Status Updates From A Social History of Western...

"For all its dangers, Enlightenment universalism has provided a theoretical underpinning for emancipatory projects much more effective than anything postmodernists have been able to devise."

Interestingly 'conjunctural' analysis of the Enlightenment, problematizing its treatment as an abstract intellectual movement.

"To sum up the comparison between [England and France]: 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."

"While pre-capitalist powers of appropriation are typically inseparable from the performance of certain communal or public functions - jurisdictional, military, political - capitalist property is unique in the degree to which appropriation is separate from the performance of such public functions - in other words, it is notable exactly for 'the absence of public responsibility'."

"The Bank of England did not, then, represent the sudden emergence of a thoroughly novel commercial regime. It was an extension of long-developing social property relations, the property relations of agrarian capitalism."

"The more the propertied classes came to depend on economic exploitation, the less they could tolerate a state that continued to act in the traditional ways of a feudal monarchy."

- Chapter 7: The English Revolution

it is another testimony to the limits of the Western political tradition that ideas devised to reassert feudal rights against an encroaching monarchy, defending a hierarchical polity and the independence of corporate power...as against a conception of active citizenship and popular power, can be treated as classics in the development of democratic ideas.

Way to ruin Spinoza for us, Wood! (She does a solid job of critiquing convenient but shaky revolutionary appropriations of his political philosophy, based on situating understandings of "democracy" in their historically specific context---an exclusionary, oligarchic one despite monism seemingly fitting a universalist polity [see Liberalism: A Counter-History by Losurdo & The Apprentice's Sorcerer by Ishay Landa]).

"The doctrine of right in its medieval form was...more likely to be used in defence of royal power, especially against the papacy. The idea that government derived its authority from the 'people' was compatible with a broad range of political commitments, including the conviction that monarchical power should be virtually unlimited."

- Chapter 4: The Spanish Empire

"That doctrines supporting the power of temporal authorities, and even the need for obedience to them, could be mobilized in support of resistance to power and even popular rebellion is a peculiarity of Western culture...[Ideas] of resistance could be adopted and disseminated by ruling classes...it also meant that their interests would shape and constrain Western conceptions of democracy.

"constitutional and even democratic doctrines in the West owe as much to the defense of aristocratic power and property as they do to popular struggles. 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."

"Much confusion has been generated by historical accounts of feudalism that identify commerce with capitalism, treating money and trade as inimical to feudal relations. Yet money rents were a prominent feature of relations between landlords and peasants, while commercial interactions---typically, in luxury goods---were very much a part of the feudal order.

"The pervasive unrest, and the fear it inspired in propertied classes, form the background against which Hellenistic thinkers embarked on their philosophical projects."

Sparta...was also the site of a particularly notable revolution in third century BC... instituting land reforms, cancellation of debts and an extension of citizenship based on fairly extreme conceptions of equality. The effect was to alarm the propertied classes...Fearing social unrest and reform at home more than they did Macedonian dominance, they allied themselves with the Macedonians.

Already caught off guard by the matter-of-fact way Wood refers to Plato and seems take his "ideal city" at face value.

My last direct engagement with Plato's Republic was in undergrad. My prof leaned toward the "it's satirical" camp convincingly enough to my neophyte mind (admitting this was a minority view) that I wrote in favour of that position.
Curious to see how Wood historicizes Plato and his texts!

"Many treated the 'greats' as pure minds floating free above the political fray; and any attempt to plant these thinkers on firm historical ground...as living and breathing historical beings passionately engaged in the politics of their own time and place, would be dismissed as trivialization, demeaning great men and reducing them to mere publicists, pamphleteers and propagandists."