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Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from the Renaissance to Enlightenment
The formation of the modern state, the rise of capitalism, the Renaissance and Reformation, the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment have all been attributed to the “early modern” period. Nearly everything about its history remains controversial, but one thing is certain: it left a rich and provocative legacy of political ideas unmatched in Western history. The concepts of liberty, equality, property, human rights and revolution born in those turbulent centuries continue to shape, and to limit, political discourse today. Assessing the work and background of figures such as Machiavelli, Luther, Calvin, Spinoza, the Levellers, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, Ellen Wood vividly explores the ideas of the canonical thinkers, not as philosophical abstractions but as passionately engaged responses to the social conflicts of their day.
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
About the author
Ellen Meiksins Wood
33 books227 followersEllen 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
December 17, 2017
Ellen Meiksins Wood’s death in 2016 deprived us of one of the most incisive minds in contemporary Marxist thinking, and one of the most significant interpreters of the Marxist tradition. Reading this, her last single authored book, reminds me just how much we have lost. Supplementing her impressive Citizens to Lords this social history of political thought – that is, a history of the conditions under which political idea and theory develops – covers the era usually known as ‘early modern’ (as Wood notes, a problematic terms, but one she uses because it is one we can at least all understand). She explores many of the most significant political theorists of the Western canon, and in doing so has produced a superb book.
Political theorists and historians have analysed and made sense of this era in all manner of ways, depending on their/our theoretical and conceptual proclivities. In Wood’s words, the era matters because it was “when fragmented sovereignty was giving way to more centralized states, and new tensions emerged between property and state. It is also a period in which, with the advent of capitalism, property and political power, dominium and imperium, became structurally disentangled in historically unprecedented ways”. (pp30-1) The era, then, was one of profound transformation in the way western thinkers conceptualised politics, the state and relations of power. For Wood, a key focus is on the tensions between private property and public power, which means that she delves into the character of sovereignty, relation within ruling class blocs as well as tensions between class blocs and fractions. Unlike many of the histories of ideas, however, this is unapologetically a social history, so Wood is concerned to show the writers and thinkers she analyses were grounded in specific contexts and the extent to which their ideas are shaped by and respond to those contexts. In doing so she introduces significant variation and diversity in what commonly refer to as Enlightenment and modernity. The book stands independently of Citizens to Lords but Wood makes a number of cross references to other work, especially the idea of agrarian capitalism most fully developed in The Origin of Capitalism where she most explicitly outlines the distinctiveness of British capitalism (drawing on key work she’d done over the years with Robert Brenner as the other key theorist of Political Marxism). Despite these cross references the case works as a self-contained argument.
Framed by chapters outlining the question of a transitions (for instance, to capitalism) and the question of the relation between modernity and capitalism, Wood presents six geographically focussed chapters to give shape to the analysis of theorists. A discussion of the renaissance city-state allows her to discuss Machiavelli, grounding his key works – The Prince and Discourses – in social and political developments in Florence. The Reformation provides the frame for a discussion of Martin Luther and John Calvin not as theologians but as political theorists, including an assessment of Protestantism and the ‘spirit’ of capitalism – this chapter includes a fascinating discussion of obedience and the right to rebel (both key political issues for non-conformist religious sects and tendencies). Moving on to the Spanish Empire, Wood continues her discussions of property and obedience through explorations of the intense Spanish debates over empire and the ownership of land and other resources, and the significance of religious belief to, in particular, the state of advanced civilization. There are fewer specific key thinkers here (although students of colonialism are likely to recognise Bartolomeo De Las Casas) but debates of profound significance not necessarily because of the wider direct impact on Western European political thinking – noting the importance of the War of the Spanish Succession – but because of the way many of these debates fed through debates in Christianity. In a sense, these three sets of thinking are more of the early part of Early Modern – more obviously building on medieval frames.
The final three location-specific chapters are, again arguably, more oriented to the ‘modern’ part of Early Modern. The discussion of the Dutch Republic takes Wood to discussions of Hugo Grotius – a major influence on international law and theorist of natural rights and natural law – and more surprisingly Spinoza, much more widely seen as a philosopher than political theorist, although her qualified case for Spinoza as radical analyst of power and property, private and public is compelling. The final two chapters are significantly longer and more complex than the previous four, focusing on discussions of French Absolutism (highlighting Jean Bodin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau) and the English revolution (emphasising Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, but also the Levellers through a discussion of the Putney Debates). These two chapters provide a critical evaluation of modernity, capitalism, the state and property. The crucial distinction she draws is between France, with a centralised monarchy with a direct relation to the mass of the people, especially the peasantry and with parcelised sovereignty with distinctive forms of localised aristocratic and other forms of power. In contrast, she highlights in England a centralised state without parcelised sovereignty where the aristocracy and at times of other dominant classes worked in concert, mostly, with the Crown – so the English Revolution turned on the Stuart drive towards greater absolutism. In these two chapters we seem Wood at her most materialist (she is much too sophisticated an analyst to allow this materialism to make her an economic determinist) but with a subtle and nuanced reading of the social, cultural and material relationships around and relating to economic imperatives. Crucially, she notes, that at the time it was unthought-of that economic factors, let alone the economy, might be made distinct from social and cultural relations; that had to wait for Adam Smith and the Scottish political economists (even the French physiocrats saw economic aspects as part of a social and cultural network of power and relations).
I found this much more satisfying than Citizens to Lords in part because the evidential base for the case is much stronger, but also because I suspect I am more comfortable with many of the Early Modern theorists than I am with classical and medieval thinkers. The case is necessarily dense and demanding in places, but Wood wears her historical knowledge lightly so we, as readers, are taken gently into the six historical contexts and Wood regularly reminds us of the social and biographical aspects of the work she is discussing. I don’t think you’d need to be an ‘historical materialist’ to find this engaging and stimulating, or to be convinced that her case distinguishing the ideological and theoretical trends in Enlightenment thinking from the origins of capitalism. I doubt that she intended this to be her final book – but that it is makes it a fine and worthy conclusion to career that had a profound impact on contemporary academic work and theoretical analyses in history, political science and activism.
We too easily describe work as a tour de force with the effect that when one actually comes along the term fails to have the impact it should. Highly recommended for students of political theory, philosophy and history – as well as the sought after intelligent general reader.
Political theorists and historians have analysed and made sense of this era in all manner of ways, depending on their/our theoretical and conceptual proclivities. In Wood’s words, the era matters because it was “when fragmented sovereignty was giving way to more centralized states, and new tensions emerged between property and state. It is also a period in which, with the advent of capitalism, property and political power, dominium and imperium, became structurally disentangled in historically unprecedented ways”. (pp30-1) The era, then, was one of profound transformation in the way western thinkers conceptualised politics, the state and relations of power. For Wood, a key focus is on the tensions between private property and public power, which means that she delves into the character of sovereignty, relation within ruling class blocs as well as tensions between class blocs and fractions. Unlike many of the histories of ideas, however, this is unapologetically a social history, so Wood is concerned to show the writers and thinkers she analyses were grounded in specific contexts and the extent to which their ideas are shaped by and respond to those contexts. In doing so she introduces significant variation and diversity in what commonly refer to as Enlightenment and modernity. The book stands independently of Citizens to Lords but Wood makes a number of cross references to other work, especially the idea of agrarian capitalism most fully developed in The Origin of Capitalism where she most explicitly outlines the distinctiveness of British capitalism (drawing on key work she’d done over the years with Robert Brenner as the other key theorist of Political Marxism). Despite these cross references the case works as a self-contained argument.
Framed by chapters outlining the question of a transitions (for instance, to capitalism) and the question of the relation between modernity and capitalism, Wood presents six geographically focussed chapters to give shape to the analysis of theorists. A discussion of the renaissance city-state allows her to discuss Machiavelli, grounding his key works – The Prince and Discourses – in social and political developments in Florence. The Reformation provides the frame for a discussion of Martin Luther and John Calvin not as theologians but as political theorists, including an assessment of Protestantism and the ‘spirit’ of capitalism – this chapter includes a fascinating discussion of obedience and the right to rebel (both key political issues for non-conformist religious sects and tendencies). Moving on to the Spanish Empire, Wood continues her discussions of property and obedience through explorations of the intense Spanish debates over empire and the ownership of land and other resources, and the significance of religious belief to, in particular, the state of advanced civilization. There are fewer specific key thinkers here (although students of colonialism are likely to recognise Bartolomeo De Las Casas) but debates of profound significance not necessarily because of the wider direct impact on Western European political thinking – noting the importance of the War of the Spanish Succession – but because of the way many of these debates fed through debates in Christianity. In a sense, these three sets of thinking are more of the early part of Early Modern – more obviously building on medieval frames.
The final three location-specific chapters are, again arguably, more oriented to the ‘modern’ part of Early Modern. The discussion of the Dutch Republic takes Wood to discussions of Hugo Grotius – a major influence on international law and theorist of natural rights and natural law – and more surprisingly Spinoza, much more widely seen as a philosopher than political theorist, although her qualified case for Spinoza as radical analyst of power and property, private and public is compelling. The final two chapters are significantly longer and more complex than the previous four, focusing on discussions of French Absolutism (highlighting Jean Bodin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau) and the English revolution (emphasising Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, but also the Levellers through a discussion of the Putney Debates). These two chapters provide a critical evaluation of modernity, capitalism, the state and property. The crucial distinction she draws is between France, with a centralised monarchy with a direct relation to the mass of the people, especially the peasantry and with parcelised sovereignty with distinctive forms of localised aristocratic and other forms of power. In contrast, she highlights in England a centralised state without parcelised sovereignty where the aristocracy and at times of other dominant classes worked in concert, mostly, with the Crown – so the English Revolution turned on the Stuart drive towards greater absolutism. In these two chapters we seem Wood at her most materialist (she is much too sophisticated an analyst to allow this materialism to make her an economic determinist) but with a subtle and nuanced reading of the social, cultural and material relationships around and relating to economic imperatives. Crucially, she notes, that at the time it was unthought-of that economic factors, let alone the economy, might be made distinct from social and cultural relations; that had to wait for Adam Smith and the Scottish political economists (even the French physiocrats saw economic aspects as part of a social and cultural network of power and relations).
I found this much more satisfying than Citizens to Lords in part because the evidential base for the case is much stronger, but also because I suspect I am more comfortable with many of the Early Modern theorists than I am with classical and medieval thinkers. The case is necessarily dense and demanding in places, but Wood wears her historical knowledge lightly so we, as readers, are taken gently into the six historical contexts and Wood regularly reminds us of the social and biographical aspects of the work she is discussing. I don’t think you’d need to be an ‘historical materialist’ to find this engaging and stimulating, or to be convinced that her case distinguishing the ideological and theoretical trends in Enlightenment thinking from the origins of capitalism. I doubt that she intended this to be her final book – but that it is makes it a fine and worthy conclusion to career that had a profound impact on contemporary academic work and theoretical analyses in history, political science and activism.
We too easily describe work as a tour de force with the effect that when one actually comes along the term fails to have the impact it should. Highly recommended for students of political theory, philosophy and history – as well as the sought after intelligent general reader.
August 8, 2020
This book is reviewed superbly well by Malcolm and I am not about to compete with that. Instead I have a few thoughts arising from it.
Wood makes a number of cross references to Jonathan Israel’s examinations of the Enlightenment, and the contrasts and similarities interest me. Her modest 320 pages of text compare with Israel’s profligate trilogy of some 3,000 pages, and yet despite his apparently comprehensive review of so many philosophers, Wood calmly begs to differ in her attention to Hobbes and Locke, who are given much less importance by Israel; her much more constructive account of Rousseau; her time frame, reaching back to the Renaissance; and her interpretation of the major differences at stake. They both insist on the need to place any philosopher in the their national, social, economic and political situation, but whereas Israel sees the English and Scottish Enlightenments as divorced from the radical tradition in which he is more interested, Wood sees Locke in particular as a crucial source of ideas for modern capitalism and the dominant influence for subsequent British philosophy. My feeling is that we are more in need of a thorough debunking of Locke than Israel attempts, if we are to start understanding that working for equal opportunities or for democratic values without challenging the ideology of property is destined for failure, and Wood goes some way to offering this.
The apparent differences are not as problematical as they initially appeared; Wood never actually disproves Israel any more than Israel really undermines her. Israel is drawing attention to the existence of a radical Enlightenment which he contrasts to moderate philosophers, with the distinction notably being that the so called moderates were busy protecting religious, political and economic interests which the radicals threatened to undermine. Moderates wanted to select out the parts of the Enlightenment project that they found useful (or unavoidable) and discard the rest. A philosopher like Spinoza or Condorcet is radical because they are willing to follow their logical reasoning to its conclusion, regardless of the political risks, something the moderates are diametrically opposed to. The same impression emerges from Wood, which is that while rationalist thinkers claimed to construct dispassionate theories of society and political power on the basis of first principles and sound reasoning, it was pretty well always the case that, by the magic of pure logic, the result was to justify exactly and delightfully the very arrangements in which they were invested from the beginning. It is almost amusing to observe so much ingenuity engaged in proving that we are where we are and it can never be otherwise.
Hobbes has no difficulty accepting (or insisting) that all men are equal, and then appeals to his own account of human nature to demonstrate that without political constraints the outcome of our natural instincts will be a state of permanent war; we need absolute monarchy to make social life at all possible. Locke, from similar assumptions of equality in a state of nature, demonstrates alternatively that what people need is a fair judge to provide the protection of a sound legal system, built on property, the right to appropriate land from others for profit, not least by settler colonialism, and the paradoxical justice of wage labour and slavery. For the French, the equality of all men means that they have no coherent interests or opinions until they come together as corporate bodies; the role of the multitude is to provide a justification for the exercise of sovereignty or power by the political agents who represent them, and there was a debate as to whether the diverse local corporate bodies or the absolute monarch could best encapsulate the will of the multitude. As a rule of thumb, appeals to liberty and to traditional rights and privileges were generally concerned with competitive claims to power and wealth between members of the elite, and rarely empower the multitudes; indeed, the Spanish chapter is often preoccupied with the conundrum of how to defend the Spanish monarchy within Spain without allowing the same reasoning to undermine Spain’s claims to its imperial conquests outside of Spain.
Wood, like Israel, can point to the occasional emergence of truly radical political theories, most remarkably in her account of the Putney Debates in the English Civil War. She gives Rousseau more credit than Israel does for his determination to pursue the egalitarian principles systematically in the context of specifically French political realities. She describes in a number of places the existence from the earliest days of radical disagreement with every aspect of European imperialism and racism. She points to a passion for education in the belief that this would be of universal value and she challenges the postmodernist contention that Enlightenment values were inherently oppressive, racist, sexist, imperialist. Indeed, she shares with Israel a commitment to defend and promote Enlightenment values against the incompatible, obscurantist agenda of postmodernism. What she lacks, and Israel supplies in full, is an account of the many ways radical ideas were suppressed by those in religious and secular authority and forced underground throughout the period of the Enlightenment.
Some Quotes
Locke’s political theory as outlined in the Second Treatise might be understood as a theoretical expression of the alliance between the Whig aristocracy and London radicals, a mobilization of radical ideas in order to advance the interests of the propertied classes. ... A major part of Locke’s theoretical strategy is to adapt such radical ideas for the sole purpose of making the strongest case for Parliament against the king, and for the right of revolution, while at the same time depriving these ideas of their most democratic implications. [p262]
Locke did not, of course, invent this property regime, nor did he invent a wholly new discourse to capture it. In less systematic form , the idea of claims to property deriving from ‘improvement’ and the creation of value had been at work for some time... But Locke gave the conception its first systematic elaboration, and in that sense his theory gave conceptual expression to the revolution in the English property regime. [p284]
To sum up the comparison between England and France simply and crudely, where French science in the eighteenth century typically answered the needs of the state, English science, even a century earlier, was already answering the needs of property, and property in an increasingly capitalist form. [p300]
Let us consider again Locke’s famous observation, in the second Treatise, that ‘in the beginning all the World was America’ [SII.49] ... Locke is here making the point that the earliest, and the natural, condition of the earth was effectively ‘waste’, and that humans have a divine obligation to remove the earth from the waste, to make the earth productive, to improve it. His measure of improvement or productivity... is ‘profit’, not in the older meaning of advantage, whether material or otherwise, but quite simply as exchange value or commercial gain. This argument has many implications – for instance, that improvement or productivity and profit, trump other claims, such as the customary rights of English commoners, or the rights of indigenous peoples. [p308]
We get a fairly clear picture of what constitutes progress for Locke and the contrast with Condorcet is striking... For Condorcet it is rationality v ignorance and superstition, equality v inequality, for Locke it is profit v waste. ...If for Condorcet equality is an objective for the indefinite future, for Locke it is a reality in an unrecoverable past, or, at best, a moral principle conceived as easily compatible with gross inequalities in the real world... If for Condorcet the objective is the improvement of humanity, for Locke the objective is the ‘improvement’ of property. The progress of humanity is subordinated to, or at least subsumed under, the advance of productivity and profit. [p309]
What makes Western political theory particularly interesting and even puzzling ... is that it invented a defence of domination not simply combined with, but based on, a notion of equality, which specifically denies any natural division between ruler and ruled, or any justification of domination on the grounds of natural inequality. .. the Western canon is distinctive in its systematic mobilization of egalitarian doctrines and ideas of a universal human community in the justification of both class and imperial domination. [p312]
The essence of the capitalist ‘economy’ is that a very wide range of human activities, which in other times and places were subject to the state or to communal regulation of various kinds, have been transferred to the economic domain. In that ever expanding domain, human beings are governed not only by the hierarchies of the workplace but also by the compulsions of the market, the relentless requirements of profit-maximisation and constant capital accumulation, none of which are subject to democratic freedom or accountability. [p317]
The culmination of the Enlightenment conception of progress, in a way its last gasp, is Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Human Mind – published in 1795... His Sketch provides a clear and simple measure against which to test the standard accusations levelled at the ‘Enlightenment Project’, about the inherent oppressiveness of its rationalism and the imperialism of its universalist principles.... ”Our hopes for the future condition of the human race can be subsumed under three important heads: the abolition of inequality between nations, the progress of equality within each nation, and the true perfection of mankind... The final end of the social art is real equality.” ... here, in the locus classicus of Enlightenment optimism, equality within and between nations, races and sexes emerges not in opposition to, or in uneasy juxtaposition with, rationalism and universalism, but as their logical conclusion, the final destination of progress. [pp302,303]
No one can doubt that Enlightenment universalism could and did have oppressive, racist and imperialist manifestations, but it is also important to keep in mind something that postmodernist critics systematically forget: the connection between Enlightenment universalism and a critical temper that subjected European knowledge, European authority and European culture to more trenchant critique than any other. ... For all its dangers, Enlightenment universalism has provided a theoretical underpinning for emancipatory projects much more effective than anything postmodernism has been able to devise. So indeed has the concept of progress. For that matter, it gives us something that postmodern celebrations of diversity and difference do not and cannot: a reason for recognizing and respecting otherness – if only on the grounds that the cumulative and open-ended quality of human knowledge and the progress of the human mind require us to be careful about closing any doors. .. Condorcet may not have been typical in the degree to which he took the emancipatory logic of the Enlightenment seriously, but ... this most classic example of Enlightenment optimism is also the one that most explicitly attacks the very evils ascribed to that Enlightenment optimism by critics today: racism, sexism, imperialism. Nor is this an accidental or contradictory juxtaposition: Condorcet’s universalism and his optimism about human progress rest on the same foundations as his commitment to equality, his respect for the authenticity and integrity of other cultures, his attack on imperialism. [pp 304-305]
Wood makes a number of cross references to Jonathan Israel’s examinations of the Enlightenment, and the contrasts and similarities interest me. Her modest 320 pages of text compare with Israel’s profligate trilogy of some 3,000 pages, and yet despite his apparently comprehensive review of so many philosophers, Wood calmly begs to differ in her attention to Hobbes and Locke, who are given much less importance by Israel; her much more constructive account of Rousseau; her time frame, reaching back to the Renaissance; and her interpretation of the major differences at stake. They both insist on the need to place any philosopher in the their national, social, economic and political situation, but whereas Israel sees the English and Scottish Enlightenments as divorced from the radical tradition in which he is more interested, Wood sees Locke in particular as a crucial source of ideas for modern capitalism and the dominant influence for subsequent British philosophy. My feeling is that we are more in need of a thorough debunking of Locke than Israel attempts, if we are to start understanding that working for equal opportunities or for democratic values without challenging the ideology of property is destined for failure, and Wood goes some way to offering this.
The apparent differences are not as problematical as they initially appeared; Wood never actually disproves Israel any more than Israel really undermines her. Israel is drawing attention to the existence of a radical Enlightenment which he contrasts to moderate philosophers, with the distinction notably being that the so called moderates were busy protecting religious, political and economic interests which the radicals threatened to undermine. Moderates wanted to select out the parts of the Enlightenment project that they found useful (or unavoidable) and discard the rest. A philosopher like Spinoza or Condorcet is radical because they are willing to follow their logical reasoning to its conclusion, regardless of the political risks, something the moderates are diametrically opposed to. The same impression emerges from Wood, which is that while rationalist thinkers claimed to construct dispassionate theories of society and political power on the basis of first principles and sound reasoning, it was pretty well always the case that, by the magic of pure logic, the result was to justify exactly and delightfully the very arrangements in which they were invested from the beginning. It is almost amusing to observe so much ingenuity engaged in proving that we are where we are and it can never be otherwise.
Hobbes has no difficulty accepting (or insisting) that all men are equal, and then appeals to his own account of human nature to demonstrate that without political constraints the outcome of our natural instincts will be a state of permanent war; we need absolute monarchy to make social life at all possible. Locke, from similar assumptions of equality in a state of nature, demonstrates alternatively that what people need is a fair judge to provide the protection of a sound legal system, built on property, the right to appropriate land from others for profit, not least by settler colonialism, and the paradoxical justice of wage labour and slavery. For the French, the equality of all men means that they have no coherent interests or opinions until they come together as corporate bodies; the role of the multitude is to provide a justification for the exercise of sovereignty or power by the political agents who represent them, and there was a debate as to whether the diverse local corporate bodies or the absolute monarch could best encapsulate the will of the multitude. As a rule of thumb, appeals to liberty and to traditional rights and privileges were generally concerned with competitive claims to power and wealth between members of the elite, and rarely empower the multitudes; indeed, the Spanish chapter is often preoccupied with the conundrum of how to defend the Spanish monarchy within Spain without allowing the same reasoning to undermine Spain’s claims to its imperial conquests outside of Spain.
Wood, like Israel, can point to the occasional emergence of truly radical political theories, most remarkably in her account of the Putney Debates in the English Civil War. She gives Rousseau more credit than Israel does for his determination to pursue the egalitarian principles systematically in the context of specifically French political realities. She describes in a number of places the existence from the earliest days of radical disagreement with every aspect of European imperialism and racism. She points to a passion for education in the belief that this would be of universal value and she challenges the postmodernist contention that Enlightenment values were inherently oppressive, racist, sexist, imperialist. Indeed, she shares with Israel a commitment to defend and promote Enlightenment values against the incompatible, obscurantist agenda of postmodernism. What she lacks, and Israel supplies in full, is an account of the many ways radical ideas were suppressed by those in religious and secular authority and forced underground throughout the period of the Enlightenment.
Some Quotes
Locke’s political theory as outlined in the Second Treatise might be understood as a theoretical expression of the alliance between the Whig aristocracy and London radicals, a mobilization of radical ideas in order to advance the interests of the propertied classes. ... A major part of Locke’s theoretical strategy is to adapt such radical ideas for the sole purpose of making the strongest case for Parliament against the king, and for the right of revolution, while at the same time depriving these ideas of their most democratic implications. [p262]
Locke did not, of course, invent this property regime, nor did he invent a wholly new discourse to capture it. In less systematic form , the idea of claims to property deriving from ‘improvement’ and the creation of value had been at work for some time... But Locke gave the conception its first systematic elaboration, and in that sense his theory gave conceptual expression to the revolution in the English property regime. [p284]
To sum up the comparison between England and France simply and crudely, where French science in the eighteenth century typically answered the needs of the state, English science, even a century earlier, was already answering the needs of property, and property in an increasingly capitalist form. [p300]
Let us consider again Locke’s famous observation, in the second Treatise, that ‘in the beginning all the World was America’ [SII.49] ... Locke is here making the point that the earliest, and the natural, condition of the earth was effectively ‘waste’, and that humans have a divine obligation to remove the earth from the waste, to make the earth productive, to improve it. His measure of improvement or productivity... is ‘profit’, not in the older meaning of advantage, whether material or otherwise, but quite simply as exchange value or commercial gain. This argument has many implications – for instance, that improvement or productivity and profit, trump other claims, such as the customary rights of English commoners, or the rights of indigenous peoples. [p308]
We get a fairly clear picture of what constitutes progress for Locke and the contrast with Condorcet is striking... For Condorcet it is rationality v ignorance and superstition, equality v inequality, for Locke it is profit v waste. ...If for Condorcet equality is an objective for the indefinite future, for Locke it is a reality in an unrecoverable past, or, at best, a moral principle conceived as easily compatible with gross inequalities in the real world... If for Condorcet the objective is the improvement of humanity, for Locke the objective is the ‘improvement’ of property. The progress of humanity is subordinated to, or at least subsumed under, the advance of productivity and profit. [p309]
What makes Western political theory particularly interesting and even puzzling ... is that it invented a defence of domination not simply combined with, but based on, a notion of equality, which specifically denies any natural division between ruler and ruled, or any justification of domination on the grounds of natural inequality. .. the Western canon is distinctive in its systematic mobilization of egalitarian doctrines and ideas of a universal human community in the justification of both class and imperial domination. [p312]
The essence of the capitalist ‘economy’ is that a very wide range of human activities, which in other times and places were subject to the state or to communal regulation of various kinds, have been transferred to the economic domain. In that ever expanding domain, human beings are governed not only by the hierarchies of the workplace but also by the compulsions of the market, the relentless requirements of profit-maximisation and constant capital accumulation, none of which are subject to democratic freedom or accountability. [p317]
The culmination of the Enlightenment conception of progress, in a way its last gasp, is Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Human Mind – published in 1795... His Sketch provides a clear and simple measure against which to test the standard accusations levelled at the ‘Enlightenment Project’, about the inherent oppressiveness of its rationalism and the imperialism of its universalist principles.... ”Our hopes for the future condition of the human race can be subsumed under three important heads: the abolition of inequality between nations, the progress of equality within each nation, and the true perfection of mankind... The final end of the social art is real equality.” ... here, in the locus classicus of Enlightenment optimism, equality within and between nations, races and sexes emerges not in opposition to, or in uneasy juxtaposition with, rationalism and universalism, but as their logical conclusion, the final destination of progress. [pp302,303]
No one can doubt that Enlightenment universalism could and did have oppressive, racist and imperialist manifestations, but it is also important to keep in mind something that postmodernist critics systematically forget: the connection between Enlightenment universalism and a critical temper that subjected European knowledge, European authority and European culture to more trenchant critique than any other. ... For all its dangers, Enlightenment universalism has provided a theoretical underpinning for emancipatory projects much more effective than anything postmodernism has been able to devise. So indeed has the concept of progress. For that matter, it gives us something that postmodern celebrations of diversity and difference do not and cannot: a reason for recognizing and respecting otherness – if only on the grounds that the cumulative and open-ended quality of human knowledge and the progress of the human mind require us to be careful about closing any doors. .. Condorcet may not have been typical in the degree to which he took the emancipatory logic of the Enlightenment seriously, but ... this most classic example of Enlightenment optimism is also the one that most explicitly attacks the very evils ascribed to that Enlightenment optimism by critics today: racism, sexism, imperialism. Nor is this an accidental or contradictory juxtaposition: Condorcet’s universalism and his optimism about human progress rest on the same foundations as his commitment to equality, his respect for the authenticity and integrity of other cultures, his attack on imperialism. [pp 304-305]
January 15, 2013
This is an outstanding piece of scholarship. I would highly recommend it for students of political thought and for general readers who have an interest in the subject. You will find thorough discussions of such political thinkers as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and others. Importantly the author also covers a number of writers who are not always associated with political thought such as Luther and Spinoza. Particularly interesting is that the political ideas discussed are always placed in their social and historical contexts. Thus, the world of political theory is shown as intricately connected to the world of political reality.
October 17, 2013
Strong conclusion on the importance of distinguishing the ideological sources of Enlightenment and capitalism - coinciding largely with the national/cultural distinctions between Absolutist France and mixed-constitution England.
February 27, 2026
In Liberty and Property, Ellen Meiksins Wood continues her historical examination of Western Political Philosophy, picking up where she left off with Citizens to Lords. Here she seeks to contextualize the political theories of Machiavelli, Spinoza, Calvin, Luther, Bodin, Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke among others within the economic, political and social context these philosophers are addressing. The result is an analysis of how concepts like liberty, equality, rights of man (which she reminds us, is always men), and resistance evolve from Medieval political economies of parcelized sovereignty in the states and city states of the Holy Roman Empire, through French absolutism, landing at early agrarian capitalism in England. Along the way, she shows how understanding the political and economic forces at work informs the writings of these philosophers, often resulting in a paradox where each of them uses concepts that sound to a modern ear as the expansion of individualism, but were in fact defenses of corporate or state power and inequality and even erasure of individual liberty. Consequently, the individualism embedded in Protestant theology's justification by faith, while it leads to a right to resistance, it also finds Luther and Calvin denying the right and defending the crown(s) against more radical offshoots like the Huguenots. Likewise, Wood shows how Locke's idea of a radical equality in a state of nature ends in a defense of property that defends inequality and the market forces of early capitalism over individual rights and freedom. The text argues that understanding this historical context helps to inform how the revolutionary potential of these texts nonetheless also forms the basis for a defense of hierarchy, economic dispossession, and state power.
August 31, 2022
This is the second book in Ellen Wood's social history of Western political theory. In this, she essentially continues the same task she began in the first, but this time tackling thinkers including Machiavelli, Luther, Calvin, Las Casas, Vitoria, de Soto, Suárez, Grotius, Spinoza, Bodin, Montesquieu, Rousseau, the parties to the Putney Debates (the royalists, Cromwell’s parliamentarians, and the Levellers), Hobbes, Locke, Hume and very briefly Smith. I protested in the first book, Citizens to Lords, that I didn't think she paid due credit to the emancipatory potential latent within orthodox Western political thought, but she certainly brings that potential much more sharply into focus here. If you read Citizens to Lords, do read Liberty and Property too. It is worth it. My only regret is that she did not get the chance to write a third on the post-Enlightenment period. Her stunning clarity of vision and stubborn insistence on disentangling the logic of capitalism from all the historical cultures, ideas, figures, categories, classes and tropes commony associated with it, even by many Marxists, will be sorely missed, but it only gives me more motivation to internalize her methodology and way of seeing things in myself.
June 19, 2023
Impressively Noted, though I think Wood made this book too academic, when her stated goal was to make it less so. No points taken off for Wood being smart as fuck, regardless. Still, I found her premise hard to stay with intellectually. For me there is simply too much we don't know about the social realities of these men (those silent citizens), and giving "voice to the voiceless" based on supposition, conjecture, and wishful thinking feels un-academic at best, outright guesswork at worst, and ultimately unsatisfying for me. Yes, each of these men were part of the society they wrote about, thought about, and analyzed, but I think I have tired of rehashing the same (mostly) White, Propertied Male as the focus of scholarship. Granted, I don't want history rewritten - where the power of extremely marginalized groups (basically anyone not White, Male, Propertied) gets exalted based on a very select few individuals - but I also don't need to read more about the Usual Intellectual Suspects and how they are actually just pawns in a larger political-economic-social long game of which they were builders AND yeomen of sorts. There is not denying Wood's credentials, but I found this book a dull departure from some of her other work.
January 7, 2021
There were moments where this text made me drowsy, but it's an impressive investigation of the ideological underpinnings of Western thought. Woods covers Machiavelli, Grotius, Spinoza, Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke to name a few. She outlines how the historical contexts, the distinctive relational differences between the state and its citizens, how the economic developments, property law, etc., radically affected theories of individual freedom from country to country throughout the Enlightenment.
September 3, 2020
Sheds light on philosophies that led to various European modernities
January 13, 2021
derste öğrendiğim yanlışların doğrularını öğrenmek için okudum tavsiye ederim
Read
August 16, 2024Doesn’t hold the same laser like precision as The Origin of Capitalism and reads, at times, like it needed another round of editing to prune cluttered phrases and refocus the point.
Read
July 7, 2026Political philosophy? Not without my Wood.
January 16, 2014
Comrade Ellen's attempt to discredit major Western thinkers by portraying them as being first and foremost proactive political activists is noted. I shall pass on my recommendation to the Red Octobrist League.
December 28, 2012
Still reading this one, just got distracted.
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