Wickham on "feudalism"

Chris Wickham is perhaps Britain’s leading historian of European history between the end of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. His two books, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000 (2009) and Medieval Europe (2016), are rich and intriguing accounts of the heterogeneous and diverse histories that the period encompasses.

One topic in particular that is of interest to anyone with even a passing interest in medieval social history is the question of “feudalism”. Marx treated feudalism as the central social formation, the mode of production, of the Middle Ages. In the following century Marc Bloch’s historical writings were primarily focused on “feudalism”, including both the political arrangements of the system and the agrarian relations that the period embraced. Here is Bloch's 1940 characterization of feudalism:

A subject peasantry; widespread use of the service tenement (i.e. the fief) instead of a salary, which was out of the question; the supremacy of a class of specialized warriors; ties of obedience and protection which bind man to man and, within the warrior class, assume the distinctive form called vassalage; fragmentation of authority—leading inevitably to dis-order; and, in the midst of all this, the survival of other forms of association, family and State, of which the latter, during the second feudal age, was to acquire renewed strength—such then seem to be the fundamental features of European feudalism. (Bloch, Feudal Society v. II: Social Classes and Political Organisation, kl 4413)

And here is Perry Anderson's neo-Marxist summary description of the "feudal mode of production" in his 1974 Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism:

The feudal mode of production that emerged in Western Europe was characterized by a complex unity. Traditional definitions of it have often rendered this partially, with the result that it has become difficult to construct any account of the dynamic of feudal development. It was a mode of production dominated by the land and a natural economy, in which neither labour nor the products of labour were commodities. The immediate producer – the peasant – was united to the means of production – the soil – by a specific social relationship. The literal formula of this relationship was provided by the legal definition of serfdom glebae adscripti or bound to the earth: serfs had juridically restricted mobility. The peasants who occupied and tilled the land were not its owners. Agrarian property was privately controlled by a class of feudal lords, who extracted a surplus from the peasants by politico-legal relations of compulsion. This extra-economic coercion, taking the form of labour services, rents in kind or customary dues owed to the individual lord by the peasant, was exercised both on the manorial demesne attached directly to the person of the lord, and on the strip tenancies or virgates cultivated by the peasant. Its necessary result was a juridical amalgamation of economic exploitation with political authority. The peasant was subject to the jurisdiction of his lord. At the same time, the property rights of the lord over his land were typically of degree only: he was invested in them by a superior or noble (or nobles), to whom he would owe knight-service – provision of a military effective in time of war. His estates were, in other words, held as a fief. The liege lord in his turn would often be the vassal of a feudal superior, and the chain of such dependent tenures linked to military service would extend upwards to the highest peak of the system – in most cases, a monarch – of whom all land could in the ultimate instance be in principle the eminent domain. Typical intermediary links of such a feudal hierarchy in the early mediaeval epoch, between simple lordship and suzerain monarchy, were the castellany, barony, county or principality. The consequence of such a system was that political sovereignty was never focused in a single centre. The functions of the State were disintegrated in a vertical allocation downwards, at each level of which political and economic relations were, on the other hand, integrated. This parcellization of sovereignty was constitutive of the whole feudal mode of production. (147-148)

This tradition, from Marx through Bloch and Anderson, describes feudalism as a system that pervaded western Europe and depended upon bonded labor and a system of disaggregated political and military power. It is very interesting, therefore, that Wickham is reluctant about the concept of “feudalism” altogether. In The Inheritance of Rome he refers to the “feudal revolution”, but always in quotation marks and usually in reference to the academic debate with that label. (Bisson's "Feudal Revolution" is a landmark for this debate; link.) Wickham is somewhat more willing to use the term “feudal” in Medieval Europe without quote marks, but retains his skepticism about the concept. He distinctly does not regard the “European socio-economic-political world” as a unified system at all; rather, he sees a great deal of variation, local varieties, and different dynamics. Here is the idea that provides the key foundation of his skepticism: he insists on the heterogeneity of historical experience, social arrangements, and political regimes that existed across the expanse of territory encompassed by the map of western Eurasia.

Rather than looking for a single all-embracing concept of the "social and political system of the medieval period", Wickham insists on recognizing the diversity of arrangements found throughout the period, and the parallel importance of detailed historical investigation of various sub-regions. Franks, Magyars, Bulgars, Visigoths, Vandals, Lombards, Danes, Khazars, Anglo-Saxons, and Andalusian Muslims -- the populations of various regions of Europe possessed their own histories and social arrangements, with influences flowing in all directions over time. Attempting to capture the social system of much of this map in terms of an abstract concept of "feudalism" is an error of historiography. There are commonalities across the regions and populations of the face of Europe, created by the fundamental existential circumstances of life in an environment with limited technology, communication, and travel. But the problems of material life, and the political and coercive arrangements through which groups of people were coordinated and controlled, varied across time and space. This critique can be put in terms of Weber's idea of ideal types as well (link): the concept of feudalism is an ideal type, that accentuates some features of the social order and minimizes others, in order to capture a broad social reality in a compact description. But for Wickham the historian, this attempt is wrong-headed. We do not gain anything of intellectual value by asserting that rural England, Saxony, and the territory of the Khazars were all "feudal" in their fundamental social relations. 

Let's look a little more closely at Wickham's account in the two books. A key idea in traditional conceptions of feudalism is the idea of “infeudation”, or the dispersal of authority, power, landed property, and military authority. Wickham introduces a number of novel ideas for describing the structure of medieval society, including especially cellularization, capillarization, and networks. In The Inheritance of Rome he introduced the idea of “cellularization” as a way of describing the social, economic, and political structure of medieval Europe. He attributes the concept to historian Robert Fossier (Enfance de l'Europe. Aspects économiques et sociaux. Tome 1: L'homme et son espace). The vocabulary of cellurization is used only twice in Inheritance, but it is used frequently in Medieval Europe. Here are a few examples from the latter book:

It [decentralized social life] marks a fundamental difference between the political systems of the early middle ages and those of later centuries, in which the public sphere had to be recreated, and always coexisted with a cellular structure of locally based powers, as we shall see in later chapters. (pp. 145-146). 

The French peasantry were increasingly caged inside the cellular structure of local power, and subjected, on top of rents, to lordly exactions which were often heavy, sometimes arbitrary, and always designed to underpin direct domination. (p. 180). 

Conversely, the weakening of the public framing for politics forced local powers to become better defined, creating the cellular structure of the future. And both of these developments fit what Marc Bloch meant by the ‘fragmentation of powers’: they were an always-possible consequence of the politics of land, in a world where the state was not separately supported by taxation. (pp. 180-181)

State-building was by now based on different, cellular, units: the newly legal, although of course highly exploitative, local lordships, large or small, of the eleventh century – to which we can now add the urban and rural communities of the twelfth, which gained their own autonomy, where they could, inside and against these lordships; and also dioceses, the cells of the international papal network. (p. 248)

The key implication of the language of "cellularization" in application to medieval society is the idea of extreme localization of most social, political, and economic activities. A cellular organism (in biology) is one that accomplishes its key metabolic activities based on processes under its immediate control -- bacteria, fungi, and molds, for example. A complex multicellular organism is one that embodies a functional system of interdependence between different parts of the organism; a division of labor between different organs; and a complex system through which the metabolic needs of each cell in the organism are satisfied as a result of the activities and products of distant parts of the organism. Analogously for the social case: a large-scale non-cellular distributed social system depends upon a regional division of labor, a more or less well developed system of trade, communication, and transport, and a degree of central coordination of activities. By describing large swaths of medieval society as "cellular", Wickham is asserting autarky, self-sufficiency, and extremely limited trade for large parts of the territory of the region. Subsistence farming and handicraft production define the fundamental material terms of existence in such a world. The "cells" in this construction are not households or hamlets, but may be as large as minor lordships controlling a radius of a few dozen kilometers. But the structure is cellular nonetheless, because there is little connection among these units within the broader region.

Another term that Wickham uses frequently is the idea of “capillarization” of revenues and power. For example —

The Lombard kings did not tax, after the first couple of generations of their rule at least. They operated entirely in the framework of a political practice based on land. But inside that framework, their hegemony was very great, and unusually detailed: their capillary power arguably extended to much more modest levels of society than the Frankish or Visigothic kings achieved. (146)

The state was much weaker in the post-Roman world, and one would not expect much of a tax-based movement of goods; an equivalent might be the movement of rents from one estate-centre to another, to feed landowners and kings who were located elsewhere, but the evidence we have for exchange, even in the relatively localized early Middle Ages, seems more capillary than that for the most part. (222)

That local lords in some cases were rising, militarized, families from the same community, former village-level medium owners or even former rich peasants (above, Chapter 21), did not make things any better; such families had a local knowledge that made domination easier, and also often had capillary hierarchical links with their neighbours or former neighbours, in the form of patron and client as well as landlord and tenant. (540)

This is a suggestive metaphor that evokes the minute subdivision of relationships through the social landscape. Capillarization in biology refers to the circulatory system of mammals and other orders; the capillaries are the very small blood vessels that proliferate through tissue and lungs to deliver nutrients and oxygen and remove waste products. So the key idea is "proliferation of a broadening network of channels". In the circulatory context, the fluid moves in a complete circuit -- traveling from the heart to tissue and returning. Here is a diagram:

In applying the idea of capillarization to the medieval social world, it is not entirely clear that the processes in question are circulatory (out-bound and in-bound). Rather, it seems that Wickham has in mind an extractive capillary system, in which a central fiscal power has established channels through which taxes or labor services flow from periphery to center. (This description does not imply that the power in question is "king"; it may be a regional lord controlling an extended territory.) On this view, the system will look more like the branching network of the roots of a tree:

On either scenario, the meaning of capillarization is reasonably clear: it involves the proliferation of channels of influence permitting the flow of taxes and products from local to regional places (the tree-root system) or possibly a roundtrip flow of services from the center to periphery and a return trip conveying taxes and labor services from periphery to center. We might say, then, that a "capillarized" rural society is no longer cellular; rather, it is interpenetrated by a system of circulation or extraction that succeeds in delivering products, ideas, or commands from a "center" to "periphery" and return.

Finally, Wickham often analyzes rural society — and occasionally town and city society — in terms of the networks of activity that can be discerned at the distance of a thousand years. Sometimes he applies this idea in terms of “social networks” — groups of individuals connected by family, loyalty, friendship, etc. — who are then able to call upon each other in times of need for collaboration or completion. Sometimes the networks that he describes are defined in terms of information flows — the flow of ideas through the Christian church establishment across a territory. A third application has to do with trade and market relationships, both nearby and distant.

The motor of exchange before 800 was, broadly, aristocratic wealth and buying-power; the richer élites were, the more they were able to sustain large-scale networks of production and distribution. (550)

These ideas are suggestive. But do they enable a significantly different view of the economic and political structure of feudal society — or do these terms simply provide a different vocabulary for describing the system that is familiar from Bloch? We might say that these concepts differ from traditional concepts of feudalism -- even as they aim to capture similar social characteristics -- in virtue of their abstraction. The concept of "infeudation" used by Marx and Bloch is inseparable from other specific assumptions about military subordination among lords, the lack of power of rural producers, and the nature of central political or monarchical power. The concepts of cellularization, capillarization, and a networked regional society are neutral about the nature of the power relations that sustain these social relations among individuals and communities. They serve to describe the "topology" of economics and power in the circumstances of the natural and technological environment of the period in Eurasia between 500 CE and 1500 CE without making specific assumptions about the legal instantiations of these relationships. 

In an unexpected way, Wickham's use of these concepts might be seen as a more abstract theoretical application of the most fundamental ideas of historical materialism articulated by Marx. The argument goes something like this: Human beings in X region in the eighth century find themselves in small nucleated settlements with very little ability to communicate or transport goods or people to places more than 25 kilometers distant. They satisfy their needs by farming and handicraft, and they cultivate for the purpose of consumption. (They are thus "cellularized".) More distant powerful figures ("lords in waiting") have an interest in gaining access to some of their crops. These figures gain coercive ability (armed groups) capable of extracting tribute (rent, taxes, tribute, gifts) from peasant communities. The hamlets become "cellularized": multiple hamlets are drawn into extractive relationships with more distant bosses who dominate them. Land and peasant labor are the primary sources of wealth; so the lords compete over territory and the right to extract from their "dominions". Cellularization and the growth of capillaries and networks are then comprehensible results rather than simply being the embodiments of "infeudation". 

(It would be very interesting to consider the passage from Perry Anderson quoted above and construct a sentence-by-sentence analysis and critique based on Wickham's historical accounts of Eurasian developments during the centuries considered. This would establish fairly precisely the ways in which Wickham's account differs from traditional accounts of "feudalism".)

First generation anti-positivism: Wellmer

In Critical Theory Of Society (1969) Albrecht Wellmer announced a critique of positivist assumptions in the study of society. Proceeding from the perspective of critical theory and especially Horkheimer and Adorno, Wellmer denounced the embrace of positivism by "bourgeois" social science. But perhaps more surprisingly, he addresses this critique to Marx's system as well.

Probably Horkheimer himself offered the most impressive statement of the Frankfurt school's estimate of its own function and importance when, in his article on traditional and "critical" theory, he joined issue with bourgeois science and its objectivist misconception of its own nature. The essay shows clearly that the confrontation between critical, Marxist and traditional "bourgeois" science had hardly moved by then into the vague realm of methodological abstractions; to the extent that the debate was concerned with methodology, critical theory was more inclined to view it as the mere reflection of actual social conflicts. (10)

The main thrusts against positivism consist of the claim that positivists look at social arrangements as purely objective and factual; whereas they require interpretation.

Apart from strict behaviorists, social scientists would in general no longer dispute the fact that access to the measured or observed data of their field of study is obtained through the medium of communication. but, they opine, the role of interpretations finishes with its provision of a means of access to the data, and perhaps also of a heuristic value for the discovery of explanations; in addition, they would claim for their science the methodological status of a natural science, and therefor of a science entitled, with the aid of universal laws, to explain and predict unusual phenomena. (35)

And positivism assumes that value perspectives can be filtered out in the perception of facts; whereas critical theorists maintain that perspective is inseparable from perception. (Proletarians see the social world differently from the bourgeois.)

So what is "critical social science"? To start, it is hermeneutic, according to Wellmer: it has to do with the interpretation of meanings in social action.

It has already been shown that explanatory sociology is always interpretative sociology as well; and that an interpretative sociology cannot be merely a subjective sociology of the interpretation of meaning. It is also clear now that the empirical content of social scientific theories is peculiarly proportional to the historical concretion to which they attain. (38)

Further, critical social science is fundamentally responsive to historical context. So hermeneutic interpretation cannot be extracted from its historical context.

So much of the specific content of a certain historical period enters into the basic theoretical assumptions and the framework of reference used for categorization, that its hypotheses cannot be transferred without violence to more distant socio-historical situations. (36)

This point parallels the post-positivist view that observation is theory-laden; but it goes beyond that by postulating that social observations are framed by conceptual systems that are themselves historically specific.

Third, critical social science rests on a recognition (even more explicit in Habermas) that knowledge and interest are interwoven:

Already apparent is the changed relation of theory and practice that exists for a critical social theory derived form a practical interest in cognition. Critical theory is derivable from a notion of the "good life" already available to it as part of the socio-historical situation it subjects to analysis; which, as the notion of an acknowledgement of each individual as a person by each other individual, and as the idea of a non-coercive communal human life of dialogue, is a draft meaning of history already fragmentarily embodied in a society's traditions and institutions. (41)

The tension between the Frankfurt School and orthodox Marxist theory is evident here, because Wellmer's critique of "bourgeois social science" is extended to Marx himself.

The critique of the objectivism of Marx's philosophy of history was directed at a latently positivistic misconception, which, according to Habermas's thesis, arises from the part played by the concept of labor. (67)

"Objectivism" here means the stance of the social researcher to regard the social as "given", not subject to interpretation. And Wellmer argues that there is a strand of Marx's thought that does precisely that. Marx's materialist theory of history -- "history consists of a dialectic of change driven by conflict between the forces and relations of production" -- leaves no room for the radical interpretivism that Wellmer favors. Crudely, Marx in the German Ideology and Capital is not at all interested in the ideas that men and women have, but rather the objective system of social relations that underlies their actions and interactions. Even arguments that Marx makes about ideology, false consciousness, and fetishism of commodities takes the form of demystification -- dissolution of the system of false consciousness rather than interpretation of how these representations relate to the workings of the social order. Consciousness plays no role in the dynamics of history. And in fact Wellmer believes that this stance plays a self-defeating role in Marx's system:

The union of historical materialism and the criticism of political economy in Marx's social theory is inherently contradictory. (74)

What Wellmer favors for social theory is expressed here:

This means that critical theory does not wish to replace an ideological consciousness with a scientific consciousness, but -- of course by means of empirical and historical analyses -- to assist the practical reason existing in the for of ideological consciousness to "call to mind" its distorted form, and at the same time to get control of its practical-utopian contents. Ultimately, therefore, critical theory can prove itself only by initiating a reflective dissolution of false consciousness resulting in liberating praxis: the successful dissolution of false consciousness as an integrative aspect of emancipatory practice is the proper touchstone for its truth. (72)

So Wellmer's "critical theory of society" is criticism all the way down: critique of the assumptions about knowledge, action, and social relations that underlie both bourgeois social science and large swathes of Marx's own theoretical framework. In place of orthodox "empiricist" ideas about empirical confirmation and "hypothetico-deductive method", he advocates the "hypothetico-practical model of validation. Those theories which unfold into a basis for human liberation are for that reason rationally preferable to those that do not. Rather than theory and observation, Wellmer's philosophy of science rests on a view of theory and praxis, or theory and liberation.

However, it is difficult today to interpret this series of observations as a serious and credible approach to social science epistemology. It offers suggestive ideas about what is involved in making sense of a given historical-social reality. But it gives little guidance about how to evaluate various theories and interpretations.

(The choice of Millet's painting "Peasants planting potatoes" is apt for a discussion of Wellmer's philosophy of social science. The painting represents a set of "facts"; but we cannot say what facts these are without substantial interpretation, and various interpretations are possible. The painting might be regarded as a small piece of critical social theory all by itself, with a gesture towards social reality, a depiction that can be understood as a system of domination, and a call for liberation.)

Origins of feudalism in the West

In the grand historical march postulated by historical materialism, ancient slavery and medieval feudalism preceded capitalism as distinct systems of domination and exploitation (e.g. Perry Anderson's Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism). In each social order small elites captured great wealth from the mass of producers, whether enslaved farmers and artisans in the ancient (Roman) world or bonded serfs in the feudal world. And whether we go for "internal contradictions within the forces and relations of production" or other more contingent causes of change, the evolution of European social and economic systems from the Roman Republic through the millennium of Western European feudalism to the "breakthrough" of industrialism in Britain is one of the truly important macro-histories available for study. (China's economic history from its earliest dynasties to the last moments of the Qing is another, and India's longue durée economic history is equally important.)

But how should this story be understood -- as the necessary unfolding of some set of systemic and historical imperatives, or as a process substantially more contingent and piecemeal than that?

Patrick Geary's Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World is a fascinating study of the centuries-long transition from Romanized barbarian Europe to barbarian Roman society. The book is couched as late Roman history, and in fact the words "feudal" and "feudalism" never appear in the book. But what Geary is describing is precisely this: the emergence of a feudal society and economy out of the late Roman Empire in the West.

A big question is, what social forces and circumstances drove the evolution and transition from one social assemblage to another? The reader will note that I've refrained from using the terms "social system," "social order," or "mode of production" in this question because each of these implies a degree of systematicity which begs the question. And in fact much of the evidence offered in Geary's book gives support to the idea that these transitions were not driven by systemic tendencies, but rather the accretion of a number of different forces, playing out differently in different locales. Technical and artisanal practices (pottery, glass, metal-working), economic demand for agricultural products, concentration of land property, military competition, the rigors of European terrain, and many other factors play into the narrative that Geary provides.

During the second through fourth centuries there was a process of gradual "de-Romanization" of the outer reaches of the Roman Empire, as Roman political institutions and cultural norms lost impact on local society. Geary describes this as a process of "barbarization of the West" -- a resurgence of underlying Celtic and Germanic political and cultural forms that had never disappeared through the long centuries of Roman rule.

From the third through fifth centuries these indigenous traditions increasingly reasserted themselves as the Italian monopoly on politics and culture began to decline. (kl 205)

Barbarization was but part of the rapid changes in Roman society, culture, and government that took place during the third and fourth centuries. Partially spurred by such internal problems as plague, a falling birthrate, constitutional instability, and the failure of the Roman world to develop from a labor-intensive system based largely on slavery to a more efficient mercantile or protoindustrial system, and partially by the increased creased external pressures on its overextended frontiers, the Empire had to seek a new equilibrium. (kl 205)

The thirty-thousand-foot impression that Geary gives is one of the simultaneous development of "barbarian" societies, military alliances, and forms of rulership across much of the Western empire even as Roman rule and military strength continued. Vast land grants assigned by the Romans to local elites, clergy, and military leaders ensured great separation between elites and common farmers. A social world consisting of a combination of interpenetrated Roman and barbarian social arrangements persisted for centuries.

A key location from the point of view of later developments was the fifth- and sixth-century Clovis kingdom in what is modern Belgium (kl 1126). This configuration became the genesis of the Merovingian period of European history.

The population of Clovis's kingdom was complex and heterogeneous in its social, cultural, and economic traditions. Not only were the Franks and Gallo-Romans different from each other culturally, but neither of these populations was itself homogeneous.... This society was deeply rooted in the nature of its economic system, which was characterized by the monopoly of landowning in the hands of a small, extraordinarily wealthy elite, with the vast majority of the population, slave and free alike, destitute and often in desperate straits. (kl 1188)

Key institutional arrangements that defined feudalism centuries later can be identified in Geary's account of the late Roman period. A Roman origin of serfdom derives from the taxation system and the powerlessness of peasants:

In the course of the third century, the status of free tenant farmers, or coloni, grew increasingly indistinguishable from that of serru, or serf-slaves.... Such an arrangement benefited landlords, who were thereby assured labor supplies, and the Empire, which could use landlords to enforce tax collection.... Another way for oppressed freemen to obtain tax relief was to place themselves under the protection (patrociniuni) of wealthy, powerful senators or other notables who, through their military power or wealth, could exert more leverage in dealing with local curials and even imperial tax agents. (kl 482, 495)

And the key feudal institution, the manor, seems to have emerged from a much earlier Roman form of land control in Gaul, the villa:

The normal form of agricultural exploitation established by Romans in Gaul, as elsewhere in the Empire, was the villa, that is, the isolated estate of varying size (80 to 180 square meters for small ones to over 300 square meters for large ones). Within the walls of the villa were found the house of the owner and the habitations of his slaves, who provided the labor on the estate. (kl 1333)

Here is Geary's summing up of this early stage of the formation of European feudalism:

Merovingian civilization lived and died within the framework of late antiquity. Its characteristic political structure remained the kingdom of the imperial German military commander who, by absorbing the mechanism of provincial Roman administration, was able to establish his royal family as the legitimate rulers of the western provinces north of the Pyrenees and the Alps. His rule consisted primarily of rendering justice, that is, of enforcing Roman law and Romanized barbarian law where possible or appropriate within the tradition of his people, and of commanding ing the Frankish army. The economic basis for his power was on the one hand the vast Roman fist and on the other the continuing mechanism of Roman taxation. (kl 2739)

The feature that serves most directly to define "infeudation" emerges out of this narrative as well: the parcelization of military power and reach across commanders whose behavior could not be controlled by the central authority.

These observations make clear the central thrust of the book: there was substantial continuity between the institutions and economy of the late Roman Empire in the West and the political and economic institutions of European feudalism which followed it for a thousand years. This continuity is unwelcome to the "modes of production" train of thought, which postulates a sharp break between classical and feudal systems. But Geary points out that perhaps it is unwelcome as well to modern ideas about European identity:

An essential characteristic of Francia was the fluidity of the political and cultural identities of its inhabitants. To many modern French, who identify with the Roman cultural tradition as opposed to Germanic conquest and occupation, the Gallo-Roman Roman aristocracy of the Merovingian period were a disappointing lot. Gallo-Romans were ready to defend their Roman cultural tradition even while opposing any attempt by Roman imperial government to interfere with their local control. (kl 2750)

(It is possibly far-fetched to raise the issue of Roman-centrism against Geary with his use of the terms "barbarian" and "barbarization", but the terms do appear to be value-loaded in a way that post-colonial scholars have criticized in other contexts of cross-cultural description. Geary confronts this issue when he describes the pernicious and lingering effects of classical ethnography concerning the German barbarians (kl 539).)

M I Finley on the dynamics of the Roman Empire

One of the books I found influential in graduate school in philosophy was M. I. Finley's The Ancient Economy, which appeared in 1973. Finley's book sought to explain important parts of the Roman world by piecing together the best knowledge available about the economic relations that defined its socioeconomic foundation. And the book proposes to consider economic history in a new way:

There is a fundamental question of method. The economic language and concepts we are all familiar with, even the laymen among us, the "principles", whether they are Alfred Marshall's or Paul Samuelson's, the models we employ, tend to draw us into a false account. For example, wage rates and interest rates in the Greek and Roman worlds were both fairly stable locally over long periods ... , so that to speak of a "labour market" or a "money market" is immediately to falsify the situation. (23)

Finley's point here is that we need to conceptualize the ancient economy in terms that are not drawn from current understandings of capitalist market economies; these economic concepts do not adequately capture the socioeconomic realities of the ancient world. Finley argues that the concepts and categories of modern market society fit the socioeconomic realities of the ancient world very poorly. (In this his approach resembles that of Karl Polanyi, who was indeed an important influence on Finley.) One thing that is interesting in this approach is that it is neither neo-classical nor Marxist.

Finley addresses a question that is particularly important in the human sciences, the problem of how to handle heterogeneity within a social whole.

Is it legitimate, then, to speak of the "ancient economy"? Must it not be broken down by further eliminations...? Walbank, following in the steps of Rostovtzeff, has recently called the Empire of the first century "a single economic unit", one that was "knit together by the intensive exchange of all types of primary commodities and manufactured articles, including the four fundamental articles of trade -- grain, wine, oil, and slaves". (33)

This is to take a regionalist perspective on defining an economic region: we emphasize not homogeneity and self-similarity, but rather systemic interconnections among the parts. But to conclude a set of places fall in a single "economic region", Finley argues something else is needed:

To be meaningful, "world market", "a single economic unit" must embrace something considerably more than the exchange of some goods over long distances.... One must show the existence of interlocking behaviour and responses over wide areas. (34)

So what distinguishes the "interlocking behaviour and responses" of the ancient world? Finley's view is that the dominant ethos of the ancient world is not one of producing for accumulation, but rather maintaining status and the social order. And these imply a society sharply divided between haves and have-nots -- nobility and the poor. Finley takes issue with the "individualist" view (43) as applied to the ancient world, according to which each person is equally able to strive for success based on his/her own merits. What he calls the prevailing ideology is one of the moral legitimacy of inequalities, social and economic. Hierarchy is normal in the order of things, in the world view of the ancients. Even the heterodox insistence in the modern world on the concepts of class and exploitation, according to Finley, have little grip on the ideologies and values of the ancients. The idea of the working class fails to illuminate social realities of the ancient world because it necessarily conflates free and bonded labor (49). (Finley quotes Lukács on this point: "status-consciousness ... masks class consciousness" (50).)

There are only a few "structural" factors in Finley's account of the ancient economy. The structure and social reality of property is one -- the ownership of land and labor in the form of estates, small farms, and slaves conditions much of productive activity. Another is the availability of roads and water transport. Production largely took place within one day's transport from the consumers of that production. "Towns could not safely outgrow the food production of their own immediate hinterlands unless they had direct access to waterways" (126). Finley summarizes the "balance of payments" through which towns and cities supported themselves under four categories: local agricultural production, the availability of special resources like silver; the availability of trade and tourism; and income from land ownership and empire (139).

It is interesting to compare Finley's intellectual style in The Ancient Economy with his writing in an earlier book, Aspects of Antiquity: Discoveries and Controversies, published in 1968. Here Finley takes up many topics in a broadly chronological order. And he is more declaratory in his analysis of the broad dynamics of social development. One chapter in particular is an interesting counterpoint to The Ancient Economy, "Manpower and the Fall of Rome". The time is the late fourth century, and the circumstances are the impending military collapse of Rome. Finley estimates the population of the empire at about 60 million, noting that it is impossible to provide anything like a precise estimate. This population supported an army of about 300,000 in the time of Marcus Aurelius (d. 180), and rising to perhaps 600,000 in in the coming century. But increasingly this army was incapable of protecting the Empire from the encroaching Germanic tribes.

Roman armies still fought well most of the time. In any straight fight they could, and they usually did, defeat superior numbers of Germans, because they were better trained, better equipped, better led. What they could not do was cope indefinitely with this kind of enemy [migratory tribes]. (150)

Finley offers what is essentially a demographic and technological explanation for Rome's failure to defend itself: it simply could not sustain the substantially greater manpower needs that the Germanic warfare required, given the nature of the agrarian economy.

With the stabilization of the empire and the establishment of the pax Romana under Augustus, a sort of social equilibrium was created. Most of the population, free or unfree, produced just enough for themselves to exist on, at a minimum standard of living, and enough to maintain a very rich and high-living aristocracy and urban upper class, the courts with its palace and administrative staffs, and the modest army of some 300,000. Any change in any of the elements making up the equilibrium -- for example, an increase in the army or other non-producing sectors of the population, or an increase in the bite taken out of the producers through increased rents and taxes -- had to be balanced elsewhere if the equilibrium were to be maintained. Otherwise something was bound to break. (151)

And this leads to a general causal conclusion:

In the later Roman Empire manpower was part of an interrelated complex of social conditions, which, together with the barbarian invasions, brought an end to the empire in the west.... It was the inflexible institutional underpinning, in the end, which failed: it could not support the perpetual strains of an empire of such magnitude within a hostile world. (152,153)

This is perhaps a sober reminder of the limits of imperial power for the contemporary world.

(For readers interested in the ancient world, here is a related post on agrarian history in Weber's scholarship. And here is a video interview of M. I. Finley that touches on the key influences in his development as an historian.)

Historians of Past & Present

image: "Historians of Past and Present," National Portrait Gallery, London

A recent article on J. H. Elliott in the New York Review of Books includes a very striking portrait of the founders of the British history journal, Past and Present. The painting includes Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Lawrence Stone, and Keith Thomas (standing); and Christopher Hill, J. H. Elliott, and Joan Thirst (seated). The journal has been an incredibly important platform for some of the best social history being written from its founding in 1952 through the present, and it is very striking to see these pathbreaking historians all depicted together.

The journal was founded post-war by a group of historians who were Marxist and often members of the British Communist Party; but the journal itself maintained an intellectual independence from doctrine and party that allowed it to cultivate genuinely important historical research. As Hill, Hilton, and Hobsbawm put the point in the 1983 essay mentioned below, "In our dealings with Party or Group we were quite explicit in establishing that the journal was independent, and would accept no policy instructions" (5).

There is one element of this piece of intellectual history that I continue to find particularly intriguing. This has to do with the relationship between intellectual honesty and political conviction.  How is an historian's work (or the work of a social scientist or philosopher) affected by his or her political convictions? Intellectual honesty seems like a straightforward thing: we want scholars to pursue their findings as the facts and inferences guide them. We want them to help us understand how the world works, based on their best reading of the evidence. We don't want them to "spin" events or processes into alignment with their political ideologies or commitments. So how did this work for the historians of Past and Present and for Communist historians who were not part of the journal like E. P. Thompson? 

One part of the answer seems clear: these historians chose their topics for research based on their intuitions about the drivers of history, and these intuitions were certainly bound up in their political commitments and passions. So when Hobsbawm focuses on "Machine Breakers" (1952) or Soboul on "Robespierre and the Popular Movement of 1793-4" (1954) or Rodney Hilton on "Freedom and Villeinage in England" (1965) or E. P. Thompson on "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd" (1971), the topics they study have an obvious relevance to their political passions. But what about their findings? Are they able to see the aspects of their stories that are unexpected from a classical Marxist point of view? Is history "gnarly" and unpredictable for them? And are they honest in laying out the facts as they found them? Having read each of Hobsbawm, Soboul, Hilton, and Thompson with a certain degree of care over the years, my belief is that they meet this test. Certainly this is true for Thompson; the originality of his classic book, The Making of the English Working Class, is precisely to be found in the fact that it is not a cookie-cutter theory of class. Instead, Thompson goes into great detail, based on a rich variety of primary sources, about the sources of identity that working people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created for themselves. These historians are not doctrinaire in their findings, and they honestly confront the historical realities that they find.

One way of getting a feeling for the journal is to look at its contents. The topics included in the first ten years of publication of Past and Present cover a broad range of historical subjects. Here are some exemplars from the first decade:

• Hill, Christopher. 1952. "Puritans and the Poor." Past & Present (2):32-50. doi: 10.2307/650123. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650123
• Hilton, R. H. 1952. "Capitalism--What's in a Name?" Past & Present (1):32-43. doi: 10.2307/649987. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649987
• Hobsbawm, E. J. 1952. "The Machine Breakers." Past & Present (1):57-70. doi: 10.2307/649989. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649989
• Homans, George Caspar. 1953. "The Rural Sociology of Medieval England." Past & Present (4):32-43. doi: 10.2307/649895. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649895
• Kiernan, V., and Christopher Hill. 1953. "Puritanism and the Poor." Past & Present (3):45-54. doi: 10.2307/650035. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650035
• Hobsbawm, E. J. 1954. "The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century." Past & Present (5):33-53. doi: 10.2307/649822. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649822
• Mondolfo, Rodolfo, and D. S. Duncan. 1954. "The Greek Attitude to Manual Labour." Past & Present (6):1-5. doi: 10.2307/649811. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649811
• Soboul, A. 1954. "Robespierre and the Popular Movement of 1793-4." Past & Present (5):54-70. doi: 10.2307/649823. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649823
• Childe, V. G. 1955. "The Sociology of the Mycenaean Tablets." Past & Present (7):76-77. doi: 10.2307/650174. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650174
• Kosminsky, E. A. 1955. "The Evolution of Feudal Rent in England from the XIth to the XVth Centuries." Past & Present (7):12-36. doi: 10.2307/650170. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650170
• Rudé, George E. 1955. "The Outbreak of the French Revolution." Past & Present (8):28-42. doi: 10.2307/649776. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649776
• Aston, T. H. 1956. "The English Manor." Past & Present (10):6-14. doi: 10.2307/650142. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650142
• Goubert, Pierre. 1956. "The French Peasantry of the Seventeenth Century: A Regional Example." Past & Present (10):55-77. doi: 10.2307/650145. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650145
• Soboul, A. 1956. "The French Rural Community in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries." Past & Present (10):78-95. doi: 10.2307/650146. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650146
• Connell, K. H. 1957. "Peasant Marriage in Ireland after the Great Famine." Past & Present (12):76-91. doi: 10.2307/650016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650016
• Klíma, A. 1957. "Industrial Development in Bohemia 1648-1781." Past & Present (11):87-99. doi: 10.2307/649742. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649742
• Ludloff, R. 1957. "Industrial Development in 16th-17th Century Germany." Past & Present (12):58-75. doi: 10.2307/650015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650015
• Jones, A. H. M. 1958. "The Roman Colonate." Past & Present (13):1-13. doi: 10.2307/649865. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649865
• Małowist, M. 1958. "Poland, Russia and Western Trade in the 15th and 16th Centuries." Past & Present (13):26-41. doi: 10.2307/649867. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649867
• Cobb, R. 1959. "The People in the French Revolution." Past & Present (15):60-72. doi: 10.2307/649832. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649832
• Trevor-Roper, H. R. 1959. "The General Crisis of the 17th Century." Past & Present (16):31-64. doi: 10.2307/650152. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650152
• Briggs, Asa. 1961. "Cholera and Society in the Nineteenth Century." Past & Present (19):76-96. doi: 10.2307/649981. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649981
• Soboul, Albert, and Georges Lefebvre. 1961. "Urban Society in the Orléanais in the Late Eighteenth Century." Past & Present (19):46-75. doi: 10.2307/649980. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649980
• Dore, R. P. 1962. "Talent and the Social Order in Tokugawa Japan." Past & Present (21):60-72. doi: 10.2307/649996. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649996
• Finley, M. I. 1962. "Athenian Demagogues." Past & Present (21):3-24. doi: 10.2307/649993. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649993

Out of this list a number of themes recur: for example, underclass life, revolution, class, and economic history. These topics reflect the theoretical and political interests of the founders and the editors of the journal, and they served to encourage a substantial volume of additional research along these lines in the years that followed. Many of these essays have proven to be a classics in their genres.

Two interesting articles were published in the journal in 1983 about its own history (link). The first was by three of the founding editors of the journal, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, and Eric Hobsbawm. And the other was by Jacques Le Goff, the then-editor of the equally important French history journal, Annales.  These two essays offer very interesting snapshots into the role that the journal played in British history through the mid 1980s.

Hill, Hilton, and Hobsbawm emphasize the intellectual independence of the journal from its inception. This independence derived from the commitment of the board of editors: "It has been the collegiality of the Board which enabled us to know each other, to formulate a consensus about the sort of history we wanted to encourage -- irrespective of ideological or other divergences within the Board -- to establish policies and perspectives for the journal, however tacitly and empirically, and to establish a flexible continuity of policy" (12).

Jacques Le Goff also addresses the Marxist orientation of the journal in his 1983 contribution in these terms:

Never having had any prejudice against Marxism, provided it was open and undogmatic, I was totally able to accept a publication in which there was certainly an element of Marxism but which gave no impression of being subject to a dogma, still less to a party. (14)

Le Goff emphasizes the importance of the intellectual impetus that Past and Present created for historians everywhere. He draws attention to the annual conferences that the Past and Present Society organized, and the importance of many of these discussions for further developments in historical research.

Past and Present has been a leading forum for a particularly dynamic field of historiography in its six decades of publication. Its pages have highlighted the importance of social and economic history; the concrete history of social classes; the dynamics of revolution; the role that technology played in ordinary life in medieval and modern times; the key roles that agriculture and rural life played in early modern history; and underclass social life. These are themes that have a great deal of salience for a Marxist interpretation of history.  But what is displayed in its pages, from beginning to the present, is rigorous, critical history -- not Marxist dogmas about the working class, the peasantry, or the inevitability of social revolution.

(Here is a rational discussion of Hobsbawm's political affiliations in the Guardian; link. And here is a diatribe against Hobsbawm's insufficient commitment to Marxism in the International Marxist Tendency; link. This lengthy piece presents an alternative interpretation of Hobsbawm's life and work. Harvey Kaye provides extensive discussion of these figures in The British Marxist Historians. Also interesting is Michael Scott Christofferson's French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Anti-totalitarian Moment of the 1970s.)

Emergence

photos: Niklas Luhman (top), Mario Bunge (bottom)

One view that has been taken about the causal properties of social structures is that they are emergent: they are properties that appear only at a certain level of complexity, and do not pertain to the items of which the social structure is composed. This view has a couple of important problems, not least of which is one of definition. What specifically is the idea of emergence supposed to mean? And do we have any good reasons to believe that it applies to the social world?

An important recent exponent of the view in question is David Elder-Vass in The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency. Elder-Vass is in fact specific about what he means by the concept. He defines a property of a compound entity or structure as emergent when the property applies only to the structure itself and not to any of its components.

A thing ... can have properties or capabilities that are not possessed by its parts. Such properties are called emergent properties. (4)

An emergent property is one that is not possessed by any of the parts individually and that would not be possessed by the full set of parts in the absence of a structuring set of relations between them. (17)

But, as I argued in an earlier post, this is such a tame version of emergence that it doesn't seem to add much. By E-V's criterion, most properties are emergent -- the sweetness of sugar, the flammability of woven cotton, the hardness of bronze.

What gives the idea of emergence real bite -- but also makes it fundamentally mysterious -- is the additional idea that the property cannot be derived from facts about the components and their arrangements within the structure in question. By this criterion, none of the properties just mentioned are emergent, because their characteristics can in principle be derived from what we know about their components in interaction with each other.

This is the concept of emergence that is associated with holism and anti-reductionism. Essentially it requires us to do our scientific work entirely at the level of the structure itself -- discover system-level properties and powers, and turn our backs on the impulse to explain through analysis.

A kind of compromise view is offered by Herbert Simon in his conception of a complex system in a 1962 article, "The Architecture of Complexity" (link). Here is how he defines the relevant notion of complexity:

Roughly, by a complex system I mean one made up of a large number of parts that interact in a nonsimple way. In such systems, the whole is more than the sum of the parts, not in an ultimate, metaphysical sense, but in the important pragmatic sense that, given the properties of the parts and the laws of their interaction, it is not a trivial matter to infer the properties of the whole. In the face of complexity, an in-principle reductionist may be at the same time a pragmatic holist. (468)

Here Simon favors a view that does not assert ontological independence of system characteristics from individual characteristics, but does assert pragmatic and explanatory independence. In fact, his position seems equivalent to the supervenience thesis: social facts supervene upon facts about individuals. But the implication for research is plain: it is useless to pursue a reductionist strategy for understanding system-level properties of complex systems.

A recent issue of Philosophy of the Social Sciences contains three interesting contributions to different aspects of this topic. Mariam Thalos ("Two Conceptions of Fundamentality") and Shiping Tang ("Foundational Paradigms of Social Sciences") are both worth reading. But Poe Yu-ze Wan's "Emergence a la Systems Theory: Epistemological Totalausschluss or Ontological Novelty?") is directly relevant to the question of emergence, so here I'll focus on his analysis.

Wan distinguishes between two schools of thought about emergence, associated with Niklas Luhmann and Mario Bunge.  Luhmann's conception is extravagantly holistic, whereas Bunge's conception is entirely consistent with the idea that emergent characteristics are nonetheless fixed by properties of the constituents. Wan argues that Luhmann has an "epistemological" understanding of emergence -- the status of a property as emergent is a feature of its derivability or explicability on the basis of lower-level facts.  Bunge's approach, on the other hand, is ontological: even if we can fully explain the higher-level phenomenon in terms of the properties of the lower level, the property itself is still emergent.  So for Bunge, "emergence" is a fact about being, not about knowledge.  Wan also notes that Luhmann wants to replace the "part-whole" distinction with the "environment-system" distinction -- which Wan believes is insupportable (180).  Here is a statement from Luhmann quoted by Wan:

Whenever there is an emergent order, we find the the elements of a presupposed materiality- or energy-continuum … are excluded.  Total exclusion (Totalausschluss) is the condition of emergence. (Luhmann, Niklas. 1992. Wer kennt Wil Martens? Eine Anmerkung zum Problem der Emergenz sozialer System.  Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 44(1): 139-42, 141)

And here is Bunge's definition of emergence, quoted by Wan:

To say that P is an emergent property of systems of kind K is short for "P is a global (or collective or non-distributive) property of a system of kind K, none of whose components or precursors possesses P. (Emergence and Convergence: Qualitative Novelty and the Unity of Knowledge, 15)

Bunge's position here is exactly the same as the conception offered by Elder-Vass above.  It defines emergence as novelty at the higher level -- whether or not that novelty can be explained by facts about the constituents.  Bunge's conception is consistent with the supervenient principle, in my reading, whereas Lumann's is not.

Wan provides an excellent review of the history of thinking about this concept, and his assessment of the issues is one that I for one agree with.  In particular, his endorsement of Bunge's position of "rational emergentism" seems to me to get the balance exactly right: social properties are in some sense fixed by the properties of the constituents; they are nonetheless distinct from those underlying properties; and good scientific theories are justified in referring to these emergent properties without the need of reducing them or replacing them with properties at the lower level.  This is what Simon seems to be getting at in his definition of complex systems, quoted above; and it seems to be equivalent to the idea of explanatory autonomy argued in an earlier post.

My own strategy on this issue is to avoid use of the concept of emergence and to favor instead the idea of explanatory autonomy. This is the idea that mid-level system properties are often sufficiently stable that we can pursue causal explanations at that level, without providing derivations of those explanations from some more fundamental level (link).

The explanatory challenge is very clear: if we want to explain meso-level outcomes on the basis of reference to emergent system characteristics, we can do so.  But we need to have good replicable knowledge of the causal properties of the emergent features in order to develop explanations of other kinds of outcomes based on the workings of the system characteristics.  I would also add that we need to have confidence that the hypothesized system-level characteristics do in fact possess microfoundations at the level of the individual and social actions that underly them; or, in other words, we need to have reason for confidence that the emergent properties our explanations hypothesize do in fact conform to the supervenient relation.

A couple of Wan's sources are particularly valuable for investigators who are interested in pursuing the idea of emergence further:

David Blitz, Emergent Evolution: Qualitative Novelty and the Levels of Reality (Episteme)
Richard Jones, Reductionism: Analysis and the Fullness of Reality
Keith Sawyer, Social Emergence: Societies As Complex Systems

Bourdieu's "field"

image: Emile Zola, 1902

How can sociology treat "culture" as an object of study and as an influence on other sociological processes? This is, of course, two separate questions. First, internally, is it possible to treat philosophy or literature as an embedded sociological process (a point raised by Jean-Louis Fabiani in his treatment of French philosophy (link))?  Can we use the apparatus to pull apart the sociology of the fashion industry?

And second, externally, can we give a rigorous and meaningful interpretation of "bringing culture back in" -- conceptualizing the ways that thought, experience, and the institutions and mental realities of culture impact other large social processes -- e.g. the rise of fascism (link)?

The problem here is to find ways of getting inside "culture" and decomposing it as a set of social, material, and semiotic practices. We need an account of some of the culture mechanisms through which voices develop, acquire validation, and are retransmitted. And we need concrete accounts of how this culture activity influences other socially important processes. Culture cannot be thought of as a monolith if we are to explain its development and trace out its historical influences; rather, we need something like an account of the microfoundations of culture.

One of the fertile voices on this question is that of Pierre Bourdieu.  His core contribution is the idea of cultural life and production being situated in a "field." So what does Bourdieu mean by a field? Is this concept genuinely useful when we aim at providing a sociology of a literary tradition or a body of ideas like "cultural despair"?

One place where Bourdieu provides extensive analysis and application of this construct is in a collection published in 1993, The Field of Cultural Production, and especially in the title chapter, originally published in 1983. Here Bourdieu is primarily interested in literature and art, but it seems that the approach can be applied fruitfully to a wide range of cultural phenomena, including American conservativism and early twentieth century German colonialism.  (George Steinmetz makes extensive use of this concept of the field in his analysis of the causes of specific features of German colonial regimes; The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa.)

The heart of Bourdieu's approach is "relationality" -- the idea that cultural production and its products are situated and constituted in terms of a number of processes and social realities. Cultural products and producers are located within "a space of positions and position-takings" (30) that constitute a set of objective relations.

The space of literary or artistic position-takings, i.e. the structured set of the manifestations of the social agents involved in' the field -- literary or artistic works, of course, but also political acts or pronouncements, manifestos or polemics, etc. -- is inseparable from the space of literary or artistic positions defined by possession of a determinate quantity of specific capital (recognition) and, at the same time, by occupation of a determinate position in the structure of the distribution of this specific capital. The literary or artistic field is a field of forces, but it is also a field of struggles tending to transform or conserve this field of forces. (30)

This description highlights another characteristic feature of Bourdieu's approach to social life -- an intimate intermixture of objective and subjective factors, or of structure and agency.  (This intermixture is also fundamental to Bourdieu's theory of practice in Outline of a Theory of Practice.)  Bourdieu typically wants to help us understand a sociological whole as a set of "doings" within "structures and powers." This is captured in the final sentence of the passage: a "field of forces" but also a "field of struggles". The field of the French novel in the 1890s established a set of objective circumstances to which the novelist was forced to adapt; but it also created opportunities for strategy and struggle for aspiring novelists. And in fact, Emile Zola, pictured above, did much to redefine aspects of that field, both in ideas and in material institutions.

Fundamental to Bourdieu's view is that we can't understand the work of art or literature (or philosophy or science, by implication) purely in reference to itself. Rather, it is necessary to situate the work in terms of other points of reference in meaning and practice. So he writes that we can't understand the history of philosophy as a grand summit conference among the great philosophers (32); instead, it is necessary to situate Descartes within his specific intellectual and practical context, and likewise Leibniz. And the meaning of the work changes as its points of reference shift. "It follows from this, for example, that a position-taking changes, even when the position remains identical, whenever there is change in the universe of options that are simultaneously offered for producers and consumers to choose from.  The meaning of a work (artistic, literary, philosophical, etc.) changes automatically with each change in the field within which it is situated for the spectator or reader" (30).  

This fact of relationality and embeddedness raises serious issues of interpretation for later readers:

One of the major difficulties of the social history of philosophy, art or literature is that it has to reconstruct these spaces of original possibles which, because they were part of the self-evident givens of the situation, remained unremarked and are therefore unlikely to be mentioned in contemporary accounts, chronicles or memoirs. (31)

Here is how Bourdieu describes the intellectual field within which philosophy proceeds in a time and place:

In fact, what circulates between contemporary philosophers, or those of different epochs, are not only canonical texts, but a whole philosophical doxa carried along by intellectual rumour -- labels of schools, truncated quotations, functioning as slogans in celebration or polemics -- by academic routine and perhaps above all by school manuals (an unmentionable reference), which perhaps do more than anything else to constitute the 'common sense' of an intellectual generation. (32)

This background information is not merely semiotic; it is institutional and material as well.  It includes "information about institutions -- e.g. academies, journals, magazines, galleries, publishers, etc. -- and about persons, their relationships, liaisons and quarrels, information about the ideas and problems which are 'in the air' and circulate orally in gossip and rumour" (32).  So the literary product is created by the author; but also by the field of knowledge and institutions into which it is offered.

Another duality that Bourdieu rejects is that of internal versus external readings of a work of literature or art.  We can approach the work of art from both perspectives -- the qualities of the work, and the social embeddedness that its production and reception reveal.

In defining the literary and artistic field as, inseparably, a field of positions and a field of position-takings we also escape from the usual dilemma of internal ('tautegorical') reading of the work (taken in isolation or within the system of works to which it belongs) and external (or 'allegorical') analysis, i.e. analysis of the social conditions of production of the producers and consumers which is based on the -- generally tacit -- hypothesis of the spontaneous correspondence or deliberate matching of production to demand or commissions. (34)

A key aspect of Bourdieu's conception of a field of cultural production is the material facts of power and capital. Capital here refers to the variety of resources, tangible and intangible, through which a writer or artist can further his/her artistic aspirations and achieve "success" in the field ("book sales, number of theatrical performances, etc. or honours, appointments, etc." (38)). And power in the cultural field is "heteronomous" -- it is both internal to the institutions of the culture field and external, through the influence of the surrounding field of power within which the culture field is located. Here is an intriguing diagram that Bourdieu introduces to represent the complex location of art activity within the broader field of social power and the market.

These comments give us a better idea of what a "field" encompasses.  It is a zone of social activity in which there are "creators" who are intent on creating a certain kind of cultural product.  The product is defined, in part, by the expectations and values of the audience -- not simply the creator.  The audience is multiple, from specialist connoisseurs to the mass public.  And the product is supported and filtered by a range of overlapping social institutions -- galleries, academies, journals, reviews, newspapers, universities, patrons, sources of funding, and the market for works of "culture."  It is also important to observe that we could have begun this inventory of components at any point; the creator does not define the field any more than the critic, the audience, or the marketplace.

I see some similarities between Bourdieu's conception of a field and the broad ideas of paradigm and research tradition in the history and sociology of science. Both ideas encompass a range of different kinds of things -- laboratories, journals, audiences, critics, and writers and scientists. Here Lakatos and Kuhn are relevant, but so are Bruno Latour and Wiebe Bijker. In each case there is some notion of rules of assessment -- explicit or tacit. And in each case we are given breadth enough to consider the social "determinants" of the cultural product at one end -- economy, institutions of training and criticism -- and some notion of the relative autonomy of the text or object at the other (truth and warrant, beauty and impact).

The point mentioned above about the validity and compatibility of both internal and external analysis of a work of art is equally important in the sociology of science: to identify some of the social conditions surrounding the process of scientific research does not mean that we cannot arrive at judgments of truth and warrant for the products of scientific research. (This point has come up previously in a discussion of Robert Merton's sociology of science (link).)

This is a very incomplete analysis of Bourdieu's concept of the field; but it should give an idea of the leverage that Bourdieu provides in framing a scheme of analysis for culture and ideas as concrete sociological factors and objects of study.  Certainly Bourdieu's writings on these subjects -- especially in The Field of Cultural Production -- repay close reading by sociologists interested in broadening their frameworks for thinking about culture.  (Jeremy Lane's Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction is a good introduction to Bourdieu's sociology, though it doesn't give much attention to this particular topic.)

Proto-industrialization

The concept of proto-industrialization became an influential one in economic history in the 1970s and 1980s. The term refers to a system of rural manufacture that was intermediate between autarchic feudal production and modern urban factory production. Variously described as rural manufacturing, domestic manufacture, cottage industry, and a "putting-out" system, it was a dispersed system of production that used traditional methods of production and extensive low-paid rural labor to produce goods for the market, both domestic and international. Unlike modern capitalist manufacturing, proto-industrialization did not depend on rising labor productivity as a source of higher profits; instead, merchants increased the scale of their businesses by extending production to additional households and workers.

One of the first to use the term was Franklin Mendels in 1970 (link), who applied the concept to extra-urban manufacturing in Flanders in the eighteenth century.  Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and Jurgen Schlumbohm's Industrialization Before Industrialization provided an extensive historical and theoretical treatment of the phenomenon in 1977.

It has long been known that industrial commodity production in the countryside for large inter-regional and international markets was of considerable importance during the formative period of capitalism. (1)

What are the chief economic characteristics of a stylized proto-industrialization system of production?

• Rural labor, often sideline activities beside agricultural work
• Production for a market, often through urban-based merchants
• Extremely low returns to labor -- squeezed labor
• Low technology, very low rate of technological change
• Extensive rather than intensive growth

In order for rural industry to develop on a large scale in a region, several factors needed to be present: extensive demand for manufactured goods by concentrated populations and developed patterns of trade; a concentration of merchant wealth; and a population of under-employed rural householders who could be recruited into sideline manufacturing employment.  Peter Kriedte explained the regional pattern of emergence of proto-industrialization in terms of the different forms of power possessed by lords in different parts of Europe:

The power-constellations and their impact on the spatial expansion of industrial commodity production were different in east-central and eastern Europe.  Peasants were more directly and more firmly dominated by their lords, and there was little room for the development of rural industries....

But whether a region developed rural industries or not was determined not so much by the extent of feudal charges as by the form in which peasants paid them. And the form of payment was determined not only by the social relationship in the narrow sense between the feudal lord and his dependent peasants but also by the overall relations of production. (18)

This argument is similar to that offered by Robert Brenner in his explanation of different courses that agricultural development took in different parts of Europe (link).

The regions where proto-industrialization developed earliest, according to Kriedte, were in western Europe:

The first regions of relatively dense rural industry had developed in England, the southern Low Countries, and southern Germany in the late Middle Ages. The decisive thrust which brought about the phase of proto-industrialization came at the end of the sixteenth and in the seventeenth centuries.... Quantitative changes in supply and demand combined to produce a cumulative process which led to a new phase. (23)

Generally speaking, a region that has made the transition to commercial agriculture is barren soil for rural manufacturing, for the simple reason that commercial farmers earn a sufficient income through farming.  However, some areas of commercial agriculture also became significant concentrations of rural manufacturing:

When proto-industrialization gained a foothold in a region of commercial agriculture despite these basic assumptions, special circumstances are usually responsible.  First of all, commercial agriculture, generally, could only develop in a highly urbanized region.  The concentrated demand of a large town or a whole network of towns was necessary in order to induce the self-sufficient peasant family holding to enter on the path of specialization. (27)

Hans Medick emphasizes the micro-side of the equation -- the economics of the peasant household in the late Middle Ages.

The central feature of the 'rationality' underlying the family economy is the fact that its productive activity was not giverned primarily by the objective of maximizing profit and achieving a monetary surplus.  The maximization of the gross produce rather than the net profit is the goal of family labour. (41)

In other words, the peasant household is governed by the dynamic that leads to "self-exploitation" in the sense described by Chayanov -- use of family labor to the point approaching a marginal product of zero (The Theory of Peasant Economy). Under these circumstances, it is economically rational to expend some family labor on sideline manufacturing if there is some income associated with this activity -- no matter how low the wage.

PI is described as transitional because its economic possibility was created by the political situation of feudal cities -- specialized manufacture in cities under a regulated guild system, self-production in the countryside.  And, it is sometimes claimed, proto-industrialization prepared the ground for a full modern systems of capitalist industry.  The "transition" scenario might be framed along these lines:

But it is also possible that proto-industrialization was an alternative to capitalist development -- a cousin rather than a grandparent.  Here the diagram would look differently:

Proto-industrialization is a significant historical phenomenon, we might say, because it represented a large and marked change in the organization and volume of production of goods from the medieval period to the early modern period.  Towns and cities were already economically active locations, representing both concentrated demand and concentrated production.  But the rural population was almost entirely involved in farming and sideline production for home use.  The emergence of a significant level of production in rural hinterlands was a shift, and so it is worth asking why this change occurred in the circumstances in which it did.  The change dynamics Kriedte, Medick, and Schlumbohm describe include population change; urban economic regulations; incentives for feudal rights-holders to transition to cash obligations; and the existence of inter-regional trade and markets that extend beyond the local village.

Several questions are especially pertinent to the study of this phenomenon.

• Was proto-industrialization indeed a step on the path to modern manufacturing and capitalism?
• What were the factors that led to the regional spread of rural manufacturing in parts of Europe?
• What factors explain the geographical distribution of rural industry in the early modern period in Europe?
• How did the economic and political institutions of the feudal order set the stage for the emergence of proto-industrialization?
• What role did demographic factors play in this period of economic development?
• Was PI a distinctive "system" or simply a predictable economic adaptation to rising demand for finished goods?
• What is the connection between PI and the "modern world system" of trade?

Here are some relevant causal factors that might be invoked in formulating answers to these questions:

• Rising population and population density
• Rising volumes of inter-regional trade
• Shifts in the political power of various collective actors
• Changes in political institutions -- central state, local civic arrangements
• Improvements in agricultural productivity
• Emergence of new technologies
• Persistence/change of the guild system
• ...

It is tempting to frame this problem in the terms offered by Thunen and early economic geographers in "modeling" the economic changes that would be predicted on a featureless plane populated by economically rational agents (VON THUNEN'S ISOLATED STATE an English Edition of Der Isolierte Staat). Imagine a sort of "SimCity" simulation that begins with a sprinkling of mid-sized towns and cities with given levels of production and trade regulated by guilds, located within a countryside consisting of manors with serfs and small peasant farms.  There is trade between town and country, since the towns must import food for the urban population, and there are some goods needed in the countryside that cannot be produced there.  But trade is limited, labor mobility is limited, and the market economy is only a small fraction of all economic production.  The actors in this story are merchants, lords, bonded serfs, free peasants, and officials.  Now postulate that the actors respond rationally to some set of changing circumstances.  Which of various initial scenarios lead to a proliferation of rural manufacture?

We might postulate that merchants have only a few accessible strategies for achieving a return on their wealth.  Investing in production and trade is one such strategy.  Town-based production was heavily regulated, however, and the opportunities for profits were limited.  A large under-employed labor force was available in the rural periphery of the towns.  So a strategy of "putting-out" materials and paying low wages to rural producers was an attractive one.

This discussion relies heavily on a very specific set of historical and institutional characteristics -- the economic and demographic conditions of Western Europe in the early modern period. But it is interesting to compare these developments with some similar patterns in China's economic history. For example, consider Mark Elvin's description of merchant-based manufacturing in Ming China in The Pattern of the Chinese Past.  It is also interesting to compare the very different analysis in Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin's World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization. Sabel and Zeitlin describe a different alternative to factory production: high wage, high return artisanal production, surviving well into the era of modern factory production.