupt because William called Parliament?
[3] capitalism solves the problems of population pressure? (1) this needs to be properly specified [what does it mean to say that 'capitalism' has or hasn't arrived? Junker 'agribusiness' estates -- was it 'wage-labour'? see p. 335] ; (2) what is related, this requires an inability to think holistically, in contrast to his aims, which comes out obviously in his treatment of China and Russia ('combined and uneven development'). in other words: yes, some features you see in other capitalist economies haven't arrived (productivity, namely--'capitalism as productive forces,' almost), but this is not because capitalism hasn't arrived.
[4] confusion of variables in the Psi measure [as per the Arjomand review -- using what he wants to prove as a measure that is supposed to prove it]
[4] not even worth taking the ideological crap at the end seriously, but still. the causal argument can be undermined (1) at the level of the argument itself; (2) at the level of the empirical 'facts' he summons to justify each link in the causal chain
the argument:
marginal elites who want to change the principles = C1 (structural)
cultural framework posesses an eschatalogical element = C2 (ideological)
C1 + C2 --> 'symbolic transformation and revolutionary political reconstruction'
absence of C1 + C2 --> 'conservative state reconstruction'
(some of) the problems:
1. the marginal elites come from unfairness in State construction. correct? if not, then where and why? structural explanation?
2. marginal elites --> revolution link [surely this is contingent? what about claims around 1848, and treachery?]
3. absurdity of the claim around West as uniquely 'eschatalogical'. [quote a bunch of bigots, or quote a couple of Westerners to make your point. ]
4. absurdity of the C2 --> transformative settlement [setting aside the problems in measurement, what is a defensible mechanism for this? elites mobilize a radical language and, voilah!, you have ideological dynamism?]
5. arbitrariness of what's being measured [how do you measure ideological dynamism?]
6. idiocy of explandum --> rise of the west link [ideological dynamism is supposed to produce the rise of the West? this is unvarnished idiocy!]
7. it's worth going through the counterfactuals, which clarify the transparent stupidity of this argument: (a) marginal elite and/or(?) eschatalogical cultural framework in Ming-Qing transition/Ottoman State breakdown would have produced ideological dynamism/institutional innovation, which would have produced the rise of the East; (b) absence of marginal elite and/or(?) eschatalogical cultural framework in Eng/France would have produced absence of ideological dynamism/institutional innovation, which would have presented the rise of the West.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Rethinking the French Revolution, George Comninel
(xi-xii): in sum--three guiding principles of Comninel's position on French Rev
(6): Lefebvre, on the other hand, saw it as a 'necessary bourgeois social revolution'
(9): an uneasy alliance between Marxists and liberals
(16): three central points of the Marxist perspective
(20-25): int. section on 'conservative liberalism' of the revisionist challenge (for revisionists, what the revolution was about is not the interesting question; they, rather, saw it as their task to prove what it was not about)
(30): by 1850, Marx and Engels had come to the conclusion that the bourgeoisie would not lead a bourgeois revolution, simply because an aristocratic regime held power
(33): Marxism retreated into theoretical 're-mixing' of the history, rather than confronting this wealth of historical evidence head-on (which demonstrated that there was no 'social frontier' separating the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, etc.)
(50): even Hill, writing about the English Civil War, conceded that the gentry played a large role. for him, the bourgeois revolution is not one which is led by the bourgeoisie (paradoxically, this one was led by the nobility), but one which creates the conditions for capitalism. Brenner takes this further, obviously, noting instead that you get radical and conservative positions within the ruling class leading to Civil War.
(56): Marx's debt to bourgeois materialism ('I did not discover the existence of classes.' [Guizot, Mignet, etc.]) [Comninel's main argument here, of course, is that Marx is giving credit where credit is not due--the 'critique of political economy' actually is a critique of the liberal categories Marx adopted in his early work]
(61): a fundamentally Smithian account of history: 'middle-class industry' as the prgoressive force of civilization, hampered by tradition, etc. Modern, bourgeois progress.
(65): the 'stages' theory is also a legacy of liberal materialism
(68): for liberal materialism, it was the 'mechanistic force of population growth which provided the essential impetus of social development' [you have density-->division of labor, in essence--Durkheim]
(74): key--the 'bourgeois revolution' that Marx imported into his account of history was borrowed from this type of an understanding of the mechanics of history (a liberal class, straining to break free)
(78): against orthodox Marxism -- in which the bourgeois revolution has pride of place (Hobsbawm being its exemplar)
(82): against Structuralist Marxism -- a scientific theory that will be filtered through Marxist categories (but, in essence, Comninel is arguing, these categories that Structuralist Marxism took for granted are flawed). moreover, it is descriptive--can't answer dynamic questions about the MoP, social structure
(106): the question is not whether you had a clash of ideologies in the Rev (you did--'constitutional liberalism' vs 'aristocratic constitutionalism'); the question is whether this reflected a fundamental social clash.
(111-112): 'classlessness' as a common ideology, for all participants in the French Rev (even if in different ways, all clung to some understanding of the 'nation')
(112-113): imp--it proved impossible to defende the Revolution while also attempting to containe the threat of popular sovereignty (explaining its move left) [remember--the argument is not that the 'masses' represented clashing social interest to the bourgeoisie/aristocracy, which is relevant] [one question, here, might be why such a trenchant conflict was fought over political spoils? his point will be the intra-ruling class struggles can be quite profound. do we accept it?]
(117): classes, in liberal history, were not defined in terms of fundamental relations of exploitation--but defined ideologically (active/passive, etc.)
(125): insisting that we remember that HM developed through the critique of capitalism--the critique of political economy
(138): imp--already by 1847, Marx coneived property relatoins as historically specific expressions of the antagonistic relations of production fundamental to each particular epoch.
(139): HM's critique of liberal ideology was to reveal its class content, and the specificity of its concepts
(141-143, 147-148, 150): key-- GI carries liberal ideology within it--division of labor as a motive force, along with increase of production (technical aspects of division of labor predominate, a la Smith; focus is on the social division of labor). two aspects: (1) conflation of liberal conception of class with Marx's own; (2) subordination of history of class society to technical development of division of labor
(151): how can you make sense of the bourgeois revolution, though, without taking into account the fundamental exploitative relationship of the epoch (namely, bourgeoisie/aristocracy with the peasantry)?
(152): Sweezy-Dobb debate--capitalism as developing external to feudalism, versus as an 'internal dynamic' in class history (here Comninel mentions there is a great deal to be said for an intervening period between feudalism and capitalism)
(156-158): critical--distinction between social division of labor, and technical division of labor, in capitalism (excellent line from Poverty of Philosophy)
(xi-xii): in sum--three guiding principles of Comninel's position on French Rev
- (a) in contrast with Britain, capitalist class relations did not yet exist in France in town or countryside; (b) the bourgeoisie was not a class opposed to the aristocracy but rather shared with it the essential social relations of property ownership (in land) and state office; (c) consequently, the two were 'partners in exploitation'
- this partnership was an unequal one -- it was over the 'political' control of the state and spoils of office (army, administration) that a conflict arose that led to the revolution
- major result of the Revolution was to unify the nation and centralize the state; but it did not transform France into a capitalist country.
(6): Lefebvre, on the other hand, saw it as a 'necessary bourgeois social revolution'
(9): an uneasy alliance between Marxists and liberals
(16): three central points of the Marxist perspective
- the bourgeoisie had been agent of growth in commerce and industry
- the aristocratic and absolutist structure had been a feudal hindrance to this growth
- and that the bourgeoisie had led the Revolution in order to overthrow this system, clearing the ground for capitalism
- bourgeois revolutionaries were 'not capitalists'
- shared in full range of landed income--including portion derived from fedual dues
- Revolution did not give rise to capitalist production but preserved the essential social characteristics of the Ancien Regime
(20-25): int. section on 'conservative liberalism' of the revisionist challenge (for revisionists, what the revolution was about is not the interesting question; they, rather, saw it as their task to prove what it was not about)
(30): by 1850, Marx and Engels had come to the conclusion that the bourgeoisie would not lead a bourgeois revolution, simply because an aristocratic regime held power
(33): Marxism retreated into theoretical 're-mixing' of the history, rather than confronting this wealth of historical evidence head-on (which demonstrated that there was no 'social frontier' separating the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, etc.)
(50): even Hill, writing about the English Civil War, conceded that the gentry played a large role. for him, the bourgeois revolution is not one which is led by the bourgeoisie (paradoxically, this one was led by the nobility), but one which creates the conditions for capitalism. Brenner takes this further, obviously, noting instead that you get radical and conservative positions within the ruling class leading to Civil War.
(56): Marx's debt to bourgeois materialism ('I did not discover the existence of classes.' [Guizot, Mignet, etc.]) [Comninel's main argument here, of course, is that Marx is giving credit where credit is not due--the 'critique of political economy' actually is a critique of the liberal categories Marx adopted in his early work]
(61): a fundamentally Smithian account of history: 'middle-class industry' as the prgoressive force of civilization, hampered by tradition, etc. Modern, bourgeois progress.
(65): the 'stages' theory is also a legacy of liberal materialism
(68): for liberal materialism, it was the 'mechanistic force of population growth which provided the essential impetus of social development' [you have density-->division of labor, in essence--Durkheim]
(74): key--the 'bourgeois revolution' that Marx imported into his account of history was borrowed from this type of an understanding of the mechanics of history (a liberal class, straining to break free)
(78): against orthodox Marxism -- in which the bourgeois revolution has pride of place (Hobsbawm being its exemplar)
(82): against Structuralist Marxism -- a scientific theory that will be filtered through Marxist categories (but, in essence, Comninel is arguing, these categories that Structuralist Marxism took for granted are flawed). moreover, it is descriptive--can't answer dynamic questions about the MoP, social structure
(106): the question is not whether you had a clash of ideologies in the Rev (you did--'constitutional liberalism' vs 'aristocratic constitutionalism'); the question is whether this reflected a fundamental social clash.
(111-112): 'classlessness' as a common ideology, for all participants in the French Rev (even if in different ways, all clung to some understanding of the 'nation')
(112-113): imp--it proved impossible to defende the Revolution while also attempting to containe the threat of popular sovereignty (explaining its move left) [remember--the argument is not that the 'masses' represented clashing social interest to the bourgeoisie/aristocracy, which is relevant] [one question, here, might be why such a trenchant conflict was fought over political spoils? his point will be the intra-ruling class struggles can be quite profound. do we accept it?]
(117): classes, in liberal history, were not defined in terms of fundamental relations of exploitation--but defined ideologically (active/passive, etc.)
(125): insisting that we remember that HM developed through the critique of capitalism--the critique of political economy
(138): imp--already by 1847, Marx coneived property relatoins as historically specific expressions of the antagonistic relations of production fundamental to each particular epoch.
(139): HM's critique of liberal ideology was to reveal its class content, and the specificity of its concepts
(141-143, 147-148, 150): key-- GI carries liberal ideology within it--division of labor as a motive force, along with increase of production (technical aspects of division of labor predominate, a la Smith; focus is on the social division of labor). two aspects: (1) conflation of liberal conception of class with Marx's own; (2) subordination of history of class society to technical development of division of labor
(151): how can you make sense of the bourgeois revolution, though, without taking into account the fundamental exploitative relationship of the epoch (namely, bourgeoisie/aristocracy with the peasantry)?
(152): Sweezy-Dobb debate--capitalism as developing external to feudalism, versus as an 'internal dynamic' in class history (here Comninel mentions there is a great deal to be said for an intervening period between feudalism and capitalism)
(156-158): critical--distinction between social division of labor, and technical division of labor, in capitalism (excellent line from Poverty of Philosophy)
Thursday, October 14, 2010
georges lefebvre, the coming of the french revolution
(vii-ix): translator defense of revolution's necessity
(xiv-xv): imp--different interests of the classes arrayed in the revolution [though here a recognition that there are facts "awkward to a purely materialist theory of class conflict," there's no attempt to rethink the basic categories of 'bourgeoisie' in the way that Comninel demands]
(xvi): the bourgeoisie had to offer something to everbyody--so they seized on the philosophy of natural rights (the philosophy of the 18th century)
(1-2): key--a new class growing within the aritsocratic order -- it was a revolution to restore the harmony between fact and law [as Marx argued--it is in this sense that Lefebvre's is the classic account]
(3): people were not the original force, but events moved steadily in the direction of the popular revolution
(7): clergy owned a tenth of the land
(8): but wasn't much of a class--"the aristocracy meant the nobility"
(9-10): nobility owned about half of the land, from which they collected dues [here he's acknowledging, again, the fact that the bourgeoisie could also own land and collect dues]
(12): nobility of the sword (wedded most to tradition) vs. nobility of the robe (of recent bourgeois extraction, wealthy because offices had high mkt value)
(16): imp--18th century was not just the time of the bourgeois revolution, but it was also the "last offensive of the aristocracy"
(20): Montesqieu's "Spirit of Laws" as the handbook of the aristocracy--arguing for 'bodies' in opposition to the monarchy; a 'liberty' of the aristocracy
(22): debt servicing in 1788 amounted to 50% of government expenditures (couldn't repudiate it because of the Parliaments and the Paris bourgeoisie--who would have forsaken further assistance)
(23): key--"under the Old Regime, the richer a man was, the less he paid. Technically the crisis was easy to meet: all that was necessary was to make everybody pay."
(25): "the character of the King and Queen must be included." [!?]
(27): aristocracy wanted to use the deficit to assert themselves, viz-a-viz the King
(29-30): battle on--around 1787-1788, between the King and the Aristocracy
(33): calling for the Estates-General, but in a way that favors the aristocracy ("a common front against royal power")
(34-37): key--at this stage, the aristocracy was imagining a France without the power of the absolutist monarchy. their model would have been England post-1688 [this is the c-factual Lefebvre raises--"had the aristocracy had their way"]; they had no intention of surrendering their privileges.
(41): key--[in direct contrast to Comninel's conception of them as exploiters,] Lefebvre suggesting that it was only because the bourgeoisie was intermixed with the rest of the population that they could assume leadership of the revolution.
(42-44): levels of the bourgeois class: (1) finance (pg. 42 -- tax farmers, rentiers); (2) merchants (pg. 43--industry, which was subordinate, is grouped here); (3) liberal professions; (4) skilled workers/crafstmen/sans-culottes, who were hostile to capitalism
(46): in short--extreme diversity of positions reflected in the diversity of life; most bourgeoisie were not very well off, and were intimately connected to common people [well, then, in what sense a coherent class, at all? upper bourgeois simply seems to mean non-nobles living off taxes/rent, and lower bourgeois simply seems to mean not proletarian--but what connects the two?]
(47): its imprudence in attacking the aristocracy was driven by a desire to eliminate legal, hereditary privilege
(48-50): int--doing them an injustice by suggesting they were motivated by their own interests alone. have to account for their 'historic mission', their idealism. [hmm]
(52): pivot point--in September 1788, the Parliament of Paris (aristocracy) rules that the Estates-General should be convened as in 1614--the bourgeoisie rebels, and redirects its ire on the aristocracy.
(53-54): the Committee of Thirty
(55): moderation of the 'patriot party', which had no objections to the idea of 'three orders' -- just wanted the 'doubling of the Third' (same number of reps as the nobility)
(58): December 12, 1788 -- a manifesto of the aristocracy, worried about the suppression of feudal rights, etc. [again--useful to think how we might re-interpret this, in light of the Comninel]
(61): November 1788-February 1789 -- the bourgeoisie was becoming 'more radical', in face of intransigence the 'doubling'. moving to question of voting by order or by head, and possibly even getting rid of the privileged orders
(65): Lawyers dominated the election process for the 3rd Estate
(68): representatives of the Third Estate identified the cause of their class with the cause of their nation.
(69-70): Sieyes was both the godfather and a gravedigger (before a pamphleteer and leading light; after the Fall of the Bastille, the popular revolution terrified him)
(72-75): imp--clear that all three orders were unanimously against absolute royal power--however, there were widely different positions on the question of privileges and civic equality, of course [a potential counterfactual, here -- suggesting that an official plan of reforms, akin to the Charter of 1814, could have saved the monarchy. 'but the court remained inert.]
(82-83): May 4, 1789 the Estates-General convenes; June 17, Third Estate takes the name of 'National Assembly'. King/Necker find themselves on the back foot.
(84-85): On June 20 they take the Tennis Court Oath (some reservations)
(87-89): imp--a of June 23rd shows the King willing to become a Constitutional Monarch, which itself shows that everything has moved forward. Decree is moot, because as July approaches the National Constituent Assembly is declared.
(92):imp--things are finely poised, the Assembly expects force to be used to expel them. BUT the force of the people intervened, and the Old Regime "went down beyond recall"
(97): imp--the Army was staffed by people who were suffering on account of high prices, mingling with townspeople, etc. [speaks to some truths about revolutions, I should think]
(98-99): the strength of insurrectionary movements lay with the 'lesser bourgeoisie' (handicraft workers, shopkeepers)
(99): very interesting--it was precisely because of the lack of coherence/organization of the working-class, Lefebvre is suggesting, that the bourgeosie was willing to move so far with the revolution. otherwise you might have had an 1848, is the implication. [this speaks to larger concerns about the 'bourgeois revolution' -- clearly there is some sense in which Comninel's invitation to think through the structure of exploitation has purchase, implicitly, in Lefebvre's account]
(102-105): economic distress (high price of bread, etc.) as an immediate cause of the insurrection
(108): almost one-half of the population (10 million out of 23 million), it's estimated, were in need of relief
(109): the economic crisis was read as an 'aristocratic conspiracy' by the Third Estate, however incorrectly
(114): attack on the Bastille was initially demand for 'arms'
(116): the 'tricolor' was a synthesis (red and blue for Paris, white for the King)
(118): int--a kind of bourgeois 'dual power'; the co-existence of the formal assembly (the common council) with district assemblies (direct democracy)
(120-122): the 'Terror', here, is made sense of through the fears of the 'aristocratic conspiracy'
(125): July 1789, a differential deepening of the Revolution--in some places the local revolution was complete; in some places democratic development was less pronounced; and yet in others the power of the Old Regime remained intact
(126): "France surged spontaneously in a federation of local units."
(127): National Guard was half-hearted in repressing disorder (the National Assembly tried to get people to pay old taxes, etc.-- but it "preached in the desert")
(133): key--Peasantry didn't enter the scene before July 14, despite being 3/4 of the population. Nonetheless, without their adherence the Revolution could hardly have succeeded. They suddenly revolted, and their uprising is one of the most distinctive features.
(132): France vs. England--unlike England, many French peasants were landowners, yet to be reduced to the ranks of the landless en masse (even though there were propertyless peasants, in quite sizeable numbers [confusing]).
(134): the Old Regime was afflicted by a serious 'agrarian crisis', owing to backwardness of cultivation (need for more land, which wasn't available).
(135): property rights remained unquestioned--principle was penalizing enemies of 'the country', not those w/ property [hmm]
(136): key--the peasantry was critical of the bourgeoisie (here he means 'commercial wealth'), but was most aroused to a state of fury by the privileges of the aristocracy [this, obviously, directly refutes Comninel's contention that the two were twin exploiters--unless we are going to make a 'misperception' qulification, which seems fruitless]
(140): key--the 18th century had seen increasing burden on the peasantry, as well as the steady encroachment on the common rights of the peasantry
(142): bourgeois discomfort over peasant agitation over manorial rights (since that was a form of property)
(143): imp--the convocation of th E-G had an enormous impact on the peasantry--one cannot exaggerate the echoes, argues Lefebvre ('the King meant to give them satisfaction')
(144): the idea of an 'aristocratic conspiracy' against a 'good King' [construction of a usable history/present]
(146): the economic crisis had revolutionary consequences, in two ways
(157): the aristocrats had hoped to postpone the Declaration--the equality of rights threatened their privileges
(159): events were confirming the principles--"the people were not waiting upon deliberations of the Assembly to realize their desires"
(161): key--strongest hint that bourgeoisie and nobility had common interests [this is the closest we get to a recognition of Comninel's argument that the 'bourgeoisie's' source of wealth was in manors/fiefs, etc.]
(168): imp--only the National Assembly was able to achieve the national unity for the monarchy had long pined.
(vii-ix): translator defense of revolution's necessity
(xiv-xv): imp--different interests of the classes arrayed in the revolution [though here a recognition that there are facts "awkward to a purely materialist theory of class conflict," there's no attempt to rethink the basic categories of 'bourgeoisie' in the way that Comninel demands]
(xvi): the bourgeoisie had to offer something to everbyody--so they seized on the philosophy of natural rights (the philosophy of the 18th century)
(1-2): key--a new class growing within the aritsocratic order -- it was a revolution to restore the harmony between fact and law [as Marx argued--it is in this sense that Lefebvre's is the classic account]
(3): people were not the original force, but events moved steadily in the direction of the popular revolution
(7): clergy owned a tenth of the land
(8): but wasn't much of a class--"the aristocracy meant the nobility"
(9-10): nobility owned about half of the land, from which they collected dues [here he's acknowledging, again, the fact that the bourgeoisie could also own land and collect dues]
(12): nobility of the sword (wedded most to tradition) vs. nobility of the robe (of recent bourgeois extraction, wealthy because offices had high mkt value)
(16): imp--18th century was not just the time of the bourgeois revolution, but it was also the "last offensive of the aristocracy"
(20): Montesqieu's "Spirit of Laws" as the handbook of the aristocracy--arguing for 'bodies' in opposition to the monarchy; a 'liberty' of the aristocracy
(22): debt servicing in 1788 amounted to 50% of government expenditures (couldn't repudiate it because of the Parliaments and the Paris bourgeoisie--who would have forsaken further assistance)
(23): key--"under the Old Regime, the richer a man was, the less he paid. Technically the crisis was easy to meet: all that was necessary was to make everybody pay."
(25): "the character of the King and Queen must be included." [!?]
(27): aristocracy wanted to use the deficit to assert themselves, viz-a-viz the King
(29-30): battle on--around 1787-1788, between the King and the Aristocracy
(33): calling for the Estates-General, but in a way that favors the aristocracy ("a common front against royal power")
(34-37): key--at this stage, the aristocracy was imagining a France without the power of the absolutist monarchy. their model would have been England post-1688 [this is the c-factual Lefebvre raises--"had the aristocracy had their way"]; they had no intention of surrendering their privileges.
(41): key--[in direct contrast to Comninel's conception of them as exploiters,] Lefebvre suggesting that it was only because the bourgeoisie was intermixed with the rest of the population that they could assume leadership of the revolution.
(42-44): levels of the bourgeois class: (1) finance (pg. 42 -- tax farmers, rentiers); (2) merchants (pg. 43--industry, which was subordinate, is grouped here); (3) liberal professions; (4) skilled workers/crafstmen/sans-culottes, who were hostile to capitalism
(46): in short--extreme diversity of positions reflected in the diversity of life; most bourgeoisie were not very well off, and were intimately connected to common people [well, then, in what sense a coherent class, at all? upper bourgeois simply seems to mean non-nobles living off taxes/rent, and lower bourgeois simply seems to mean not proletarian--but what connects the two?]
(47): its imprudence in attacking the aristocracy was driven by a desire to eliminate legal, hereditary privilege
(48-50): int--doing them an injustice by suggesting they were motivated by their own interests alone. have to account for their 'historic mission', their idealism. [hmm]
(52): pivot point--in September 1788, the Parliament of Paris (aristocracy) rules that the Estates-General should be convened as in 1614--the bourgeoisie rebels, and redirects its ire on the aristocracy.
(53-54): the Committee of Thirty
(55): moderation of the 'patriot party', which had no objections to the idea of 'three orders' -- just wanted the 'doubling of the Third' (same number of reps as the nobility)
(58): December 12, 1788 -- a manifesto of the aristocracy, worried about the suppression of feudal rights, etc. [again--useful to think how we might re-interpret this, in light of the Comninel]
(61): November 1788-February 1789 -- the bourgeoisie was becoming 'more radical', in face of intransigence the 'doubling'. moving to question of voting by order or by head, and possibly even getting rid of the privileged orders
(65): Lawyers dominated the election process for the 3rd Estate
(68): representatives of the Third Estate identified the cause of their class with the cause of their nation.
(69-70): Sieyes was both the godfather and a gravedigger (before a pamphleteer and leading light; after the Fall of the Bastille, the popular revolution terrified him)
(72-75): imp--clear that all three orders were unanimously against absolute royal power--however, there were widely different positions on the question of privileges and civic equality, of course [a potential counterfactual, here -- suggesting that an official plan of reforms, akin to the Charter of 1814, could have saved the monarchy. 'but the court remained inert.]
(82-83): May 4, 1789 the Estates-General convenes; June 17, Third Estate takes the name of 'National Assembly'. King/Necker find themselves on the back foot.
(84-85): On June 20 they take the Tennis Court Oath (some reservations)
(87-89): imp--a of June 23rd shows the King willing to become a Constitutional Monarch, which itself shows that everything has moved forward. Decree is moot, because as July approaches the National Constituent Assembly is declared.
(92):imp--things are finely poised, the Assembly expects force to be used to expel them. BUT the force of the people intervened, and the Old Regime "went down beyond recall"
(97): imp--the Army was staffed by people who were suffering on account of high prices, mingling with townspeople, etc. [speaks to some truths about revolutions, I should think]
(98-99): the strength of insurrectionary movements lay with the 'lesser bourgeoisie' (handicraft workers, shopkeepers)
(99): very interesting--it was precisely because of the lack of coherence/organization of the working-class, Lefebvre is suggesting, that the bourgeosie was willing to move so far with the revolution. otherwise you might have had an 1848, is the implication. [this speaks to larger concerns about the 'bourgeois revolution' -- clearly there is some sense in which Comninel's invitation to think through the structure of exploitation has purchase, implicitly, in Lefebvre's account]
(102-105): economic distress (high price of bread, etc.) as an immediate cause of the insurrection
(108): almost one-half of the population (10 million out of 23 million), it's estimated, were in need of relief
(109): the economic crisis was read as an 'aristocratic conspiracy' by the Third Estate, however incorrectly
(114): attack on the Bastille was initially demand for 'arms'
(116): the 'tricolor' was a synthesis (red and blue for Paris, white for the King)
(118): int--a kind of bourgeois 'dual power'; the co-existence of the formal assembly (the common council) with district assemblies (direct democracy)
(120-122): the 'Terror', here, is made sense of through the fears of the 'aristocratic conspiracy'
(125): July 1789, a differential deepening of the Revolution--in some places the local revolution was complete; in some places democratic development was less pronounced; and yet in others the power of the Old Regime remained intact
(126): "France surged spontaneously in a federation of local units."
(127): National Guard was half-hearted in repressing disorder (the National Assembly tried to get people to pay old taxes, etc.-- but it "preached in the desert")
(133): key--Peasantry didn't enter the scene before July 14, despite being 3/4 of the population. Nonetheless, without their adherence the Revolution could hardly have succeeded. They suddenly revolted, and their uprising is one of the most distinctive features.
(132): France vs. England--unlike England, many French peasants were landowners, yet to be reduced to the ranks of the landless en masse (even though there were propertyless peasants, in quite sizeable numbers [confusing]).
(134): the Old Regime was afflicted by a serious 'agrarian crisis', owing to backwardness of cultivation (need for more land, which wasn't available).
(135): property rights remained unquestioned--principle was penalizing enemies of 'the country', not those w/ property [hmm]
(136): key--the peasantry was critical of the bourgeoisie (here he means 'commercial wealth'), but was most aroused to a state of fury by the privileges of the aristocracy [this, obviously, directly refutes Comninel's contention that the two were twin exploiters--unless we are going to make a 'misperception' qulification, which seems fruitless]
(140): key--the 18th century had seen increasing burden on the peasantry, as well as the steady encroachment on the common rights of the peasantry
(142): bourgeois discomfort over peasant agitation over manorial rights (since that was a form of property)
(143): imp--the convocation of th E-G had an enormous impact on the peasantry--one cannot exaggerate the echoes, argues Lefebvre ('the King meant to give them satisfaction')
(144): the idea of an 'aristocratic conspiracy' against a 'good King' [construction of a usable history/present]
(146): the economic crisis had revolutionary consequences, in two ways
- enflamed the peasants, turning them against the tithe owners and lords
- it generalized a sense of insecurity which was blamed on the aristocracy
(157): the aristocrats had hoped to postpone the Declaration--the equality of rights threatened their privileges
(159): events were confirming the principles--"the people were not waiting upon deliberations of the Assembly to realize their desires"
(161): key--strongest hint that bourgeoisie and nobility had common interests [this is the closest we get to a recognition of Comninel's argument that the 'bourgeoisie's' source of wealth was in manors/fiefs, etc.]
(168): imp--only the National Assembly was able to achieve the national unity for the monarchy had long pined.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
class struggle in the first french republic, daniel guerin
(1): not just a bourgeois revolution, but contained within it the modern form of the class struggle
(1): first modern revolution to have involved the broad mass of people
(2): key-- this doesn't mean that the bourgeoisie didn't play a leading role--but it did mean that they were unable to put an end to absolutism without the help of the bras nus. 14 July 1789, 5 October 1789, 4 August 1789, 10 August 1792 all examples of critical importance of the mass movement.
(2): one finds the bourgeoisie equivocating (timorous b/c they knew that each step forward was a blow to the sanctity of private property --pg. 3), and each time it is the bras nus that pushes the bourgeois revolution forward
(3): bourgeoisie was only "very partially" an oppressed class -- they did share in the profits, also, with nobility and church
(4): split between bourgeoisie and bras nus was most pronounced in the cities
(4): thus French Revolution is example of Trotsky's law of combined development, too
(7): the bras nus' attitude to the war was entirely dictated by their class interests--didn't support it as a war of expansion, had to defend it when revolution was in danger
(10): Robespierre and Danton re: Brtain
(11): after Thermidor, you got rid of the revolutionary militia and inducgted a new generation of professional officers (the wars, of course, would rage till 1815)
(12): Edmund Burke, whipped up war feeling in Britain
(22): key--modern bourgeoisie had to argue that power resided with the people, but it simultaneously could not allow them to recognize it (this is where the institution of the Parliament is historically important--progressive, but also reactionary).
(25): Robespierre's Constitution of 1793 was the most democratic, but it didn't escape the logic of the revolutionary bourgeoisie--indeed, it demonstrated it at its "absolute limit" (he remained hostile to direct democracy)
(26): Malouet's warning, to the effect that the bourgeoisie could not contain the principle it was unleashing on the world
(28): the Paris Commune, in the French Revolution
(29-32): dual power, as it existed at different times throughout the revolution (Aug 1792, March 1793, Nov-Dec 1793, Feb-March 1794)
(34): from December 1793, the bourgeoisie strengthened the central power, in order to smash all chances of a federation ('revolutionary federalism', Guerin's arguing, will inspire Prodhoun, Bakunin, Marx, etc.)
(35): argument that the population was 'not ready' to build a different, democratic society
(36): Guerin arguing that a distinction should be made between the uncontrolled 'barbaric' terror and the 'terror' demanded by the popular vanguard that would be used specifically against saboteurs.
(37): again, claim about objective conditions.
(37-39, 43): important, religion--an integral part of the assault on the church. the bourgeoisie was torn, since it appreciated the role it played in maintaining social order, while also resenting the neo-feudal world it enshrined. Guerin also making the argument that the poor had little truck for the materialists/deists, and saw their popular morality through god ("they set to work to separate God from the priests)
(40): Rousseau and 'heavenly joy'
(43): extraordinary quotes from Napoleon on religion--''no society without inequality of wealth, and inequality of wealth can't exist without religion."
(45): the book is really about 1793-1795, which is where the modern class struggle makes its appearance -- when the bourgeoisie and bras nus come into conflict
(46): reviewing the nature of the initial war, which he's suggesting we understand as not much more than the latest bout in a longstanding rivalry between France and England (not a clash of ideologies--p. 53, but a clash of rivals)
(50): War was seen by the bourgeoisie in France as a solution to the economic crisis
(55): War was funded through inflation, and thus by the poor
(56): argument--1792 and especially 1793 saw the first signs of the antagonism between bras nus and bourgeoisie, as a result of the way that the War was waged.
(57): in this, at first, the Girondists and Montagnards found common ground
(62): members of the bras nus have trouble framing the demands (Tiger) -- but they have educated spokespeople in the enrages (Jacques Roux, Theophile Leclerc, Jean Varlet, and Gracchus Babeuf)
(64): "Three hours spent at a bakery door would do more to make a legislator than four years in the Convention" -- Leclerc
(64): enrages attacked the bourgeoisie directly
(65): but there were limits to their opposition--couldn't put forth a consistent programme
(66-68): in sum--they were "mirrors" (spokespeople of an ideal), rather than leaders of a revolutionary movement.
(72): critical--things reached a point where, in March-June 1793, for things to go forward it was going to be necessary for Robespierre to break with the Girondists. the revolution could not go forward without relieving public poverty--and the Girondists were unwilling to do this, because of their own hidebound interests.
(74-75): key--Girondists and Montagnards as different "class fractions". the former suffering under the impact of revolutoinary crisis, the other one profiting--therefore the first is unwilling to grant concessions, but the second is.
(79): sum--an important section of the bourgeoisie betrayed the bourgeois revolution by putting their own interests first.
(81, 87): Robespierre's tact was required to perform this surgery
(91): enrages were also pushed back
- - - -
[1] abiding question of bras nus viz-a-viz orthodox proletariat. what can be gained from this line of inquiry? re: 1848, too?
(1): not just a bourgeois revolution, but contained within it the modern form of the class struggle
(1): first modern revolution to have involved the broad mass of people
(2): key-- this doesn't mean that the bourgeoisie didn't play a leading role--but it did mean that they were unable to put an end to absolutism without the help of the bras nus. 14 July 1789, 5 October 1789, 4 August 1789, 10 August 1792 all examples of critical importance of the mass movement.
(2): one finds the bourgeoisie equivocating (timorous b/c they knew that each step forward was a blow to the sanctity of private property --pg. 3), and each time it is the bras nus that pushes the bourgeois revolution forward
(3): bourgeoisie was only "very partially" an oppressed class -- they did share in the profits, also, with nobility and church
(4): split between bourgeoisie and bras nus was most pronounced in the cities
(4): thus French Revolution is example of Trotsky's law of combined development, too
(7): the bras nus' attitude to the war was entirely dictated by their class interests--didn't support it as a war of expansion, had to defend it when revolution was in danger
(10): Robespierre and Danton re: Brtain
(11): after Thermidor, you got rid of the revolutionary militia and inducgted a new generation of professional officers (the wars, of course, would rage till 1815)
(12): Edmund Burke, whipped up war feeling in Britain
(22): key--modern bourgeoisie had to argue that power resided with the people, but it simultaneously could not allow them to recognize it (this is where the institution of the Parliament is historically important--progressive, but also reactionary).
(25): Robespierre's Constitution of 1793 was the most democratic, but it didn't escape the logic of the revolutionary bourgeoisie--indeed, it demonstrated it at its "absolute limit" (he remained hostile to direct democracy)
(26): Malouet's warning, to the effect that the bourgeoisie could not contain the principle it was unleashing on the world
(28): the Paris Commune, in the French Revolution
(29-32): dual power, as it existed at different times throughout the revolution (Aug 1792, March 1793, Nov-Dec 1793, Feb-March 1794)
(34): from December 1793, the bourgeoisie strengthened the central power, in order to smash all chances of a federation ('revolutionary federalism', Guerin's arguing, will inspire Prodhoun, Bakunin, Marx, etc.)
(35): argument that the population was 'not ready' to build a different, democratic society
(36): Guerin arguing that a distinction should be made between the uncontrolled 'barbaric' terror and the 'terror' demanded by the popular vanguard that would be used specifically against saboteurs.
(37): again, claim about objective conditions.
(37-39, 43): important, religion--an integral part of the assault on the church. the bourgeoisie was torn, since it appreciated the role it played in maintaining social order, while also resenting the neo-feudal world it enshrined. Guerin also making the argument that the poor had little truck for the materialists/deists, and saw their popular morality through god ("they set to work to separate God from the priests)
(40): Rousseau and 'heavenly joy'
(43): extraordinary quotes from Napoleon on religion--''no society without inequality of wealth, and inequality of wealth can't exist without religion."
(45): the book is really about 1793-1795, which is where the modern class struggle makes its appearance -- when the bourgeoisie and bras nus come into conflict
(46): reviewing the nature of the initial war, which he's suggesting we understand as not much more than the latest bout in a longstanding rivalry between France and England (not a clash of ideologies--p. 53, but a clash of rivals)
(50): War was seen by the bourgeoisie in France as a solution to the economic crisis
(55): War was funded through inflation, and thus by the poor
(56): argument--1792 and especially 1793 saw the first signs of the antagonism between bras nus and bourgeoisie, as a result of the way that the War was waged.
(57): in this, at first, the Girondists and Montagnards found common ground
(62): members of the bras nus have trouble framing the demands (Tiger) -- but they have educated spokespeople in the enrages (Jacques Roux, Theophile Leclerc, Jean Varlet, and Gracchus Babeuf)
(64): "Three hours spent at a bakery door would do more to make a legislator than four years in the Convention" -- Leclerc
(64): enrages attacked the bourgeoisie directly
(65): but there were limits to their opposition--couldn't put forth a consistent programme
(66-68): in sum--they were "mirrors" (spokespeople of an ideal), rather than leaders of a revolutionary movement.
(72): critical--things reached a point where, in March-June 1793, for things to go forward it was going to be necessary for Robespierre to break with the Girondists. the revolution could not go forward without relieving public poverty--and the Girondists were unwilling to do this, because of their own hidebound interests.
(74-75): key--Girondists and Montagnards as different "class fractions". the former suffering under the impact of revolutoinary crisis, the other one profiting--therefore the first is unwilling to grant concessions, but the second is.
(79): sum--an important section of the bourgeoisie betrayed the bourgeois revolution by putting their own interests first.
(81, 87): Robespierre's tact was required to perform this surgery
(91): enrages were also pushed back
- - - -
[1] abiding question of bras nus viz-a-viz orthodox proletariat. what can be gained from this line of inquiry? re: 1848, too?
Sunday, September 26, 2010
edmund wilson, to the finland station
(6): for Michelet, Vico as the originator of "historical principle" -- pattern in dev. of societies
(7): in Vico, the "organic character" of human society, the principle of "humanity creating itself"
(9): Vico had no conception of progress--a serieis of repetitive cycles. But Michelet, of course, had the Revolution.
(10): 1830 was a setback for Michelet, as the liberal bourgeoisie sold out to the Orleanists
(12) : Michelet presents his history in relation to a social and economic context
(13): approach was entirely 'rational' -- that is, anti-clerical and democratic
(19): important--Michelet alive to the "internal antithesis" of the revolution, between class solidarity and patriotic duty
(20): the principal actor, for Michelet, as the people
(28): construction of a 'usable history'
(30): important--of course, utopian to the point of being petty-bourgeois: in response to the vivid antagonisms of class society, Michelet's is that "we must have love."
(31): man seen as an 'accessory' to his position
(33): 1870-1871, France has ten million industrial workers and twenty-six million peasants
(34): Michelet's special version of nationalism in which the nation is identified with the Fr. revolutionary tradition
(37): key--with Renan, 'revolution' was coming to connote working-class interference from below in bourgeois society. this is the beginning of the decline, in that sense.
(41): Fr. bourgeois intellectual in 1870 belonged to a victorious class and a defeated nation
(45): Renan focuses on ideas -- human history is background
(58): Taine is taking us toward naturalism, away from revolutionary enthusiasm
(54-55): again--because of the socialist specter, anxieties about his understanding of the Fr. Rev.
(62): Anatole Fr. represents the revolutionary tradition in full disintegration
(64): Michelet gets a sense of solidarity from the Rev; for Frnace, abysses of doubt and despair loom large
(72-73): Babeuf had rallied around the radical elements of the Rev, after Thermidor. founded The Society of Equals.
(75): int--the people had had enough of the Jacobins--the poor were no longer ready to fight (a realism and sobriety suggestive of later phases of socialism) .
(75): Babeuf's defense as a summing-up of the unrealized ideas of the Enlightenment
(77): Rousseau--'men so odious has to dare to have more than enough while other men are dying of hunger'
(80): important--Babeuf as Fr. Revolution's last hurrah. the utopian socialists of the next century belong to a very different world.
(80): Saint Simon -- 'monseiur le comte! Remember you have great things to do!'
(82): key--Saint-Simon as offering a critique of the liberal Enlightenment, which had bestowed complete freedom on the individual, not understanding that it apprehended him only in the abstract (i.e., outside of the laws of society, of social development)
(83): Saint-Simon's vision was to have three classes (governing was to be done by those who could work for the State without pay)
(84): four great division of the world--rest would be protectorates
(84): whole message, in short, is "his peculiar version of the principle of noblesse oblige"
(90): key--both Fourier and Owen based themselves on a doctrine of Rousseau's that was in the air of the time--the idea that mankind is naturally good, and only institutions have perverted it.
(92): Owen as Henry Ford
(95): Owen, 1817 -- discovering the 'class interests' of the elite
(97): Owen had very little sympathy with the Chartists and the Corn Law agitation
(99): Enfantin becomes Christ!
(101): key -- none of these idealists understood the real mechanisms of social change, nor could they forsee the development/dynamics of the system they hated. This is what socialism meant, when it began to be current in France and England circa 1835.
(103): Comte as disciple of Saint-Simon
(120): int--the 'self-determination' of Kant as the intellectual reflection of the Fr. Rev on the German bourgeoisie -- the 'will' in Kant as a purely ideological determination and moral postulate, no influence on actual society
(121): key, Hegel -- there was a revolutionary principle in Hegel, who had himself been swept up by the Fr. Revolution until he became a Prussian professor. Young Hegelians saw no reason that these processes should be suddenly arrested?
(124): Marx pens wood-gathering essay, at 24 -- already demonstrating a concern for material context, Wilson suggests
(126-127): the critique of Feuerbach, who produces a substitute religion (love) and thinks in terms of an abstract humanity. Marx's task is to dispense of religion altogether, and place man in society. problems which had given rise to religion could only be solved by concrete man in society.
(137): the whole tradition Wilson is discussing, he wants to say, is reacitng to a kind of 'anti-social egoism'
(141): from Hegel they have taken a principle of historical change, but discarded the role of Heroes (even though, even for Hegel, these Heroes are only the expression of larger historical forces)
(143): from Saint-Simon they understand modern politics as science of regulated production; from Fourier the arraignment of the bourgeois as betraying the Englightenment; from Owen the realization that the factory system must be the root of the social revolution.
(144): through Dezamy and List they get a sense of the class struggle--the former had critized Cabet for believing that the bourgeoisie would come to the aid of Labor
(145): already by 1843 (Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law) Marx has postulated the proletariat as playing the new Hegelian role in effecting the emancipation of Germany
(148): Engels' reflections on being a bourgeois and communist at the same time ('if only one doesn't write!') -- spot on!
(154): Proudhon's warning to Marx, as he writes about desire to establish a new system--potential "leaders of a new intolerance"
(154): this is what led Marx to attack Proudhon's book with ferocity--sees "Property is theft" as presupposing real rights in property (Abstract Man, who had concealed the petty bourgeois; Proudhon declared strikes as crimes against the necessities of the established order)
(155): key--1845 as the first discussion with Marx of the theory of historical materialism, the preliminary emergence of a complete and coherent theory
(158): against moralism
(163): hilarious and telling interaction between Heine (intellectual) and Weitling (communist tailor), illustrating the difficulty of getting German intellectuals to make links to the working-class
(164): Proudhon and Weitling were thinkers from the lower classes, unlike Marx and Engels
(166-167): the actual fight, Marx vs. Weitling, at League of the Just -- scientific doctrine vs. utopian socialism, which resulted in the first Marxist party purge
(169): Gottschalk's scathing attack on the doctrinaire character of Marx and Engels -- "The distress of the workers, the hunger of the poor, have only a scientific... interest for them. Why should we, men of the proletariat, spill our blood for this?"
(170): Marx on trial, foreman thanks him for an extremely informative speech!
(172): the Marxist conception of peasant conservatism -- father has won property from the nobility, and can't stomach the thought of another revolution against property (because he is unable to understand as yet that the new bankers are dispossessing him, in their own way) [but what is the claim, here? a capacity (to change society) argument? ok, but requires further thought. a propensity (to band together) argument? demands severe qualification]
(174): Engels runs into his dad while he's trying to arm workers!
(176): Jenny doing recitations for Marx's lectures
(179): good point that materialism does not mean something extremely simple: that men always act from motives of economic interest [we do have to unpack how to reconcile historical materialism from both directions -- ec. interest angle, and man-in-society angle]
(188): on Luther--"He emancipated the body from chains, because he laid chains upon the heart."
(192): Dialectic as a religious myth
(194-195): [these are odd pages -- why read inevitability as anything more than polemic?]
(196): imp, pointing out the philosophical trap of materialism -- trying to give historical materialism intellectual foundation independent of the earthly conditions that have stimulated certain men to build it.
(198-199): 18th Brumaire -- seeing through the 'shadow-play' of politics to the real conflicts at the heart of social life
(201): key--the firest of '48 had ebbed, by 1850 a new period of prosperity had commenced. [there is a link, here, to the fundamental question of whether crises generate revolution, and what exactly the details of this relationship are]
(202): Marx/Engels vs. Wilich, in the Communist League -- question of the place of 'will' in political strategy. Marx transfers the headquarters to Cologne, to win the battle
(202-203): in 1855, Marx proclaims the beginning of the English Revolution, at a protest over Sunday ban on liquor
(209): fox-hunting as 'the real school for cavalry'!
(212): question of whether learning was simply functional for them -- Wilson believes no (he says it was for Lenin; M+E were men of the Enlightenment)
(214): communist vision had renaissance man at its heart
(216-217): death of Marx's children
(224):1850s were terrible, for Marx. exile at its lowest point
(225-226): internationalism vs. nationalism -- backing the 'advanced' over the 'non-advanced'. M+E support for the unification of Germ; an egregious 1851 letter from Engels, re: Poland
(236): German 'liberal reform' had very quickly gone backwards after '48, with universal suffrage very soon becoming graded suffrage according to income
(237): Lasalle had started to talk in Marxist terms, trying to make it practical (Wilson accuses M+E of being excessive and fastidious, here)
(243): Lasalle on the State -- saw it not so much as the instrument of a dominating class, but also as a 'moral whole', a sum of education/power/freedom that was unattainable for a simple combination of individuals. this, Wilson suggests, is behind is relationship with Bismarck in the early 1860s (till 1864, when Bismarck no longer needs Lasalle)
(251): Engels happy at industrial crisis
(256): imp, First International is founded in 1864 -- the workers' movement had been reviving, after the reaction of a decade (the 1850s)
(259): Marx gives his first address, which was a tricky balancing act between English trade unionists, Proudhonists, etc., etc.
(260): offers an immiseration type thesis, even in the 1860s
(260): by the end of the 1860s, has 800,000 members
(261): 1869 congress is 'captured' by Bakunin
(263): imp, Bakunin as a revolutionist of the will/act, upheaval as a historical necessity that didn't need strategy/plan [almost of the Holloway type]
(265): Bakunin in prison for eight years after '48
(267-268): Bakunin had wisened to the flaws of the patriotic insurrections (namely, their failure to tackle the social question)
(269): Marx vs. Bakunin on the 'right of inheritance' , in 1869(Marx opposed to making it an issue, in effect, because it was derivative). Bakunin's motion carries, Marx didn't attend
(271): Nechaev and Bakunin wrote together about the revolutionary--only one idea, the revolution, must be ready to dismiss all other sentiments, etc.
(272): imp, the vision of the vanguard is stripped of all social/political content, until it becomes divorced from the proletariat/people -- the former's job is only to destroy.
(275): Bakunin had been speaking of anarchism, sine 1866
(276): Bakunin expelled, 1872
(276): Paris Commune, though, had had the effect of encouraging their program
(277): imp, the 'readiness' argument -- Bakunin vs. Marx on the need to wait for social conditions to ripen
(277): now headquarters are transferred to NY
(278): Bakunin's telling impatience on his death bed-- disappointed that the masses did not want to become impassioned for their own emancipation
(279): key--Commune as a pivotal event, the "first great justification" of Marx's theory.
(281): more people killed/imprisoned/exiled in one week, in Terror of 1871, than in three years of the revolutionary Terror of Robespierre
(281-282): Commune as vindication of Blanqui and Bakunin?
(282): Engels, in 1891, calls the Commune example of 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat'
(283): why!?--[again, Wilson mistakes mysticism for politics]
(287): bad account of DK -- saying it derives from laws of human selfishness, which is emphatically NOT the case.
(291): Fabians had a different theory of value, dependent on demand
(294): claim of political bias in LTV
(298): on Marxism and Human Nature -- mischaracterizing the argument, though
(299, 300): bad--intentionally making the account, re: morality, mystical
(308): on crisis and factory shut-down -- "capital... drags with it into its grave the corpses of its slaves..."
(315): a thoroughly elitist, silly objection: the proletariat are not well-educated, how can we expect them to take over? [this comes up again]
(316): what!?--US as a genuine social democracy!?
(319): Marx was incapable of imagining democracy, certainly democratization to the extent that it's proceeded, today [this is a fair point]
(320): in 1872, Marx mentioned that it may be possible to make a revolution by peaceful means in dem. countries
(324): 1870 war, Lasalleans voted for war credits, Liebknecht and Bebel refrained
(326): socialism --> communism claim made in the Gotha program, 1874
(331): 1889, founding of the Second Internatoinl
(338): Eleanor commits suicide, as do Paul and Laura Lafargue
(343): it's once Alexander II comes to power (revolt of peasantry, agitation of nobility) that Marx and Engels begin to consider possibility of revolution in Russia
(344): the 1881 letter to Zazulich comes only after several drafts
(344): DK was published in 1868 in Russia, to Marx's surprise
(352): Lenin's father dies in 1886, after the period of reaction has settled in (following Alexander II's assassination in 1881)
(353-355): Alexander murdered, heart-breaking story re: Lenin's mother (finds out about it in the newspaper) and liberal friends' betrayals
(357): imp, Russian liberalism, in short, ran into the shoals of the 1880s. Subversive possibilities of peasantry, to which People's Will had been atttached, had gone down with the rise in the price of grain.
(358): Alexander had read Marx, but had thought it would be impossible to agitate amongst the w-class until the Tsarist regime had been done away with. But Lenin was coming of age at a time when the industrial dev. of Russia was beginning, at pace.
(363): Marxism in Russia being spurred along by the success of the SPD in Germany
(367): [Wilson invokes German blood to describe Lenin!]
(373): inkstands of milk and bread, in prison
(376): 1897-1900 was Lenin's Siberian exile
(379): Lenin on Beethoven -- 'I know nothing that is greater than the Apassionata; I'd like to listen to it every day... But I can't listen to music too often. It...makes you want to say stupid nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you mustn't stroke anyone's head--you might get your hand bitten off. You have to to hit them on the head, without any mercy, although our ideal is not to use force against anyone. Hm, hm, our duty is infernally hard."
(380): imp -- truth as something practical, testable; our knowledge of the world is relative, but always approaching an absolute through our work in the world
(381): Lenin not a theorist, according to Wilson. at the very least, theory subordinated to practical activity
(382): 1895, Lafargue was saying no one understood Marx in W. Europe; Bernstein proves this in 1898, by formulating 'revolution-through-evolution'
(386): Lenin became dictator not b/c of personality (no ambition, etc.) but because of 'social physics' [this term remains black-boxed in Wilson, though]
(390): importance of understanding WITBD as written in the context of a dictatorship, where democracy in party was completely impossible
(403): Trotsky also compelled to move towards Marxism, away from populism, by the force of events -- workers' agitation in 1896 and industrial development in the Ukraine
(406): Trotsky in Siberian exile from Jan 1898 to Aug 1902
(409): why Lenin and Krupskaya decided to have no children -- family could only have hampered them in their line of duty
(412): Trotsky as Engels/Lasalle, Marx as Lenin
(413-414): 1905, Trotsky as revolution's most important public figure
(419): imp--reasons for its failure, in 1905, was the Tsar's ability to control the fighting forces, b/c of predominance of a loyal peasantry in the army/navy
(420): Engels, in 1847 Principles of Communism, had already noted the impossibility of building socialism in one country
(422): Trotsky as an individual that was made by the context around him -- men of first rank who flourish inside a school
(426): isolation as Trotsky's fate, except for short-lived moments of exceptional prominence
(429): History as teleological for Trotsky [but come on, again misunderstanding polemics]
(430-431): imp discussion--Martov's prescient opposition to Bolshevik takeover [conditions are not ripe yet, etc.? but then what do you do--let the bourgeoisie run the country to the dogs?]
(432): Trotsky on morality--a thoroughgoing instrumentalism [which seems basically correct]
(438): nationalist complement to Bernstein's revisionism
(438): remember that Engels had been pro-war, in case of attack by Russia (though he had thought that the revolution would come before the war)
(439): fate of Lenin's brother and family had left Lenin with a lifelong bitterness for the cowardice of liberals
(440): hating on Plekhanov and Kautsky, after they've turned
(442): Lenin on executions (who's asking? those who sent 16 million to their graves?)
(445): Feb 1912, Lena goldfields, marks the uptick in struggle that will lead, eventually, to 1917
(447): official Bolshevik-Menshevik split isn't until 1912, remember
(458): Pravda before April, in Stalin and Kamenev's hands, had been vacillating and conciliatory re: Prov. Government
(490): Wilson's elitism, again -- proletariat can't govern like the bourgeoisie can, b/c of comparative lack of education
(6): for Michelet, Vico as the originator of "historical principle" -- pattern in dev. of societies
(7): in Vico, the "organic character" of human society, the principle of "humanity creating itself"
(9): Vico had no conception of progress--a serieis of repetitive cycles. But Michelet, of course, had the Revolution.
(10): 1830 was a setback for Michelet, as the liberal bourgeoisie sold out to the Orleanists
(12) : Michelet presents his history in relation to a social and economic context
(13): approach was entirely 'rational' -- that is, anti-clerical and democratic
(19): important--Michelet alive to the "internal antithesis" of the revolution, between class solidarity and patriotic duty
(20): the principal actor, for Michelet, as the people
(28): construction of a 'usable history'
(30): important--of course, utopian to the point of being petty-bourgeois: in response to the vivid antagonisms of class society, Michelet's is that "we must have love."
(31): man seen as an 'accessory' to his position
(33): 1870-1871, France has ten million industrial workers and twenty-six million peasants
(34): Michelet's special version of nationalism in which the nation is identified with the Fr. revolutionary tradition
(37): key--with Renan, 'revolution' was coming to connote working-class interference from below in bourgeois society. this is the beginning of the decline, in that sense.
(41): Fr. bourgeois intellectual in 1870 belonged to a victorious class and a defeated nation
(45): Renan focuses on ideas -- human history is background
(58): Taine is taking us toward naturalism, away from revolutionary enthusiasm
(54-55): again--because of the socialist specter, anxieties about his understanding of the Fr. Rev.
(62): Anatole Fr. represents the revolutionary tradition in full disintegration
(64): Michelet gets a sense of solidarity from the Rev; for Frnace, abysses of doubt and despair loom large
(72-73): Babeuf had rallied around the radical elements of the Rev, after Thermidor. founded The Society of Equals.
(75): int--the people had had enough of the Jacobins--the poor were no longer ready to fight (a realism and sobriety suggestive of later phases of socialism) .
(75): Babeuf's defense as a summing-up of the unrealized ideas of the Enlightenment
(77): Rousseau--'men so odious has to dare to have more than enough while other men are dying of hunger'
(80): important--Babeuf as Fr. Revolution's last hurrah. the utopian socialists of the next century belong to a very different world.
(80): Saint Simon -- 'monseiur le comte! Remember you have great things to do!'
(82): key--Saint-Simon as offering a critique of the liberal Enlightenment, which had bestowed complete freedom on the individual, not understanding that it apprehended him only in the abstract (i.e., outside of the laws of society, of social development)
(83): Saint-Simon's vision was to have three classes (governing was to be done by those who could work for the State without pay)
(84): four great division of the world--rest would be protectorates
(84): whole message, in short, is "his peculiar version of the principle of noblesse oblige"
(90): key--both Fourier and Owen based themselves on a doctrine of Rousseau's that was in the air of the time--the idea that mankind is naturally good, and only institutions have perverted it.
(92): Owen as Henry Ford
(95): Owen, 1817 -- discovering the 'class interests' of the elite
(97): Owen had very little sympathy with the Chartists and the Corn Law agitation
(99): Enfantin becomes Christ!
(101): key -- none of these idealists understood the real mechanisms of social change, nor could they forsee the development/dynamics of the system they hated. This is what socialism meant, when it began to be current in France and England circa 1835.
(103): Comte as disciple of Saint-Simon
(120): int--the 'self-determination' of Kant as the intellectual reflection of the Fr. Rev on the German bourgeoisie -- the 'will' in Kant as a purely ideological determination and moral postulate, no influence on actual society
(121): key, Hegel -- there was a revolutionary principle in Hegel, who had himself been swept up by the Fr. Revolution until he became a Prussian professor. Young Hegelians saw no reason that these processes should be suddenly arrested?
(124): Marx pens wood-gathering essay, at 24 -- already demonstrating a concern for material context, Wilson suggests
(126-127): the critique of Feuerbach, who produces a substitute religion (love) and thinks in terms of an abstract humanity. Marx's task is to dispense of religion altogether, and place man in society. problems which had given rise to religion could only be solved by concrete man in society.
(137): the whole tradition Wilson is discussing, he wants to say, is reacitng to a kind of 'anti-social egoism'
(141): from Hegel they have taken a principle of historical change, but discarded the role of Heroes (even though, even for Hegel, these Heroes are only the expression of larger historical forces)
(143): from Saint-Simon they understand modern politics as science of regulated production; from Fourier the arraignment of the bourgeois as betraying the Englightenment; from Owen the realization that the factory system must be the root of the social revolution.
(144): through Dezamy and List they get a sense of the class struggle--the former had critized Cabet for believing that the bourgeoisie would come to the aid of Labor
(145): already by 1843 (Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law) Marx has postulated the proletariat as playing the new Hegelian role in effecting the emancipation of Germany
(148): Engels' reflections on being a bourgeois and communist at the same time ('if only one doesn't write!') -- spot on!
(154): Proudhon's warning to Marx, as he writes about desire to establish a new system--potential "leaders of a new intolerance"
(154): this is what led Marx to attack Proudhon's book with ferocity--sees "Property is theft" as presupposing real rights in property (Abstract Man, who had concealed the petty bourgeois; Proudhon declared strikes as crimes against the necessities of the established order)
(155): key--1845 as the first discussion with Marx of the theory of historical materialism, the preliminary emergence of a complete and coherent theory
(158): against moralism
(163): hilarious and telling interaction between Heine (intellectual) and Weitling (communist tailor), illustrating the difficulty of getting German intellectuals to make links to the working-class
(164): Proudhon and Weitling were thinkers from the lower classes, unlike Marx and Engels
(166-167): the actual fight, Marx vs. Weitling, at League of the Just -- scientific doctrine vs. utopian socialism, which resulted in the first Marxist party purge
(169): Gottschalk's scathing attack on the doctrinaire character of Marx and Engels -- "The distress of the workers, the hunger of the poor, have only a scientific... interest for them. Why should we, men of the proletariat, spill our blood for this?"
(170): Marx on trial, foreman thanks him for an extremely informative speech!
(172): the Marxist conception of peasant conservatism -- father has won property from the nobility, and can't stomach the thought of another revolution against property (because he is unable to understand as yet that the new bankers are dispossessing him, in their own way) [but what is the claim, here? a capacity (to change society) argument? ok, but requires further thought. a propensity (to band together) argument? demands severe qualification]
(174): Engels runs into his dad while he's trying to arm workers!
(176): Jenny doing recitations for Marx's lectures
(179): good point that materialism does not mean something extremely simple: that men always act from motives of economic interest [we do have to unpack how to reconcile historical materialism from both directions -- ec. interest angle, and man-in-society angle]
(188): on Luther--"He emancipated the body from chains, because he laid chains upon the heart."
(192): Dialectic as a religious myth
(194-195): [these are odd pages -- why read inevitability as anything more than polemic?]
(196): imp, pointing out the philosophical trap of materialism -- trying to give historical materialism intellectual foundation independent of the earthly conditions that have stimulated certain men to build it.
(198-199): 18th Brumaire -- seeing through the 'shadow-play' of politics to the real conflicts at the heart of social life
(201): key--the firest of '48 had ebbed, by 1850 a new period of prosperity had commenced. [there is a link, here, to the fundamental question of whether crises generate revolution, and what exactly the details of this relationship are]
(202): Marx/Engels vs. Wilich, in the Communist League -- question of the place of 'will' in political strategy. Marx transfers the headquarters to Cologne, to win the battle
(202-203): in 1855, Marx proclaims the beginning of the English Revolution, at a protest over Sunday ban on liquor
(209): fox-hunting as 'the real school for cavalry'!
(212): question of whether learning was simply functional for them -- Wilson believes no (he says it was for Lenin; M+E were men of the Enlightenment)
(214): communist vision had renaissance man at its heart
(216-217): death of Marx's children
(224):1850s were terrible, for Marx. exile at its lowest point
(225-226): internationalism vs. nationalism -- backing the 'advanced' over the 'non-advanced'. M+E support for the unification of Germ; an egregious 1851 letter from Engels, re: Poland
(236): German 'liberal reform' had very quickly gone backwards after '48, with universal suffrage very soon becoming graded suffrage according to income
(237): Lasalle had started to talk in Marxist terms, trying to make it practical (Wilson accuses M+E of being excessive and fastidious, here)
(243): Lasalle on the State -- saw it not so much as the instrument of a dominating class, but also as a 'moral whole', a sum of education/power/freedom that was unattainable for a simple combination of individuals. this, Wilson suggests, is behind is relationship with Bismarck in the early 1860s (till 1864, when Bismarck no longer needs Lasalle)
(251): Engels happy at industrial crisis
(256): imp, First International is founded in 1864 -- the workers' movement had been reviving, after the reaction of a decade (the 1850s)
(259): Marx gives his first address, which was a tricky balancing act between English trade unionists, Proudhonists, etc., etc.
(260): offers an immiseration type thesis, even in the 1860s
(260): by the end of the 1860s, has 800,000 members
(261): 1869 congress is 'captured' by Bakunin
(263): imp, Bakunin as a revolutionist of the will/act, upheaval as a historical necessity that didn't need strategy/plan [almost of the Holloway type]
(265): Bakunin in prison for eight years after '48
(267-268): Bakunin had wisened to the flaws of the patriotic insurrections (namely, their failure to tackle the social question)
(269): Marx vs. Bakunin on the 'right of inheritance' , in 1869(Marx opposed to making it an issue, in effect, because it was derivative). Bakunin's motion carries, Marx didn't attend
(271): Nechaev and Bakunin wrote together about the revolutionary--only one idea, the revolution, must be ready to dismiss all other sentiments, etc.
(272): imp, the vision of the vanguard is stripped of all social/political content, until it becomes divorced from the proletariat/people -- the former's job is only to destroy.
(275): Bakunin had been speaking of anarchism, sine 1866
(276): Bakunin expelled, 1872
(276): Paris Commune, though, had had the effect of encouraging their program
(277): imp, the 'readiness' argument -- Bakunin vs. Marx on the need to wait for social conditions to ripen
(277): now headquarters are transferred to NY
(278): Bakunin's telling impatience on his death bed-- disappointed that the masses did not want to become impassioned for their own emancipation
(279): key--Commune as a pivotal event, the "first great justification" of Marx's theory.
(281): more people killed/imprisoned/exiled in one week, in Terror of 1871, than in three years of the revolutionary Terror of Robespierre
(281-282): Commune as vindication of Blanqui and Bakunin?
(282): Engels, in 1891, calls the Commune example of 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat'
(283): why!?--[again, Wilson mistakes mysticism for politics]
(287): bad account of DK -- saying it derives from laws of human selfishness, which is emphatically NOT the case.
(291): Fabians had a different theory of value, dependent on demand
(294): claim of political bias in LTV
(298): on Marxism and Human Nature -- mischaracterizing the argument, though
(299, 300): bad--intentionally making the account, re: morality, mystical
(308): on crisis and factory shut-down -- "capital... drags with it into its grave the corpses of its slaves..."
(315): a thoroughly elitist, silly objection: the proletariat are not well-educated, how can we expect them to take over? [this comes up again]
(316): what!?--US as a genuine social democracy!?
(319): Marx was incapable of imagining democracy, certainly democratization to the extent that it's proceeded, today [this is a fair point]
(320): in 1872, Marx mentioned that it may be possible to make a revolution by peaceful means in dem. countries
(324): 1870 war, Lasalleans voted for war credits, Liebknecht and Bebel refrained
(326): socialism --> communism claim made in the Gotha program, 1874
(331): 1889, founding of the Second Internatoinl
(338): Eleanor commits suicide, as do Paul and Laura Lafargue
(343): it's once Alexander II comes to power (revolt of peasantry, agitation of nobility) that Marx and Engels begin to consider possibility of revolution in Russia
(344): the 1881 letter to Zazulich comes only after several drafts
(344): DK was published in 1868 in Russia, to Marx's surprise
(352): Lenin's father dies in 1886, after the period of reaction has settled in (following Alexander II's assassination in 1881)
(353-355): Alexander murdered, heart-breaking story re: Lenin's mother (finds out about it in the newspaper) and liberal friends' betrayals
(357): imp, Russian liberalism, in short, ran into the shoals of the 1880s. Subversive possibilities of peasantry, to which People's Will had been atttached, had gone down with the rise in the price of grain.
(358): Alexander had read Marx, but had thought it would be impossible to agitate amongst the w-class until the Tsarist regime had been done away with. But Lenin was coming of age at a time when the industrial dev. of Russia was beginning, at pace.
(363): Marxism in Russia being spurred along by the success of the SPD in Germany
(367): [Wilson invokes German blood to describe Lenin!]
(373): inkstands of milk and bread, in prison
(376): 1897-1900 was Lenin's Siberian exile
(379): Lenin on Beethoven -- 'I know nothing that is greater than the Apassionata; I'd like to listen to it every day... But I can't listen to music too often. It...makes you want to say stupid nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you mustn't stroke anyone's head--you might get your hand bitten off. You have to to hit them on the head, without any mercy, although our ideal is not to use force against anyone. Hm, hm, our duty is infernally hard."
(380): imp -- truth as something practical, testable; our knowledge of the world is relative, but always approaching an absolute through our work in the world
(381): Lenin not a theorist, according to Wilson. at the very least, theory subordinated to practical activity
(382): 1895, Lafargue was saying no one understood Marx in W. Europe; Bernstein proves this in 1898, by formulating 'revolution-through-evolution'
(386): Lenin became dictator not b/c of personality (no ambition, etc.) but because of 'social physics' [this term remains black-boxed in Wilson, though]
(390): importance of understanding WITBD as written in the context of a dictatorship, where democracy in party was completely impossible
(403): Trotsky also compelled to move towards Marxism, away from populism, by the force of events -- workers' agitation in 1896 and industrial development in the Ukraine
(406): Trotsky in Siberian exile from Jan 1898 to Aug 1902
(409): why Lenin and Krupskaya decided to have no children -- family could only have hampered them in their line of duty
(412): Trotsky as Engels/Lasalle, Marx as Lenin
(413-414): 1905, Trotsky as revolution's most important public figure
(419): imp--reasons for its failure, in 1905, was the Tsar's ability to control the fighting forces, b/c of predominance of a loyal peasantry in the army/navy
(420): Engels, in 1847 Principles of Communism, had already noted the impossibility of building socialism in one country
(422): Trotsky as an individual that was made by the context around him -- men of first rank who flourish inside a school
(426): isolation as Trotsky's fate, except for short-lived moments of exceptional prominence
(429): History as teleological for Trotsky [but come on, again misunderstanding polemics]
(430-431): imp discussion--Martov's prescient opposition to Bolshevik takeover [conditions are not ripe yet, etc.? but then what do you do--let the bourgeoisie run the country to the dogs?]
(432): Trotsky on morality--a thoroughgoing instrumentalism [which seems basically correct]
(438): nationalist complement to Bernstein's revisionism
(438): remember that Engels had been pro-war, in case of attack by Russia (though he had thought that the revolution would come before the war)
(439): fate of Lenin's brother and family had left Lenin with a lifelong bitterness for the cowardice of liberals
(440): hating on Plekhanov and Kautsky, after they've turned
(442): Lenin on executions (who's asking? those who sent 16 million to their graves?)
(445): Feb 1912, Lena goldfields, marks the uptick in struggle that will lead, eventually, to 1917
(447): official Bolshevik-Menshevik split isn't until 1912, remember
(458): Pravda before April, in Stalin and Kamenev's hands, had been vacillating and conciliatory re: Prov. Government
(490): Wilson's elitism, again -- proletariat can't govern like the bourgeoisie can, b/c of comparative lack of education
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
theda skocpol, states and social revolutions (1979)
chapter 1
(4): definition of social revolutions
(20): important reminder that the international context is crucial (totality insight) (see 23, structures of world economy, state system; and "world-time")
(22): a State-centered conception of the State ("interdependent with world capitalism"), which demands interrogation.
(27): argument that Marxists and Tilly haven't looked seriously at clashes between dominant elites and State rulers.
(29): in a way, five reasons to care about the State
(32): important--not interested in the breakdown of 'legitimacy', really, as much as the breakdown of the 'capacity to coerce'
(34): Marxists haven't recognized how important the variable of State strength is.
(41): social revolutions as a triple conjuncture
(48): the fundamental tensions in these three cases were the tensions between producing classes and landed classes, and between landed classes and State (not commercial-industrial classes and anyone else)
(49): [State in feudalism vs. State in capitalism? or is the question simply about State and autonomous sources of revenue.]
(50-51): key dynamic, then--the context of escalating international competition placed pressure on centralized monarchies, who in turn put pressure on their landed elites. in France and China a strong landed class responded by incapacitating the State, in effect. in Russia, the nobility were weaker--however, the State was still unable to carry out the requisite reforms, and it still fell into protracted political crisis.
(51-67): FRANCE
(81-99): RUSSIA
(100-104): Meiji Restoration in Japan--why?
chapter 3
(113): peasants as protagonists -- their revolt was a necessary ingredient, but urban workers' revolt was not [dubious--could Russia have been consolidated without an urban workers' challenge?]
(115-117): thesis--Skocpol focusing on three factors
(118-128): FRANCE
(145-146): in Prussia you didn't have successful peasant rebellions because of the State's capacity to repress peasant rebellions. moreover, E. of the Elbe you had Junkers who didn't give the serfs any breathing room--serfs had fragmented landholdings, and landlords had a monopoly on administrative sovereignty.
(147): CHINA
Chapter 4
(168): Revolutionaries as 'state-builders' [very slippery slope]
(170-171): argument that revolutionary ideologies are immaterial to the analysis of the post-Revolution [extremely problematic]
Chapter 6
(207): key--in Russia, the liberals were much, much weaker than in France [is this not a permanent revolution argument?]
(210): liberal incapacity, in short
(211): important--peasant incapacity, too -- couldn't constitute a new national order, by themselves [but this is precisely why revolutionary leadership is important, in all cases. shouldn't we look here for differences between France and Russia, as well, for example? (as mentioned earlier)]
(214): a deceptive presentation of the disbanding of the Constituent Assembly [precisely because she's decided not to think seriously about the principles behind it--the default interpretation for everything is for 'reasons of State']
(221-225): Skocpol's presentation of NEP and the scissors crisis (argument, here, is that Bukharin's proposal was impossible b/c of lack of market legacy; Stalin's proposal was necessary, but was bound to come at massive cost). [whatever else there is to say, have to push back on the attempt to link this to the Old Regime--surely 'habits' don't matter as much as the 'scissors'. if you give them prices, they will produce.]
(224): ridiculous to say that the quasi-psychological 'need' for was driving the alternatives
(226-227): consolidation of State-Party system
(227): upward mobility
(228-229): fate of workers and peasants
(232): in sum--all of this were the imperatives that confronted a State under international pressures that needed heavy-industrialization, but was presiding over a predominantly agrarian society
(233-235): notes that all this brings back bourgeois/proletarian distinction. but her contribution is to stress that this unfolds in a context. [fair enough--but you've set yourself a strawman.]
- - - - - -
(1) her structuralism/voluntarism discussion makes it very difficult to have any serious room for (a) contingency and (b) organization in the argument.
(2) "the potential autonomy of the State." it is unclear what role, exactly, this is playing in her argument. empirically, the analyses of the Old Regime, to my mind, prove precisely the opposite--that in all of these cases, the State is unable to move against its landed class successfully (in France and China it doesn't; in Russia it does but the reforms are ineffectual). theoretically, the question is obvious--insofar as the State requires resources, it can't have total autonomy until it has autonomous ways to extract surplus. the extent to which this is true about the three cases is hard to establish, but this should be recognized. why should the capacity of the State rise and fall with the 'political' power of landlords (i.e., whether the gentry have been integrated into the state apparatus, as in France and China)? why not with their economic power?
(3): her discussion of peasant 'community' seems hurried. isn't it difficult to generalize across nations? see pg. 137 discussion of France and Russia, post-revolution, where she clearly neglects political leadership as one of the factors. why, when in Russia these communal institutions are limited to one part of the country (C. Steppes) does agrarian revolt of a 'leveling' kind take place everywhere? are the other factors not doing more work? [she acknowledges the critical importance of the CCP, remember--though the implication is that this is exceptional]
(4): her treatment of the scissors crisis is poor, insofar as she harkens back to "Old Regime" legacies rather than contemporary factors. we need to foreground the actual dilemma.
(5): strawman treatment of the bourgeois/proletarian distinction (re: political leadership, again), on pp 233-235.
(6): deceptive presentation of the disbanding of the Constituent Assembly, precisely because she's decided to not take revolutionaries' aims seriously. it's fine to say their confronted with competing imperatives; but it's ludicrous to say that everyone can be understood as a State-builder.
chapter 1
(4): definition of social revolutions
- coincidence of structural change with class upheaval
- coincidence of political with social transformation
- structural perspective (14-18)
- international and world-historical context (19-24)
- the potential autonomy of the state (24-33)
(20): important reminder that the international context is crucial (totality insight) (see 23, structures of world economy, state system; and "world-time")
(22): a State-centered conception of the State ("interdependent with world capitalism"), which demands interrogation.
(27): argument that Marxists and Tilly haven't looked seriously at clashes between dominant elites and State rulers.
(29): in a way, five reasons to care about the State
- political crises have expressed contradictions in the structures of the Old Regime
- the protagonists of these conflicts have formed as interest groups around state structures
- the vanguard parties have been responsible for State-building, without which revolution makes no sense
- social revolutions have changed State structures as much as they have changed class relations
- effects of revolution have been due to the changes in State form, as well
(32): important--not interested in the breakdown of 'legitimacy', really, as much as the breakdown of the 'capacity to coerce'
(34): Marxists haven't recognized how important the variable of State strength is.
(41): social revolutions as a triple conjuncture
- incapacitation of central State machineries
- widespread rebellion by lower-classes, notably peasants
- attempts by political leaderships to consolidate State power
(48): the fundamental tensions in these three cases were the tensions between producing classes and landed classes, and between landed classes and State (not commercial-industrial classes and anyone else)
(49): [State in feudalism vs. State in capitalism? or is the question simply about State and autonomous sources of revenue.]
(50-51): key dynamic, then--the context of escalating international competition placed pressure on centralized monarchies, who in turn put pressure on their landed elites. in France and China a strong landed class responded by incapacitating the State, in effect. in Russia, the nobility were weaker--however, the State was still unable to carry out the requisite reforms, and it still fell into protracted political crisis.
(51-67): FRANCE
- (54): serious competition putting pressures on royal capacities
- (55): relatively backward agriculture
- (56): a dominant class that was neither 'feudal' nor 'capitalist--surplus appropriation was a melange of rents/dues, but also redistribution accomplished through the State, itself
- (61): revenue problem of the French State
- (64): key--power of the landed elite (she will say their 'political power') prevents the State from moving against them [doesn't this highlight the lack of autonomy of the State, fundamentally?]
- (65): army was reluctant to move against privilege
- (71): gentry class based upon office-holding and ownership of liquid wealth/surplus land
- (75): key--State was confronted by acute crises (peasant revolts, population pressures) -- but the way in which it repressed these simply stregnthened the hands of the gentry, making centralization/reform/development impossible. And ultimately making the political crisis more acute.
(81-99): RUSSIA
- (82): free of feudal shackles--a particularly efficient bureaucracy was possible
- (85): after the defeat in the Crimean War, State successfully implemented reforms (including Emancipation of serfs in 1861, creation of zemstvos, etc.)
- (86-87): important--State moving to expropriate landlords, acquiring its own sources of surplus, which obviously increase its autonomy (passing them out as rewards for State service, instead). becoming less dependent on the landed elite.
- (89): important--however, reforms fail to spur the modernization of agriculture [now here redemption payments figure centrally--yet aren't the existence redemption payments a sign that the State doesn't possess the requisite autonomy to eviscerate its landed class?]
- (90): contrast w/ China, where the argument is that the gentry were much more powerful viz-a-viz the State
- (91): Witte's program of crash industrialization in the 1890s (behind tarriff walls, etc. -- laissez-faire didn't work)
- (92): industrialization creates grave digger
- (94): key--but, at its root, this didn't solve the problems brought on by international military competition. decisive problem remained the low rate of growth in agriculture.
- (95): 1905 vs. 1917 is simply a question of differential state capacity. State can repress in 1905 because troops are back by 1906. this is not the case in 1917.
(100-104): Meiji Restoration in Japan--why?
- absence of a powerful landed upper class in Tokugawa Japan
- no breakdown in State capacity--this was a revolution from above
- bureaucratic reforms were pursued (as in Russia), that were successful in ensuring economic take-off (unlike Russia)
- a better-organize bureaucracy--upper-classes didn't infiltrate the State apparatus [seems crucial to the explanation]
- upper-classes made a pact, with the State, in effect--they were willing to surrender kingdom-wide authority
- emancipation in Prussia succeeded in modernizing agriculture, because Prussia had large, commercially-oriented estates (unified management pursued innovative techniques, etc.)
chapter 3
(113): peasants as protagonists -- their revolt was a necessary ingredient, but urban workers' revolt was not [dubious--could Russia have been consolidated without an urban workers' challenge?]
(115-117): thesis--Skocpol focusing on three factors
- the kinds of solidarity of peasant communities
- degreees of peasant autonomy from day-to-day supervision
- relaxation of State coercive sanctions against peasantry
(118-128): FRANCE
- (123-124): in short--1. creation of collective communities (see also 126), through cahiers; 2. disorganization of upper strata; 3. lack of repressive capacity, of National Assembly; 4. urban forces against 'aristocratic reaction'
- (127): important--the Revolution stregnthened private property and individualism--agrarian revolution of 1789-1793 left peasants more divided (unlike Emancipation of Serfs in Russia)
- (129-133): 1. emancipation left serfs worse off, bogged down by redemption payments; 2. obschina remained form of land tenure, thus collective institutions were still strong; 3. many were still rentiers, and thus in a very precarious economic situation; 4. the mir was the center of political authority, as emancipation reduced the serfs political dependence on the State.
- (133): area was ripe for rebellions, all that was needed was end to coercive controls--which happened in 1917
- (135): Stolypin reforms--noticed communal institutions, but didn't really work
- (137): France vs. Russia [in France they respected private property, etc.; in Russia it was levelling--but this has everything to do with political leadership, it would seem to me. to suggest that this is determined by economic structure seems problematic. it could only be the case if 'collective institutions' didn't exist at all in France, and they existed everywhere in Russia. otherwise something else is doing the work, no? certainly she notes other factors. but surely political leadership must be one--and maybe the most important? would 'levelling' have happened if the Bolsheviks hadn't existed to recognize the seizures?]
(145-146): in Prussia you didn't have successful peasant rebellions because of the State's capacity to repress peasant rebellions. moreover, E. of the Elbe you had Junkers who didn't give the serfs any breathing room--serfs had fragmented landholdings, and landlords had a monopoly on administrative sovereignty.
(147): CHINA
- (148): in China, collective identity and freedom from landlord control had to be created ('base areas')--they didn't prexist the revolutionary interregnum.
- (149): both collecitve institutions, and freedom from sociopolitical control were absent, in effect.
- (151): in previous rebellions, peasants had to be led by gentry--they didn't have their own communal institutions
- (152): the Chinese gentry were strong, but now they're being portrayed as locally-centered. capable of undermining the State but incapable of providing unified administrative apparatus. [it feels like everything is going on at once--will need to think about this more--is this fair?]
- (153): CCP leadership is critical [again, we can ask why this isn't the case in Russia?]
Chapter 4
(168): Revolutionaries as 'state-builders' [very slippery slope]
(170-171): argument that revolutionary ideologies are immaterial to the analysis of the post-Revolution [extremely problematic]
Chapter 6
(207): key--in Russia, the liberals were much, much weaker than in France [is this not a permanent revolution argument?]
(210): liberal incapacity, in short
(211): important--peasant incapacity, too -- couldn't constitute a new national order, by themselves [but this is precisely why revolutionary leadership is important, in all cases. shouldn't we look here for differences between France and Russia, as well, for example? (as mentioned earlier)]
(214): a deceptive presentation of the disbanding of the Constituent Assembly [precisely because she's decided not to think seriously about the principles behind it--the default interpretation for everything is for 'reasons of State']
(221-225): Skocpol's presentation of NEP and the scissors crisis (argument, here, is that Bukharin's proposal was impossible b/c of lack of market legacy; Stalin's proposal was necessary, but was bound to come at massive cost). [whatever else there is to say, have to push back on the attempt to link this to the Old Regime--surely 'habits' don't matter as much as the 'scissors'. if you give them prices, they will produce.]
(224): ridiculous to say that the quasi-psychological 'need' for was driving the alternatives
(226-227): consolidation of State-Party system
(227): upward mobility
(228-229): fate of workers and peasants
- trade unions neutered by 1928
- living standards deteriorated markedly in the 1930s
- collective farmers for peasants, where they were intensely exploited
- high food prices to extract surplus from workers
(232): in sum--all of this were the imperatives that confronted a State under international pressures that needed heavy-industrialization, but was presiding over a predominantly agrarian society
(233-235): notes that all this brings back bourgeois/proletarian distinction. but her contribution is to stress that this unfolds in a context. [fair enough--but you've set yourself a strawman.]
- - - - - -
(1) her structuralism/voluntarism discussion makes it very difficult to have any serious room for (a) contingency and (b) organization in the argument.
(2) "the potential autonomy of the State." it is unclear what role, exactly, this is playing in her argument. empirically, the analyses of the Old Regime, to my mind, prove precisely the opposite--that in all of these cases, the State is unable to move against its landed class successfully (in France and China it doesn't; in Russia it does but the reforms are ineffectual). theoretically, the question is obvious--insofar as the State requires resources, it can't have total autonomy until it has autonomous ways to extract surplus. the extent to which this is true about the three cases is hard to establish, but this should be recognized. why should the capacity of the State rise and fall with the 'political' power of landlords (i.e., whether the gentry have been integrated into the state apparatus, as in France and China)? why not with their economic power?
(3): her discussion of peasant 'community' seems hurried. isn't it difficult to generalize across nations? see pg. 137 discussion of France and Russia, post-revolution, where she clearly neglects political leadership as one of the factors. why, when in Russia these communal institutions are limited to one part of the country (C. Steppes) does agrarian revolt of a 'leveling' kind take place everywhere? are the other factors not doing more work? [she acknowledges the critical importance of the CCP, remember--though the implication is that this is exceptional]
(4): her treatment of the scissors crisis is poor, insofar as she harkens back to "Old Regime" legacies rather than contemporary factors. we need to foreground the actual dilemma.
(5): strawman treatment of the bourgeois/proletarian distinction (re: political leadership, again), on pp 233-235.
(6): deceptive presentation of the disbanding of the Constituent Assembly, precisely because she's decided to not take revolutionaries' aims seriously. it's fine to say their confronted with competing imperatives; but it's ludicrous to say that everyone can be understood as a State-builder.
Monday, January 25, 2010
barrington moore, social origins of dictatorship and democracy (1966)
preface and acknowledgments (xi-xix)
(xi): animated by skepticism of thesis that "industrialism was the main cause of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, because of the veyr obvious fact that Russia and China were overwhelmingly agrarian countries when the communists established themselves."
(xii-xiii): clarifying why these countries, in particular (and why not looking at small countries--there decisive influence comes from without).
(xiii): "The focus of interest is on innovation that has led to political power, not on the spread and reception of institutions that have been hammered out elsewhere..."
(xiii): very much a Weberian, ideal-type-ist, comparative approach, rather than a search for real abstractions. but perhaps the book itself is evidence that the difference between these two need not be so large?
(xiv): explorer is to native as sociologist is to historian!? a bit odd, this.
(xiv-xvii): KEY, central theses--"...one may discern three main historical routes from the preindustrial to the modern world.
(xvii): you have some elements of reaction in the progressive examples, and vice-versa--thus, we have empircally-based general categories that transcend particular cases. moreover, there is invariably an element of contingency in the argument.
PART ONE: REVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF CAPITALIST DEMCORACY
Chapter One, England and the Contributions of Violence to Gradualism (3-40)
I. Aristocratic Impulses behind the Transition to Capitalism in the Countryside (3-13)
(3): "The focus in this chapter will be on the particular and very significant part that the classes in the countryside played in the transformation to industrialism."
(4-5): from the 1300s, he's arguing, we see the growing importance of commerce in countryside and in towns--and thus, the "dismounting of feudalism and its replacement by England's relatively weak version of royal absolutism."
(5): increasing importance of the wool trade in the Late Middle Ages (1300-1500), oriented to markets in the Italy and the Low Countries
(5): and the Black Death in 1348-1349 and demographic collapse, which gave an impetus to peasant rebellion.
(5): this chapter focused on the upper classes; by the late 1300s and the 1400s, especially, feudalism was in decline--it had "become parasitic, deriving its strength from the maneuvers of powerful magnates and the countermoves of the monarch."
(5-6): The Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) marks this process, the weakening of the landed aristrocracy and the emergence of the Tudor dynasty.
(6): Henry VIII, the second of the Tudor Kings, breaks with the Catholic Church without
supporting the Protestant Reformation--confiscation of the onasteries, etc.
(6-7): important, in sum: (1) ROYAL PEACE, AND (2) WOOL, combining in a specific way--"Combined with the continuing stimulus of the wool trade, the Tudor peace generated a powerful stimulus to the growth of a commercial and even capitalist outlook in the countryside." [quoting Tawney--the Tudor victory had "made the command of money more important than the command of men... [This change]... marks the transition from the medieval conception of land as the basis of political functions... to the modern view of it as an income-yielding investment."--BUT is this sufficient? hypothetically it could have happened at any time, no? isn't it question-begging?]. "The key to the English situation is that commercial life in both town and countryside during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries grew up mainly though not entirely in opposition to the crown."
(8-9): thus, economic individualism was not simply the preserve of Adam Smith and the bourgeoisie; enclosing landlords, too, "provided at least as important a breeding ground..."
(9): enclosures, key--"propelled by the prospect of profits to be made either in selling wool or by leasing their lands to those who did and thereby increasing their rents, the lords of the manors found a variety of legal and semilegal methods to deprive the peasants of their rights of cultivation in the open fields..."
(10): key--"...a change from the feudal seigneur who was at worst a lawless tyrant to an overlord who was closer to an acute man of business exploiting the material resources of the estate with an eye to profit and efficiency..." These habits existed, too, in the yeomen--the upper ranks of the peasantry, and the chief force behind small enclosures; analogy drawn to kulaks.
(13): important, comparative point--"Thus in England the chief carriers of what was eventually to be a modern and secular society were at this time fundamentally men of commerce in both the countryside and the towns. In sharp contrast with what happened in France, these men pushed forward mainly on their own instead of under the umbrella of paternalist royal patronage."
(14): the Crown, Charles I, had started to antagonize commercially-minded elements in the countryside and the town (unlike in France, power had always been delegated to the gentry in the countryside; so the Crown's meddling was impositional). this was, of course, setting the scene for the First Civil War.
II. Agrarian Aspects of the Civil War (14-19)
(14-16): summary of these trends: "in the light of this general background there would seem to be little reason to question the thesis that commercially minded elements among the landed upper classes, and to a lesser extent among the yeomen, were among the main forces opposing the King and royal attempts to preserve the old order, and therefore an important cause, though not the only one, that produced the Civil War... From the gentry as a class, then, came the main representatives of a decisive historical trend modifying the structure of English rural society... Thus under the impact of commerce and some industry, English society was breaking apart from the top downward in a way that allowed pockets of radical discontent produced by the same forces to burst temporarily in the limelight [this has interesting implications--more radical elements doing the dominant oppositional classes' handiwork; and for 1848, since it sheds light on potential cleavages in the alliance].. In this process, as the old order breaks up, sections of society that had been losing out due to long-run economic trends come to the surface and do much of the violent 'dirty work.' of destroying the ancien regime..."
(16): act of beheading the King, for example, was a popular demand rooted in the desires of 'urban journeymen and peasants' (in the Army); a preponderance of the poorer gentry amongst the regicides.
(17): modernizers and traditionalists, too, not always opposed--certainly, for example, united in their fears of the 'lower orders.' even amongst the gentry, of course--"One would scarcely expect men of substance to have an easy conscience about kicking over two of the main props, king and church, that supported the social order." [again, the ghosts of 1848]
(17): important, certainly--"the policy of the leaders of the rebellion was clear and straightforward. They opposed interference with the landlord's property rights on the part of the king and on the part of radicals from the lower orders" [abolition of the Star Chamber, 'the main royal weapon against enclosing landlords' -- the peasants, clearly, are being marginalized]
(18-19): important--"In economics the Civil War did not produce any masive transfer of landed property from one group or class to another..." but it was, certainly, a revolution--"its revolutionary consequences were deep and lasting in the area of law and social relationships. with the abolition of the Star Chamber, the peasants lost their chief protection against the advance of enclosures..."
(19): this is a critical point (leveled against the critics of those who label the Civil War a bourgeois revolution)--the fact that landed elites were still in command of the state apparatus after this, and even after 1832, does not mean this wasn't a bourgeois revolution. precisely because, as we have seen, of the increasing commercialization of countryside... "The aristocratic order survived, but in a new shape, for money more than birth was now its basis. And Parliament itself became the instrument of landed capitalists... "
(20): in sum--"while the original impulse toward capitalism may have come from the towns far back in the Middle Ages, it proceeded on the land as strongly as in the cities... both the capitalist principle are directly antithetical to... : divinely supported authority in politics, and production for use rather than for individual profit in economics. Without the triumph of these principles in the seventeenth century it is hard to imagine how English society could have modernized peacefully--to the extent that it actually was peaceful--during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries..."
III. Enclosures and the Destruction of the Peasantry (20-28)
(20): enclosures after the Civil War as legal, and historically-significant form of violence (this was not the landed aristrocracy against independent peasants; but landed capitalists against peasantry). either way, moreover, "the enclosures were the final blow that destroyed the whole structure of English peasant society embodied in the traditional village."
(21-22): speaking, here, of a decline in the 'openness' of local government to the peasantry, after the Glorious Revolution [we must ask, then, about the general thesis of the book--increasing democratization? clearly this is presented as a blip, but we can't leave its significance under-interrogated...].
(22): the anti-democratic writ of Parliament, as property triumphed over the peasantry in matters of enclosure.
(22): key--"The outcome of the Civil War itself, in sharp contrast to that of the French Revolution, was to strengthen greatly the position of the landed upper classes."
(23): 1688 to the end of the Napoleonic Wars (ca. 1815) as the "golden age of the great landed estate" (some technological improvement, in fertilizer, new crops, crop rotation; but also the simple efficiency of economies of scale)
(24): the rural capitalist, he's noting, is fairly divided into two:
(26): "the intrusion of commerce into a peasant community generally sets in motion a tendency toward the concentration of land in fewer hands..."
(26-28): key, enclosures--graphic, moving account of the disintegration and suffering of the peasant communities (some stayed on land to be rural laborers; others migrated to the cities in search of work)--"it seems quite clear that when the common fields disappeared and a new economic system began to win out in the countryside, the old peasant community finally gave way and disintegrated... the enclosures greatly strengthened the larger landlords and broke the back of the English peasantry, eliminating them as a factor from British political life."
(29): amen--"That the violence and coercion which produced these resluts took place over a long space of time... must not blind us to the fact that it was massive violence exercised by the upper classes against the lower." [this is critical, as it contains a larger point about modernization and its relationship to violence--reminds me of Chris Harman's comment on Stalin; all the violence of modernization condensed into a few, exceptionally brutal years]
IV. Aristocratic Rule for Triumphant Capitalism (29-39)
(29): when considering the 'peaceful transition' to parliamentary democracy in the 19th century, we would do well to remember the violence that scarred the 17th and 18th centuries.
(29): consequence one--"perhaps the most important legacy of a violent past was the strengthening of Parliament at the expense of the King" [bequeathed an institutional mechanism for settling conflicts of interest]
(30): "the strong commercial tone in the life of the landed upper classes... also meant that there was no very solid phalanx of aristrocratic opposition to the advance of industry itself... the most influential sector of the landed upper classes acted as a political advance guard for commercial and industrial capitalism."
(30): consequence two--"the other main consequence was the destruction of the peasantry. It meant that modernization could proceed in England without the huge reservoir of conservative and reacitonary forces that existed at certain points in Germany and Japan... And it also of couse meant that the possibility of peasant revolutions in the Russian and Chinese manner were taken off the historical agenda."
(31): the French Revolution induced a period of reaction, in England--only to be lifted with the Battle of Waterloo.
(32): what was key re: the rise of the commercial classes in the 19th century, in England, was that "the road had been smoothed for them... under the leadership of the landed classes." [contrast with Prussia, where the State had to establish a uniform legal system, currency, etc.] "... The absence of a strong monarchy resting on an army and a bureaucracy, as in Prussia, made easier the development of parliamentary democracy... "
(32): important--"In the meantime the landed gentry and those above it in the social scale retained a firm hold on the levers of political power... [With reform bill of 1832, and the striking down of Corn Laws in 1846, he writes] The landed upper classes suffered no disaster, but they learned the limits of their power."
(34): key--comparatively mild treatment of the Chartist movement (1838-1848), down to three factors [in Germany, on the other hand, the bourgeoisie leaned on the aristocracy and the State, to protect them against popular discontent]
(35): "Thus the theme of diehard opposition to the march of democracy is a rare and minor current among the landed aristocracy of England in the nineteenth century. One cannot find in English history the counterpart to... German conservatives ['take ten men and shoot the Reichstag!']"
(35): very KEY; reason for lack of conservativsm/reaction--"One of the reasons why such a scene seems incongrous in England... is that, unlike the Junkers, the gentry and nobility of England had no great need to rely on political levers to prop up a tottering economic position..."
(36): "In the nineteenth century, as in earlier periods, the lines between wealthy nobility, gentry, and the upper reaches of business and the professions were blurred and wavering."
(37): key-- "In nineteenth century Prussia the members of the bourgeoisie who became connected with the aristocracy generally absorbed the latter's habits and outlook. Rather the opposite relationship held in England." [this is his answer--and see below--to the puzzle that their seemed to be more osmosis between the two classes in Prussia, than in England]
(37): important, larger point--"Men who hold power do not necessarily exercise it simply in the interests of the class from which they arise, especially in changing situations."
(38): key, divergent paths of England and Germany in late-19th Century--an agricultural depression in the aftermath of the Civil War (the availability of American grain, by steamship), "seriously commenced to erode the economic base of the landed upper strata." Roughly the same thing happened in Germany. BUT: there, Junkers used the State to preserve their position, forming a "united agricultural front" with peasant proprietors and even industrial interests around a program of imperialism and reaction; in England, on the other hand, "...agriculture was allowed to commit decorous suicide... The economic base had shifted to industry and trade."
(39): in sum--"...what factors stand out as responsible for England's progress toward demcoracy? Those inherited from a violent past have already been mentioned: (1) a relatively strong and independent Parliament; (2) a commercial and industrial interest with its own economic base; (3) no serious peasant problem." Other factors are specific to the 19th century... the landed upper classes absorbed new elements into their ranks... it was possible because the economic position of the governing classes eroded slowly... [furthermore], there is no reason to deny the historical significance of moderate and intelligent statesmen."
Chapter Two, Evolution and Revolution in France (40-110)
1. Contrasts with England and their Origins (40-45)
(40): key, enormous differences with England, he's noting at the outset--
(41): "the French nobility lived very largely from dues collected in kind or in cash from their peasants." [features emerge by the late 1300s and during the 1400s]
(41): they were located in law, and dependent on the peasantry--these two facts "were to distinguish the French nobility from the English gentry for the remainder of its history."
(41-42): "at quite an early date the peasantry had managed to escape from personal servitude...by the time of the Revolution," de facto property rights. [this is not explained, at all]
(42): in fact, precisely because they lacked an independent economic base (a la the gentry in England), the feudals also slowly lost out to the Crown (and the growing Royal Bureaucracy). this was encapsulated in the "long reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715).
(42-43): even if this fact let urban wealth intrude into rural areas, the basic form of wealth accumulation in the countryside remained the collection of wealth (not production for market)
(43): key--"France did not undergo an extensive enclosure movement. By and large, the large proprietor was interested in preserving peasant tenures because they provided the basis of his existence. Only in the latter part of the 1700s did the situation begin to change."
(43-44): important--in the course of the 1500s and afterward, "the king consolidated and extended his authority..." at the expense of the nobility [he deprived them of judicial functions, raised soldiers and taxes on their lands, intervened in their affairs, and forced them to submit to his Parlements]. This, again, culminated in Louis XIV. King had to ensure loyalty of nobility, though, which he did through the Church and War.
2. The Noble Response to Commercial Agriculture (45-56)
(45): until the opening decade of the 1700s, there certainly was a weak impluse toward commercial agriculture in France [limited markets, mostly in wheat--problem was to feed those who didn't grow, which was a small problem].
(49-50): crux of the matter, it seems: [after a lengthy discussion of the wine trade,] "The monarchy wanted a prosperious nobility as a decorative adjunct to the crown... But the crown did not want the nobility to establish an independent economic base that could enable it to challenge royal power." [I'm worried we're verging on a tautology here--no independent economic base is supposed to explain strength of monarchy; so how can strength of monarchy also explain no independent economic base?]
(50): "...successful commercial farming for the high aristocrat involved a temporary escape from French society." [mention of Haiti]
(51): "All these facts indicate that the cultural and legal barriers were becoming much less important during the 18th century." [in other words, this is not where we want to look if we want to understand the weakness of commercial agriculture]
(52): yes, a critique of Weber that parallels the charges leveled by Ellen Meiskins Wood--"Those who follow Weber, especially those who speak in terms of some abstract drive for achievement, neglect the importance of the social and political context in which such changes manifest themselves. The problem is not merely whether French rural nobles tried to run their estates efficiently... The key question is whether not in so doing they altered the structure of rural society in a way similar to what took place in those parts of England where the enclosure movement was strongest. The answer to this question is simple and decisive. They did not. Those nobles who represented the leading edge of commercial advance in the French countryside tried to extract more from the peasants."
(53): discussing Toulouse, where despite production for market, there was no real technical innovation--"the nobles used the prevailing social and political framework to squeeze more grain out of the peasants and sell it." [again, worried about a tautology--isn't the lack of an economic base meant to explain that social and political framework?]
(53-54): explaining the land tenure situation, as it differs from England; but I must say, I don't fully follow...
(55): in sum, though: "In contrast to England, commercial influences as they penetrated into the French countryside did not undermine and destroy the feudal framework. If anything they infused new life into old arrangements, though in a way that ultimately had disastrous consequences for the nobility... Essentially what the landed proprietor possessed were certain property rights, whose essence were claims, enforceable through the repressive apparatus of the state, to a specific share of the economic surplus..." [if run like this, the tautology fades, I think--but do need to think through this, some more]
(56): "In England the fusion between countryside and town was in the main directed against the crown... In France the fusion took place through the crown with very different political and social consequences."
3. Class Relationships under Royal Absolutism (56-62)
(56-57): in the 1600s, the French bourgeoisie was not the spearhead of modernization; instead, "it was heavily dependent on royal favor, subject to royal regulation..." [like Tokugawa Japan or even Akbar's India]
(57): thus, under Louis XIV, "the impulse toward establishing the bases of a modern society... came much more from the royal bureaucracy than from the bourgeoisie. That, however, was scarcely the deliberate intention of the crown. At the same time its real function... was to maintain order, supervise the economy..."
(57-58): like other agrarian bureaucracies, it was confronted with a limited source of surplus, like elsewhere (partial solution was to sell positions in the bureaucracy)
(58): regardless--"French society of the 1600s and 1700s presents us with an illuminating mixture of competing trades that scholars sometimes regard as characteristically Western and characteristically Oriental: feudalism, bourgeoisie, and bureaucracy." [an admirable universalism]
(59): "...the sale of offices was at the root of the king's independence of the aristocracy, of any effective control by a parliament. It was the key prop of royal absolutism. At the same time the practice undermined the king's independence [since it made office a piece of property]"
(60): key--had the effect of steeling the bourgeoisie to stand with the State against feudal elements; but also of converting bourgeois elements into feudals. "...The system diverted energy and resources from commerce and industry."
(62-63): why didn't such a pervasive monarchy, then, pursue the path of a Germany or Japan--a "conservative path to modernization"? he isn't providing the answer now, only suggesting that "agrarian problems played a very important part in bringing about this result."
4. The Aristocratic Offensive and the Collapse of Absolutism (62-70)
(63): the last half of the 1700s saw "a penetration of commercial and capitalist practices into agriculture." [a brief enclosure movement]
(64): crucial: the method of surplus-extraction (and the political apparatus that corresponded), in France, was simply different than in England [in France, feudal; in England, commercial]
(64): interesting that, right here at one of his most concretely Marxist moments, he is pushing back against caricatured Marx--"...any notion that the economic substructure somehow automatically determines the political superstructure, can lead one astray. The political mechanism was decisive..." [as was, then, the effort to smash it]
(64): key--enclosure movement in France more of a government move than in England, where it was indigenously actualized by gentry. "Hence capitalism was seeping into the French countryside... in the form of feudalism through the seignoral reaction, in the form of an attack on feudalism, and... through the officially sponsored enclosure movement. More rapid penetration had to await the measures of the Revolution..." [critical--all of this, though [increased feudal dues, enclosures], had the critical effect of turning the peasantry against the established order--this encouraged the unity of the Third Estate]
(65): this negative response, of course, is why "the most prosperous peasantry in Europe could become a major force for revolution."
(66-67): it was not that the nobility was closed (he's providing examples of bourgeoisie incorporation), that explains the Revolution.
(67): important--it is the case that in England this fusion took place against the king. In France, it was the monarchy that turned commoners into landed aristrocrats.
(67-68): concomitant to all this, there was expansive growth in commerce, and trade [embodied in proposals made by Turgot, which had the effect of antagonizing the sans-culottes by liberalizing grain market]
(69): KEY--"As it came to France, capitalism often wore a feudal mask... The demand for property rights within the prevailing system was very strong, as the sale of offices and the seigneurial reaction demonstrates. Capitalism... permeated the ancien regime.. Partly for this reason the radical thrust behind the Revolution, based on the sans-culottes and sections of the peasantry, was explicitly and strongly anticapitalist."
5. The Peasants' Relationship to Radicalism during the Revolution (70-92)
(70): "only when popular grievances could coalesce even briefly with those of more powerful groups would they help to bring the monarchy crashing down..."
(70-71): important--in the absence of commercial revolution (or manorial reaction), "many French peasants had become in effect small property owners." [though, he notes that, in some places families without land may have been anywhere from 20 to 70% of the rural population."]
(71): two major demands, amongst poorer peasantry
(73): for the upper ranks of the peasantry, on the other hand, discontent was a product of a fact of "possessing the land without really owning it... Mainly wanted to eliminate the arbitrary aspects of the feudal system that had been increasing in the last years..."
(74-75): the impulses giving rise to the Revolution in this context: decreasing duties on British manufactures, natural disasters, reactionary pressure of stratum of nobility [others were quite willing to compromise], etc.
(75): summer of 1789, then, sees a series of peasant uprisings
(75-76): important, no bourgeoisie on the barricades--"full-scale violence [actually] frightened the bourgeoisie, who retreated into the arms of the nobility"
(76): with the storming of the Bastille, major traits of the radical elements in the French Revolution
(80): 25th of August 1792, feudal dues disappeared; 28th of August, villagers receive back commond lands
(81-83): important, peasant radicalism, in the form of 'loi agrarire': equal distribution of lands, making the Commune uncomfortable, it seems (splitting the ranks) [March 1793 the death penalty decreed for preaching it!] -- all this, he's saying, a response to the intrusion of capitalism into the countryside.
(84): yes, the spectre of 1848, again--"...the bourgeois revolution needed the help of the radical revolution, as we have seen with the events of July 14 and August 4..." [of course!] This, even though "the two were fundamentally incompatible due to incompatible attitudes toward property..."
(86): critical, effects and context of the third uprising--"...both the rural and the urban radicals shared a common hostility at this point to the rich who were profiting from the Revolution and to the unfettered workings of the market... To sum up the meaning of the uprising..., the bourgeois revolution had been pushed sharply to the left under radical pressure and forced to shed the moderates (arrest of 32 Girondins), while the urban radicals and the peasants were still marching together..." This was the 'heroic' and 'desperate' time of the Revolution, led by the Committee of Public Safety (my understanding--you had the Constituent Assembly until 1791; the Legislative Assembly until the second uprising; and the Commune, until now)
(88): key, running into trouble--for the wealthier peasants -- as producers -- the system of price controls implemented in the third phase was oppressive, and they evaded it (even though the high, unregulated price of wheat had enabled the uprising, in the first place). Thus, the radical phase of the Revolution was "in many places an outright attack on the substantial peasants... worst of all, townsmen... were its main agents in the countryside..."
(89): in sum--"The obvious and decisive fact of the radical phase is this: the urban sans-culottes had been able to push the Jacobin leaders into policies that saved the Revolution but at the cost of turning the peasants against it... To the extent that these conditions prevailed elsewhere in the countryside [high price of bread relative to wages], they alienated radical support from the Revolution and dried up the sources of rural radicalism"
(90): important--Ventose decrees, Robespierre and Saint-Just realizing that they needed to make concessions to the peasantry. Alas, "it would have been very difficult to meet the expressed desires of the poorer peasants without putting a spike into the wheels of the bourgeois and capitalist revolution... Thus during the radical phase the needs and aspirations of the urban sans-culottes finally came into direct and open conflict with all sections of the countryside..."
(91): key--against the Marxist argument that the bourgeois revolution could not follow the radical revolution this far, Moore attributes the failure of the radical revolution to the tension that his policies brought them into conflict with the countryside--and in a way that aggravated the misery of the city-dweller.
(92): "No matter how radical the city was, it could do nothing without the help of the peasants. The radical revolution was over." [I need to sharpen my understanding of what exactly led to this fall-out; what I have culled from this chapter seems a bit confused...]
6. Peasants against the Revolution: The Vendee (92-101)
(92): from 1793 to 1796--the "only major peasant uprising against what is loosely called the Left" (calling for restoration of King, what have you)
(92): key, there is actually no paradox here: "the main thrust of the counterrevolution was anticapitalist against the merchants and manufacturers in nearby towns and those scattered through the heart of the Vendee itself... Resembles the great peasant upheavals that were the main popular force breaking apart the old regimes of Russia and China before the communist victories..."
(93): importantly--"The counterrevolutionary area was one where commercial agriculture had not penetrated..." But this, he is suggesting, is not an answer. Instead, something more specific is needed. His best guess is not the lightness of burden, nor the myth that these peasants lived amongst the nobility, but that "the leading peasants in the areas that were to become counterrevolutionary already had some of the major benefits of private property (because these were areas where enclosures had taken place)." Led to a "stubborn individualism--"in many instances a man would not see his neighbors for long stretches of time. "...What might be expected to happen if the Revolution failed to abolish rents and took more taxes out of the peasants than had been the case under the old order? What if the Revolution promoted a substantial bourgeois land grab? Finally, what if the Revolution came as a wholesale attack on peasant society? These are things that did happen."
(98): key, then--"What mattered most in the specific conditions of the Vendee was the attack on the clergy because it was part of a general offensive: economic, political, and social at once." So things like the reorganization of local government, the seizure of church properties, etc. (which had led to a very large bourgeois land grab).
7. Social Consequences of Revolutionary Terror (101-108)
(101): writing, now, against the impulse to regard the Terror "as a daemonic outburst of mob violence..." Certainly, there was much that was indiscriminate (the 1792 September Massacres, for example).
(103-104): roughly 30,000 to 40,000 victims of revolutionary repression--"Yet in assessing it, one has to keep in mind the repressive aspects of the social order to which it was a response. The prevailing order of society always grinds out its tragic toll of unnecessary death year after year... [T]o dwell on the horrors of revolutionary violence while forgetting that of normal time is merely partisan hypocrisy." [and this is just as true in China, India, etc.]
(104): reminder that the radical arm of the revolution was a negative, defensive reaction to the bourgeois revolution ("the steady spread of capitalist figures..." / the free market in grain, etc.).
(105): KEY POINT--you could not have had a peaceful transition, had the conservatives smothered the Revolution successfully, as you 'did' in England after the civil war. "The underlying social structure of France was fundamentally different and hence ruled out the kind of peaceful transition... that England experienced in the 1700s and 1800s."
(105): key--addressing himself to the question of whether it was, or was not, a bourgeois revolution: "To deny that the predominant thrust and chief consequences of the Revolution were bourgeois and capitalist is to engage in a trivial quibble... [Certainly, he agrees that the bourgeoisie were not protagonists, themselves, BUT] That the ultimate outcome of all the forces at work was a victory for an economic system of private property and a political system based upon equality before the law... are truths undeniable even if they are familiar." [see also pg. 109]
(105): Bourbon Restoration recovered half of the property lost during the Revolution!
(106): key, and in sum--"...the destruction of the political power of the landed aristocracy constitutes the most significant process at work in the course of French modernization. Ultimately it is largely... traceable to the response of the French nobility to the problems of agriculture in an increasingly commercial society. Royal absolutism was able to tame and control an aristocracy that had difficulty in establishing an independent economic base." [this eliminated, he's adding, the threat of right-wing authoritarianism]
(107): key--it also created "small-peasant property," with ambiguous consequences--"the experience of requisitioning, the attempt to place ceilings on the prices of grain, and the encouragement given to small holders and agricultural workers during the radical phase... turned the upper stratum of the peasants decisively against the Republic." [there is more, certainly, that needs to be said about the divisions in the peasantry; why are we so concerned, after all, with the upper peasantry, given their limited numbers?]
(107-108): some provisional reflections on revolutionary and reactionary tendencies of peasantry, but nothing conclusive beyond these few generalizations about the 19th and 20th centuries in France
(108): again, a summary--Revolution was imperative, precisely because the ancien regime stood in the way of democratization; this was not the case in England, where you had a landed elite that were quite bourgeois ("part of democracy's entering wedge")
(110): in tracing the end of the French revolution, he speaks about how the Jacobin need to get food to urban areas and revolutionary armies broke the alliance with the richer peasants. but i am confused, perhaps because of poor comprehension: why did the poor peasants leave this alliance? or, differently put, why was the counterrevolution successful--did it have the backing of poor peasants?
Chapter Three, The American Civil War: The Last Capitalist Revolution (111-158)
1. Plantation and Factory: An Inevitable Conflict? (111-114)
(111): In America, of course, no well-entrenched agrarian society, of either feudal or bureaucratic forms. (1) Rather, "commercial agriculture" was important from the very beginning. (2) No political struggles, then, between a monarch and a landed aristocracy. (3) No massive class of peasants, comparable to Europe or Asia.
(112): key, a revolution not motivated by desire to cast off economic fetters--"The conclusion... amounts to the statement that the American Civil War was the last revolutionary offensive on the part of what one may legitimately call urban or bourgois capitalist democracy. Plantation slavery in the South... was not an economic fetter upon industrial capitalism. If anything, the reverse may have been true... But slavery was an obstacle to a political and social democracy." [but hang on, there is a point about technical inefficiency of slavery, owing to the low cost of labor, and whatever else--but let's watch this proceed]
(112): rightly passing over the American Revolution, which "did not result in any fundamental changes in the structure of society."
(114): to the question of whether there was some inherent contradiction between the industrial capitalism of the North and the plantation economy of the South, "we can answer.. with a provisional negative: there is no abstract general reason... Special historical circumstances... had to be present in order to prevent agreement between an agrarian society based on unfree labor and a rising industrial capitalism." [here he is making a comparison to Germany, where advanced industry got along well with highly repressive forms of rural labor (even if the Junker was not a slave-owner)]
(115): BUT--"if the conflict between the North and South had been compromised, the compromise would have been at the expense of subsequent democratic development in the United States..."
2. Three Forms of American Capitalist Growth (115-131)
(115): By 1860, there were three different forms of society in the US:
(116): "In Southern society, the plantation and slave owners were a very small minority. By 1850, there may have been less than 350,000 in a white population of six million... only a small minority owned most of the slaves... [7% owned 75%!]"
(117): "...the smaller farmers in the South by and large accepted the political authority of the big planters..."
(117-118): "Slavery was almost certainly not on the point of dying out for internal reasons... If slavery were to disappear from American society, armed force would be necessary..."
(118): Emancipation Proclamation (1863) only emancipated slaves in areas where the North had no jurisdiction!
(118): "These considerations point strongly toward the conclusion that slavery was economically profitable."
(119): Slavery shifting to the "low South", and West (not in the tobacco growing areas, after 1850). This shift was of course threatening the balance of slave states and free states (Missouri coupled with Maine)
(121): key--but even if running a plantation was a capitalist task, the Southern plantocracy was not bourgeois--not opposed to hereditary privilege, and not based in town life. "Here was a real difference and a real issue."
(123): key-- "It is almost impossible to speak of purely economic factors as the main causes behind the war, just as it is impossible to speak of the war as mainly a consequence of moral differences over slavery. The moral issues arose from economic difference. Slavery was the moral issue... Without the direct conflict of ideals..., the events leading up to the war... are totally incomprehensible" [but what do we make of the hollowness of the Emanicpation proclamation? the notion that Lincoln was willing to save the union, alone?]
(124): after the 1830s, the North became a manufacturing center--the American Economy as a whole was less depndent on a "single agricultural staple." Cotton ceased to dominate the Northeast.
(125): regardless, though, it certainly wasn't Northern business interests behind the war--they "were very far from bellicose advocates of a war of liberation or even war for the sake of the union."
(127): the conflict comes, then, over the supply of labor to Northern Capitalists--"Perhaps more than any other factor, these trends set the stage for armed conflict and aligned the combatants in such a way as to make possible a partial victory for human freedom."
(128-129): key--the West is an important part of this story--"From the 1830s onward, there was a gradual redirection of Western produce toward the Eastern seaboard" [made possible by transportation revolution]. As a result, he's arguing, "The outlook of the early individualist and small-scale capitalist, characteristic of the Northeast, spread to the dominant upper stratum of the Western farmers." This, he's suggesting, produced a fear of competition from slavery.Similarly, Southern planters see this new strata as a threat.
(130): this was the underpinning of the bargain that brought Lincoln to office, in 1860--"business was to support the farmers' demand for land, popular also in industrial working-class circles, in return for support for a higher tariff."
(131): interesting--"Here energies that in Europe would have gone into building trade unions... went into schemes providing a free farm for every workman whether he wanted it or not. The actual effect of the Westward trek... was to strengthen the forces of early competitive and individualist capitalism by spreading the interest in property." [this was more a myth than reality--speculators had their hands on it, and maybe some of the more wealthy, enterprising workers]
(131): "The link between Northern industry and the free farmers ruled out for the time being the classic reactionary solution to the problems of growing industrialism..." It also brought the country towards civil war.
3. Toward an Explanation of the Causes of the War (132-140)
(132-133): no obvious, 'mortal' conflict in economic terms, between the two systems
(134): important--"In addition to the conflict between free farmers in the West and the plantation system, about the strongest case one can make in strictly economic terms is that for the South secession was not an altogether unreasonable proposal mainly because the South did not need much that the North really had to offer."
(134): other than economic answers, historians have given three explanations
(140): alternative way of framing it: causes for unity were being undermined--"it is difficult to find a case in history where two different regions have developed economic systems based on diametrically opposite principles and yet remained under a central government that retained real authority in both areas... Cohesive forces appear to have been weak..."
(140-141): there was also, he's arguing, neither (1) a strong working-class in the North, nor (2) threat of foreign power which could bind North and South together under a common banner (Germany 1871, Japan 1868 are said to have been examples of this)
(141): in sum--"...[T]he ultimate causes of the war are to be found in the growth of different economic systems... Two further factors made compromise extremely difficult. The future of the West appeared uncertain in such a way as to make the distribution of power at the center uncertain... Secondly... the main forces of cohesion in American society... were still very weak."
4. The Revolutionary Impulse and its Failure (141-148)
(141): Unlike the French Revolution and, partly, unlike England, there was no real "radical upsurge" during the Civil War [here we need 'Black Reconstruction' and the others--the 'new' histories of the Civil War, even if the kind of argument Moore is making is still defensible (no artisans, sans-culottes, though?)]
(142): slave outbreaks had no political consequences? To the DuBois!
(141-145): Thaddeus Stevens and Radical Republicans provided the revolutionary impulse that did exist, intending to wage 'progressive capitalism's' war on the 'baron and serf' slavery (combination of workers, industrialists, and some railroad interests at its height, in 1865-1868). The South were to be treated as a 'conquered people', and their society reconstructed (land reform, land confiscation, 'forty acres and a mule').
(146-147): The 1867 reconstruction acts floundered, though, because "influential Northern sentiment was in no mood to tolerate an outright attack on property... The failure of land reform was a decisive defeat and removed the heart of the Radical program."
(147): In the absence of this radical reconstruction, there was a move towards a new form of labor--not wage labor (which didn't work, when attempted first), but sharecropping.
(148): this didn't enrich the planters, but it did have the effect of making the South more of a one-crop economy than before (as everyone was pressed to grow cash-crop)
(148): key--of course, 1876 marks the return to normalcy--as elite moderates make an alliance across battle lines (Hayes-Tilden), and occupational regime is finally dismantled. "...the classic conservative coalition was possible. So came Thermidor to liquidate the 'Second American Revolution'"
5. The Meaning of the War (149-155)
(149-152): War gave a massive boost to industrial capitalism through permitting policies that would never have been tolerated, without it (high tariffs, end of slavery, subsidies, national banking and currency system). At the same time, this was not why the war happened, again--industrial capitalism did not necessarily have to regard plantation slavery as an obstacle; slavery was an obstacle to the establishment of democracy, however (and democracy is not a prerequisite of industrial capitalism--Germany, Japan).
(152): "Slavery was a threat and an obstacle to a society that was indeed the heir of the Puritan, American, and French Revolutions."
(153): "Striking down slavery was a decisive step, an act at least as important as the striking down of absolute monarchy in the English Civil War and the French REvolution..."
PART THREE: THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS AND PROJECTIONS
Chapter Seven, The Democratic Route to Modern Society (413-432)
(413): again, three routes to the modern world
(415): Western feudalism predisposed societies toward the parliamentary path, because of certain institutions it contained--"immunity of certain groups from the ruler, conception of right of resistance to unjust authority." [come on, though, this is quite unconvincing--reading into the relationship of lord to vassal the modern concept of the contract?]
(416): Marx's concept of an oriental despotism that coordinates the irrigation system he finds unconvincing, though it can be a starting point.
(417): as regards the process of modernization, "one point is clear:" persistence of royal absolutism or a hulking bureaucracy is not favorable to democracy. At the same time, they were important to 'checking' the nobility.
(417): a decisive precondition, too, "has been the emergence of a rough balance between the crown and the nobility... The pluralist notion that an independent nobility is an essential ingredient in the growth of democracy has a firm basis in historical fact." [but what about France?]
(418): but the nobility does need a bourgeoisie--if it seeks its freedom outside of this alliance, democracy is not the result (Russia as an example of this)
(418): ok--strong agreement with the "Marxist thesis that a vigorous and independent class of town dwellers has been an indispensable element in the growth of parliamentary democracy."
(419): furthermore--"among the most decisive determinants influencing the course of subsequent political evolution are whether or not a landed aristocracy has turned to commercial agriculture, and if so, the form that this commercialization has taken."
(419): European feudalism had three main divisions of land. Japan showed resemblances to this arrangment; some similarities in India. China was not like this.
(421-422): a 'cultural' explanation is quite unconvincing, he's arguing. agreed.
(422): important--"Where it has been possible for landlords to make use of the coercive apparatus of the state in order to sit back and collect rents, a phenomenon found widely in Asia and to some extent in prerevolutionary France and Russia, there is clearly no incentive to turn to less repressive adaptations."
(423): there are therefore at least three major variables:
(424): and here's an odd, contingent point, that throws the comparisons into doubt, I feel -- one that opens into the question of the 'permanent revolution', though: "the English bourgeoisie from the 17th through much of the 19th century had a maximum material stake in human freedom because it was the first bourgeoisie and hand not yet brought its foreign and domestic rivals to their full powers."
(426): again, England and the US (for different reasons) were the only countries to escape the peasant question (he attributes the "instability of French democracy in the 20th century to this fact").
(426): the role of violence--the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and the American Civil War
(427): provided the distinctions between the cases remain clear, "it is necessary to group revolutions by the broad institutional results to which they contribute."
(428): KEY, Barrington Moore against the classic concept of the bourgeois-democratic revolution--"..this meaning of the bourgeois revolution is such a simplification as to be a caricature of what took place. To see that it is a caricature we need only recall
(430): once more, an executive summary of FIVE conditions (looking at these, through India):
(432): in Germany and Japan, you have capitalism in agriculture and industry, but no popular upheaval
(434-435): critical distinction, labor-repressive labor system vs. market labor system--the crux of his distinction between the English example (and the West of the US) and the Japanese, German, Russian, and even French cases is the form of surplus extraction. in the latter case, a reliance on a 'labor-repressive' system (rather than the labor market) to ensure an adequate labor force and adequate surplus ties the landed aristocracy to the State apparatus. [this is precisely where Skocpol pushes back--to her, the distinction between the two on the basis of their political implications is not admissable; it is rather another way of assessing the claim about the strength of the central bureaucracy]
(436): this seems deeply problematic--from the subordination to the House of Hohenzollern in the 1600's and 1700s, he's reading ideas of subordination to a central institution that he links to fascism! too ambitious, and he immediately acknowledges this. so where does it leave the claim?
(437-438): interesting, citing Marx and Engels on the German 1848--a bourgeoisie which was to weak to rule, and for the right to make money threw in its lot with the landed aristocracy and the royal bureaucracy (this will not, though, bring fascism in and of itself, just a conservative modernization from above--that only happens under the inability of these democracies to cope and to bring about fundamental structural changes). If this coalition is wanting, he adds, you move towards Russia and China.
(438): and what he's noting about fascism, let us remember, is the significant role of the landed elite (made possible by the failure of peasants to band together with urban strata)
(438-439): discussing the rationalization of the new order in Germany and Japan in the 1800s, which had already been done, in England and France, under royal absolutism.
(440): the State, obviously, was critical for incipient industrialization, and the taming of the labor force (but this is perhaps where the contrast with the other examples becomes blurred, a la Skocpol's claim?)
(441): raising the question of the autonomy of the State structure, which is posed, though unclearly, here--it must be able to "free itself from the influence of both extreme reactionary and popular or radical pressures in the society, something that can happen rather more easily than simplified versions of Marxism would allow us to believe."
(442): ultimately, though, these regimes are in a bind, because modernization will require changes in social structure, which they want to stabilize. the answer to this, he's arguing, is militarism.
(443): drawing parallels between McCarthyism and the situation in England, during and after the Napoleonic Wars.
(444): this is the real question--why did England, in its reactionary phase during the Napoleonic Wars, not launch itself onto the reactionary path of a Germany or Japan--the answer, critically, was the relative weakness of the repressive apparatus, in England. [one thinks Skocpol will pick up, right here; whereas for Moore this pushes the question back]
(445): he's playing with the 'fascist' possibility in the Russian case, but for me this is revealing how undefined the term itself has been, till this point.
(446): again, this needs lengthy interrogation--"...the Russian peasants were revolutionary and eventually the major force in exploding the old regime."
(446): Fascism and the Subcontinent
(447-8): Fascism, a provision definition--"Fascism is inconceivable without... the entrance of the masses onto the historical stage. Fascism was an attempt to make reaction and conservatism popular and plebian... [It] stressed not only the inevitability of hierarchy, discipline, and obedience, but also positied that they were values in their own right... Another feature was the stress on violence... Plebian anticapitalism thus appears as the feature that most clearly distinguishes 20th century fascism from its predecessors, the nineteenth-century conservative and semiparliamentary regimes..."
(448-449): Fascism and the peasantry--most successful in appeal to the peasant whose holding was relatively small and unprofitable for the particular area in which it existed" [the 'little fellow'--seduced by the romantic image of an idealized peasant. though, it goes without saying, this was only ever an ideological justification, rather than a policy pursued by the Nazis]
(450-451): example of Japan, Italy--same pseudoradical and propeasant features, though in the latter especially, this was entirely opportunistic and ideological (policy catered to big agriculture, after Mussolini took power)
Chapter Nine, The Peasants and Revolution (453-583)
(453): "The process of modernization begins with peasant revolutions that fail. It culminates during the 20th century with peasant revolutions that succeed." [catchy -- but the first part is not clear]
(453): recovering the peasant as a subject of history, after he/she had been dismissed
(453-45 ): we want to understand what triggers peasant revolutions, and why. at this stage, certain theories can be dismissed:
(459): the general hypothesis--it is society's with a central authority that are more vulnerable to rebellion; but where regulation is diffuse (i.e., the caste system), rebellion is less likely. [this is useful, because England and France seem to fit the model, too, though he doesn't acknowledge this in the same way...]
(459-460): if landed elites take up commercial agriculture, the more limited the rebellion
(462): discussing the context leading up to the Peasant War in Germany--enserfment was the response, there, to the rise of an export market in grain
(466): the aristocratic victory in the Peasant War, he's arguing, foreclosed the possibility of liberal democracy emerging (since, presumably, it consolidated a labor-repressive system of surplus extraction)
(467): English squire vs. German Junker
(477-478): "To sum up, the most important causes of peasant revolutions have been the absence of a commercial revolution in agriculture... and the concomitant survival of peasant social institutions into the modern era... Where the peasant community survives, as in Japan, it must remain closely linked to the dominant class in the countryside if revolution is to be avoided."
(479): "By themselves peasants have never been able to accomplish a revolution. On this point the Marxists are absolutely correct, wide of the mark though they are on other crucial aspects. The peasants have to have leaders from other classes..." [And anyway,] "peasant revolts have been repressed far more often than they have succeeded."
(481): noting that artisans and journeymen played a much more important role than Marxist theory might lead us to believe (this is Craig's intervention, as well, but there it is 1848 under scrutiny)
(481): deeply unsatisfactory account of the Russian Revolution
--
(1) there is a preliminary problem in the opposition of democracy to communist dictatorship, but we will keep this on the shelf for when the concepts are elucidated further.
(2) the question-begging character of the argument, which almost inheres in its Weberian set-up. we can always, it seems, push the chain of causality back. our task is to think through when this is useful, and when it is not. (example of impulse given by wool trade, in 1300s/1400s England--can we not ask to have this pushed back, further? or is it simply a contingent factor?)
(3) obvious problem in Russia's case was that the peasantry did not, in the slightest, 'lead' the revolution. it will be interesting to see how he justifies the claim that they constituted the decisive revolutionary impulse; it is, certainly, more defensible, but still requires some reconciling to the larger narrative of Bolshevik triumph.
(4) cleavages in the revolution; poorer elements doing dirty work. one can see why this might culminate in 1848, and 'permanent revolution'
(5) increasing lack of democracy in the aftermath of the civil war, for the peasantry (pg. 21)
(6): Stalin as condensation of the typical violence, rather than atypical, which is inherent in the path of modernization.
(7) the critique of Moore that the German and Japanese examples are disingenuous, because their fascist 'phases' were temporary, raises the more fundamental question, i think, of what in each example we can treat as a true 'characteristic', and what we treat as 'temporary'. this is, of course, fundamental--the balance of contingency and theory is the challenge of any good history.
preface and acknowledgments (xi-xix)
(xi): animated by skepticism of thesis that "industrialism was the main cause of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, because of the veyr obvious fact that Russia and China were overwhelmingly agrarian countries when the communists established themselves."
(xii-xiii): clarifying why these countries, in particular (and why not looking at small countries--there decisive influence comes from without).
(xiii): "The focus of interest is on innovation that has led to political power, not on the spread and reception of institutions that have been hammered out elsewhere..."
(xiii): very much a Weberian, ideal-type-ist, comparative approach, rather than a search for real abstractions. but perhaps the book itself is evidence that the difference between these two need not be so large?
(xiv): explorer is to native as sociologist is to historian!? a bit odd, this.
(xiv-xvii): KEY, central theses--"...one may discern three main historical routes from the preindustrial to the modern world.
- "the first of these leads through what I think deserve to be called bourgeois revolutions... A key feature in such revolutions is the development of a group in society with an independent economic base, which attacks obstacles to a democratic version of capitalism that have been inherited from the past. Though a great deal of the impetus has come from trading and manufacturing classes in the cities, that is very far from the whole story. The allies this bourgeois impetus has found, the enemies it has encountered, vary sharply from case to case. The landed upper classes... were either an important part of this capitalist and democratic tide, as in England, or if they opposed it, they were swept aside in the convulsions of revolution or civil war. The same thing may be said about the peasants. Either the main thrust of their political efforts coincided with that toward capitalism and political democracy, or else it was negligible. And it was negligible either because capitalist advance destroyed peasant society or because this advance began in a new country, such as the United States, without a real peasantry."
- "...the second route has also been capitalist, but culminated during the twentieth century in fascism... I shall call this the capitalist and reactionary form. It amounts to a form of revolution from above. In these countries the bourgeois impulse was much weaker. If it took a revolutionary form at all, the revolution was defeated. Afterward sections of a relatively weak commercial and industrial class relied on dissident elemetns in the older and still dominant ruling classes.. to put through the political and economic changes required for a modern industrial society... Industrial development may proceed rapidly under such auspices. But the outcome, after a brief and unstable period of democracy, has been fascism."
- "The third route is of course communism, as exemplified in Russia, and in China. The great agrarian bureaucracies of these countries served to inhibit the commercial and later industrial impulses even more than in the preceding instances. The results were twofold. In the first place these urban classes were too weak to constitute even a junior partner in the form of modernization taken by Germany and Japan... And in the absence of more than the most feeble steps toward modernization a huge peasantry remained. This stratum, subject to new strains and stresses as the modern world encroached upon it, provided the main destructive revolutionary force that overthrew the old order..."
- "Finally, in India we may perceive still a fourth general pattern that accounts for the weak impulse toward modernization. In that country there has been neither a capitalist revolution from above or below, nor a peasant one leading to communism. Likewise the impulse toward modernization has been very weak. On the other hand, at least som eof the historical prerequisites of Western democracy did put in an appearance... [T]his case stands somewhat appart from any theoretical scheme that it seems possible to construct for the others..."
(xvii): you have some elements of reaction in the progressive examples, and vice-versa--thus, we have empircally-based general categories that transcend particular cases. moreover, there is invariably an element of contingency in the argument.
PART ONE: REVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF CAPITALIST DEMCORACY
Chapter One, England and the Contributions of Violence to Gradualism (3-40)
I. Aristocratic Impulses behind the Transition to Capitalism in the Countryside (3-13)
(3): "The focus in this chapter will be on the particular and very significant part that the classes in the countryside played in the transformation to industrialism."
(4-5): from the 1300s, he's arguing, we see the growing importance of commerce in countryside and in towns--and thus, the "dismounting of feudalism and its replacement by England's relatively weak version of royal absolutism."
(5): increasing importance of the wool trade in the Late Middle Ages (1300-1500), oriented to markets in the Italy and the Low Countries
(5): and the Black Death in 1348-1349 and demographic collapse, which gave an impetus to peasant rebellion.
(5): this chapter focused on the upper classes; by the late 1300s and the 1400s, especially, feudalism was in decline--it had "become parasitic, deriving its strength from the maneuvers of powerful magnates and the countermoves of the monarch."
(5-6): The Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) marks this process, the weakening of the landed aristrocracy and the emergence of the Tudor dynasty.
(6): Henry VIII, the second of the Tudor Kings, breaks with the Catholic Church without
supporting the Protestant Reformation--confiscation of the onasteries, etc.
(6-7): important, in sum: (1) ROYAL PEACE, AND (2) WOOL, combining in a specific way--"Combined with the continuing stimulus of the wool trade, the Tudor peace generated a powerful stimulus to the growth of a commercial and even capitalist outlook in the countryside." [quoting Tawney--the Tudor victory had "made the command of money more important than the command of men... [This change]... marks the transition from the medieval conception of land as the basis of political functions... to the modern view of it as an income-yielding investment."--BUT is this sufficient? hypothetically it could have happened at any time, no? isn't it question-begging?]. "The key to the English situation is that commercial life in both town and countryside during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries grew up mainly though not entirely in opposition to the crown."
(8-9): thus, economic individualism was not simply the preserve of Adam Smith and the bourgeoisie; enclosing landlords, too, "provided at least as important a breeding ground..."
(9): enclosures, key--"propelled by the prospect of profits to be made either in selling wool or by leasing their lands to those who did and thereby increasing their rents, the lords of the manors found a variety of legal and semilegal methods to deprive the peasants of their rights of cultivation in the open fields..."
(10): key--"...a change from the feudal seigneur who was at worst a lawless tyrant to an overlord who was closer to an acute man of business exploiting the material resources of the estate with an eye to profit and efficiency..." These habits existed, too, in the yeomen--the upper ranks of the peasantry, and the chief force behind small enclosures; analogy drawn to kulaks.
(13): important, comparative point--"Thus in England the chief carriers of what was eventually to be a modern and secular society were at this time fundamentally men of commerce in both the countryside and the towns. In sharp contrast with what happened in France, these men pushed forward mainly on their own instead of under the umbrella of paternalist royal patronage."
(14): the Crown, Charles I, had started to antagonize commercially-minded elements in the countryside and the town (unlike in France, power had always been delegated to the gentry in the countryside; so the Crown's meddling was impositional). this was, of course, setting the scene for the First Civil War.
II. Agrarian Aspects of the Civil War (14-19)
(14-16): summary of these trends: "in the light of this general background there would seem to be little reason to question the thesis that commercially minded elements among the landed upper classes, and to a lesser extent among the yeomen, were among the main forces opposing the King and royal attempts to preserve the old order, and therefore an important cause, though not the only one, that produced the Civil War... From the gentry as a class, then, came the main representatives of a decisive historical trend modifying the structure of English rural society... Thus under the impact of commerce and some industry, English society was breaking apart from the top downward in a way that allowed pockets of radical discontent produced by the same forces to burst temporarily in the limelight [this has interesting implications--more radical elements doing the dominant oppositional classes' handiwork; and for 1848, since it sheds light on potential cleavages in the alliance].. In this process, as the old order breaks up, sections of society that had been losing out due to long-run economic trends come to the surface and do much of the violent 'dirty work.' of destroying the ancien regime..."
(16): act of beheading the King, for example, was a popular demand rooted in the desires of 'urban journeymen and peasants' (in the Army); a preponderance of the poorer gentry amongst the regicides.
(17): modernizers and traditionalists, too, not always opposed--certainly, for example, united in their fears of the 'lower orders.' even amongst the gentry, of course--"One would scarcely expect men of substance to have an easy conscience about kicking over two of the main props, king and church, that supported the social order." [again, the ghosts of 1848]
(17): important, certainly--"the policy of the leaders of the rebellion was clear and straightforward. They opposed interference with the landlord's property rights on the part of the king and on the part of radicals from the lower orders" [abolition of the Star Chamber, 'the main royal weapon against enclosing landlords' -- the peasants, clearly, are being marginalized]
(18-19): important--"In economics the Civil War did not produce any masive transfer of landed property from one group or class to another..." but it was, certainly, a revolution--"its revolutionary consequences were deep and lasting in the area of law and social relationships. with the abolition of the Star Chamber, the peasants lost their chief protection against the advance of enclosures..."
(19): this is a critical point (leveled against the critics of those who label the Civil War a bourgeois revolution)--the fact that landed elites were still in command of the state apparatus after this, and even after 1832, does not mean this wasn't a bourgeois revolution. precisely because, as we have seen, of the increasing commercialization of countryside... "The aristocratic order survived, but in a new shape, for money more than birth was now its basis. And Parliament itself became the instrument of landed capitalists... "
(20): in sum--"while the original impulse toward capitalism may have come from the towns far back in the Middle Ages, it proceeded on the land as strongly as in the cities... both the capitalist principle are directly antithetical to... : divinely supported authority in politics, and production for use rather than for individual profit in economics. Without the triumph of these principles in the seventeenth century it is hard to imagine how English society could have modernized peacefully--to the extent that it actually was peaceful--during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries..."
III. Enclosures and the Destruction of the Peasantry (20-28)
(20): enclosures after the Civil War as legal, and historically-significant form of violence (this was not the landed aristrocracy against independent peasants; but landed capitalists against peasantry). either way, moreover, "the enclosures were the final blow that destroyed the whole structure of English peasant society embodied in the traditional village."
(21-22): speaking, here, of a decline in the 'openness' of local government to the peasantry, after the Glorious Revolution [we must ask, then, about the general thesis of the book--increasing democratization? clearly this is presented as a blip, but we can't leave its significance under-interrogated...].
(22): the anti-democratic writ of Parliament, as property triumphed over the peasantry in matters of enclosure.
(22): key--"The outcome of the Civil War itself, in sharp contrast to that of the French Revolution, was to strengthen greatly the position of the landed upper classes."
(23): 1688 to the end of the Napoleonic Wars (ca. 1815) as the "golden age of the great landed estate" (some technological improvement, in fertilizer, new crops, crop rotation; but also the simple efficiency of economies of scale)
(24): the rural capitalist, he's noting, is fairly divided into two:
- the big landowner (who did no work himself, though looked at the figures--his contribution was legal and political, arranging the enclosures);
- and the large tenant farmer (whose contribution was economic, the real pioneers of agricultural development).
(26): "the intrusion of commerce into a peasant community generally sets in motion a tendency toward the concentration of land in fewer hands..."
(26-28): key, enclosures--graphic, moving account of the disintegration and suffering of the peasant communities (some stayed on land to be rural laborers; others migrated to the cities in search of work)--"it seems quite clear that when the common fields disappeared and a new economic system began to win out in the countryside, the old peasant community finally gave way and disintegrated... the enclosures greatly strengthened the larger landlords and broke the back of the English peasantry, eliminating them as a factor from British political life."
(29): amen--"That the violence and coercion which produced these resluts took place over a long space of time... must not blind us to the fact that it was massive violence exercised by the upper classes against the lower." [this is critical, as it contains a larger point about modernization and its relationship to violence--reminds me of Chris Harman's comment on Stalin; all the violence of modernization condensed into a few, exceptionally brutal years]
IV. Aristocratic Rule for Triumphant Capitalism (29-39)
(29): when considering the 'peaceful transition' to parliamentary democracy in the 19th century, we would do well to remember the violence that scarred the 17th and 18th centuries.
(29): consequence one--"perhaps the most important legacy of a violent past was the strengthening of Parliament at the expense of the King" [bequeathed an institutional mechanism for settling conflicts of interest]
(30): "the strong commercial tone in the life of the landed upper classes... also meant that there was no very solid phalanx of aristrocratic opposition to the advance of industry itself... the most influential sector of the landed upper classes acted as a political advance guard for commercial and industrial capitalism."
(30): consequence two--"the other main consequence was the destruction of the peasantry. It meant that modernization could proceed in England without the huge reservoir of conservative and reacitonary forces that existed at certain points in Germany and Japan... And it also of couse meant that the possibility of peasant revolutions in the Russian and Chinese manner were taken off the historical agenda."
(31): the French Revolution induced a period of reaction, in England--only to be lifted with the Battle of Waterloo.
(32): what was key re: the rise of the commercial classes in the 19th century, in England, was that "the road had been smoothed for them... under the leadership of the landed classes." [contrast with Prussia, where the State had to establish a uniform legal system, currency, etc.] "... The absence of a strong monarchy resting on an army and a bureaucracy, as in Prussia, made easier the development of parliamentary democracy... "
(32): important--"In the meantime the landed gentry and those above it in the social scale retained a firm hold on the levers of political power... [With reform bill of 1832, and the striking down of Corn Laws in 1846, he writes] The landed upper classes suffered no disaster, but they learned the limits of their power."
(34): key--comparatively mild treatment of the Chartist movement (1838-1848), down to three factors [in Germany, on the other hand, the bourgeoisie leaned on the aristocracy and the State, to protect them against popular discontent]
- strong current of opinion in favor of doing something to alleviate mass distress--devotion to idea of libery [possibly a question-begging explanation, but ok]
- lack of a strong repressive apparatus
- a favorable economic turn and poor-friendly legislation took the steam out of the movement
(35): "Thus the theme of diehard opposition to the march of democracy is a rare and minor current among the landed aristocracy of England in the nineteenth century. One cannot find in English history the counterpart to... German conservatives ['take ten men and shoot the Reichstag!']"
(35): very KEY; reason for lack of conservativsm/reaction--"One of the reasons why such a scene seems incongrous in England... is that, unlike the Junkers, the gentry and nobility of England had no great need to rely on political levers to prop up a tottering economic position..."
(36): "In the nineteenth century, as in earlier periods, the lines between wealthy nobility, gentry, and the upper reaches of business and the professions were blurred and wavering."
(37): key-- "In nineteenth century Prussia the members of the bourgeoisie who became connected with the aristocracy generally absorbed the latter's habits and outlook. Rather the opposite relationship held in England." [this is his answer--and see below--to the puzzle that their seemed to be more osmosis between the two classes in Prussia, than in England]
(37): important, larger point--"Men who hold power do not necessarily exercise it simply in the interests of the class from which they arise, especially in changing situations."
(38): key, divergent paths of England and Germany in late-19th Century--an agricultural depression in the aftermath of the Civil War (the availability of American grain, by steamship), "seriously commenced to erode the economic base of the landed upper strata." Roughly the same thing happened in Germany. BUT: there, Junkers used the State to preserve their position, forming a "united agricultural front" with peasant proprietors and even industrial interests around a program of imperialism and reaction; in England, on the other hand, "...agriculture was allowed to commit decorous suicide... The economic base had shifted to industry and trade."
(39): in sum--"...what factors stand out as responsible for England's progress toward demcoracy? Those inherited from a violent past have already been mentioned: (1) a relatively strong and independent Parliament; (2) a commercial and industrial interest with its own economic base; (3) no serious peasant problem." Other factors are specific to the 19th century... the landed upper classes absorbed new elements into their ranks... it was possible because the economic position of the governing classes eroded slowly... [furthermore], there is no reason to deny the historical significance of moderate and intelligent statesmen."
Chapter Two, Evolution and Revolution in France (40-110)
1. Contrasts with England and their Origins (40-45)
(40): key, enormous differences with England, he's noting at the outset--
- whereas in England you had an independent landed gentry, in France they were appendages of the Crown;
- whereas in England they adopt commercial agriculture, in France they live off what they can extract from the peasantry;
- whereas in England they respond to the rise of the manufacturing classes by becoming capitalists themselves, in France they are destroyed by the Revolution.
- whereas in England the peasant problem disappeared, in France it persisted and was consolidated gradually both before and after the Revolution.
(41): "the French nobility lived very largely from dues collected in kind or in cash from their peasants." [features emerge by the late 1300s and during the 1400s]
(41): they were located in law, and dependent on the peasantry--these two facts "were to distinguish the French nobility from the English gentry for the remainder of its history."
(41-42): "at quite an early date the peasantry had managed to escape from personal servitude...by the time of the Revolution," de facto property rights. [this is not explained, at all]
(42): in fact, precisely because they lacked an independent economic base (a la the gentry in England), the feudals also slowly lost out to the Crown (and the growing Royal Bureaucracy). this was encapsulated in the "long reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715).
(42-43): even if this fact let urban wealth intrude into rural areas, the basic form of wealth accumulation in the countryside remained the collection of wealth (not production for market)
(43): key--"France did not undergo an extensive enclosure movement. By and large, the large proprietor was interested in preserving peasant tenures because they provided the basis of his existence. Only in the latter part of the 1700s did the situation begin to change."
(43-44): important--in the course of the 1500s and afterward, "the king consolidated and extended his authority..." at the expense of the nobility [he deprived them of judicial functions, raised soldiers and taxes on their lands, intervened in their affairs, and forced them to submit to his Parlements]. This, again, culminated in Louis XIV. King had to ensure loyalty of nobility, though, which he did through the Church and War.
2. The Noble Response to Commercial Agriculture (45-56)
(45): until the opening decade of the 1700s, there certainly was a weak impluse toward commercial agriculture in France [limited markets, mostly in wheat--problem was to feed those who didn't grow, which was a small problem].
(49-50): crux of the matter, it seems: [after a lengthy discussion of the wine trade,] "The monarchy wanted a prosperious nobility as a decorative adjunct to the crown... But the crown did not want the nobility to establish an independent economic base that could enable it to challenge royal power." [I'm worried we're verging on a tautology here--no independent economic base is supposed to explain strength of monarchy; so how can strength of monarchy also explain no independent economic base?]
(50): "...successful commercial farming for the high aristocrat involved a temporary escape from French society." [mention of Haiti]
(51): "All these facts indicate that the cultural and legal barriers were becoming much less important during the 18th century." [in other words, this is not where we want to look if we want to understand the weakness of commercial agriculture]
(52): yes, a critique of Weber that parallels the charges leveled by Ellen Meiskins Wood--"Those who follow Weber, especially those who speak in terms of some abstract drive for achievement, neglect the importance of the social and political context in which such changes manifest themselves. The problem is not merely whether French rural nobles tried to run their estates efficiently... The key question is whether not in so doing they altered the structure of rural society in a way similar to what took place in those parts of England where the enclosure movement was strongest. The answer to this question is simple and decisive. They did not. Those nobles who represented the leading edge of commercial advance in the French countryside tried to extract more from the peasants."
(53): discussing Toulouse, where despite production for market, there was no real technical innovation--"the nobles used the prevailing social and political framework to squeeze more grain out of the peasants and sell it." [again, worried about a tautology--isn't the lack of an economic base meant to explain that social and political framework?]
(53-54): explaining the land tenure situation, as it differs from England; but I must say, I don't fully follow...
(55): in sum, though: "In contrast to England, commercial influences as they penetrated into the French countryside did not undermine and destroy the feudal framework. If anything they infused new life into old arrangements, though in a way that ultimately had disastrous consequences for the nobility... Essentially what the landed proprietor possessed were certain property rights, whose essence were claims, enforceable through the repressive apparatus of the state, to a specific share of the economic surplus..." [if run like this, the tautology fades, I think--but do need to think through this, some more]
(56): "In England the fusion between countryside and town was in the main directed against the crown... In France the fusion took place through the crown with very different political and social consequences."
3. Class Relationships under Royal Absolutism (56-62)
(56-57): in the 1600s, the French bourgeoisie was not the spearhead of modernization; instead, "it was heavily dependent on royal favor, subject to royal regulation..." [like Tokugawa Japan or even Akbar's India]
(57): thus, under Louis XIV, "the impulse toward establishing the bases of a modern society... came much more from the royal bureaucracy than from the bourgeoisie. That, however, was scarcely the deliberate intention of the crown. At the same time its real function... was to maintain order, supervise the economy..."
(57-58): like other agrarian bureaucracies, it was confronted with a limited source of surplus, like elsewhere (partial solution was to sell positions in the bureaucracy)
(58): regardless--"French society of the 1600s and 1700s presents us with an illuminating mixture of competing trades that scholars sometimes regard as characteristically Western and characteristically Oriental: feudalism, bourgeoisie, and bureaucracy." [an admirable universalism]
(59): "...the sale of offices was at the root of the king's independence of the aristocracy, of any effective control by a parliament. It was the key prop of royal absolutism. At the same time the practice undermined the king's independence [since it made office a piece of property]"
(60): key--had the effect of steeling the bourgeoisie to stand with the State against feudal elements; but also of converting bourgeois elements into feudals. "...The system diverted energy and resources from commerce and industry."
(62-63): why didn't such a pervasive monarchy, then, pursue the path of a Germany or Japan--a "conservative path to modernization"? he isn't providing the answer now, only suggesting that "agrarian problems played a very important part in bringing about this result."
4. The Aristocratic Offensive and the Collapse of Absolutism (62-70)
(63): the last half of the 1700s saw "a penetration of commercial and capitalist practices into agriculture." [a brief enclosure movement]
(64): crucial: the method of surplus-extraction (and the political apparatus that corresponded), in France, was simply different than in England [in France, feudal; in England, commercial]
(64): interesting that, right here at one of his most concretely Marxist moments, he is pushing back against caricatured Marx--"...any notion that the economic substructure somehow automatically determines the political superstructure, can lead one astray. The political mechanism was decisive..." [as was, then, the effort to smash it]
(64): key--enclosure movement in France more of a government move than in England, where it was indigenously actualized by gentry. "Hence capitalism was seeping into the French countryside... in the form of feudalism through the seignoral reaction, in the form of an attack on feudalism, and... through the officially sponsored enclosure movement. More rapid penetration had to await the measures of the Revolution..." [critical--all of this, though [increased feudal dues, enclosures], had the critical effect of turning the peasantry against the established order--this encouraged the unity of the Third Estate]
(65): this negative response, of course, is why "the most prosperous peasantry in Europe could become a major force for revolution."
(66-67): it was not that the nobility was closed (he's providing examples of bourgeoisie incorporation), that explains the Revolution.
(67): important--it is the case that in England this fusion took place against the king. In France, it was the monarchy that turned commoners into landed aristrocrats.
(67-68): concomitant to all this, there was expansive growth in commerce, and trade [embodied in proposals made by Turgot, which had the effect of antagonizing the sans-culottes by liberalizing grain market]
(69): KEY--"As it came to France, capitalism often wore a feudal mask... The demand for property rights within the prevailing system was very strong, as the sale of offices and the seigneurial reaction demonstrates. Capitalism... permeated the ancien regime.. Partly for this reason the radical thrust behind the Revolution, based on the sans-culottes and sections of the peasantry, was explicitly and strongly anticapitalist."
5. The Peasants' Relationship to Radicalism during the Revolution (70-92)
(70): "only when popular grievances could coalesce even briefly with those of more powerful groups would they help to bring the monarchy crashing down..."
(70-71): important--in the absence of commercial revolution (or manorial reaction), "many French peasants had become in effect small property owners." [though, he notes that, in some places families without land may have been anywhere from 20 to 70% of the rural population."]
(71): two major demands, amongst poorer peasantry
- land
- preservation of specific village customs that served their interests
(73): for the upper ranks of the peasantry, on the other hand, discontent was a product of a fact of "possessing the land without really owning it... Mainly wanted to eliminate the arbitrary aspects of the feudal system that had been increasing in the last years..."
(74-75): the impulses giving rise to the Revolution in this context: decreasing duties on British manufactures, natural disasters, reactionary pressure of stratum of nobility [others were quite willing to compromise], etc.
(75): summer of 1789, then, sees a series of peasant uprisings
(75-76): important, no bourgeoisie on the barricades--"full-scale violence [actually] frightened the bourgeoisie, who retreated into the arms of the nobility"
(76): with the storming of the Bastille, major traits of the radical elements in the French Revolution
- the fear of counterrevolutionary plots
- defensive uprising amongst the masses, mainly artisans and journeymen
- will to punish and destroy enemies
- storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789
- storming of the Tuileries on August 10, 1792, which led to the execution of Louis XIV
- uprising on May 31, 1793, which led to the reign of terror and Robespierre.
(80): 25th of August 1792, feudal dues disappeared; 28th of August, villagers receive back commond lands
(81-83): important, peasant radicalism, in the form of 'loi agrarire': equal distribution of lands, making the Commune uncomfortable, it seems (splitting the ranks) [March 1793 the death penalty decreed for preaching it!] -- all this, he's saying, a response to the intrusion of capitalism into the countryside.
(84): yes, the spectre of 1848, again--"...the bourgeois revolution needed the help of the radical revolution, as we have seen with the events of July 14 and August 4..." [of course!] This, even though "the two were fundamentally incompatible due to incompatible attitudes toward property..."
(86): critical, effects and context of the third uprising--"...both the rural and the urban radicals shared a common hostility at this point to the rich who were profiting from the Revolution and to the unfettered workings of the market... To sum up the meaning of the uprising..., the bourgeois revolution had been pushed sharply to the left under radical pressure and forced to shed the moderates (arrest of 32 Girondins), while the urban radicals and the peasants were still marching together..." This was the 'heroic' and 'desperate' time of the Revolution, led by the Committee of Public Safety (my understanding--you had the Constituent Assembly until 1791; the Legislative Assembly until the second uprising; and the Commune, until now)
(88): key, running into trouble--for the wealthier peasants -- as producers -- the system of price controls implemented in the third phase was oppressive, and they evaded it (even though the high, unregulated price of wheat had enabled the uprising, in the first place). Thus, the radical phase of the Revolution was "in many places an outright attack on the substantial peasants... worst of all, townsmen... were its main agents in the countryside..."
(89): in sum--"The obvious and decisive fact of the radical phase is this: the urban sans-culottes had been able to push the Jacobin leaders into policies that saved the Revolution but at the cost of turning the peasants against it... To the extent that these conditions prevailed elsewhere in the countryside [high price of bread relative to wages], they alienated radical support from the Revolution and dried up the sources of rural radicalism"
(90): important--Ventose decrees, Robespierre and Saint-Just realizing that they needed to make concessions to the peasantry. Alas, "it would have been very difficult to meet the expressed desires of the poorer peasants without putting a spike into the wheels of the bourgeois and capitalist revolution... Thus during the radical phase the needs and aspirations of the urban sans-culottes finally came into direct and open conflict with all sections of the countryside..."
(91): key--against the Marxist argument that the bourgeois revolution could not follow the radical revolution this far, Moore attributes the failure of the radical revolution to the tension that his policies brought them into conflict with the countryside--and in a way that aggravated the misery of the city-dweller.
(92): "No matter how radical the city was, it could do nothing without the help of the peasants. The radical revolution was over." [I need to sharpen my understanding of what exactly led to this fall-out; what I have culled from this chapter seems a bit confused...]
6. Peasants against the Revolution: The Vendee (92-101)
(92): from 1793 to 1796--the "only major peasant uprising against what is loosely called the Left" (calling for restoration of King, what have you)
(92): key, there is actually no paradox here: "the main thrust of the counterrevolution was anticapitalist against the merchants and manufacturers in nearby towns and those scattered through the heart of the Vendee itself... Resembles the great peasant upheavals that were the main popular force breaking apart the old regimes of Russia and China before the communist victories..."
(93): importantly--"The counterrevolutionary area was one where commercial agriculture had not penetrated..." But this, he is suggesting, is not an answer. Instead, something more specific is needed. His best guess is not the lightness of burden, nor the myth that these peasants lived amongst the nobility, but that "the leading peasants in the areas that were to become counterrevolutionary already had some of the major benefits of private property (because these were areas where enclosures had taken place)." Led to a "stubborn individualism--"in many instances a man would not see his neighbors for long stretches of time. "...What might be expected to happen if the Revolution failed to abolish rents and took more taxes out of the peasants than had been the case under the old order? What if the Revolution promoted a substantial bourgeois land grab? Finally, what if the Revolution came as a wholesale attack on peasant society? These are things that did happen."
(98): key, then--"What mattered most in the specific conditions of the Vendee was the attack on the clergy because it was part of a general offensive: economic, political, and social at once." So things like the reorganization of local government, the seizure of church properties, etc. (which had led to a very large bourgeois land grab).
7. Social Consequences of Revolutionary Terror (101-108)
(101): writing, now, against the impulse to regard the Terror "as a daemonic outburst of mob violence..." Certainly, there was much that was indiscriminate (the 1792 September Massacres, for example).
(103-104): roughly 30,000 to 40,000 victims of revolutionary repression--"Yet in assessing it, one has to keep in mind the repressive aspects of the social order to which it was a response. The prevailing order of society always grinds out its tragic toll of unnecessary death year after year... [T]o dwell on the horrors of revolutionary violence while forgetting that of normal time is merely partisan hypocrisy." [and this is just as true in China, India, etc.]
(104): reminder that the radical arm of the revolution was a negative, defensive reaction to the bourgeois revolution ("the steady spread of capitalist figures..." / the free market in grain, etc.).
(105): KEY POINT--you could not have had a peaceful transition, had the conservatives smothered the Revolution successfully, as you 'did' in England after the civil war. "The underlying social structure of France was fundamentally different and hence ruled out the kind of peaceful transition... that England experienced in the 1700s and 1800s."
(105): key--addressing himself to the question of whether it was, or was not, a bourgeois revolution: "To deny that the predominant thrust and chief consequences of the Revolution were bourgeois and capitalist is to engage in a trivial quibble... [Certainly, he agrees that the bourgeoisie were not protagonists, themselves, BUT] That the ultimate outcome of all the forces at work was a victory for an economic system of private property and a political system based upon equality before the law... are truths undeniable even if they are familiar." [see also pg. 109]
(105): Bourbon Restoration recovered half of the property lost during the Revolution!
(106): key, and in sum--"...the destruction of the political power of the landed aristocracy constitutes the most significant process at work in the course of French modernization. Ultimately it is largely... traceable to the response of the French nobility to the problems of agriculture in an increasingly commercial society. Royal absolutism was able to tame and control an aristocracy that had difficulty in establishing an independent economic base." [this eliminated, he's adding, the threat of right-wing authoritarianism]
(107): key--it also created "small-peasant property," with ambiguous consequences--"the experience of requisitioning, the attempt to place ceilings on the prices of grain, and the encouragement given to small holders and agricultural workers during the radical phase... turned the upper stratum of the peasants decisively against the Republic." [there is more, certainly, that needs to be said about the divisions in the peasantry; why are we so concerned, after all, with the upper peasantry, given their limited numbers?]
(107-108): some provisional reflections on revolutionary and reactionary tendencies of peasantry, but nothing conclusive beyond these few generalizations about the 19th and 20th centuries in France
- influential peasants are not concerned about democracy; they want guarantees of property and social position
- continued advance of capitalism threatens small peasant property
(108): again, a summary--Revolution was imperative, precisely because the ancien regime stood in the way of democratization; this was not the case in England, where you had a landed elite that were quite bourgeois ("part of democracy's entering wedge")
(110): in tracing the end of the French revolution, he speaks about how the Jacobin need to get food to urban areas and revolutionary armies broke the alliance with the richer peasants. but i am confused, perhaps because of poor comprehension: why did the poor peasants leave this alliance? or, differently put, why was the counterrevolution successful--did it have the backing of poor peasants?
Chapter Three, The American Civil War: The Last Capitalist Revolution (111-158)
1. Plantation and Factory: An Inevitable Conflict? (111-114)
(111): In America, of course, no well-entrenched agrarian society, of either feudal or bureaucratic forms. (1) Rather, "commercial agriculture" was important from the very beginning. (2) No political struggles, then, between a monarch and a landed aristocracy. (3) No massive class of peasants, comparable to Europe or Asia.
(112): key, a revolution not motivated by desire to cast off economic fetters--"The conclusion... amounts to the statement that the American Civil War was the last revolutionary offensive on the part of what one may legitimately call urban or bourgois capitalist democracy. Plantation slavery in the South... was not an economic fetter upon industrial capitalism. If anything, the reverse may have been true... But slavery was an obstacle to a political and social democracy." [but hang on, there is a point about technical inefficiency of slavery, owing to the low cost of labor, and whatever else--but let's watch this proceed]
(112): rightly passing over the American Revolution, which "did not result in any fundamental changes in the structure of society."
(114): to the question of whether there was some inherent contradiction between the industrial capitalism of the North and the plantation economy of the South, "we can answer.. with a provisional negative: there is no abstract general reason... Special historical circumstances... had to be present in order to prevent agreement between an agrarian society based on unfree labor and a rising industrial capitalism." [here he is making a comparison to Germany, where advanced industry got along well with highly repressive forms of rural labor (even if the Junker was not a slave-owner)]
(115): BUT--"if the conflict between the North and South had been compromised, the compromise would have been at the expense of subsequent democratic development in the United States..."
2. Three Forms of American Capitalist Growth (115-131)
(115): By 1860, there were three different forms of society in the US:
- cotton-growing South;
- the West, a land of free-farmers;
- and the rapidly industrializing Northeast.
(116): "In Southern society, the plantation and slave owners were a very small minority. By 1850, there may have been less than 350,000 in a white population of six million... only a small minority owned most of the slaves... [7% owned 75%!]"
(117): "...the smaller farmers in the South by and large accepted the political authority of the big planters..."
(117-118): "Slavery was almost certainly not on the point of dying out for internal reasons... If slavery were to disappear from American society, armed force would be necessary..."
(118): Emancipation Proclamation (1863) only emancipated slaves in areas where the North had no jurisdiction!
(118): "These considerations point strongly toward the conclusion that slavery was economically profitable."
(119): Slavery shifting to the "low South", and West (not in the tobacco growing areas, after 1850). This shift was of course threatening the balance of slave states and free states (Missouri coupled with Maine)
(121): key--but even if running a plantation was a capitalist task, the Southern plantocracy was not bourgeois--not opposed to hereditary privilege, and not based in town life. "Here was a real difference and a real issue."
(123): key-- "It is almost impossible to speak of purely economic factors as the main causes behind the war, just as it is impossible to speak of the war as mainly a consequence of moral differences over slavery. The moral issues arose from economic difference. Slavery was the moral issue... Without the direct conflict of ideals..., the events leading up to the war... are totally incomprehensible" [but what do we make of the hollowness of the Emanicpation proclamation? the notion that Lincoln was willing to save the union, alone?]
(124): after the 1830s, the North became a manufacturing center--the American Economy as a whole was less depndent on a "single agricultural staple." Cotton ceased to dominate the Northeast.
(125): regardless, though, it certainly wasn't Northern business interests behind the war--they "were very far from bellicose advocates of a war of liberation or even war for the sake of the union."
(127): the conflict comes, then, over the supply of labor to Northern Capitalists--"Perhaps more than any other factor, these trends set the stage for armed conflict and aligned the combatants in such a way as to make possible a partial victory for human freedom."
(128-129): key--the West is an important part of this story--"From the 1830s onward, there was a gradual redirection of Western produce toward the Eastern seaboard" [made possible by transportation revolution]. As a result, he's arguing, "The outlook of the early individualist and small-scale capitalist, characteristic of the Northeast, spread to the dominant upper stratum of the Western farmers." This, he's suggesting, produced a fear of competition from slavery.Similarly, Southern planters see this new strata as a threat.
(130): this was the underpinning of the bargain that brought Lincoln to office, in 1860--"business was to support the farmers' demand for land, popular also in industrial working-class circles, in return for support for a higher tariff."
(131): interesting--"Here energies that in Europe would have gone into building trade unions... went into schemes providing a free farm for every workman whether he wanted it or not. The actual effect of the Westward trek... was to strengthen the forces of early competitive and individualist capitalism by spreading the interest in property." [this was more a myth than reality--speculators had their hands on it, and maybe some of the more wealthy, enterprising workers]
(131): "The link between Northern industry and the free farmers ruled out for the time being the classic reactionary solution to the problems of growing industrialism..." It also brought the country towards civil war.
3. Toward an Explanation of the Causes of the War (132-140)
(132-133): no obvious, 'mortal' conflict in economic terms, between the two systems
(134): important--"In addition to the conflict between free farmers in the West and the plantation system, about the strongest case one can make in strictly economic terms is that for the South secession was not an altogether unreasonable proposal mainly because the South did not need much that the North really had to offer."
(134): other than economic answers, historians have given three explanations
- a moral conflict over slavery--but this elides the fact that North never took a radical position on slavery
- the blunering of politicians--but this is unhhelpful
- push question back to why political machinery for consensus broke down
(140): alternative way of framing it: causes for unity were being undermined--"it is difficult to find a case in history where two different regions have developed economic systems based on diametrically opposite principles and yet remained under a central government that retained real authority in both areas... Cohesive forces appear to have been weak..."
(140-141): there was also, he's arguing, neither (1) a strong working-class in the North, nor (2) threat of foreign power which could bind North and South together under a common banner (Germany 1871, Japan 1868 are said to have been examples of this)
(141): in sum--"...[T]he ultimate causes of the war are to be found in the growth of different economic systems... Two further factors made compromise extremely difficult. The future of the West appeared uncertain in such a way as to make the distribution of power at the center uncertain... Secondly... the main forces of cohesion in American society... were still very weak."
4. The Revolutionary Impulse and its Failure (141-148)
(141): Unlike the French Revolution and, partly, unlike England, there was no real "radical upsurge" during the Civil War [here we need 'Black Reconstruction' and the others--the 'new' histories of the Civil War, even if the kind of argument Moore is making is still defensible (no artisans, sans-culottes, though?)]
(142): slave outbreaks had no political consequences? To the DuBois!
(141-145): Thaddeus Stevens and Radical Republicans provided the revolutionary impulse that did exist, intending to wage 'progressive capitalism's' war on the 'baron and serf' slavery (combination of workers, industrialists, and some railroad interests at its height, in 1865-1868). The South were to be treated as a 'conquered people', and their society reconstructed (land reform, land confiscation, 'forty acres and a mule').
(146-147): The 1867 reconstruction acts floundered, though, because "influential Northern sentiment was in no mood to tolerate an outright attack on property... The failure of land reform was a decisive defeat and removed the heart of the Radical program."
(147): In the absence of this radical reconstruction, there was a move towards a new form of labor--not wage labor (which didn't work, when attempted first), but sharecropping.
(148): this didn't enrich the planters, but it did have the effect of making the South more of a one-crop economy than before (as everyone was pressed to grow cash-crop)
(148): key--of course, 1876 marks the return to normalcy--as elite moderates make an alliance across battle lines (Hayes-Tilden), and occupational regime is finally dismantled. "...the classic conservative coalition was possible. So came Thermidor to liquidate the 'Second American Revolution'"
5. The Meaning of the War (149-155)
(149-152): War gave a massive boost to industrial capitalism through permitting policies that would never have been tolerated, without it (high tariffs, end of slavery, subsidies, national banking and currency system). At the same time, this was not why the war happened, again--industrial capitalism did not necessarily have to regard plantation slavery as an obstacle; slavery was an obstacle to the establishment of democracy, however (and democracy is not a prerequisite of industrial capitalism--Germany, Japan).
(152): "Slavery was a threat and an obstacle to a society that was indeed the heir of the Puritan, American, and French Revolutions."
(153): "Striking down slavery was a decisive step, an act at least as important as the striking down of absolute monarchy in the English Civil War and the French REvolution..."
PART THREE: THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS AND PROJECTIONS
Chapter Seven, The Democratic Route to Modern Society (413-432)
(413): again, three routes to the modern world
- the route of the bourgeois revolution
- capitalist road without a revolutionary surge (German and Japanese examples)
- the communist road
(415): Western feudalism predisposed societies toward the parliamentary path, because of certain institutions it contained--"immunity of certain groups from the ruler, conception of right of resistance to unjust authority." [come on, though, this is quite unconvincing--reading into the relationship of lord to vassal the modern concept of the contract?]
(416): Marx's concept of an oriental despotism that coordinates the irrigation system he finds unconvincing, though it can be a starting point.
(417): as regards the process of modernization, "one point is clear:" persistence of royal absolutism or a hulking bureaucracy is not favorable to democracy. At the same time, they were important to 'checking' the nobility.
(417): a decisive precondition, too, "has been the emergence of a rough balance between the crown and the nobility... The pluralist notion that an independent nobility is an essential ingredient in the growth of democracy has a firm basis in historical fact." [but what about France?]
(418): but the nobility does need a bourgeoisie--if it seeks its freedom outside of this alliance, democracy is not the result (Russia as an example of this)
(418): ok--strong agreement with the "Marxist thesis that a vigorous and independent class of town dwellers has been an indispensable element in the growth of parliamentary democracy."
(419): furthermore--"among the most decisive determinants influencing the course of subsequent political evolution are whether or not a landed aristocracy has turned to commercial agriculture, and if so, the form that this commercialization has taken."
(419): European feudalism had three main divisions of land. Japan showed resemblances to this arrangment; some similarities in India. China was not like this.
- the commons
- the land owned by feudal, worked by peasant
- peasants' own plots
- English landed aristocracy turned to commercial farming, moving peasants of the lands.
- The French landed elite left the peasants in possession--intensification of the old arrangement (I think). [this led to democracy only because of the Revolution, remember--it could equally have led to the German path]
- In E. Europe you had the manorial reaction--E. German Junkers reduced free peasants to serfdom, and a similar process was at work in Russia (though for political, and not economic reasons).
(421-422): a 'cultural' explanation is quite unconvincing, he's arguing. agreed.
(422): important--"Where it has been possible for landlords to make use of the coercive apparatus of the state in order to sit back and collect rents, a phenomenon found widely in Asia and to some extent in prerevolutionary France and Russia, there is clearly no incentive to turn to less repressive adaptations."
(423): there are therefore at least three major variables:
- the relationship of the aristocracy to the monarchy
- the response of the aristocracy to commercialization
- the relationship of the landed upper classes with the bourgeoisie
(424): and here's an odd, contingent point, that throws the comparisons into doubt, I feel -- one that opens into the question of the 'permanent revolution', though: "the English bourgeoisie from the 17th through much of the 19th century had a maximum material stake in human freedom because it was the first bourgeoisie and hand not yet brought its foreign and domestic rivals to their full powers."
(426): again, England and the US (for different reasons) were the only countries to escape the peasant question (he attributes the "instability of French democracy in the 20th century to this fact").
(426): the role of violence--the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and the American Civil War
(427): provided the distinctions between the cases remain clear, "it is necessary to group revolutions by the broad institutional results to which they contribute."
(428): KEY, Barrington Moore against the classic concept of the bourgeois-democratic revolution--"..this meaning of the bourgeois revolution is such a simplification as to be a caricature of what took place. To see that it is a caricature we need only recall
- the importance of capitalism in the English countryside, which enabled the landed elite to control the political machinery
- the weakness of any purely bourgeois impulse in the French case, and the importance, therefore, of radical elements; and the continuation of the peasant economy into present-day
- the fact that plantation slavery was an obstacle to democracy, certainly, but not so much to capitalism.
(430): once more, an executive summary of FIVE conditions (looking at these, through India):
- first condition is to develop a balance, in order to avoid too strong a crown or too independent a landed aristocracy.
- a turn toward an appropriate form of commercial agriculture either on the part of the landed aristocracy or the peasantry.
- weakening of the landed aristocracy, if not commercial
- prevention of an aristocratic-bourgeois coalition against peasants and workers (typical when the bourgeoisie is weak, and the basis for authoritarianism)
- a revolutionary break with the past
(432): in Germany and Japan, you have capitalism in agriculture and industry, but no popular upheaval
(434-435): critical distinction, labor-repressive labor system vs. market labor system--the crux of his distinction between the English example (and the West of the US) and the Japanese, German, Russian, and even French cases is the form of surplus extraction. in the latter case, a reliance on a 'labor-repressive' system (rather than the labor market) to ensure an adequate labor force and adequate surplus ties the landed aristocracy to the State apparatus. [this is precisely where Skocpol pushes back--to her, the distinction between the two on the basis of their political implications is not admissable; it is rather another way of assessing the claim about the strength of the central bureaucracy]
(436): this seems deeply problematic--from the subordination to the House of Hohenzollern in the 1600's and 1700s, he's reading ideas of subordination to a central institution that he links to fascism! too ambitious, and he immediately acknowledges this. so where does it leave the claim?
(437-438): interesting, citing Marx and Engels on the German 1848--a bourgeoisie which was to weak to rule, and for the right to make money threw in its lot with the landed aristocracy and the royal bureaucracy (this will not, though, bring fascism in and of itself, just a conservative modernization from above--that only happens under the inability of these democracies to cope and to bring about fundamental structural changes). If this coalition is wanting, he adds, you move towards Russia and China.
(438): and what he's noting about fascism, let us remember, is the significant role of the landed elite (made possible by the failure of peasants to band together with urban strata)
(438-439): discussing the rationalization of the new order in Germany and Japan in the 1800s, which had already been done, in England and France, under royal absolutism.
(440): the State, obviously, was critical for incipient industrialization, and the taming of the labor force (but this is perhaps where the contrast with the other examples becomes blurred, a la Skocpol's claim?)
(441): raising the question of the autonomy of the State structure, which is posed, though unclearly, here--it must be able to "free itself from the influence of both extreme reactionary and popular or radical pressures in the society, something that can happen rather more easily than simplified versions of Marxism would allow us to believe."
(442): ultimately, though, these regimes are in a bind, because modernization will require changes in social structure, which they want to stabilize. the answer to this, he's arguing, is militarism.
(443): drawing parallels between McCarthyism and the situation in England, during and after the Napoleonic Wars.
(444): this is the real question--why did England, in its reactionary phase during the Napoleonic Wars, not launch itself onto the reactionary path of a Germany or Japan--the answer, critically, was the relative weakness of the repressive apparatus, in England. [one thinks Skocpol will pick up, right here; whereas for Moore this pushes the question back]
(445): he's playing with the 'fascist' possibility in the Russian case, but for me this is revealing how undefined the term itself has been, till this point.
(446): again, this needs lengthy interrogation--"...the Russian peasants were revolutionary and eventually the major force in exploding the old regime."
(446): Fascism and the Subcontinent
(447-8): Fascism, a provision definition--"Fascism is inconceivable without... the entrance of the masses onto the historical stage. Fascism was an attempt to make reaction and conservatism popular and plebian... [It] stressed not only the inevitability of hierarchy, discipline, and obedience, but also positied that they were values in their own right... Another feature was the stress on violence... Plebian anticapitalism thus appears as the feature that most clearly distinguishes 20th century fascism from its predecessors, the nineteenth-century conservative and semiparliamentary regimes..."
(448-449): Fascism and the peasantry--most successful in appeal to the peasant whose holding was relatively small and unprofitable for the particular area in which it existed" [the 'little fellow'--seduced by the romantic image of an idealized peasant. though, it goes without saying, this was only ever an ideological justification, rather than a policy pursued by the Nazis]
(450-451): example of Japan, Italy--same pseudoradical and propeasant features, though in the latter especially, this was entirely opportunistic and ideological (policy catered to big agriculture, after Mussolini took power)
Chapter Nine, The Peasants and Revolution (453-583)
(453): "The process of modernization begins with peasant revolutions that fail. It culminates during the 20th century with peasant revolutions that succeed." [catchy -- but the first part is not clear]
(453): recovering the peasant as a subject of history, after he/she had been dismissed
(453-45 ): we want to understand what triggers peasant revolutions, and why. at this stage, certain theories can be dismissed:
- not simple deterioration of living, owing to impact of commerce and industry (think India--even if there have been upheavals)
- not a threat to peasant existence (i.e. enclosrues)
- where nobility lives amongst peasantry, less likely? (no, look at Russia)
- landless labor, large rural proletariat--but this doesn't explain the Russian Revolution, or even the Chinese Revolution, really
- religion? but it's always wielded by upper classes, interpreted differently by lower classes
(459): the general hypothesis--it is society's with a central authority that are more vulnerable to rebellion; but where regulation is diffuse (i.e., the caste system), rebellion is less likely. [this is useful, because England and France seem to fit the model, too, though he doesn't acknowledge this in the same way...]
(459-460): if landed elites take up commercial agriculture, the more limited the rebellion
(462): discussing the context leading up to the Peasant War in Germany--enserfment was the response, there, to the rise of an export market in grain
(466): the aristocratic victory in the Peasant War, he's arguing, foreclosed the possibility of liberal democracy emerging (since, presumably, it consolidated a labor-repressive system of surplus extraction)
(467): English squire vs. German Junker
- the former turned to commercial agriculture, destroyed the social organization of the peasantry through enclosures--no peasant war
- the latter turned to serfdom in the face of the export trade--faced with peasant war
- production for the market
- peace and order over a wide area; the creation of a strong central gov't
- character of link to the overlords (landlord, priest)--when strong, chances of rebellion are feeble
- class divisions within the peasantry
- and degree of cohesiveness within the peasantry [he is also making a distinction between revolutionary and conservative forms of solidarity--the latter is, in the main, a modern phenomenon (this is the context of Marx's comment on the peasantry being a 'sack of potatoes'--it's the effect of commerce, industry and a capitalist legal framework, at least in part, which encourages competition between households in a village]
(477-478): "To sum up, the most important causes of peasant revolutions have been the absence of a commercial revolution in agriculture... and the concomitant survival of peasant social institutions into the modern era... Where the peasant community survives, as in Japan, it must remain closely linked to the dominant class in the countryside if revolution is to be avoided."
(479): "By themselves peasants have never been able to accomplish a revolution. On this point the Marxists are absolutely correct, wide of the mark though they are on other crucial aspects. The peasants have to have leaders from other classes..." [And anyway,] "peasant revolts have been repressed far more often than they have succeeded."
(481): noting that artisans and journeymen played a much more important role than Marxist theory might lead us to believe (this is Craig's intervention, as well, but there it is 1848 under scrutiny)
(481): deeply unsatisfactory account of the Russian Revolution
--
(1) there is a preliminary problem in the opposition of democracy to communist dictatorship, but we will keep this on the shelf for when the concepts are elucidated further.
(2) the question-begging character of the argument, which almost inheres in its Weberian set-up. we can always, it seems, push the chain of causality back. our task is to think through when this is useful, and when it is not. (example of impulse given by wool trade, in 1300s/1400s England--can we not ask to have this pushed back, further? or is it simply a contingent factor?)
(3) obvious problem in Russia's case was that the peasantry did not, in the slightest, 'lead' the revolution. it will be interesting to see how he justifies the claim that they constituted the decisive revolutionary impulse; it is, certainly, more defensible, but still requires some reconciling to the larger narrative of Bolshevik triumph.
(4) cleavages in the revolution; poorer elements doing dirty work. one can see why this might culminate in 1848, and 'permanent revolution'
(5) increasing lack of democracy in the aftermath of the civil war, for the peasantry (pg. 21)
(6): Stalin as condensation of the typical violence, rather than atypical, which is inherent in the path of modernization.
(7) the critique of Moore that the German and Japanese examples are disingenuous, because their fascist 'phases' were temporary, raises the more fundamental question, i think, of what in each example we can treat as a true 'characteristic', and what we treat as 'temporary'. this is, of course, fundamental--the balance of contingency and theory is the challenge of any good history.
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