This book raises a vast range of problems. To make the paper manageable, I can only concentrate on the major argument: Anderson’s explanation of absolutism. I do not consider Book I, chapters 5 &. 6, Book II, chapter 7, and the two appendices. These deal with cases where neither absolutism nor the basic economic changes which Anderson relates to absolutism occur. If one argues that Anderson’s positive explanations of absolutism do not work, then the counter-factual function of these chapters disappears.
The paper is divided as follows:
1) Anderson’s definition of absolutism.
- His explanations of absolutism.
- Omissions and alternatives.
- Definitions
Some historians have disputed whether there is such a thing as absolutism because it is difficult to distinguish it sharply from other forms of monarchical government. Power never is absolute, monarchs never actually claim absolute power, and there is often institutional continuity with monarchy not classified as absolutist.[1]
It is, however, undeniable that, from the sixteenth century onwards, a number of monarchical states in Europe were raising massively larger revenues and armies than hitherto and that, in many cases, institutional, formal checks on monarchical power seemed weak or non-existent. Furthermore, there was such a sweeping breadth of change of this sort that any adequate explanation must be equally sweeping. Anderson’s project is a valid one.
Nevertheless, there are tricky definitional problems. Anderson nowhere defines absolutism. All he provides are theoretical statements, e.g. that absolutism is ‘… a redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination’,[2] but these are part of the explanation and there cannot be used to define absolutism without arguing in a circle. The definitional problem would disappear if absolutism was related exclusively and exhaustively to its causes. One could simply argue that absolutism is the form of government associated with the breakdown of primary feudalism by the extension of commodity production. There would, of course, be enormous problems in delineating such a social formation.
However, this is not the case. Anderson admits that a social formation of this sort might not give rise to absolutism (e.g. Poland) and that absolutism can exist in societies with other social formations (e.g. late nineteenth century Russia). We do, therefore, require a political definition of absolutism rather than being asked to accept that it ‘is’ what exists in France in the two centuries or so before 1709, or in Prussia from the Great Elector until some time into the nineteenth century.
Explanations
If we accept Anderson’s distinction between a western and an eastern form of absolutism, in each case there are three crucial steps in his argument that need to be examined.
For the western model these are:
(a) Something occurred which can be described as the development of commodity production within the feudal mode of production.
(b) The occurrence of (a) led to a weakening of local noble power.
(c) The occurrence of (b) required and produced a reconstitution of ‘noble power at a central, state level.
Statement (a) is a very sweeping one. There is an uncertainty as to whether Anderson is referring primarily to the commutation of dues into money or to the growing importance of production for the market.[3] The two are linked insofar as a peasant must sell a proportion of his product in the market if he has to make money payments. But this might only apply to a tiny proportion of total output. Commutation of dues into money is a fairly precise process, the most important phase of which had taken place long before the rise of absolutist monarchies. The growth of commodity relations is a much more general process which takes place haltingly, unevenly, and with many local reversals, over a number of centuries. To relate it to absolutism it would be necessary to break down this process into much more precise statements. Yet Anderson does nothing more than assert that this occurred. His most fundamental point remains, like the ‘rising middle class’ or ‘industrialisation’ in other explanations of widespread change, an invisible, long-term cause.[4]
Even if one accepted (a), it is difficult to know why it should lead to (b). Commodity production can involve many different relationships between lord and peasant. One can counter examples of absentee landowners with accounts of closer supervision in share-cropping arrangements or unscrupulous exploitation of short-term leases, in which no great assistance seems to be required from the state. Other factors, such as the density and rate of change of population will be as important, if not more important, than the extent of commodity production in determining the local power of nobles. In any case, it is incumbent upon Anderson to indicate how one would test his assertion. Would one expect to find areas where commodity production had become important to be characterised by a higher incidence of protest and disorder than in other areas, or by a greater use of troops for the collection of dues? Anderson does not tell us. As with statement (a), we are asked just to accept it and the account moves quickly on to the political effects of these alleged causes.
One should also be clear as to what would not be an acceptable explanation of (b). One might accept that there is a shift in some areas to what Porchnev calls a ‘centralised feudal due’, and that this is accompanied by an increased degree of absentee landownership and noble dependence upon state agencies for revenue.[5] However, one could argue that it was the attraction and power of the state which led to a weakening of local noble power, rather than the other way around. Of course, one would then have to provide an alternative explanation for the growth of state power.
In any case, Anderson’s linking of weakened nobility to western absolutism is questionable on empirical grounds.
Anderson begins his case studies with Spain. Spain presents special problems. One can talk only of Castilian rather than Spanish absolutism.[6] Castile was, in many ways, a new state. In newly conquered areas, nobles wielded enormous power. They established towns and laid out estates. On these great latifundia, Castilian nobles seem to fit Anderson’s description of east European nobility.[7]
This would leave one with two members of Anderson’s western model of absolutisms France and Sweden. Sweden is described as an ‘under-determined’ absolutism,[8] which is one way of saying that it is not absolutist in the full Andersonian sense.
This leaves us with a model with one member. Occasionally, Anderson’s concept of western absolutism seems to be derived from France, where the development of strong monarchy was so clearly based on internal resources. That does not mean that one should accept that his explanations work for France.
The failure to provide evidence for statements (a) and (b) or to indicate how one can link empirically the various levels of Anderson’s argument means that the bulk of the book can be read as a well-controlled description of political change which is often brilliant and illuminating. However, these descriptions can be judged without any reference to Anderson’s basic explanations. What we have is not an explanation of political events in Marxist terms but a ‘fit’ between these political events and certain assertions about the underlying changes which are supposed to explain those events.
The major difficulty at this third level of argument is that the principal resistance to the development of strong monarchies came from nobles. Anderson resorts to the ‘cunning of reason’ argument: a class interest can assert itself against the will of many of the members of that class.[9]
One problem here is in deciding who are the nobility. It is the heterogeneity of the nobility, both between different states and within individual states, that is striking. During the Fronde, the sorts of nobility which resisted the crown and their motives varied enormously. They all lost their battles when royal authority was successfully reasserted. In a society dominated by the ethos of aristocracy, it was inevitable that the major beneficiaries were also nobles. The differences between the winners and the losers would seem to be best dealt with by considering them as clusters of elites with different economic and other resources rather than as a single class unwillingly and un- comprehendingly adjusting to change.[10] Many adjustments can be explained without recourse to deeper factors. The stimulus to a regrouping of noble power can often be explained by reference to external threats. The mechanics of such regroupings can often be explained in terms of the sorts of political channels available (patronage networks, representation through estates). Anderson takes account of such factors in the way he treats political and ideological matters, but this involves serious problems for a Marxist approach to which I will return later.
One has a similar trio of statements to analyse for the eastern model of absolutism.
(a) There occurred a process which Anderson, following earlier writers, calls ‘re-feudalisation’.
(b) This involved a tightening up of noble control over the peasantry.
(c) This, in turn, was achieved with the help of the state which reformed the nobility into a state service class.
(a) is a much more acceptable assertion than its equivalent for western Europe as it refers to a specific process which has been well studied. The main problem is to explain it primarily in terms of internal causes.
(b) is actually another way of stating (a). This immediately raises a general problem Anderson has to face. He argues that there is a political relationship built into the very concept of a feudal mode of production.[11] He also attributes enormous independent importance to certain ideological factors.[12] Consequently, any central focus, e.g. ‘economy’ or ‘power’ disappears from view and it is often difficult to distinguish Anderson’s Marxism from other historians’ pluralism.
For (c) there is a problem of how much of this process of refeudalisation occurred without any state assistance. Hellie cites the ‘non-decree’ interpretation of this process in Russia which looks to factors such as peasant indebtedness and long-term residence as the major explanations and sees state decrees as a legal confirmation of what had happened rather than as an important contributory factor.[13]
In other words, one might agree with Anderson as to what took place. One might also agree that the military threat from the west was the major cause of the transformation of the state. However, one might also consider that the relationship between military change and enserfment was much looser than Anderson suggests.[14] This is made clear by the difficult case of Poland.
Poland underwent all the economic changes which, in terms of Anderson’s argument, would require the political buttress of absolutism. The reasons offered for the absence of this development are that a stable, rather than a falling, population does not require the same rigorous control as areas with declining populations and that, therefore, a strong central state is not needed to impose this sort of control; that there was no serious military threat to Poland during the period in which surrounding states built up absolutist states; and that the differentiations within the Polish nobility were so great that they inhibited co-operation with the monarch.[15] I find these points persuasive but it is difficult to relate them to Anderson’s general model. Population decline was closely related to war. Therefore, this and the second factor relate to politico-military explanations. On the third point, one can cite enormous internal differentiations of wealth within the Spanish, French and Russian aristocracy. Only in Prussia, as Anderson points out, is absolutism linked to a fairly homogenous nobility of middling wealth.[16]
What one is pushed towards then is a pluralist explanation: that military threat combined with commercial stimuli combined with a particular internal socio-political structure of the nobility combined with a particular balance of power between lord and peasant combined with particular levels and rates of change in the population can produce strong military states. This is incompatible with the general explanation offered by Anderson.
So far, I have only looked at the skeleton of Anderson’s argument. There are additional factors, especially for western Europe, which require consideration.
Anderson argues that western absolutism is far more complex than its eastern counterpart.[17] There is no sharp distinction between state power and the private power of the nobility. The process of commodity production is tied up with the increasing importance of capitalism. Where such capitalist developments are particularly important – the Netherlands, England, north Italy – or where states are too small or urban society too important – western and southern Germany, northern Italy, the Netherlands – then the conditions which could give rise to absolutism are absent. Absolutist states require the dominance of a feudal nobility over a large territory. In some of these territories, urban and capitalist elements are seen as subordinate features of the social formation which nevertheless crucially condition the character of absolutism. Anderson writes of capitalism, that it ‘over-determined’ the emergence of absolutism.[18]
There are two main problems in this treatment of capitalism.
Firstly, there is the problem of method. How does one decide when feudalism is the dominant mode of production and capitalism the subordinate mode of production? One sees the problem in sharp form when Anderson argues (by what seem to be the most arbitrary assumptions) that capitalism was the dominant mode of production in late nineteenth century Russia.[19] This arbitrary usage of dominance/subordination, coupled with the slippery notion of the concept of ‘secondary feudalism’,[20] creates the danger that one will simply read back the appropriate economic arrangements from political events.
Even if one could solve this problem satisfactorily, one might dispute Anderson*s arguments on empirical grounds. In Spain, for example, just as one finds it difficult to accept Anderson’s assigning of the nobility to the western category of absolutism, so one finds it difficult to accept that the role of Atlantic trade was to ‘over-determine’ the development of absolutism. Rather, it seems to be the crucial cause by providing an enormous boost to state revenue.
What one then has to explain is the Iberian, particularly the Spanish, initiative and success in the Atlantic trade and how and why this success could be turned into a new sort of political power. Parry’s book provides a convincing approach to the first question.[21] The shifting of long-established financial concerns into Spain but maintaining contacts with Augsburg, Genoa, etc. which made it possible to turn bullion into armies, provides the key to answering the second question.[22] Neither involve any consideration of some underlying change in the feudal mode of production. One must, of course, take into account the readiness of nobility to play a leading role in the political and military developments which then occurred but that is rather different from the approach of Anderson.
- Omissions and alternatives
One can broaden this criticism of Anderson. Anderson plays down the role of external factors in his general models of absolutism. Instead, he makes basic internal changes within each state the crucial determinant of absolutism, although these interact with other factors. Yet what strikes one most forcibly is the enormously varied social and economic structures on which different absolutisms developed. The search for the unity which underlies absolutist developments must look somewhere else.
This can be seen in another recent Marxist work by Wallerstein.[23] Here, Europe is placed within a world context. The varied opportunities and responses within this new world system (which is what Wallerstein deals with) create new tensions within Europe. At times, as individual states obtain a disproportionately high access to these new opportunities, they threaten to dominate Europe. This leads to political responses from other states.
Obviously, absolutism is only one response. Whether it takes place and in what precise form is dependent upon the internal situation in each state. The character of the nobility is probably the most important single factor in this internal situation. Looked at in this way, Anderson has many illuminating points to make. But these points can be detached from the basic framework within which Anderson places them.
Also, one should not over-emphasise the degree of change within society generally that accompanied the development of the absolutist state. The absolutist state was relatively weak and detached from society in comparison with the contemporary state. In our society, fundamental change in the character of the state would involve fundamental social and economic change. When the state is a much more limited agency that is not the case. Anderson ‘over-explains’ absolutism.
The book asks a legitimate question. The brilliant and complex answer, however, has many defects. Anderson fails to provide empirical evidence for the most fundamental assertions in the book. He fails even to indicate, in principle, what evidence might support these assertions. In some cases, it is difficult to know how evidence could be used. He fails to indicate how one would test his assertions about the links between the different levels of his argument. Much of the book tends to become narrative of political change. Much of this narrative seems to be as amenable to a pluralist treatment as to Anderson’s particular Marxist approach. He postulates too comprehensive a relationship between changes in the nature of the state and general socio-economic change. He overemphasises internal socio-economic changes and underestimates the importance of an uneven and combined development of power relationships between states which, in turn, are linked to external factors such as Atlantic trade.
However, the book reminds us sharply that there is a general dimension to political change in modern Europe which underlies any particular example. Some answer to the question Anderson asks is required, even for the specialist historian. To provide so sustained an answer to this huge question as Anderson does is an achievement in itself. It would certainly be worth trying to turn some of Anderson’s fundamental assertions into more nuanced and testable statements because, in principle, it would seem obvious that the particular ‘form of extraction of surplus product’[24] has political implications.
Also, the book works very well in the field of comparative political history. Anderson is right to make the political relationship between nobility and monarchy the crucial feature of absolutist monarchies. His accounts of the reasons why this relationship differs from one case to another (venal office, service nobility, etc.) are convincing and original.
These are positive features even if one contends that the basic explanation of absolutism offered by the book is unacceptable.
9 August 1976
[1] R. Mousnier and F. Hartung, ‘Quelques Problèmes concernant la Monarchie Absolue’, X Congress Internazionale di Scienzi Storici – Relazioni IV (Florence, 1955); P. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974), pp. 44ff, hereafter cited as ‘Anderson’.
[2] Anderson, p. 18.
[3] On money dues, see Anderson, p. 19; on commodity relations, see Anderson, p. 20.
[4] Anderson’s bald assertions on this matter are regressive in comparison with the debates on the ‘transition from feudalism to capitalism’ (newly printed in book form under the title The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London, 1976)), where different Marxist historians deal with the problem of defining the character of early modern European economies.
[5] See the reference in Anderson, p. 35. Generally, see B. Porchnev, Die Volksaufstände in Frankreich vor der Fronde 1623-1648 (Leipzig, 1954), especially pp. 376-86.
[6] J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469-1716 (London, 1970), chapter 3; and, by the same author, ‘The Decline of Spain’ in T. Aston (ed.), Crisis in Europe (London, 1965), pp. 167-93.
[7] On the matter of crown assistance to nobles, which is similar to eastern European cases see J. Highfield, ‘The Catholic Kings and the Titled Nobility of Castile’ in J. Hale (ed.), Europe in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1965), pp, 358-85; and C. Jago, ‘The Influence of Debt on the Relations between Crown and Aristocracy in Seventeenth Century Castile’, Economic History Review (1973), pp. 218-36.
[8] Anderson, p.184. ‘Under-determination’ and ‘over-determination’ are concepts which raise all sorts of methodological problems which I do not have space to discuss.
[9] For the general argument see Anderson, pp. 47-8, 53-5.
[10] This is the sort of approach outlined by J.H. Hexter, ‘A new framework for social history’ in Reappraisals in History (London, 1963), pp.
[11] For the general definition of feudalism provided by Anderson, see the volume which precedes the one under discussion, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London, 1974), pp.147-53.
Consequently, one could provide a ‘political’ explanation of economic change which would be very different from Anderson’s accounts but which would remain Marxist. Such an approach is indicated in a recent article by R. Brenner, ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe’ in Past and Present (70), pp. 30-75.
For a Marxist attempt to avoid confusing relations of production with relations of coercion see B. Hindess and P. Hirst, Pre-capitalist Modes of Production (London, 1975), especially pp.223-33 which, in effect, criticises the sort of position taken by Anderson, both in defining feudalism and the role of the state in a feudal society.
[12] See, for example, his comments on Roman law, Anderson, pp. 24-29.
[13] R. Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago. 1971), pp. 1-10.
[14] For a general view of this emphasis on the military factor see Hellie, op.cit. pp. 17-18, Anderson’s criticisms of Hellie (Anderson, fn15, pp. 336-7) are weak and turn upon whether one accepts a Marxist definition of the state or not.
[15] On stable population see Anderson, pp. 285-6 in particular; on military threats p. 286; on internal differentiation of the nobility, pp. 284-5, 298.
[16] Anderson, p. 262.
[17] See generally, Anderson, Book I, Chapter 1.
[18] Anderson, pp. 22-4, 39-40.
[19] Anderson, pp. 352-3.
[20] This is simply my shorthand term to describe Anderson’s notion of a feudal mode of production without serfdom, with a ‘generalised commutation of dues into money rents’ (Anderson, p.19) and set in the wider context of a ‘transitional social formation’ marked by the ‘spread of commodity production and exchange’ (Anderson, p. 18).
[21] J.H. Parry, The Discovery of the Sea (London, 1974), especially Part I. See also I. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974), pp. 37-44. Anderson does not touch upon this question.
[22] See, for example, F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Vol. 1 (London, 1972), pp. 476-515 and Vol. 2 (London, 1973), pp. 693-700.
[23] Wallerstein, op. cit.
[24] M. Dobb, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, op. cit., p.166.
