Brad’s Reviews > A Social History of Western Political Thought > Status Update

"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.