For Marx, the major determinants of historical change lay within the dominant mode of production of a specific social formation. The mode of production involves a labour process (elements: labour power, instruments, materials) carried on at a specific level of technological development by men who work within the context of a specific set of property relationships. In any social formation above physical subsistence level, there is an economic surplus. The strategic social relationship is that between social classes defined primarily (though not exclusively) by whether they control, or do not control, the means of production. Those who control the means of production form the dominant class, and appropriate the surplus. The kind of property relation that exists is itself a significant limiting factor on the kinds of technology that can be developed within a particular productive mode. It is mediated through ideological beliefs and cemented by institutions of domination, notably the state. Thus “the essential difference between the various economic formations of society … lies only in the form in which … surplus labour is in each case extracted from the direct producer, the labourer”.[i] It is this, according to Marx, that “determines the relationship of ruler and ruled … It is always the direct relation of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers – a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thus its social productivity – which reveals … the hidden basis of the whole social structure and with it … the corresponding specific form of the states”.[ii] Marx left a number of points unclear, notably the exact causal relations deemed to exist between the elements of his model. For instance, the base/superstructure formulation of the 1859 Preface gave the impression of a one-way determination of base on the ideological and political superstructure belied by his more detailed analyses elsewhere. He also left a number of problems unresolved, a major one being, as Marx himself said, “the relations of different state forms to different economic structures of society”.[iii]
The second of Perry Anderson’s brilliantly written volumes may be seen, in part, as an answer to the last problem, as exemplified in an analysis of the absolutist states of Europe. But the two books have a greater significance than this. Anderson is clear that Marx and Engels are open to adverse criticism, not only for particular errors of historical judgement (though Engels’s judgements are nearly always superior to Marx’s. Lineages of the Absolutist State – henceforth, abbreviated as LAS – note 23), but also for theoretical weaknesses. Certain fundamental revisions are proposed to the whole Marxian perspective as an approach to large scale comparative history.
Anderson distinguishes between a social formation and a mode of production: “Social formations … are … always concrete combinations of different modes of production, organised under the dominance of one of them” (Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism – henceforth PAF: 22). Like Marx, he asserts that “the resolution of structural crises in a given mode of production always depends on the direct intervention of the class struggle” (PAF: note 198), and that such conflict “is ultimately resolved at the political – not at the economic or cultural – level of society. It is the construction and destruction of the states which deal the basic shifts in the relations of production, as long as classes subsist” (LAS: 11). However, he differs radically from at least the Marx of the 1859 Preface in asserting that the typical resolution of such a structural crisis is not one “in which vigorous (economic) forces of production burst triumphantly through a higher productivity and society on their ruins. On the contrary, the forces of production typically tend to stall and recede within the existent relations of production” and these must first be changed. “In other words, the relations of production generally change prior to the forces of production in an epoch of transition, and not vice versa” (PAF: 204).
Anderson further makes a distinction implicit in Marx, but takes it a good deal further than Marx did:
In all forms in which the direct producer remains the ‘possessor’ of the means of production … the property relation must at the same time appear as a direct relation of lordship and servitude, so that the direct producer is not free; a lack of freedom which may be reduced from serfdom with enforced labour to a merely tributary relationship … Under such conditions the surplus labour for the nominal owner of the land can be extorted from them only through extra-economic pressure, whatever the form assumed may be.[iv]
Anderson distinguishes between capitalism and all pre-capitalist modes of production (nomadic pastoralism, slave and feudal modes, dismissing the notion of an Asiatic mode in Appendix 5 of LAS), in that, whereas the former extracts the surplus through the mechanism of the exchange economy, the latter all extract the surplus by means of extra-economic sanctions (kinship, customary, religious, legal or political).
The ‘superstructures’ of kinship, religion, law or the state necessarily enter into the constitutive structure of the mode of production in pre-capitalist social formations … In consequence, pre-capitalist modes of production cannot be defined except via their political, legal and ideological superstructures, since these are what determine the type of extra-economic coercion that specifies them.
There are (at least) three analytically distinguishable elements within any mode of production: economic production, juridical property and politico-ideological power. The second can never be separated in any analysis of the other two: “Its absolutely central position within any mode of production derives from its linkage of the two, which in pre-capitalist social formations becomes an outright and official fusion” (LAS: 403-5). In effect, this is to obliterate the base-superstructure distinction of any meaning for any mode other than capitalism. It remains necessary for Anderson to carefully specify the relationships among the variables now said to constitute a mode of production. For, otherwise, what we have is a pluralist or multi-causal framework where the respective explanatory “weight” of the variables is given no precise theoretical specification, but changes with the kind of events being described. In this connection, the concept of over-determination is given a lot of work to do. We shall return to this: first we shall look at two of the extra-economic factors which are of predominant importance in Anderson’s account; ideology and the state.
Although there is no clear general statement concerning the relation between ideological belief and a given mode of production, cultural factors and institutions as bearers of culture, are given a large explanatory role at crucial points in the two books. Thus slavery is seen as a labour intensive form of economy inimical to the use of technical innovation; but “the structural constraint of slavery upon technology … lay not so much in a direct extra-economic causality … as in the mediate social ideology which enveloped the totality of manual work in the classical world, contaminating hired and even independent labour with the stigma of debasement” (PAF: 25). Later, in discussing the transition to feudalism, Anderson emphasises the “prior ideological transformations wrought by the Church”[v] which stressed work as meritorious rather than as debasing (PAF: 183). Indeed, the Church ensured that the collapse of the Graeco-Roman world did not lead to the loss of its cultural heritage, and “objectively” performed the role of a “specific vessel” by which that heritage was passed on (PAF: 137). The full significance of this becomes evident at the end of the second volume, where the rise and eventual dominance of capitalism uniquely in Europe is related to crucial differences in the cultural experiences of Europe as opposed to anywhere else in the world.
In a comparison with Japan, the only other advanced industrial capitalism outside Europe and its overseas settlements, Anderson notes that, despite a radical diversity of origins, Europe and Japan shared the two fundamental structural features of feudalism: “a rigorous parcellisation of sovereignty and scalar private property in land” (LAS: 414).[vi] Yet Japan did not develop capitalism endogenously: the fundamental impetus came from the exogenous impact of Western imperialism. Missing in Japan were not only all the key institutions of absolutism, but also – and this is critical – “the perdurable inheritance of Classical Antiquity … what rendered the unique passage to capitalism possible in Europe was the concatenation of antiquity and feudalism” (LAS: 420). Thus, the vitality of the towns in the later feudal period was partly owing to the acceptance of a social and juridical conception of a citizenry classical in memory and derivation, with no parallel outside Europe. The rediscovery of “the classical heritage of Roman Law” facilitated the acceptance of an absolute rather than conditional concept of private property in land, the propagation of which was vital to the breakdown of the feudal order (LAS: 424-6).[vii] The Renaissance was the great historical turning point for Europe; there was no inherent drive within the feudal mode itself which necessitated the rise of capitalism.[viii]
For Marx and Engels, the absolutist state should be understood as the product of class equilibrium between the old feudal nobility and the new urban bourgeoisie. For Anderson, on the contrary, the absolutist state was “a redeployment and recharged apparatus of feudal domination”, which ruled in the collective interest of the feudal aristocracy, despite the intense hostility the latter often evinced towards it (LAS: 18). In both formulations can be seen the need to cope with the “relative autonomy” of the absolutist state in relation to the existing social classes. In the West, the basic structure of absolutism is seen by Anderson as fundamentally determined by a feudal regrouping against the peasant, once serfdom had ended, and secondarily “over-determined” by the rise of an urban bourgeoisie (LAS: 21-2). It protected the aristocracy, yet also functionally ensured the basic interests of a nascent mercantile and manufacturing class. Anderson describes absolutism as, in effect, “the necessary form” of the “political power” of the landed aristocracy, despite their own rebellions and despite the fact that in some cases (France, Russia) these aristocracies lost all semblance of independent political power. In Eastern Europe, absolutism was both a device for the consolidation of serfdom (LAS: 195), and a response to external Western military threats (Sweden, the Habsburgs). The Eastern nobility was forced “to adopt an equivalently centralised state machine, to survive”: Poland did not, and was partitioned (LAS: 198). Thus divergent infrastructures arose in the West and the East, yet the superstructures were convergent. The uneven development of feudalism obliged the Eastern nobility “to match the state structure of the West before they reached any comparable stage of transition towards capitalism”. The result was an absolutist state “in advance of the relations of production on which it was founded” (LAS: 202, 209).
There are two problems about this account. The first concerns the relationship of the absolutist state to the feudal nobility. Anderson tells us that, throughout the history of absolutism, the feudal aristocracy “was never dislodged from its command of political power” (LAS: 18), “this role of the Absolutist State was that of the feudal nobility in the epoch of transition to capitalism” (LAS: 42). Such formulations under-rate two points: that conflicts within classes can be as crucial as conflicts between classes, and that the state can have interests of its own , opposed to the nobility (as Anderson realises (LAS: 108, 110-11). This is exemplified most clearly in the French case, where the monarchy and the nobility competed for the right to exploit the peasantry.[ix] As Anderson states, except for Spain “the primary pattern was the suppression of aristocratic rather than burgher revolts” (LAS: 48). Clearly, in the long term, monarchy and aristocracy shared interests which were opposed to those of the peasantry and the urban bourgeoisie. But, in the short term (which may be many years), choices have to be made among alternatives where it is not obvious what the class interest is, even where it can be shown that a conscious class policy existed. Anderson speaks of absolutism operating “within the necessary bounds of the class whose interests it secured” (LAS: 51). But can we fix these bounds with any precision, or independently of the actual purposes manifested by members of the class? For Anderson, the feudal nobility was not class conscious, having no clear view of its long term, “real”, “objective” class interest: “it had to be broken in to the harsh … discipline” of its own conditions of political rule (LAS: 55). But, on his own account, many of the choices made by absolutism proved inimical to the long term viability of the feudal nobility. The cunning of reason proved abortive.
The second problem is this. Why should we regard the absolutist state in the East as being “in advance of the relations of production on which it was founded” (LAS: 209)? The claim can only make sense if we are to take developments in the West as the normal course of development, but why should we? The implication is that the Eastern absolutist state is, in some sense, an exotic growth to be explained by external factors, an unnatural excrescence on top of the backward agrarian system. Yet the absolutisms of Prussia and Russia proved the most durable of all. Lurking behind Anderson’s formulations here is the ghost of the base-superstructure distinction, implying that a particular kind of economic base can only sustain a limited range of political superstructures.
To return to the concept of over-determination. In Althusser’s version of Marxism, there are two vital elements: one, determination in the last instance by the (economic) mode of production; two, the relative autonomy of the superstructures and their specific effectivity. To over-emphasise the first is to fall into “economism” or even “technologism”; to over-emphasise the second is to fall into “ideologism”. The concept of over-determination can be seen as a way of conceptualising the proper balance between the two elements. The basic contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production is always over-determined “by the historically concrete forms and circumstances in which it is exercised. It is specified by the forms of the superstructure (the state, the dominant ideology, religion, politically organised movements and so on); specified by the internal and external historical situation …”.[x] It is with this notion of over-determination that Anderson works in these two volumes.[xi] It will be sufficient to take two examples of the way the concept is used.
The first concerns the crisis of feudalism in the mid-fourteenth century. Rural reclamation, “which had driven the whole feudal economy forwards for three centuries, eventually over-reached the objective limits of both terrain and social structure” (PAF: 197). Declining yields and a relative overpopulation spelt structural crisis. “This structural crisis war over-determined by a conjunctural catastrophe” (PAF: 201) , the Black Death, which probably led to a fall of 40 per cent of the population of Western Europe by 1400. This factor, of course, can in no way be attributed to the nature of feudalism. The use of “over-determinisation” here emphasises the centrality of the structural weakness in the mode of production at the expense of those factors deemed “over-determining”. The implication is that the structural crisis would have ended the feudal mode in its current form in any case: the Black Death was merely an additional, but not as important a factor, which at most acted as an accelerator of what were inevitable long-term trends. But this is a wholly gratuitous assumption, in no way borne out by the evidence adduced by Anderson. Postan, upon whom Anderson relies heavily for his general account, implies that it is not at all self-evident that the pre-plague situation was sufficiently grave to preclude recovery. Indeed, a lower death-rate, eliminating a certain proportion of the population but not too many, may well have saved, the feudal system.[xii] That is, there is no less evidence (and no more) for the Black Death being the main determinant of the collapse of the feudal system than there is for an irreversible decline of the system prior to the Black Death. The concept of over-determination is used to cover the gap between the theory and the evidence.
This is equally true of our second example, concerning the rise of Prussia in the eighteenth century. Anderson begins his explanation by asking “what was the total political configuration of Germany that made the later dominance of Prussia within it logical and possible?” (LAS: 246). The analysis which follows examines the fragmentation of political units which occurred in Germany, the effect of Swedish military power at crucial junctures, the internal reasons which meant that the other two candidates for German supremacy – Saxony and Bavaria – were ultimately unable to enforce their claims. Yet he concludes: “It was the internal nature of the Prussian social formation which explains its sudden over-shadowing of all other German states … This rise was over-determined by the complex historical totality of the Reich as a whole …” (LAS: 261). Certainly, the internal character of Prussia is essential to the explanation: but there is no more reason to pick this aspect out as the major determinant than there is to pick out any of the other aspects so lucidly delineated by Anderson. Yet, once again, the concept of over-determination is employed to thrust all the other factors into the background and highlight the one favoured by Anderson’s prior theoretical commitment. Alternatively, its use is a way of allowing into the analysis all those relevant factors which are admitted to have influenced the event to be explained, while, at the same time, relegating them by definitional fiat to the role of “secondary determinants”. This is not an admissible procedure. Stripped of the Marxian framework, Anderson’s pluralism and his emphasis on the importance of cultural factors, makes his an apt pupil of Max Weber.
July 1976,
University of Manchester
[i] MEW 23. 231; Cap. I: 200.
[ii] MEW: 25. 799-800; Cap. III: 772.
[iii] Marx to Kugelmann, 28 Becomber 1862, MEW: 30. 633. See my Karl Marx (London 1975), pp. 61-78 for a short account of some of the problems.
[iv] MEW: 25. 793; Cap. III: 771. Note the analysis in L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital (London 1970), pp. 220-4, which leads Balibar to a definition of what he thinks Marx meant by determination in the last instance by the economy. “In different structures, the economy is determined in that it determines which of the instances of the social structure occupies the determinant place.” Lukacs, on the other hand, used the passage as part of his argument as to why class consciousness could not be a feature of pre-capitalist societies. “Because class interests in pre-capitalist society never achieve full (economic) articulation. Hence the structuring of society into castes and estates means that economic elements are inextricably joined to political and religious factors. In contrast to this the rule of the bourgeoisie means the abolition of the estates system and this leads to the organisation of society along class lines.”, History and Class Consciousness (London 1971), p. 55, see pp. 55-9.
[v] “Strange historical object par excellence … the Church has never received theorisation within historical materialism.” (PAF: 131).
[vi] I leave to other contributors the question of whether Anderson’s restricted definition of feudalism is a useful one.
[vii] Thus Marx was right to stress the distinction between the genesis of a mode of production and the self-sustaining character of its structure once created, but he was wrong to claim that the historic presuppositions of capitalism “are past and gone, and hence belong to the history of its formation, but in no way to its contemporary history” (Grundrisse: 363, Eng. Trans.. p. 459).
[viii] Considering the large role attributed to ideological and cultural beliefs in these books, it is disappointing to find Anderson reverting back to talk of an “ideological idiom” when mentioning the relation between religious belief and political conflict. Thus the campaigns of European Absolutism in the period 1550-1660 are seen only as geopolitical dynastic rivalries with a superimposition of religious conflict (LAS: 58).
[ix] See the illuminating remarks in R. Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe”, Past and Present 70 (February 1976), pp. 30-75, at 68-71.
[x] L. Althusser, “Contradiction and Over-Determination” (1962), in For Marx (London 1965), pp. 88-116, especially 90-113.
[xi] See especially PAF: 201, LAS: 22-3, 39, 54, 217, 236-7 note 261, 356. In seminar discussion, Anderson defined over-determination as a situation in which “there is a plurality of causal determinants but there is greater empirical evidence for some rather than for others”. This does not seem to square with the two examples I have cited. It is significant, too, that, in the one clear case that fits Anderson’s description (where he describes the Eastern Absolutisms as centrally determined by the international political system, and secondarily over-determined by internal class conflict), the Marxian framework becomes clearly inadequate.
[xii] M.M. Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society: An Economic History of Britain in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth 1975), p. 43. “In ordinary circumstances a decline in population due to the increasing mortalities and declining birth rates, which were in their turn due to an insufficiency of land, could be expected to correct itself by its own inherent momentum. For as population declined the ratio of land to men could improve and the ability of men to raise enough food to sustain themselves, to marry and to breed, would be enhanced,”
Anderson also faces here a problem which besets all comparative historians: the need to develop proper criteria for rating factors as “decelerators” or “accelerators”, and showing that a particular empirically determinable trend is in fact to be seen as “inevitable” in some sense. This raises the question of stating alternative possibilities when the relevant counterfactuals did not in fact happen.
