Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

In this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood rewrites the history of political theory. She traces the development of the Western tradition from classical antiquity through to the Middle Ages in the perspective of social history—a significant departure not only from the standard abstract history of ideas but also from other contextual methods.

Treating canonical thinkers as passionately engaged human beings, Wood examines their ideas not simply in the context of political languages but as creative responses to the social relations and conflicts of their time and place. She identifies a distinctive relation between property and state in Western history and shows how the canon, while largely the work of members or clients of dominant classes, was shaped by complex interactions among proprietors, labourers and states. Western political theory, Wood argues, owes much of its vigour, and also many ambiguities, to these complex and often contradictory relations.

From the Ancient Greek polis of Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus and Sophocles, through the Roman Republic of Cicero and the Empire of St Paul and St Augustine, to the medieval world of Averroes, Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, Citizens to Lords offers a rich, dynamic exploration of thinkers and ideas that have indelibly stamped our modern world.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, World History

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Ellen Meiksins Wood FRSC (April 12, 1942 – January 14, 2016) was an American-Canadian Marxist historian and scholar. From 1967 to 1996, she taught political science at Glendon College, York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

With Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood articulated the foundations of Political Marxism, a strand of Marxist theory that places history at the centre of its analysis. It provoked a turn away from structuralisms and teleology towards historical specificity as contested process and lived praxis.

Meiksins Wood's many books and articles, were sometimes written in collaboration with her husband, Neal Wood (1922–2003). Her work has been translated into many languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Romanian, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Of these, The Retreat from Class received the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1988.

Wood served on the editorial committee of the British journal New Left Review between 1984 and 1993. In 1996, she was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada, a marker of distinguished scholarship. From 1997 to 2000, Wood was an editor, along with Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, of Monthly Review, the socialist magazine.

Reviews

[Justin Evans · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book concludes: "A more generous version of human emancipation requires us to go beyond ruling ideas to a richer tradition of emancipatory struggle, in action and thought; but we can best reveal the limits of prevailing orthodoxies if we understand the canonical tradition and the historical experience in which it is rooted."

On the one hand, it's hard to argue with that. Wood does an excellent job in her introductory chapters. She argues that the Cambridge school of the history of political thought is pretty good, but needs to be improved. Those gents (I fear mostly gents) read the canon in the context of the disputes that a canonical work might be a response to, and it's very enlightening. But, as Wood points out, their understanding of 'context' is very narrow--almost entirely textual. Wouldn't it be nice to take that contextual approach, broaden it out to include, say, socio-economic factors, and gain a better understanding of the great books? Sure would.

Unfortunately, Wood fails to do this, and at times fails spectacularly, because, as I would have thought only an unreconstructed Leninist could, she insists that the context is always and only a binary relationship between oppressor (/ruler/ruling class/property owners) and oppressed (/subject/working class/peasantry).

To get a feel for how misleading this can be, consider her answer to the question why political thought developed as it did in the West. Woods argues that this tradition is unique, that political thought does not exist in the same way in East Asian or Islamic or African societies. Western political thought starts in Greece, she says, because only in Greece is economic and political power separated. In the West, there is such a thing as "private property" far earlier than anywhere else, because in "Greece" there was democratic rule, rather than oligarchic, monarchical, or imperial.

On the one hand, this seems interesting, but then you realize that Greek political thought is clearly the result of Greek political conditions, i.e., many city-states all with different ways of ruling themselves, and all aware of the imperial models on the other side of the Mediterranean. And then your remember that almost no Greeks ever got to be 'citizens.' And then you realize that Woods has imported into the distant past a very modern way of understanding what 'property' is, and what 'democracy' is, and thus of what 'society' is. And that all her claims about proper historicization are straight hypocrisy. This is bad enough, but at least arguable. Perhaps this putative disconnect between economic and political power was and important one.

Where things get really bad is in her readings of the texts. For each text Woods tells a simple story: the author is an apologist for the rich and powerful, and the 'context' for the book is the need to keep the poor and powerless as they are. In order to tell this story, Woods identifies a hero in each case.

So, in the case of Socrates (evil), we have Protagoras as our hero (in the Platonic dialogue of the same name). Socrates believes that true knowledge is only available through divine insufflation, and that means the rabble can't have it, whereas Protagoras believes in democracy. Also, the sophists invented political thought. This is an odd reading, to say the least, given that Protagoras never says anything of the sort in the dialogue, that the 'insufflation' at the end of the Meno is clearly ironic (i.e., Socrates specifically does not believe that), and that we know nothing at all about what either Socrates or Protagoras really thought, since this is a dialogue by Plato, not a fucking documentary film. It won't surprize you that Wood also systematically misunderstands Stoicism. The Stoics end up as free will libertarian irrationalists. I am not making this up. No mention here of the stoic sage and the elitism this belief entails, no no no. The stoics, being not so famous, must be the good guys.

As for Rome, well, Rome consolidated the distinction between public rule and private property because of the weakness of the centralized state. I'm not making this up. All of imperial Rome, by the way, can be treated in more or less the same way, from Augustus to the last of the Western emperors, and we can ignore entirely the Eastern half of the empire (you might be interested to 'know' that "Roman imperial structures and institutions" were preserved in the Christian church of the West, and not in the Eastern Empire). This, I may have mentioned, is a book very insistent on the importance of historicism.

That historicism also allows us to act as if St. Paul and Augustine had the same historical circumstances. For the sake of comparison, imagine if I said that T. W. Adorno and Baruch Spinoza should be analyzed in the same terms, since they were both Jewish and lived in Europe.

Christianity is described more or less by the phrase "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's," a phrase that any contextualization at all would show to be a response made by a Jewish man, Jesus, to other Jewish men who had asked, in the context of Jewish rebellions against Roman taxation, whether Jews should pay taxes to Rome. If he says yes, they can send damn him. If he says no, they can take him to the powers that be. Instead he questions the bases of the tax rebellions, more or less saying "I'm not concerned with that kind of thing, and neither should you be."

Anyway, St. Paul is 'credited' with turning this little moment of wit into a "defense of absolute obedience to earthly powers." His theological principles were far more congenial to the state authorities than "Judaism or Jewish Christianity," which would have been news to the Saducees, and would also be news to scholars of early Christianity who have been arguing for some time now that there simply was no division between Christianity and "Jewish Christianity."

In one particularly astonishing moment, Wood claims that "Paul's emphasis on salvation by faith rather than works had clear advantages to those who stood to lose from strict adherence to the social Gospel." The social Gospel, you may remember, was an early twentieth century movement. Paul's 'emphasis' on salvation by faith rather than works is a Reformation interpretation of one sentence of Paul's; Paul himself almost certainly meant by 'works' "Jewish ritual traditions," and anyway is quite clear in other places that good deeds are necessary for salvation. Not done yet, Wood then proves that Paul, not content with being an imperialist lackey, was also in favor of slavery. How? She quotes from a letter that Paul probably didn't write, then intentionally misreads a letter he did.

Fair enough, of course; Wood is not a Christian and not interested in Christianity and, given her belief that the winners are always more evil than the losers of history, she's likely to find all kinds of turpitude in Paul. Surely things will get better with Augustine though, right? He's a proper political thinker.

Dear reader, it is not to be. So ingrained is this "people I've heard of must be evil, people who are obscure must be good" logic that the freaking Donatists, of all people, are described as a working class movement for democracy. Whereas, for Wood, Augustine is--I'm not exaggerating--popular culture's Calvin. "The essence of Augustine's doctrine is, again, the fallen condition of humanity... he underpins this doctrine with a particularly harsh conception of predestination. Not only are some predestined to enjoy God's grace and salvation, whatever their own acts on earth, but the separation of others from God's grace and their eternal punishment is also predestined, not as a function of their own uniquely sinful acts," but because God is a prick. Except, of course, that's not how Augustine understands predestination, that's how a singularly caricatured Calvin does. For Augustine, God foresees one's actions without constraining them (an argument better expressed by Boethius); in that sense punishment or salvation is 'predestined.' But punishment is precisely due to one's own uniquely sinful acts.

Why is Wood even writing about this? It's not clear, except that we have to make sure the Christian thinkers are the bad guys. So bad that Augustine's pessimism in The City of God is explained by his theory, not the fairly obvious material historical fact that his civilization was getting taken over by (people he understood to be) barbarians. Did I mention recently that this is a book very concerned to stress how historically materialist it is?

Also, Pelagius is a hero, of course, for all the obvious reasons.

I contemplated not finishing the book at this point, but thought someone had to tell the truth about it on Goodreads, so I read on.

The final chapter, 'The Middle Ages,' was actually quite promising. Wood's central thesis about the importance of property and power being split in the West is slightly truer for the feudal West, if only because the central political powers were so weak. She is rightly critical of historians who think that any trade or commerce in the middle ages is a forerunner of capitalism (or, from another perspective, "freedom").

But all too soon the same ignorance raises its head. To take just a few examples, Wood writes that: the Magna Carta was not about barons "asserting their own jurisdiction over other free men." The filioque controversy was really about "the necessity of obedience to prevailing authority," which the Byzantines were really not into but the West was all about. Aquinas was canonized because the Dominicans were easier on ecclesiastical wealth than the Franciscans. Christianity has unique difficulty dealing with the relationship between philosophy and "religion" (by the way, have I mentioned how this book is concerned with historical difference, and would never apply modern concepts to medieval realities?), despite the fact that e.g., Aquinas' writings on this issue borrow heavily from Islamic and Jewish philosophers. Since Islam only started to "police theology" on 9/11 (cold comfort to those killed, by other Muslims, in the name of the Prophet or Ali or for professing Sufism and so on since at least the battle of Karbala), it never needed a concept of natural law, whereas Christianity is uniquely oppressive precisely because of that concept, a fact that will dismay the many academics writing about natural law in Islam, and puzzle those who suspect that the oppressors were more likely to wield swords than copies of Aquinas's Summa. The distinction between religion and secularity shouldn't be imposed on medieval Islam, but can safely be imposed on medieval Christianity for reasons that are not at all obvious to me.

In case it isn't clear yet, this is a work by a talented theorist (and that is intended as true praise: if this book had carried out the program announced in the introduction, I wouldn't hesitate to give it five stars). But Wood appears to know almost literally nothing about the time period covered in this book. She came to the history of political theory with a rigid structure (political theory is only ever about defending the rich), some preconceived beliefs (the marginalized are intellectually and morally right, always; dualism is always bad), and a desire to contextualize.

Context, I suggest, should be history, not one's own opinions. But I guess saying that would make me too much like Socrates, that notorious imperialist.

[Dominique · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book about the limits of political orthodoxy where the argument is made by exploring the material conditions under which those orthodox ideas developed. It is not a narrative history of Western political thought but explores the social conditions of its development.

There are, for me, two key themes that run through the book. The first is that much of the stuff of Western political theory has been about the tension between civil or moral equality and the realities and impact of class inequality. The second is more generic and centres on the ambiguities and paradoxes of Western political theory, such as the observation that notions of the limits of government may be as indebted to defences of aristocratic power as they are to popular struggles to challenge or overcome that power.

The problem and frustration (weakness, even) of the book is that social histories of intellectual life are difficult at the best of times, but when the sources are as scarce as they are for many of the periods Wood is dealing with here there are places where she is left with little more than broadly contextualised textual analysis. Even this is a step beyond much of what we get elsewhere, uncontextualised textual analysis.

This is in places a difficult text, but in the end rewarding. I am not a specialist in the field so cannot say how useful it might be to that audience, but it is significant and rewarding, and will merit several return visits.

[Grimble Gromble · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kitabın ana tezini (Batı siyasi düşüncesinin izlediği yolun zamanın (siyasi) gerilimlerine yanıt verme dürtüsüyle şekillendiği) az çok kavradığımı düşünüyorum. Antik Yunan / Roma ve Ortaçağ toplumlarındaki temel siyasi ilişkiler-bu ilişkilerin kendine has gerilimleri, bunların nasıl dönüştüğü ve bu dönüşümlerin siyaset felsefesine nasıl yansıdığını takip ediyoruz, isminde ne diyorsa onu anlatıyor tam olarak.

Aydınlanma'nın "yurttaşlık" "anayasal haklar" "doğal hukuk" "yönetenlerin sorumlu tutulması/hesap verilebilirlik" vs. gibi kavramlarının, aktif yurttaşlar-arası siyasi ilişkilerden oluşan Antik Yunan toplumundan değil de, yurttaşlığın pasifize edildiği ve farklı aktörler arası güç dengelerinin idaresinin arandığı ortaçağ siyasi pratiği ve felsefesinden geldiğini savunuyor. Mind-blown meme gibi okudum o kısımları. Burada da ufak ufak dokunuyor da, Kapitalizmin Arkaik Kökeni'nde işlediği İngiliz kapitalizmi - Fransız mutlakiyetçiliği ile birlikte düşününce netlenmiş oluyor iyice.

Roma ve Ortaçağ kısımlarında özellikle düşünürleri tek tek incelediği kısımlarda koptum ara ara, kim ne diyor, neler oluyor, bu buna karşı çıktıysa bu kimdi diye diye okudum. Biraz sıkıcıydı açıkçası ben de sallamadım pek :D Ama dönemin genel bir anlatısını yaptığı kısımları pür dikkat okuyarak telafi ettik diyelim...

Neyse işte, EMW yoldaşım bam bam bam sıkmış yine, okuyalım.

[Camilo Ruiz Tassinari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps the main problem with Wood’s book is one of labelling. This is not a history of political thought, but rather a history of how the social conditioned political thought. It’s not the same, and readers looking for detailed textual analysis of this or that thinker will inevitably be disappointed. Her overall point is well taken, as I believe she never assumes nor pretends to prove a linear social determination of political thought.
The introduction is very powerful and I certainly agree with her take on the Cambridge School. However, the point remains: why not write a proper history of political thought? In the rest of her work Meiksins Wood uses political thought as erudite and intelligent examples to prove wider historical points, and how this or that social development was expressed in the philosophy of the time. I feel like here she pretty much wanted to extend that same method, but it somehow doesn’t work as neatly. Anyhow, a must-read if you’re into PT.

[John Turner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting interpretation of Western political theory canon that explores major thinkers through the conflicts of their age (primarily class-related given Wood's Marxist approach). Much more thorough with the Classical authors than the Medieval.

[Chris Tolve · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second book of Wood's that I've had the pleasure to read, and she never disappoints. Her relentless clarity of vision is exhilarating, and one skill of hers I've noticed that helps this is her ability to clearly survey the historiography of her subject before situating her intervention at the crux where all past theorists have fallen short. In this book, she charts a "social history of Western political theory" from Plato to Aristotle to the Epicureans to the stoics to Cicero to Augustine to Aquinas and a host of lesser figures scattered in between, ending around the mid-14th century just before Machiavelli, where she places the end of the medieval era. In contrast to textual and contextual methodologies, she hones in on the politico-economic occurrrence from which each philosopher writes, and although she doesn't use the term, historical materialism is clearly her jumping-off point for this.

Her central contention is that each of these major canonical thinkers confronted some material problem of their day, perhaps a crisis for some powerful group or institution, and inevitably resolved that conflict in favor of the ruling class, or at least some section of it. She sums up this view in the conclusion: “The canon of Western political theory, while it includes some notably radical thinkers, is largely the work of members or clients of dominant classes.”

I have just two criticisms. Firstly, and this is minor, I think she misunderstands Augustine's conception of the relationship between predestination and the works/grace dilemma. She thinks he believes that each person is harshly predestined either for salvation or damnation absolutely irrespective of their actions on Earth, a theory that prefigures Calvinism. Augustine, however, is more nuanced than this. In my reading, he is a compatibilist, meaning he believes free will and determinism are compatible. hHe resolves the tension between the two basically by redefining free will to mean any action that isn't impeded by some antithetical external force. Hence, he believes humans make free choices, but he also believes their choices are predetermined and foreknown by God. Consequently, people can be judged on their works, not merely gifted God's grace, and still be predestined for heaven or hell before they actually do anything. Of course, I think this is absurd, but it undermines Wood's argument that Augustine's theory of predestination by grace protects immoral rulers from having to live up to their Christian ideals. This point is more than just pedantic, but I don't knock her too hard for it because it's one of several critiques she makes of Augustine and I think her basic argument about him is correct.

A second criticism I have is that I don't think she affords enough charitability to some of the theorists she analyzes. I agree that the predominant theme in their thought is conservative, but with a careful enough reading you can also draw out an emancipatory potential from each of them, especially the Greeks. It's disappointing that this book ends before the modern era because I would love to see how she would've grappled with canonical philosophers whose emancipatory elements are undeniable, like Hegel and Marx. Nevertheless, I recognize that it's not exactly her mission to do this; her point is that the thinkers studied here were elevated to canonical status precisely because their ideas were so useful to the ruling class, irrespective of any hidden radicality beneath the text. She also does pay some attention to more overtly radical thinkers like Protagoras and Pelagius, whose influence was naturally suppressed.

And finally, Wood never writes anything without making sure you understand its relevance to contemporary struggles for democratic human emancipation. These are just a couple remarkable quotes I plucked from her conclusion.

“The constitutive principles of Western liberal democracy, its ideas of limited and accountable government, have more to do with medieval lordship and its claims to autonomous power than with rule by the demos as conceived in ancient Athens.”

“What is most ambiguous and paradoxical in the Western tradition of political theory, which was born in the civic community of ancient Greece, is that its foundational ideas of citizenship and civic equality have almost since the beginning been adapted to serve the cause of inequality and domination.”

[Regan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like to think of Wood as the black sheep punk of classicist studies. She's the Howard Zinn of ancient world: she focuses on the the impact of institutions and economic structures on ordinary people, not on wealthy aristocrats.

[Anibal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Conflict as the "creator" of political thought! That is the main idea of this work.

The understanding of the evolution of western political thought and its motivators is one of the objectives of Ellen Wood. Being a Marxist, she uses conflict between classes as the main generator of political thought. From the Greek democracy to the middle ages, Wood's analyses some of the most important authors integrating them in the contemporary political context and explaining with extraordinary virtuousness each political opinion and their objectives.

I'm no sociologist, so I don't really understand the feuds between their factions. But I'm an historian, and I detect some flaws in the methodology, exegesis of the ancient texts and even in the relevance of the chosen pieces. The author makes her case solely based on written texts by some thinkers...many of them that had really limited or no power at all and although their works reached our time to be analyzed, some had only extremely limited influence to their contemporaries. For example, Cicero was a consul and a prolific author, and obviously his political points of view were shared by many of the Roman elite, but almost all early imperial authors are extremely critical of Cicero's political thinking! To consider his views as a "basis" is incorrect. Other mistakes are obvious like her statement that the barbarian menace wasn't that important for Rome's decline but financial problems were the main cause...of course financial problems were the main cause, but what caused that financial problem was precisely the threat of the great barbarian confederations that forced Rome to increase immensely their army and the loss of revenue through occupied areas by foederati. Because some civilizations left few political writings Woods don't even consider them; one example is the Northman with their democracy and allthing; although they don't have great artisans of the word, their political thought had obvious repercussions everywhere they settled (including Britain).

Make no mistake; although I share those critical thoughts, this is a superb work. I believe Ellen Wood's an extremely intelligent academic and her writing is accurate, precise and to the point. The conclusions she shares about the political thinking of some authors is completely valid; she hits right on the target. Obviously trying to extrapolate those views to a broader target isn't historically valid.

Although I believe she fails in delivering a comprehensive social history of political thought, her failure overshadows most other author's successes.

Recommended.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an exceptional telling of Western political theory from Solon to William of Ockham. In it, Meiksins-Wood delineates how the concepts of equality, citizen, and property reflect the material conditions and conflicts of Greece, Rome, and Medieval Europe. Contextualizing the works of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas and Ockham among others, Meiksins-Wood demonstrates how philosophical arguments respond to the class conflicts and the political milieu of their times while also speaking across times, in borrowing and revamping the ideas and concepts these thinkers raise. As a history, this approach shines light on the critical differences between, for example, Aristotle's concept of a telos and Aquinas' idea of natural law, or Plato's Republic and Augustine's City of God. As a consequence, we see how concepts such as equality become complex, as they transition from the contested histories of state actors, aristocratic power centers, and producing classes from the Greek Polis to the Roman Republic, then Empire, to the Feudal networks of Medieval Europe.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh man, this was a dense book. definitely not one for any casual reading before bed. the arguments were very well thought out and very well explained, but idk if I'm too stupid or just didn't have enough background information for me to truly get what was being argued. As historical books and arguments go, this is very highly regarded, but honestly, I have to say I'm not too sure much stuck with me as I was reading it. Not to say that is the books fault, but maybe I am saying be careful how you approach the book.

[Seahorse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started out really interesting with the Greeks, by the time it got to the Romans there was some shoehorning of concepts, and then by the time it reached medieval scholasticism it became a task to parse. All in all, an important and fun project, maybe the temporal distance and scale made it disorienting. Or perhaps the reason that only the ancient Greek thought section felt better laid out was because of its stronger overlap with democratic forms today. More hopeful about the second volume.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

#StudyingForComps
The intro and conclusion are incredible. The book itself makes a ton of arguments about reinterpretation of "standard" readings of the Western political canon, which I'm all for, but in some parts I also found myself not really knowing exactly what the point being argued against was.

[Dogukan]

antik yunan düşüncesinden itibaren 14. yüzyıl ortalarına kadar siyasi düşünce tarihini toplumsal arka planı göz önünde bulundurarak incelediği derinlikli bir araştırma. Soyut düşünce tarihi yerine bahsi geçen siyasi geleneklerin nasıl toplumsal koşulların sonuçları ve nedenleri olduğunu açıklamayı deniyor.

[Keldorn Sahin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book to follow ancient thoughts and history, but tries to explain a big part of history, while trying to be short an basic. Without Democritos of Hereclius, you cannot form a good look into the aristocracies problems with democracy. Thats all i am going to say.

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read

[Guillote · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una obra de arte en cuanto a marxismo y filosofía política.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the premise of this book, and the way the argument was laid out made me think about old topics in new ways.

In general, the idea of thinking about "canonical" works as being made by human people who existed in a specific time and place and participated in a culture and had families and personal histories and relationships which influenced the way they thought should not feel as revolutionary as it does. This book really made me think about these works, the men who wrote them, and, most importantly, what I had always been taught about them, in new ways.

I think the author did a good job of contextualizing the information to give the reader a better understanding of what society and culture was like at the time these works were written, and where the authors would have fallen in the social hierarchy. In addition, this was done in a way which was very read-able, and I had no problem reading large chunks of this book at a time, and it never felt dry.

My only problem with this book was that occasionally the evidence felt cherry-picked and repetitive, and rather than addressing some alternate viewpoints or theories, the author would just make the same point over again. It made me walk away from this book thinking that I learned less than I could have, which is a shame.

[Naum · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did not know what to expect from this title -- always interested in Greek/Roman/Middle Age streams of political thinking. And I cannot proclaim that I learned a great deal from it either. Some interesting bits, for certain, but more offset by great chunks of drudgery, or merely reframing the obvious. Then, in other parts, I thought significant threads were barely explored.

It did get better towards the end, and the highlight was the survey of individual political thinkers -- Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, William of Ockham, etc.…

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice early review, I just happen to like this author and her presentations. So forgive me being less than objective.

[Harun]

İT is good