A Social History of Western Political Thought

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

In this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood rewrites the history of political theory, from Plato to Rousseau. 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.

In this new edition, incorporating both volumes, the book takes us from classical antiquity to the age of enlightenment. In the first volume, Wood 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. In the second volume, Wood moves on to explore the formation of the modern state, the rise of capitalism, the Renaissance and Reformation, the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment. In her focus on canonical thinkers through the ages, Wood illuminates a rich and provocative legacy of political ideas unmatched in Western history.

Genres: History, Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Sociology, Political Science, Theory

557 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2022

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

[Kenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

What Wood has accomplished in writing this two-volume work is a truly astonishing feat. From detailing the intricacies of political economy in the ancient world and its relation to the origins of political philosophy, to describing the cataclysm in thought wrought by the beginning of capitalism in England, there is much to learn from this book.

But, as with most sweeping accounts of intellectual history, including Peter Gay, Ernst Cassirer and, more recently, Jonathan I. Israel, specifics are frequently overlooked in favour of a compelling narrative which would unify these moments of history as belonging to a series of coherent economic developments. There is, in other words, a loss of the individuality of the writers in Wood's approach to each of them as embodying the national flavour of their settings.

This issue becomes the most obvious in her treatment of the Enlightenment. Hobbes is treated as the originator of the state of nature myth, and this because of the social context in which he was writing. Because numerous developments in the political world, including the Putney debates, required English philosophers to engage with rights as belonging, not to corporate entities, but to individual citizens irrespective of their politically constituted property, Hobbes was uniquely required to treat the origins of the state in terms of individual decisions.

Grotius is oftentimes credited as the father of the state of nature myth, but because he was writing in the Dutch context, Wood treats his and Spinoza's philosophies as though they could only have been speaking of corporate entities when they spoke of rights and sovereignty. There are certainly allusions to this view in Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. But Spinoza was a keen reader of Hobbes (and, if Montag is to be believed, was also a part of the close circle to whom he circulated his unpublished manuscripts while he was living in Holland). I don't believe that his view of rights is necessarily corporatist, but this is lost in the attempt to describe his philosophy in terms of the national character of 17th century Dutch thought. Ultimately, the methodology of social history deprives many thinkers of their uniqueness and ability to spring free from their national-cultural setting (but not all - Rousseau stands out in Wood's analysis of him).

Such, perhaps, is the consequence of any attempt to write so encyclopaedic a history of western political thought. Narrative streams must be selected, and to tell this narrative, certain nuances must be discarded. The narratives which Wood selects are fascinating ones which likely do hold for most philosophers. The central claims which I see this book as arguing for, from ancient Greece to revolutionary France, are (i) that popular sovereignty has little discursively to do with democracy, and has often been used in defence of empire and absolutism, and (ii) that natural equality, even when acknowledged, can be quickly and effectively subordinated to, or even used in defence of, political inequality.

In the conclusion, Wood is on familiar territory, and her analysis becomes immediately more incisive and rigorous. The contrast between the English and French enlightenments she draws is genuinely edifying, and dispels certain prominent stories about the Enlightenment as a whole being capitalist in character. In this context, I would like to have seen more about Diderot (mentioned in passing as a contrast against Rousseau and Condorcet), who was a radically egalitarian political theorist, and whose economic writings, if Jonathan Israel is to be believed, were a source of consternation for Adam Smith in the development of his own economic thought.

Ultimately, there is a difficult balancing act that must be accomplished between situating philosophers in their national contexts, and grasping the ways in which philosophers of various countries read and understood each other's works. Wood has prioritised national context, perhaps at the expense of an analysis of the interconnectedness of various enlightenments.

A final bugbear: Verso is notoriously bad at printing books. To say nothing of paper quality and font choice, the font size changes between the first and second volumes - a bizarre decision which I can only imagine was done to reduce printing costs by producing fewer pages.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book Meiksins Wood outlines what I think is a rigorous Marxist historical perspective, using it to analyze the history of political theory:

The 'social history of political theory', which is the subject of this book, starts from the premise that the great political thinkers of the past were passionately engaged in the issues of their time and place. This was so even when they addressed these issues from an elevated philosophical vantage point, in conversation with other philosophers in other times and places, and even, or especially, when they sought to translate their reflections into universal and timeless principles. Often their engagements took the form of partisan adherence to a specific and identifiable political cause, or even fairly transparent expressions of particular interests, the interests of a particular party or class. But their ideological commitments could also be expressed in a larger vision of the good society and human ideals.

At the same time, the great political thinkers are not party hacks or propagandists. Political theory is certainly an exercise in persuasion, but its tools are reasoned discourse and argumentation, in a genuine search for some kind of truth. Yet if the 'greats' are different from lesser political thinkers and actors, they are no less human and no less steeped in history.

She starts with the Greeks, because:

the subject of this book is one very particular mode of political thinking that emerged in the very particular historical conditions of ancient Greece and developed over two millennia in what we now call Europe and its colonial outposts. For better or worse, the Greeks invented their own distinctive mode of political theory, a systematic and analytical interrogation of political principles, full of laboriously constructed definitions and adversarial argumentation, applying critical reason to questioning the very foundations and legitimacy of traditional moral rules and the principles of political right. While there have been many other ways of thinking about politics in the Western world, what we think of as the classics of Western political thought, ancient and modern, belong to the tradition of political theory established by the Greeks.

Other ancient civilizations in many ways more advanced than the Greeks - in everything from agricultural techniques to commerce, navigation, and every conceivable craft or high art - produced vast literatures on every human practice, as well as speculations about the origins of life and the formation of the universe. But, in general, the political order was not treated as an object of systematic critical speculation.

I don't know if the Greeks were really the first to engage in political theorizing in this way, but I'm not sure the point is very relevant to Meiksins Wood's theoretical advancement. To me it seems a strong claim to make with only scant evidence provided, not to mention David Graeber and David Wengrow would undoubtedly have a different opinion here. But it is at plausible for the particular history of the particular place (i.e. Europe) which she is focusing on here:

Let me offer at for the purposes of this study, the main justification for using the shorthand 'Western' political theory has to do with the particularities of political life, since classical antiquity, within the geographic area we now call Europe. For all its internal diversity which should be evident throughout this work this 'Western' world has been marked by certain social and political peculiarities, which have been briefly outlined in this chapter and which have produced certain distinctive patterns of political thinking. The justification for treating ancient Greece and Rome as part of this 'tradition' is simply that we can trace the 'West's' political divergence back to Greco-Roman antiquity, and with it the development of political theory.

The classic texts of political theory considered in this book, then, focus upon the Western state.

Following Greek political theory she turns to the Romans, whom she assigns a more plausible novelty:

What set the Romans apart from all other high civilizations was their property regime, with its distinctive legal conception of property; and with it came a more sharply delineated private sphere in which the individual enjoyed his own exclusive dominion.

The contrast with Greece is here particularly striking. It has often been remarked that the Greeks had no clear conception of ownership, indeed no abstract word for it at all. An Athenian might claim a better antic right than someone else to some piece of property but certainly nothing a like the exclusive claim entailed by the Roman concept of dominium. In disputes over property, the difference in practice may not have been as great as it seems in theory, but its significance should not be underestimated. It tells us a great deal about how the Romans conceptualized the social world. The word dominium 'and the actual law relating to ownership', writes one commentator on Greek law, emphasizing the contrast with Rome, 'serve to underline the strongly individualistic character of Roman ownership, which only Roman citizens could enjoy.

Meiksins Wood then traces these two distinctive characteristics into the Christian era, through the long years of Feudalism, then the Renaissance, and finally the early modern period. Her historical outline of 'permanent' war—independent property owners locked in a contradictory struggle of both domination and dependency with the 'state'—is striking in its clear outline of our current political conditions.

Overall I found her methodology fruitful, even if some particular detail here or there looks objectionable. The tree is healthy, in other words, no matter the varying states of its fruit. Just to follow the long chain of logic used to justify the division between the haves and the have-nots is worth the read. Through many varied and even contradictory positions, the history of the right of private power against the power of the 'common good' has been a constant for 2500 years.

[Alexander B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good overview of European political philosophy up to the French Revolution. At times too drawn out but has some strong points relating to the conflation of enlightenment, capitalism and modernity, and the subtle differences between French and English state systems and philosophical movements.

[Brendan McCarthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just know there are simpler ways of conveying this type of information and all these political scientists and historians are just gate keeping this stuff with their overly complex explanations. Decent book, long ass read.