304 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.

1 (2011) 304318
Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Tought From Antiquity to the Middle
Ages, Ellen Meiksins Wood, London: Verso, 2008
Abstract
Tis article seeks to contextualise Ellen Meiksins Woods recent survey of classical and medieval
political thought within the context of some of the prevailing approaches to the history of
political thought. After an initial elaboration of Woods political-Marxist approach to issues of
historical development and contextualisation, I emphasise what is signifcant about Woods
specifc contribution to the study of Greek, Roman and medieval political ideas in particular, as
well as to the history of political thought in general.
Keywords
history of political thought, state-formation, property-relations, classical political thought,
medieval political thought
State-formation and social-property relations
With the linguistic turn in the 1960s, intellectual currents within the history of political
thought began to move away from the traditional presumption that the development of
political theory constituted a transhistorical dialogue based on the perennial problems of
politics in order to focus on the signifcance of historically specifc discursive contexts for
understanding the history of political thought.
1
Te work of Cambridge-school historians
such as Quentin Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock represented an explicit rejection of both the
teleological studies of the Whig-era and the more philosophically-oriented studies of the
postwar-period that premised their surveys either on the belief that politics and therefore
political theorising represented a series of perennial and unchanging problems of the
human condition, or that histories of political thought were organised around a series of
stable vocabularies that remained constant over time.
2
Under the rubric of Cambridge,
political theory became incorporated into a history of contested political languages that
related political theory to traditions of discourse and the contingent political controversies
of the theorists own historical context.
3
Te purpose was to understand the history of
political thought on its own terms without engaging in the anachronistic exercise of
presuming that the classics had anything to say about our own contemporary problems and
predicaments.
1. Te histories of political thought produced by Leo Strauss and his acolytes emphasised
the history of esoteric writing that was political philosophy and identifed the crisis of modernity
with the betrayal of ancient wisdom (see Strauss 1953 and Strauss and Cropsey (eds.) 1963).
Sheldon Wolins magisterial work Politics and Vision was founded on the belief that the history
of political thought defned as the development of the concept of the political was the most
efective means of exposing the nature of our present predicaments, which he considered to be
the decline of the political resulting from the rise of an individualistic liberalism (see Wolin
2004, p. xxiii).
2. Pocock 1975; Skinner 1978. Also, see Skinners extensive incursions into the methodological
debates of the discipline in Skinner 2002.
3. Burns (ed.) 1988; Burns and Goldie (eds.) 1994; Rowe, Schofeld, Harrison and Lane
(eds.) 2000; Goldie and Wolker (eds.) 2006.
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156920610X550686
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 304318 305
In her bold and innovative survey of ancient and medieval political theory, Ellen Meiksins
Wood employs a much more radical approach to the question of historical contextualisation
than that of the Cambridge historians. Working within the tradition of historical
materialism, Wood employs what she refers to as a social history approach to political
theory, an approach to contextualisation that difers signifcantly from the dominant
linguistic approaches employed by the Cambridge-school historians, in the sense that it is
the social context of social-property relations and the specifc social struggles that emerge
within these contexts that is the starting point of any history of political thought.
4
Te question of historical context is not simply a matter of sketching out a general socio-
economic backdrop within which political theorists conceive their doctrines and write their
treatises. Tis approach is implicit even in the works of some of the Cambridge-school
historians who expressly eschew the utility of social contextualisation. In his Machiavellian
Moment, Pococks narrative of the persistence of classical republicanism occurs within the
early-modern transition from traditional agrarian society to a modern commercial society.
Tis important dichotomy runs through much of the civic-humanist inspired republican
revival that has informed Anglo-American historiography. More recently, Brian Nelson, in
Te Making of the Modern State, has treated the history of political thought as a grand
narrative, concerned with articulating a theory of the modern state that is the result of the
rise of the bourgeoisie. As the subtitle of his book implies, this tends to be cast as a
teleological development, and the bourgeoisie continues to rise, yet never seems to arrive.
At the same time, Nelson recognises that the bourgeoisie supported whatever was in their
economic interest; thus, whether supporting the centralizing monarchs of England and
France, or the city-states of Italy and Germany, the emerging middle classes were able to
assert their independence from the nobility.
5
From Woods perspective, portmanteau-
contexts such as the development of commercial society or the rise of the bourgeoisie do
more to level the signifcant diferences that exist between social contexts than illuminate
our understanding of the works of specifc theorists.
But neither is this act of contextualisation the same as treating political thought as merely
a refection of social-property relations; nor is it a matter of reducing political theory to the
class-position of a particular political theorist, thereby treating classical political theorists
as ideological spokespersons or prize-fghters for their respective social classes. Such a
critique has consistently been levelled at Marxist interpretations of the history of political
thought in various diferent ways by mainstream-scholars, enabling them to dismiss
Marxism as being more concerned with what political theorists tell us about the society in
which they live, as opposed to engaging in an autonomous study of political ideas. In Te
History of Political Teory and Other Essays, John Dunn tells us that, while the objects of
[Marxists] study is plainly the history of political theory, its products are scarcely in
4. Te term social history of political theory was frst used by Neal Wood in Wood 1978 (see
also Wood 2002). Other attempts at a social history approach to the history of political thought
have been unsuccessful. For example, J.S. McClelland, in his survey of political thought, states
that his initial intention to examine the history of political thought from the bottom up was
unsustainable, thereby rendering the book old fashioned and largely text-centred (McClelland
1996, p. ix).
5. Nelson 2006, p. 147.
306 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 304318
themselves contributions to understanding that history.
6
Similarly, it is in this regard that
Quentin Skinner argues that Marxists have insisted that the principles professed in political
life are commonly the merest rationalizations of quite diferent motives and impulses, and
that it follows from this that such principles have no causal role in political life, and scarcely
even need to fgure in consequence in explanations of political behaviour.
7
In a similar
vein, Conal Condren rejects Marxist interpretations of political thought because they
presuppose a prior ideology and set of power relations which are taken to be refected in
language, mystifed and masked by it.
8
Lastly, Pocock claims that, if the historian of
political thought is a Marxist, he declared that ideas were a mere refection of social
reality.
9
Whether or not these critiques are fair is a matter of debate. What is certain, however, is
that they have long been a staple of anti-Marxist scholarship and have been levelled against
Wood. One recent reviewer has written:
Despite avowals to the contrary, there are traces of a tendency to read opinions
of class position, with brilliantly original thinkers such as Augustine coming
perilously close to being labelled as mere apologists for domination, while
Ockhams thought is considered to refect English individuality, itself merely a
result of a strong property regime and a strong state.
10
Yet, there remains a crucial distinction between reading opinions of class position and
relating the meaning of political theory to the specifc development of social-property
relations and state-formation in diferent social contexts. To suggest that Augustine
presented an ideological defence of the Roman Empire is not the same as claiming that,
because Augustine was a member of the dominant class, we can take his political theory to
not only refect his class-interests, but also represent the class-interests of the Roman
aristocracy as a whole. Nor is relating the individualism of Ockham to the peculiar
development of English individualism (that fnds its way into virtually all political theory
by the sixteenth century) an act of class-reductionism.
Woods approach to socio-historical contextualisation rests on a particular interpretation
of historical development that difers from a number of infuential Marxist approaches to
historical periodisation that characterise European development in terms of a succession of
modes of production: beginning with the ancient slave-mode of production, through the
feudal mode of production and ultimately culminating in the development of capitalism.
In particular, Woods historical materialism is defned through a critical engagement with
Perry Andersons attempt to explain European development as a succession of slave-, feudal
6. Dunn 1996, p. 24. Dunn is referring to C.B. Macpherson, Christopher Hill and Lucien
Goldmann.
7. Skinner does not cite any Marxist scholarship in this passage, but it is presumed that he
is referring to the work of C.B. Macpherson, whom he references in his bibliography (Skinner
1974, p. 291).
8. Condren 1994, p. 8.
9. Pocock 1971.
10. West 2009, p. 915. West goes on to remark: Specialists will assuredly disapprove of this
book for the most part, and they could be forgiven for ignoring it. After all, it generally ignores
them. (West 2009, p. 916.)
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 304318 307
and capitalist modes of production.
11
Tose familiar with Woods work will know that hers
is a Marxism that not only rejects this Marxist understanding of European historical
development, but also problematises the more economistic and reductionist Marxist
understanding of a mode of production defned in terms of the causal relationship between
the economic base of society and the political superstructure, as well as the traditional
Marxist emphasis on the contradictions between the forces and relations of production as
the catalyst for social transition.
12
Tey will also be aware that Wood has been a vociferous
critic of traditional Marxist interpretations of capitalist transition that seek to explain
capitalist development in terms of an urban bourgeoisie rising up in opposition to a
parasitic, rural aristocracy.
13
Rather, Woods approach to historical context emphasises the dynamic interplay between
social-property relations and the historical processes of state-formation. Social-property
relations are characterised not only by the ways in which a surplus is extracted from the
direct producers in society by a class of appropriators, it also comprises the tenuous
relationships within the class of appropriators and their relationship to the development of
the state. Tus, the lines of confict and contestation that frame the broader social context
of the development of political theory not only pits the ruling class against the threats it
faces from below, but also the threats it faces from within the ruling class particularly in
regard to access to lucrative state-ofces and/or the potential competition from the state as
an agent of surplus-extraction in its own right. Indeed, Wood argues that the specifcity of
the West is to be found, not in the development of some form of transhistorical rationality,
but, rather, in a specifc diferentiation between property and state a diferentiation that
was absent in the more sophisticated civilisations of the East that sees property become
the specifc dominium of a class of private individuals outside the jurisdiction of the
state itself. Te development of European societies and by extension, European political
theory is distinct from developments in the East, not by virtue of the absence of private
property in the latter, but by virtue of the absence of a similar diferentiation of state and
property. In concrete terms, this means that while in the civilisations of the East, the
division between ruler and ruled largely corresponded to the division between appropriators
and producers, no such correspondence existed in the societies that eventually developed in
the West (i.e., Greece and Rome) and it is this diference that plays an important rle in
creating the particular dynamic of confict that frames the context for the rise of political
theory as an intellectual endeavour oriented to interrogating the relationship between ruler
and ruled in a highly sophisticated and analytical manner:
Te ambiguous relation between ruling class and state gave Western political
theory certain unique characteristics. Even while propertied classes could never
11. See Anderson 1974a and 1974b. Of course, Andersons is merely one (albeit highly
infuential) interpretation of one of Marxs schemata of historical development: compare, for
instance, Wickham 1994. For an insightful discussion of the various approaches to the historical
periodisation of modes of production, see Blackledge 2006. For a useful discussion on the
conceptual issues at stake in the debates regarding historical materialism, see Rigby 1988.
12. In particular, Wood criticises the technological determinism of Cohen 1978: see Wood
1995. For a critique, see Callinicos 1990.
13. Wood 1991 and 2002.
308 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 304318
ignore the threat from below, and even while they depended on the state to
sustain their property and economic power, the tensions in their relations with
the state placed a special premium on their own autonomous powers, their rights
against the state, and also on conceptions of liberty which were often
indistinguishable from notions of aristocratic privilege asserted against the state.
So challenges to authority could come from two directions: from resistance by
subordinate classes to oppression by their overlords, and from the overlords
themselves as they faced intrusions by the state. Tis helped to keep alive the
habit of interrogating the most basic principles of authority, legitimacy and the
obligation to obey, even at moments when social and political hierarchies were at
their most rigid. (p. 25.)
14
Despite this diferentiation between state, class and private property that is specifc to the
West, the ways in which the class of private appropriators exploit the direct producers of
society, and the way in which they relate to the state, and the way in which they maintain
their own cohesion as a class, difers from one social context to the next. Tus, that which
unifes Europe as a coherent social context within which to study the history of political
theory is not enough to understand the specifcity of, say, Athenian political theory in
relation to Roman or Renaissance-Italian political theory. Tus, the emphasis on the
specifcity of social-property relations is carried over into the study of various societies
within the European context as well both in the geographical and the historical sense. We
are therefore left with a very sophisticated approach to contextualisation, which at one and
the same time emphasises the specifcity of distinctive societies within a larger European
context that is itself diferentiated from those of the non-European world.
From polis to republic to empire
From this starting point, Wood takes the reader through a brilliant and bold interpretation
of the invention of political theorising within the context of the Greek polis that is
characterised, not as a manifestation of the slave-mode of production typical of traditional
Marxist renderings of the ancient-Greek context, but rather as a radical if not
revolutionary democracy characterised by a political association of direct producers, in
which the peasant-citizen plays a crucial rle, against an appropriating class of declining
landlords. By characterising the context of Athenian democracy in such a way, Wood is
rejecting conventional Marxist interpretations of antiquity as a slave-mode of production,
in which the predominant line of social confict revolves around the antagonisms between
a class of slaves engaged largely in production and a citizen-body of slave-owners.
15
By downplaying the operative rle of slavery as the dynamic of class-struggle in ancient
Greece, Wood seeks to illuminate the ways in which struggles within the community of
Athenian citizens develop along class-lines. Tus, the primary pole of confict is that which
pits free producers (peasants and artisans) against an increasingly besieged class of landed
aristocrats. Te tensions within the democratic community of Athens a community
14. For an interpretation that downplays the social diferences between East and West in
antiquity, and the implications for classical political thought, see Springborg 1992.
15. de Ste. Croix 1981; Anderson 1974b.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 304318 309
where a socially stratifed citizenry met as political equals compelled the philosophical
defenders of the declining aristocratic order to elaborate sophisticated rationalisations of
lite-rule against the ideological defenders of the democracy. To put it another way, with
the development of the polis and the community of citizens it represented, the relationship
between rulers and ruled and between producers and appropriators characteristic of
Mycenaean Greece not to mention the bureaucratic state-civilisations of the East broke
down. Anti-democratic and aristocratic political theorists had to accommodate their ideas
to the realities of the polis, thereby resulting in the development of political philosophy as
an extension of the anti-Sophistic natural philosophy of Socrates. Even the more extreme
political theory of Plato, with its abstract construction of a social division between rulers
and ruled that corresponds to a division between those who produce and those who are
fed, requires the existence of the polis as the primary unit of association. Platos radicalism
resides not in his elaboration of some form of early communism (which Te Republic clearly
is not), but, rather, in the subversion of the ethos of the polis in the attempt to eradicate
politics and establish the rule of philosophy.
16
Readers of Woods earlier work on Greece will be familiar with much of the argument
about the polis and the Socratic philosophers.
17
To the Greeks, the most signifcant
conceptual distinction was that between the polis and the oikos. As Aristotle argued in Te
Politics, the political was confned to the polis, which was a form of human association that
was characterised by relations of equality between equal citizens. Crucial to this defnition
is the conception of equality between citizens within the political community. Regardless
of Aristotles own aristocratic preferences, such a conception of the polis was ultimately
compatible with the exclusive democracies of Athens and Rhodes. In contrast to this, the
oikos or household was comprised by a number of non-political relationships between
unequals: the patriarchal relationship between man and wife, the paternalistic relationship
between father and son, and the despotic relationship between master and slave. Aristotelian
political thought sought ways of accommodating the relationships of inequality inherent in
the oikos with the relationships of equality inherent in the polis by diferentiating between
functional rles that the parts and the conditions of the body politic play in maintaining
the socio-political order.
Citizens to Lords builds on Woods earlier work by delving deeper into pre-Socratic
natural philosophy as well as the development of Stoic and Epicurean philosophy of the
Hellenic period. With the Macedonian invasion, and the subsequent rise of Alexander the
Great, we begin to see a signifcant shift away from the established boundaries of Athenian
political philosophy. Te polis is superseded by the cosmopolis of Alexander. Tis development
will provide a vital link between Athens and Rome, and lay the foundations for the
development of Roman imperial political thought that substitutes exclusive rights of
citizenship with a universal subjection to imperial authority.
18
Herein lie the roots of the
16. Tis interpretation is radically at odds with those who believe that Platonic philosophy
(and Greek political theory in general) represents the elevation of the political over other forms
of association.
17. Wood 1988; Wood and Wood 1978.
18. Tis is a signifcantly diferent interpretation of the implications of Stoic and Christianised-
Roman political thought than that put forward by Patricia Springborg, who argues that it was
through the embrace of Christianity during the imperial era that the foundation for a universal
310 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 304318
confict between imperial universalism and republican particularism a confict between
competing ideologies that are united only in their shared contempt for classical
democracy.
Woods treatment of Rome is of equal signifcance to that of Greece for a number of
reasons. First, in most standard histories of political thought published after WWII, Rome
is often either glossed over or neglected, due to the failure of Rome to produce any great
or innovative thinkers.
19
Tus, despite the signifcance of Rome to the history of European
state-formation (not to mention political theorising), its absence from the traditional
histories of political thought needs to be corrected. Secondly, conventional histories of
political thought are often conceptualised around a qualitative break between modernity
and antiquity, in which the latter is comprised of the Greco-Roman world in ways that
downplay the important diferences between the two contexts.
20
On closer examination, we
begin to see the dramatic diferences between Athens and Rome, to the extent that Roman
conceptions of citizenship and liberty, as well as the institutional arrangements of the
Roman constitution, have more in common with later developments of the early-modern
period than with the realities of ancient Greece.
21
Tirdly, recent attempts to revisit Rome
and re-integrate it into the broader tradition of Western-European political thought have
done so through the lens of a republicanism concerned with excavating notions of neo-
Roman liberty that, ironically, do little to engage with the actual history of the Roman-
republican era.
22
As such, a more substantive understanding of the nature of Roman society,
conception of individual freedom was developed. It is ironical, but true, that the Hellenistic and
Roman Empires, and not the league of Greek city states or the Roman Republic, were responsible
for the greatest number of democratic foundations, giving to municipalities which had long
lived under autocracy democratic freedoms, which the Romans referred to as the freedom of the
Greeks. (Springborg 2001, p. 857.)
19. In J.S. McClellands survey of Western political thought, pagan Rome is treated in a mere
twenty pages, reserving most of his commentary for Augustine and other Christianised Romans
(McClelland 1996). David Bouchers edited text skips over pre-Augustinian Rome entirely
(Boucher (ed.) 2009). Te general neglect of Rome in the history of political thought is, however,
a relatively current phenomenon. Histories written prior to WWII and the establishment of
political theory as a sub-discipline in political science tended to cover a wider range of political
thinkers due to the absence of a pro-philosophical bias in determining what constitutes political
theory.
20. Indeed, some surveys of Western political thought (as distinct from surveys of modern
political thought) simply begin with either Machiavelli or Hobbes, implying that Machiavellis
alleged discovery of the autonomy of the political, and Hobbess rejection of antiquity, are key
to understanding modern political thought.
21. Early recognition of these diferences can be found in Wolin 2004 and Wirszubski
1950.
22. Skinner 1998; Skinner 2008. Skinner is careful to defne the tradition that he seeks to
examine as neo-Roman liberty, which allows him to focus solely on Roman-inspired writers of
the early-modern English period. Philip Pettit, however, is more insistent on the Roman origins
of what he considers to be a progressive notion of liberty that is concerned with non-domination.
Pettit, however, engages in no signifcant discussion of the Roman context; nor does he engage
with the work of Roman-republican writers such as Cicero (Pettit 1997). Similarly, Maurizio
Viroli, inspired by both Pettit and Skinner, conveniently omits Rome from his narrative of
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 304318 311
Roman law and Roman political thought can provide us with a critical perspective from
which to evaluate the current republican revival in political theory.
Te diferences between Athens and Rome are important in their own right; yet, they
assume a greater signifcance when we understand the infuence that Rome has had on the
later development of political thought in European history.
23
Far from representing an
analogous source of positive liberty, the case of the Roman Republic represents a highly
dynamic mixed constitution, combining elements of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy
into an elaborate faade that masked the concentration of aristocratic power within a
Roman Senate. Te signifcance of the Roman case resides less in the Roman contribution
to political philosophy (which tended to come from Romanised Greeks) than it does in the
creation of Roman law and the republics articulation of a form of citizenship that diluted
popular power and acted as an alternative to Athenian democracy.
24
Whilst Athenian
citizenship cut across class-lines, thereby creating a political community in which citizens
of unequal socio-economic backgrounds came together as political equals, Roman
citizenship institutionalised the socio-economic inequalities of status and class in ways that
were inspirational to later political theorists. We are familiar with the exclusive basis of
Athenian citizenship: metics, women and slaves were all excluded from membership in the
demos. But, even within a more inclusive conception of the people, characteristic of Rome,
liberty did not necessarily imply an equality of political rights. For example, Cicero that
most famous proponent of Roman liberty could argue for the libertas of the Roman
people while believing that the dignitas of the great requires an unequal distribution of
political and economic rights. In other words, Ciceros conception of libertas was limited to
a more abstract juridical equality that entitled all Roman citizens, regardless of rank or class,
to an equal access to Roman law; but it did not follow that all citizens enjoyed equal
political rights in terms of an equality of voting rights (and therefore, the power to determine
the content of that law). Tus, a res publica, for Cicero, envisioned a hierarchical society in
which political rights are monopolised by a landed aristocracy, yet this does not prevent
him from championing the libertas of the Roman people as a community.
25
Te institutionalisation of this inequality could not have occurred without the
development of Roman law. Most signifcant among these innovations were the distinctions
drawn between a public and private sphere, and the development of a clearly-defned realm
of private property. Wood writes:
Te Athenians, as we saw, managed the conficts between peasants and landlords,
mass and elite, largely on the political plane. Te efect of their democratic
republicanism (all the while selectively including Cicero when it is convenient), preferring to
begin his history with Machiavelli (Viroli 2001).
23. See Roberts 1994.
24. In Te Republic, Cicero clearly states the case for a popular government (a res publica) in
contrast to the kind of democracies that existed in Athens and Rhodes.
25. Wood 1988. Janet Coleman writes: Tis is what Rome discovered, a useful kind of
compromise concerning irreconcilable approaches to status. Tis is the agreement that defnes
the state as an association in justice: equality before the law but not to equal things. Scipio
insists that men of the highest and lowest honour must exist in every state and hence treating
them equally cannot be fair. But treating everyone equally before the law is the minimum to
which everyone, with his diferent view of status, can accept. (Coleman 1999, p. 279.)
312 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 304318
reforms was gradually to dilute legal or status distinctions among free Athenians
in the common identity of citizenship. Te Romans to some extent also pursued
the political course, and the citizen body also included both rich and poor; but,
while property increasingly trumped heritage, even status distinctions among
citizens, notably between patricians and plebeians, continued to play a role, with
patricians enjoying privileged status and disproportionate representation in
assemblies. Te Romans did, to be sure, devise political institutions and
procedures to regulate relations between diferent types of citizen such as the
particularly distinctive ofce of the tribune. But, while infuenced at frst by
Greek law, the Romans constructed a much more elaborate legal apparatus,
relying more than the Greeks on the law to manage transactions between mass
and elite, between propertied classes and less prosperous citizens. Social relations
between these groups were in large part played out not in the public domain of
political life but in the sphere of private law a distinctively Roman category;
and the regulation of property would constitute by far the largest part of Romes
civil law. (p. 121.)
Tis diferentiation between public and private spheres, along with the development of the
rights of private property, enabled the ruling class to relegate conficts between citizens of
diferent classes to the private sphere through the medium of private law. Such a phenomena
was alien to the Greeks, for whom conficts between citizens of diferent classes ultimately
spilled over into the public sphere of the popular assemblies.
26
In Rome, by contrast,
substantive inequalities in both spheres coexisted with a limited status of equality embodied
in a hierarchical notion of citizenship. While Rome was no more stable than Athens, the
constitutional and legal infrastructure established by the Roman ruling class, along with the
divisions that existed between Roman peasants and the urban plebeians, enabled them to
retain their oligarchic power in the presence of the popular faade of republican
government.
From Woods perspective, if modern liberal democracies owe anything to antiquity for
their development, it is to Rome not Athens that we must turn our attention. While
democracy is a Greek invention, it is the Roman case with its mixed constitution that
masks oligarchic power, its inclusive citizenship that stresses formal legal equality over
substantive social equality, to its diferentiation between a public and private sphere, where
class-conficts are confned to the latter through the development of private law, and to
well-developed relations of private property that clearly diferentiate between imperium
(rule) and dominium (ownership) that is more instructive to understanding the
development of modern liberal democracy.
27
26. Indeed, the Greeks did not have a well-developed distinction between a public sphere
and a private sphere; merely a polis comprised of equality, and an oikos characterised by
inequality.
27. Te partnership of dominium and imperium, then, sums up both the distinction between
public and private and the alliance of property and state that was so distinctively Roman. (Wood
2008, pp. 1245.)
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Imperial decline and European feudalisms
Te imperial crisis of the third century resulted not only in a substantive military-
bureaucratic revolution, but also the conversion of the Empire to Christianity under the
rule of the Emperor Constantine. With this conversion, Christianity underwent its
transformation from a small Jewish sect to an ideology of empire, largely due to the works
of the later Stoics, St Paul, and, fnally, Augustine. While the conversion to Christianity
coincided with the Eastward drift of imperial power, the sources of Western Christian
dualism may be found in social and cultural conditions. . . . of the Roman property regime
and the distinctive public/private dichotomy it engendered (p. 147). Roman conceptions
of dominium and imperium property and state played a crucial rle in the development
of Western Christianity and its relationship to state-power. Pauls injunction to render
under Caesar represented the acceptance and co-existence of the competing centres of
power and authority that would shape the development of politics and political thought in
the medieval period:
Pauline Christianity, in other words, efected an adaptation of universalism
analogous to the changes in Stoic doctrine, which blunted its egalitarian
implications and its potential challenge to existing authorities, making the
doctrine more congenial to Roman elites. It might be said that, like the Roman
stoics, Paul who was familiar with and infuenced by Stoic philosophy
achieved this efect by reintroducing a kind of dualism that allowed a separation
between, on the one hand, the moral or spiritual sphere, in which the cosmic
logos dictated a universal equality, and, on the other hand, the material world in
which social inequalities and even slavery prevailed and political authority was
entitled to impose an absolute and universal obedience, just as masters could
compel their slaves. (pp. 1501.)
Upon the collapse of the imperial state, and the subsequent fragmentation of political
power amongst competing warlords, it was the Church that maintained the imperial
structures, hierarchies and institutions. And it is the collapse of this centralised public
authority and the exacerbation of the competing claims of jurisdiction between the papacy
and the Holy Roman Empire that constitutes the context of medieval political thought.
28

Tis competition, however, is situated within a broader social context of feudalism, which
Wood defnes in terms of the parcellisation of sovereignty, usually in the hands of
competing lords who have managed to appropriate limited public powers in the wake of
the collapse of the Carolingian state.
29
In this feudal context, the fusion of public power
with private appropriation is perhaps most apparent, resulting in the interpenetration of
relations of political and juridical status with the powers of exploitation and surplus-
extraction and the eclipse of any well-defned public authority:
28. Tis is a signifcantly diferent position from that presented by Wolin, who argues that it
is the institutionalisation of the Church rather than its competition with secular authorities
that rescues the concept of the political from extinction during the medieval period (Wolin
2004).
29. Te term parcellisation of sovereignty, was coined by Perry Anderson (Anderson 1974a,
p. 19).
314 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 304318
To put it another way, the public or civic sphere completely disappeared. Tis was
so not only in the sense that the state apparatus efectively disintegrated but also
in the sense that public assemblies in which free men could participate, of a kind
that survived throughout the Carolingian realm, no longer existed. Clear
distinctions between free men and slaves gave way to a complex continuum of
dependent conditions. Te category of free man efectively disappeared in the
former Frankish empire, where even owners of free land might be subject to
seigneurial jurisdiction and feudal obligations, while the concept of slavery was
overtaken by a spectrum of dependence, in relations between lords and their
men. (pp. 1712.)
However, an important point of diferentiation is made between Continental and English
feudalisms, with the latter coexisting with a centralised state augmented by the Norman
Conquest. Tis distinction is signifcant in both enabling us to understand the diferences
between English and Continental medieval political theory, but also for understanding the
signifcant variations in socio-economic and political development that will be elaborated
upon in the second volume.
30
Continental feudalism, including that of France and the
quasi-feudalism of the autonomous Italian communes, is characterised by a particular
fusion of public power with the power of private appropriation that expressed itself in
overlapping claims to property and legal jurisdiction. From this perspective, the development
of Italian republicanism in the late-medieval period did not represent a fundamental
change in the social constitution of political and economic power. While Continental
medieval political thought was primarily concerned with the confict between competing
claims of the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire to political authority, it was rarely
concerned with addressing the source of factionalism and political disunity the
parcellisation of sovereignty characteristic of feudal social relations.
Within this context of parcellised sovereignty, medieval political thought developed
largely as an expression of the competing claims of imperium and dominium that took for
granted the dependent status of the producing classes. As such, medieval political thought
was pre-occupied with identifying the locus of political and legal authority. What medieval
political thought did not attempt to do, was to revive the civic relationship that existed
between classes characteristic of the ancient Greek polis.
Medieval political theory involved a particularly complex relation to the legacy of
classical antiquity. It was complicated not only by relations between secular and
ecclesiastical authority but also by the ever-changing scope of secular state power
and ever-present tensions between the processes of state centralization and the
forces of parcellization. Te legacy of empire, together with its classical inheritance,
continued to structure the parcellized sovereignty of feudalism, both in practice
and in theory. It survived both in the theological doctrines of Christian
universalism and in the institutional hierarchy of the Church; but these were
always in tension with the particularities of plural kingdoms, lordly jurisdiction
30. Tis important point of diferentiation is absent from Skinners two volumes on the
Renaissance and Reformation, and remains perhaps the most important diference between
Woods social-history approach and Skinners intellectual-history approach.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 304318 315
and autonomous corporations of various kinds. At the same time, political
philosophy had to adapt to the absence of a neatly defned political terrain, not a
civic community such as the polis but a particularly convoluted network of
secular and ecclesiastical institutions, together with the unity of property and
jurisdiction. (p. 200.)
In contrast to republican interpretations that attribute to him the revitalisation of a civic
sphere of politics, Marsilius of Padua does nothing to challenge the feudal parcellisation of
sovereignty characteristic of the Italian city-states, and his conception of communal
autonomy is better suited, not to republican self-government based on active citizenship,
but, rather, on incorporating communal autonomy into imperial rule.
31
For Marsilius, the
corporation of citizens is represented and governed by a ruling part ( pars principans), which
may consist of many, few or even one; and he always qualifes his references to the universal
body of citizens with or its prevailing part (valentior pars, sometimes translated as the
weightier part), which apparently can be very limited in numbers. As a result, not only
the power to elect (or depose) the ruling or executive part but even the legislative function
and the ultimate power of consent could, then, reside in a very small number (pp. 2201).
Te development of English medieval political thought particularly that of William of
Ockham reveals a signifcant point of departure between the processes of Continental
and English state-formation. Whereas Continental medieval political thought started out
from the premises of corporate representation and competing jurisdiction, Ockhams
political thought is premised on a kind of methodological individualism that corresponds
to the realities of English feudalism: notably development of the status of freeman under
the auspices of common law. Tese diferences corporatism versus individualism proved
crucial in determining the character of the doctrines of popular sovereignty that emerge in
the early-modern period; they determine whether popular sovereignty resides in the
individual as in the case of English political thought or in the colleges and other
corporate bodies characteristic of Continental feudalism.
Wood concludes her study, not with the decline of medieval scholasticism and the rise of
Renaissance-humanism, but, rather, with the onset of the crisis of feudalism that is largely
dated during the last half of the fourteenth century. Given her emphasis on the social as
opposed to the intellectual contexts of political theory, it seems appropriate that the second
volume will begin amidst the backdrop of the divergent processes of state-formation that
constitute the early-modern period of European history. For this second volume, we can
anticipate the development of political thought against the background of at least three
distinctive social contexts: the development of English political thought within the context
of an emerging agrarian-capitalist society, constituted by a multitude of free men, and the
formation of a centralised state taking the form of King, Lords and Commons; the
development of French political thought within a largely feudal society, comprised of
colleges and corporate bodies and constituted by the contradictions of an absolutist state
defned by the countervailing tendencies of parcellised sovereignty; and the Renaissance-
31. Coleman 2000. For Marsilius of Padua as a republican theorist contributing to early
democratic political thought, see Held 2006.
316 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 304318
revival of antiquity amidst the autonomous, quasi-feudal communal city-states of the Italian
peninsula, each struggling for survival in a new confguration of absolutist geopolitics.
Conclusion
If there is a weakness to Woods book, it is both the downplaying of the kind of detailed
textual exegesis that is standard fare in the history of political thought as well as the more
discursive contextualisation that is typical of the Cambridge-school. Wood recognises this,
noting that critics and readers may think that such a social-history approach places too
much emphasis on grand structural themes at the expense of a more exhaustive textual
reading of the canon, yet leaves it open for others to engage in the kinds of interpretation
that results in more minute and detailed reading (p. 16). On the one hand, this seems
perfectly reasonable, for no interpretive approach can accomplish everything, and Woods
intention is to reveal the way a Marxist social history can illuminate our understanding of
the canon. On the other hand, it does nothing to force the proponents of the Cambridge
school to acknowledge the contribution that Wood makes to the history of political
thought. Given the predominance of the Cambridge-school approach to contextualisation,
and the marginalisation of Marxist interpretations on the grounds outlined rightly or
wrongly by Dunn at the outset of this essay, and reasserted by West in his hostile review
of Woods work, there is a pressing need to meet the Cambridge school on its own terrain.
Tis will be particularly important in the next volume, due to the fact that both Skinner
and Pocock have done much to re-frame the way in which historians view the intellectual
developments of the early-modern period. In particular, the republican paradigm, be it in
the form of Skinners neo-Roman liberty or Pococks Aristotelian-inspired civic humanism,
has supplanted the old bourgeois paradigm as the hegemonic interpretation of the early-
modern period. In terms of the ancient and medieval periods, however, it is hoped that
Woods book will provide the groundwork for future research within the Marxist
interpretation of the history of political thought.
Reviewed by Geof Kennedy
University of Durham
geof.kennedy@durham.ac.uk
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