Coercion and Consent E-Book

John A. Hall

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 487

Beschreibung

This book examines the key institutional structures and processes of modernity. Combining historical insight with sustained political and social analysis, Hall analyses the form and character of capitalism, war, late development, civil society and the the causes and collapse of socialism and addesses the revival of nationalism and the possibilities of democratization.

Leseprobe

COERCION AND CONSENT:

Studies on the modern state

JOHN A. HALL

Polity Press

Copyright © John A. Hall 1994

The right of John A. Hall to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1994 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers.

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To Patricia Cronewithadmiration and affection

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1CAPSTONES AND ORGANISMS

2A CURIOUS STABILITY?

3AN ABSOLUTE COLLAPSE

4STATE POWER AND PATTERNS OF LATE DEVELOPMENT(WRITTEN WITH DING-XIN ZHAO)

5CONSOLIDATIONS OF DEMOCRACY

6NATIONALISMS, CLASSIFIED AND EXPLAINED

7WILL THE UNITED STATES DECLINE AS DID BRITAIN?

8THE WEARY TITAN? ARMS AND EMPIRE, 1870–1913

Conclusion: The State of Post-modernism

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Earlier versions of five of these essays have been published previously. ‘Capstones and Organisms’ appeared in Sociology, vol. 19, 1985. A shortened version of ‘State Power and Patterns of Late Development’ appeared in vol. 28 of Sociology in 1994. ‘Consolidations of Democracy’ first appeared in David Held’s Prospects for Democracy, published by Polity in 1992. ‘Nationalism, classified and explained’, reprinted by permission of Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is from the issue entitled ‘Reconstructing Nations and States’, summer 1993, vol. 122, no. 3. Please note that the comments made about post-communist societies in the last two essays mentioned have been revised, in line with the argument made in the third essay in this volume. ‘Will the United States decline as did Britain?’ first appeared in Michael Mann’s The Rise and Decline of the Nation State, published by Blackwell in 1990. Further, the conclusion draws on some arguments made in ‘Peace, Peace at Last?’, which appeared in a Festschrift for Ernest Gellner, Transition to Modernity, edited by J. A. Hall and I. C. Jarvie and published by Cambridge University Press in 1992. I am grateful to all the various journals and publishers – and to Ding-xin Zhao, the co-author of the fourth essay – for permission to make use of this material.

I also wish to thank my colleagues, especially Michael Smith, at McGill for welcoming me so warmly to such an excellent department. Happily, I remain indebted to Michael Mann, Ernest Gellner, Anatoly Khazanov and Nicos Mouzelis. Most importantly, I could not have finished this volume without the love of Linda Blair.

JOHN A. HALL

INTRODUCTION

Claude Lévi-Strauss may have been wrong to insist that human thought depends upon the capacity to make binary oppositions.1 But social scientists do tend to think in either/or terms. Unfortunately, this style of reasoning brings error more often than enlightenment. Nowhere is this more true than in modern political sociology, and in particular in studies of the modern state. Background intellectual assumptions have led us to equate coercion with the strength of a state. Brutality is seen as power, and held to equal effectiveness. In similar vein, the necessity to seek consent is equated with the weakness of a state. To engage in the politics of give and take, to be checked and balanced, means, according to this view, a diminution of force and direction. These presumptions may well have their origins in the inter-war period; at the least, the experiences of those years added to a bias whose roots may be deeper still. Both fascism and communism had the capacity to decide where dull democracy dithered, supine in the face of challenges to its very existence.

This book has a central argument, variously addressed by essays dealing with a set of interrelated topics. If the matter is put negatively, the argument amounts to questioning the assumptions identified and the binary logic upon which they rest. In positive terms, the book insists that societies based on consent can generate great energies, including energies that allow them to coerce with mighty effectiveness. Just as importantly, coercion can weaken, by putting people’s backs up and so leading them to resist or retreat in the face of initiatives from above. It would be idle to deny that this view is based on a particular notion of power. If one definition of power stresses its zero-sum aspect, that is the ability to make somebody do what you wish, an equally important if neglected definition stresses that power is not a fixed sum – and that agreement can increase its very quantity. Underneath this latter view is a general metaphysic, clearly prescriptive but distinctively descriptive as well, that is highlighted in Oscar Wilde’s observation that ‘selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live’.2 Differently put, societal energy is likely to be enhanced when social institutions are designed so that the contributions made by many can be synthesized and utilized.

A particularly striking attempt within social science to move beyond the binary division between coercion and consent was made in Michael Mann’s important essay on the nature of state power.3 Mann initially follows the traditional either/or view of state power in drawing a contrast between states that are more or less arbitrary – that is a distinction between despotic and more constitutional regimes. But his training as a historical sociologist naturally made him aware that there is a second dimension to state power, seen most clearly in the capacity to get things done. This sort of infrastructural power was very limited in classic agrarian circumstances but became much enhanced with the creation of modern systems of communication. A particular benefit of this appreciation of the logistics of power is that it clearly highlights the fact that classic agrarian empires were but puny leviathans, sitting on top of societies they could scarcely see, let alone penetrate and organize. The power of the state depends at all times upon its ability to raise taxes, and this was necessarily limited before the state could directly reach into one’s pay packet.

But Mann’s scheme is curiously static. Above all, what can be said about the comparative strength of constitutional and authoritarian regimes? The first chapter of this book suggests that even in pre-industrial circumstances constitutionalism – whose provenance is explained – enhanced state strength; a more particular point made against Mann is that the main change in human powers pioneered in European history, that is the triumph of capitalism, depended upon (and did at least something to enhance) constitutionalism. With the advantage of hindsight, it is all too easy to see that Mann overdid his insistence on the stability of authoritarian regimes in industrial circumstances. Germany would not have lost its pre-eminence for so long, chapter 7 annd 8 point out, had a more constitutional regime checked the foreign policy fantasies of its leaders; more striking still, the self-destruction of the Soviet Union, analysed in the chapter 3, demonstrates that vast edifices can be built on quicksand even in the industrial era.4 A consideration of Tocqueville, whose insights form a leitmotiv of this book, encourages important generalizations at this point.

Tocqueville insisted that the strength of a state depended upon its legitimacy. One of the main discoveries of the Old Regime and the French Revolution was that French absolutism had begun the increase in state infrastructural reach through the creation of an official bureaucracy, manned by the intendants, that is by establishing a centrally directed official authority system, in charge of law and taxation, designed to reach into every corner of society. But Tocqueville’s analytic point was that the French state remained very weak. He made this particularly clear in the important appendix dealing with Languedoc. In that region, the aristocracy had retained local liberties – which was to say that they had refused the offer, accepted by their peers, of tax exemption in return for the destruction of representative assemblies. Tocqueville found government in Languedoc to be efficient. The meeting of estates provided knowledge and pride, whilst the aristocracy was prepared to pay taxes to a government that it felt to be its own. And what was true of a province was true of modern societies as a whole. Tocqueville was well aware that the English state was more powerful than that of France. In this he was correct: the English won the War of the Atlantic because consent allowed military might to flourish on sound finances.5

It would be naive in the extreme to deny the contention, familiar to us from the Greeks, that constitutional regimes can become corrupt. No-holds-barred demands by everybody for immediate and total gratification must mean an absence of cohesion and an inability to act. Maximal societal energy results not just from the recognition of functional specificity per se; as important is the ability of different power groups to work together in some sort of ‘politics of reciprocal consent’.6 It is at this point that Tocqueville makes his greatest contribution to the social sciences.

To say that he knew about the corruption of democracy would be to understate his concern severely. From his earliest days, he was obsessed with the problem of liberty in the modern era. His early work is based on assumptions that he shared with others of his generation. Roughly speaking, he felt that modern individualism would encourage social isolation and a destruction of public virtue. So he was surprised to discover that Americans could combine liberty with equality. He confided to his travel journal his contempt for the middle classes, noting, almost reluctantly, that ‘in spite of their petty passions, their incomplete education and their vulgar manners, they clearly can provide practical intelligence’.7 It is extremely important to realise that Tocqueville came to change these initial and basic presuppositions.8 He moved away from a view based on modern social conditions to one that was far more state-centred: ‘Almost all the vices, miscalculations and disastrous prejudices I have been describing owed their origin, their continuance, and their proliferation to a tyne of conduct practised by so many of our Kings, that of dividing men so as the better to rule them’.9 The vices, miscalculations and prejudices to which Tocqueville is here referring boil down in essence to one: people so distrust each other that they cannot cooperate in liberty – yet the blame for this sorry condition is not their own but that of their rulers. Put differently, social atomization is less an emergent property of a new social order than the result of a particular style of domination.

The tremendous insight at work here is that the character of social action is determined massively by interaction with the state: in the second and sixth chapters this principle helps us make sense of working-class and nationalist movements. The principle can be looked at in a different way. Tocqueville is in effect arguing that it is normal in conditions of political liberty for groups to work together and for cross-class coalitions to be formed. Political participation is held to take human beings out of themselves and thereby to increase their understanding: ‘Feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, and the understanding developed only by the reciprocal action of men one upon another.’10 This insight lies at the back of the contention of chapter 2, namely that liberal regimes gain stability by diffusing conflict throughout society. As this might seem excessively optimistic, it makes sense to highlight the fact that Tocqueville’s thought about the possibility of liberal regimes as a whole is deeply pessimistic. In a sense, he has no sociology of transition: France lost its liberty in the old regime and is held unlikely thereafter to regain it, whilst England’s culture of liberty could be maintained within the era of equal social conditions.

This sense of historical constraint, indeed of historical determinism, is a salutary corrective to naive views, currently popular, suggesting that democracy is bound to spread throughout the globe, and it accordingly lies at the back of the treatment of democratization in chapter 5. It is as well to note, immediately, that this treatment goes some way past Tocqueville, most notably by demonstrating that trust has on particular occasions been created and by considering those features of social organization in addition to political culture that matter for the consolidation of democracy. All the same, I have great sympathy for the one activist principle that can be found in Tocqueville: the only long-term cure for political distrust and social conflict is the exercise of liberty. The people can be trusted to learn to cooperate – so that, in Sting’s rather different formulation, ‘if you love someone, set them free’. If that formulation is too grand for some, the same analytic point can be couched in more Machiavellian guise: the offer of participation coopts, thereby taming radicalism.

Further discussion of all these points can safely be left to the chapters themselves. But a final introductory remark about the nature of modernity can usefully underscore the nature of the argument as a whole. That discussions of modernity have tended to be exceedingly abstract is perhaps a pity, yet it is scarcely disastrous in itself. But the combination of abstraction with culturalism, that is the view – so massively present in the influential work of Talcott Parsons – that meaning makes the world go round, did lead to intellectual catastrophe. This perspective on modernity failed to give proper account to base forces of production and coercion, and understood ideology itself in an unhelpfully traditional manner. Such views did reflect and make some sense of the historical experience of the modern United States, but they were little use in understanding the twentieth century as a whole – for the brute reason that they failed to place the world wars at the centre of their attention.

The underlying assumption of the book is that modernity has structures. The most obvious of these for present purposes is that of the state. There is nothing complex about the definition of the state at work: the state has personnel who gain ascendancy by functional means – above all by seeking to monopolize violence, to encourage economic development and, in modern circumstances, to ensure normative integration. One point that is implicit in this definition can usefully be brought into the open: the state’s emphasis on territorializing social relations means that it faces outwards as much as inwards. The most obvious consequence of this is that states are in opposition to each other, seeking security because they are fearful for their survival. But as important as existence within the larger society of state competition has become the ever more pressing need to swim inside capitalist society. There are complex relations between these two larger societies. If the first emergence of capitalism was allowed by European multipolarity, the dynamism of capitalism then had a major impact on the state: an increase in absolute wealth together with the ease of taxing moveable goods made it possible for states to penetrate their civil societies ever more effectively, and in consequence to wage more absolute war. By the end of the eighteenth century, this led to the politics of nationalism and of representation. Differently put, the ‘modernization’ of the state, as forgotten theorists understood,11 has a neglected political dimension. This is not to discount the economic aspect, merely to note that it has been better appreciated by social science. This is scarcely surprising. After a single country had mysteriously, even accidentally pioneered new means of production, other states necessarily made it their business to force development.12 The fourth chapter, which proposes a theory of the type of state most likely to achieve late development, makes it clear that this generalization holds as true today as it did in the recent past. Once competing states had their own industrial machines, wars between them became utterly ruinous, raising the question, discussed in some detail in chapters 7 and 8, as to whether the successful workings of capitalist society depend upon the leadership of a single great and liberal power.

But perhaps all these concerns are outdated. Currently influential postmodernist social theory, not just abstract and culturalist but scandalously relativist as well, makes much of the more general claim that nation states are withering away. Obsolescence has been caused, it is claimed, by a globalization of production that has at once made traditional geopolitical gain meaningless and effectively removed any hope of the national management of an economy. The conclusion considers this view, suggesting that it makes no sense of much of the contemporary world and but little of its advanced component.

1C. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1966.

2Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, in Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Writings, Penguin, London, 1973, p. 49.

3M. Mann, The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results’, European Journal of Sociology, vol. 25, 1984.

4This emphasis on the viability of authoritarianism is especially present in M. Mann, ‘Ruling Class Strategies and Citizenship’, Sociology, vol. 21, 1987.

5For modern demonstrations of England’s greater fiscal strength, see, inter alia: P. O’Brien, The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1688–1815’, Economic History Review, vol. 41, 1988; J. C. Riley, ‘French Finances, 1727–1768’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 59, 1987; J. F. Bosher, French Finances, 1770–1795, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1970; P. Mathias and P. O’Brien, ‘Taxation in England and France’, Journal of European Economic History, vol. 5, 1976; J. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991; J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power, Alfred Knopf, New York, 1989.

6This happy expression is used by R. J. Samuels in The Business of the Japanese State, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1987 to describe the way in which state elites and business elites bargain with each other to a common end.

7A. de Tocqueville, Journey to America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. G. Lawrence, Doubleday, New York, 1971, p. 259, cited by R. Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1987, p. 89.

8I make this argument at length in Trust in Tocqueville’, Policy Organisation and Society, vol. 5, 1992.

9A. de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. S. Gilbert, Anchor Books, New York, 1955, p. 136.

10A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. G. Lawrence, Anchor Books, New York, 1969, p. 515.

11H. Sidgwick, The Development of the European Polity, Macmillan, London, 1903; R. MacIver, The Modern State, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1926.

12The classic statement remains A. Gershenkron, ‘Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective’, in B. Hoselitz, ed., The Progress of Underdeveloped Areas, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1952. Cf. G. Sen, The Military Origins of Industrialisation and International Trade Rivalry, Frances Pinter, London, 1984.

1

CAPSTONES AND ORGANISMS

The state is once again at the forefront of our attention. Although this development is, given the importance of political coercion and military activity in history, much to be welcomed, it must be admitted that there are few solid results to show for considerable labours.1 Two particular problems, especially manifest in Marxist attempts to come to terms with the state, spring to mind. Firstly discussions of the state have tended to be formal and abstract, as the merest glance at the writings of, say, Nicos Poulantzas on the capitalist state demonstrates. Underlying this is, one suspects, an attitude quite familiar from traditional political science which habitually considers that the state can be treated timelessly on the grounds that the problems and tasks of government must be met in any historical circumstance. Secondly, it is not clear whether marxists really do allow for the independent impact of politics, as talk about ‘relative autonomies’ of one sort or another indicates. It is worth while distinguishing three positions in this connection. Naive marxism denies the importance of the state altogether, whilst more sophisticated marxists take coercion seriously yet remain true to the commanding heights of their ideology by insisting that the state’s autonomy is only relative: that is that the laws of historical motion remain dependent upon class.

A third position, stating that marxism can remain marxism whilst admitting that political power, and not just economic exploitation by class, is an autonomous source of evil in human affairs, has never yet been spelt out. Frankly, I believe that this last position can never be created without the destruction of the conceptual apparatus and the promise of salvation inherent in marxism.2

It would be possible to present an account of recent attempts to grapple with the state at a conceptual level, but an entirely different tack is adopted here. An account of the relation between political forms and the triumph of capitalism, concentrating on a comparison between the West and China, is offered in order that some advance may be made beyond the impasses noted. For the sake of clarity, it is as well to spell out my attitude towards the problems that have been highlighted. Firstly, formalistic concern with the state seems to me misguided as different types of state are present in the historical record. Secondly, I shall argue that political forms matter. A strong line is thus being taken against existing marxist accounts, although something will be said in favour of the more sophisticated versions of that approach.

One final preliminary is in order. Discussion centres on two classic theories of the relation between state forms and economic development, both neglected recently to our loss. The first of these is that of Max Weber, who insisted that bureaucratic states in the pre-industrial epoch killed off capitalist development.3 The second is Adam Smith’s contention that, in the West, there was, to use the Weberian term, an ‘elective affinity’ between commerce and liberty.4 These are interesting and powerful claims which deserve to be brought back into general discussion.

Empires in the Abstract

When we think of empires the image at the front of our minds is that of great strength. This is largely the result of the mental image created by the monuments and records of arbitrariness empires have left behind; this image has been formalized by Wittfogel, whose view of hydraulic empires stresses their total control of their societies.5 A moment’s reflection must make us doubt all this. It is always dangerous to take written records at face value, and this is especially true in pre-industrial empires where the demands of ideology and myth-making are great. We know that such empires could not have been so strong: economically they remained segmentary, unless there was water transport, since large-scale transportation over land was impossible, and this in turn logistically limited the means of military power.6 All this is more than confirmed by what we know of limits to the powers of emperors themselves.7 In the later Roman Empire, for example, the emperor was quite incapable of seeing every paper sent to him. He threatened all administrators who prepared or submitted illegal rescripts. But he openly admitted his impotence by declaring invalid in advance any special grants in contravention of the law, even if they bore his own signature.8

Those who have written about empires have tended to stress one or the other of these factors. In fact both were present: the paradox of empire is that its great strength – its monuments, its arbitrariness, its scorn for human life – is based upon and reflects social weakness. Put thus, this sounds a straightforward contradiction rather than a paradox, but that this is not so can be seen by identifying two distinct faces of power.

One view of power has always seen it in terms of command, of the ability to get people to do something against their will. But there is a different view, which has stressed that power is an enabling means, created by an agreement about what is to be accomplished. Something follows from this: social capacity is likely to be enhanced if agreement can be reached. The argument to be made is that a contrast can be drawn in terms of this dimension between a capstone state, strong in arbitrary power but weak in its ability to penetrate its society, and a more organic state, deprived of arbitrary power but far more capable of serving and controlling social relations within its territory. We can now turn to explaining this variation.

Splendours and Miseries of the Chinese Imperial State

Marx’s theory of history posited that capitalism would follow feudalism. At first glance this theory receives decisive refutation from the Chinese case, for a long period of feudalism was ended in 221 BC when one border kingdom, that of the Chi’n, making use of large citizen armies and acting with a brutality of Assyrian intensity, united all China in an empire. It is important to note that despotism had little to do with water control of any sort: arbitrary rule of a military type came from the west of China, where no water control was needed: the empire was in place before much advantage was taken of the loess soils of the great river valleys; and, more generally, the bureaucracy never planned or managed irrigation works, for reasons to be noted.9 Where does all this leave marxism? One commendably blunt retort is that given by Witold Rodinski in a recent history of China:

The political structure of the Chou era clearly and unambiguously deserves to be referred to as feudal; confusion ensues when some historians, who restrict the meaning of this term to political phenomena, see in the creation of a centralised, absolute monarchy, beginning with Chi’n and Han, an end to feudalism in China. In reality, in its socioeconomic sense, it was to be present up to the middle of the twentieth century.10

This is a very bold statement indeed; it says, in effect, that the fact of empire made no real difference. And the same argument underlies the refusal to allow the military factor any real autonomy in Chinese history. It may well be that an army is not always exploitative: Michael Mann has argued that the creation of an empire, by establishing peace, allows for an expansion of regular economic activity, a process sometimes aided directly by the state.11 But the marxist position does lead us to ask not just about the creation of empires (often, by means of booty, ‘cost free’) but about the continued maintenance of such military power. What were the relations between state and society? Did the former have any substantial autonomy over the social classes of the larger society?

There is no doubt that there is much to be said for the marxist-inspired scepticism about the power of the state. All pre-industrial regimes must tax through local notables, and China, despite having a historically large bureaucracy, was not different in this respect. We can see that Wittfogel’s thesis of a state exercising ‘total power’ over its society is a fantasy by looking at simple figures. The first Ming emperor in 1371 sought to have but 5,488 mandarins in government service. This number did expand, yet in the sixteenth century, the last of the Ming dynasty, there were still only about 20,400 in the empire as a whole, although there were perhaps another 50,000 minor officials.12 As a very large number of these were concentrated in Peking, an official in one of the 1,100 local districts might well have managed 500–1,000 square miles with the aid of only three assistants. Weber’s comment remains apposite:

The officials’ short terms of office (three years), corresponding to similar Islamic institutions, allowed for intensive and rational influencing of the economy through the administration as such only in an intermittent and jerky way. This was the case in spite of the administration’s theoretical omnipotence. It is astonishing how few permanent officials the administration believed to be sufficient. The figures alone make it perfectly obvious that as a rule things must have been permitted to take their own course, as long as the interests of the state power and of the treasury remained untouched … 13

All in all, the Chinese state simply did not have the means by which to exercise the total control envisaged in Wittfogel’s picture. Of course it sought, as did other imperial states, to gain such autonomy, and the use of eunuchs – supposedly biologically loyal to the state – is one index of this. Importantly, the mandarinate was always jealous of eunuchs, since it was aware that an increase in central power would be at its own expense. When the state was strong, most usually when it had just been founded, decentralizing tendencies were strongly counteracted. Land was shared out, taxes were collected and abuses corrected; at the accession of the Ming in 1371, over 100,000 members of the gentry were executed. Moreover, individual members of the gentry always had something to fear from the arbitrary exercise of state power; thus the making of a fortune in state service was best followed by a discreet withdrawal to the country, where profits could be enjoyed in peace. Nevertheless, arbitrary action against individuals was counterbalanced by a fundamental inability of the state to go against the gentry class as a whole. Reformer after reformer tried to establish a decent land registry as the basis for a proper taxation system, but all were defeated by landlord refusal to cooperate. Chinese society thus witnessed a ‘power stand-off between state and society, a situation of stalemate that led to the inability to generate a large sum of societal energy.

The mechanism of this power stand-off can be seen at work in the dynamic process of Chinese history already noted, that is in the cyclical pattern, well known to the mandarins themselves, whereby disintegration of the empire was followed by imperial reconstitution. Naturally, each historical case had its peculiarities, but it is nevertheless possible to detect a habitual pattern. A newly established dynasty sought to create a healthy peasant base for both its tax and military potential. To this end, seeds were distributed and some attempt made, usually with striking success, to promote agricultural development, not least through the printing of agricultural handbooks. Yet even without internal or external pressures, the state tended to lose control of society. The local power of the gentry was transformed into the ability both to increase their estates and to avoid taxation. But pressures were in any case usually present. Internally, prosperity led to an expansion of population, by no means discouraged by the gentry, and this eventually caused land hunger and peasant rebellion.

Externally, the nomads on the borders found the empire more and more attractive as its prosperity waxed in front of their eyes. There is some scholarly debate as to whether such nomads invade of their own will, or whether they are forced into such action by mercantilist policies of the state itself, keen to keep its riches to itself and loath to treat with nomads for whom trade is virtually a necessity.14 Whatever the case, nomads do not often, as Hollywood representations might suggest, come into empires intent on loot, rape and destruction – although these were precisely the aims of the Mongols. Barbarians wish to possess the benefits of civilization and prove increasingly capable of getting them. For barbarians are often employed as mercenaries by empires in their later days and, as a result, they learn military techniques that, when allied with their inherent military resource of great mobility, make them a formidable force.

In these circumstances, the imperial state is, of course, forced to increase taxation, and it is at this moment that the power stand-off between state and society proves to be important. Many landlords choose to shelter peasants who refuse to pay such increased taxation, and thereby increase their own local power. The combination of feudal-type disintegration and overpopulation led to a constant decrease in the number of taxpaying peasant smallholders. Rodinski cites as one example of this process the census of 754, which showed that there were only 7.6 million taxpayers out of a population of 52.8 million.15 In such circumstances the state is forced to tax even more heavily where it can, and is driven to arbitrary action of all types; this in its own turn fuels peasant unrest.

This situation of breakdown and division could, as noted, last for a long time, but a new dynasty was established in the long run, usually in one of two ways. Nomads succeeded in establishing only two dynasties that united all of China, namely those of the Mongols and the Manchu, although they ruled various segments of northern China on several occasions. Other dynasties resulted from peasant revolt. It is worth nothing that peasants were not able to link their laterally insulated communities horizontally, so that successful and non-local revolt often depended upon the help of déclassé mandarins, members of millenarian groups or discontented gentry. The leaders of such revolts, when they proved successful, eventually cooperated with the gentry and founded a new dynasty–which again began the cycle of Chinese history.

This has been a long description of the perpetual cycle of Chinese civilization, and certain points at issue in it need to be spelt out. In so far as nomad pressure ran according to its own logic, it is inappropriate to say that the whole cycle of Chinese history can be seen in internal class terms. The empire was, to borrow a famous description of the Fall of Rome, at least sometimes ‘assassinated’ from the outside. But sophisticated marxist analyses have important points to make, and these have been made, for a different empire, with marvellous acuity by Geoffrey de Ste Croix in his Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World.16 Such analyses powerfully draw our attention to the thoroughgoing class nature of the imperial state and to the extreme selfishness of the upper classes in refusing to place the situation of their civilization above their own personal liberties. Had this class domination been absent, it is argued, nomadic pressure could have been dealt with since, after all, a mere 10,000 nomads on one occasion overran the Chinese state. I think it is unlikely that this debate over the primacy of external military or internal class factors, whether in Rome or China, is ever going to be finally resolved, largely because both approaches do emphasize certain features of social reality. But even were some ultimate primacy to be given to class factors when considering the fall of empires, it remains the case that the classical marxist canon would remain badly dented.

At an abstract level, marxist concepts depend upon classes being dynamic, that is conflicting in such a way as to lead to a higher mode of productive relations. The developmental aspect of class was missing in China; the situation can be aptly captured in the words of Marx, as historian rather than theorist, to the effect that ‘both classes went to their common ruin’. This point can be put in more technical terms, borrowed from Mann.17 Where class conflict in the modern world sees organized groups of owners confronting equally organized groups of workers, the segmented nature of the pre-industrial economy meant that class conflict took on a very different form. Most typically, conflict is avoided by the disintegration of society that results from landlords protecting peasants from the taxing powers of the central state. The theoretical point to be made is simple: it looks very much as if social progress does not result from internal class factors only.

All this downplays the importance of the empire by stressing its weakness. But this is not the whole story, as we can see by asking why it was that time and again the empire was restored. The collapse of Rome led to a type of treason, to be noted later, amongst one section of that elite. The mandarins, in contrast, held together and remained true to the imperial ideal. On a number of occasions barbarians tried to rule without them, partly because they wished to maintain their own cultural identity, and partly because the mandarins were wont to stay away from a dynasty that did not respect the fundamentals of Confucianism.

A famous example of this was that of the Mongols, one of the two sets of nomads to conquer all of China and to establish a new dynasty, who tried to turn north China into pasture for their horses. This phase did not last long. They wished to be civilized and, in order to become so, had to adopt and adapt to the imperial form. Any consideration of the rather small numbers of the elite shows that an enormous confidence trick was played on the gentry. They remained loyal to the state, but the paucity of their numbers is evidence that they did not do all that well from it; indeed a well-known social problem in Chinese history was that of the downward mobility of those members of the gentry who failed in one way or another. Furthermore, there was, as noted, great insecurity attached to office holding. This is not, it must be stressed, to resurrect the notion of totalitarian strength on the part of the state. This did not exist and in most matters and for most of the time the scholar-gentry class could block imperial initiatives, although individuals amongst its number did suffer in one way or another. So the argument here is that there is, in Chinese history, a definite autonomy of the state, of the political, because the state was strong enough to force class relations into a particular pattern. Of course, this pattern was maintained by the acquisition of solid profits, via state service and by cultural indoctrination stressing imperial loyalty; and the latter was much reinforced by the Chinese ideograph, which increased cohesion amongst the elite largely by making their monopoly of literacy, as is historically rare, firm and immovable. It is a remarkable fact that this loyalty survived during periods of disunity, and especially during the long first period of disunity of the empire, about which much too little is known. Perhaps the mandarins were prepared to wait for the material incentive of renewed state profit, but a further part of the explanation may be found in the monolithic nature of Chinese culture.

The more cosmopolitan world of the Middle East allowed for different ideological options; the centrality of Confucianism in China meant that alternative ideological options were much harder to come by, and in this manner ideological residues probably exerted a certain force. But whatever the exact explanation for the loyalty, its importance is clear: it largely explains the power of the empire to reconstitute itself. However, this merely returns us to the central questions: given the presence of the empire, in what ways, if any, did it have deleterious effects upon the Chinese economy?

Bureaucracy and Capitalism

A number of theoretical questions need to be highlighted at the start of this section. If greater taxation and control of landlord classes was one way in which empires would, in principle, have been able to counteract barbarian invasion, another method, again much discussed by marxist writers, would have been to increase state revenue by means of an expanding and improving economy. This brings to mind Max Weber’s contention that the bureaucracy of pre-industrial empires killed off capitalist developments within their territories. Is there any truth in this view?

If much real light is to be thrown upon this question it is as well to concentrate our attention. It is not just easy but also perhaps tempting to do so; for there was a highly notable efflorescence of economic advance in medieval China from the tenth or eleventh century to the fourteenth. There are obvious indices of economic progress in this period. A striking revolution in water transport occurred, and this was of course a necessary precondition for greater economic interchange. Shiba Yoshinobu has shown in pioneering studies how deeply the commercial spirit penetrated society, with predictable results in the nature of business and financial organization.18 The government provided a sound copper currency; as a result, where only 4 percent of taxes had been paid in money in 750, about 50 percent were so paid in 1065.19 Perhaps the most impressive achievement is that drawn to our attention in a series of articles by Robert Hartwell.20 Most of these deal with the iron and steel industry, and they demonstrate that Sung China, producing at least 125,000 tons of iron in 1078, easily led the world in the production of this basic commodity. But, in the end, this fabulous start did not lead to any ‘take-off, and we must ask why this was so.

The first point to note is that the greatest expansion took place during a period when the empire was disunited. The Northern Sung did, supposedly, rule all of China from 960 to 1127, but even in that period they were faced with the militant nomadic Jurchen, who conquered their capital Kaifeng in 1127. After that, the Southern Sung (1127–69) were always faced with competitors to the North, first Jurchen and then Mongol. The fact of disunity is exceptionally important. It encouraged the Southern Sung to build a navy in order to man all waterways that stood between them and their northern competitors. This construction produced techniques and skills that proved beneficial to the economy as a whole and, most spectacularly so, to the Chinese voyages of discovery of the fourteenth century. Further action of this sort was forced on the Sung by the presence of real competitors. One of the greatest of all sinologists, Etienne Balazs, was wont to argue that the market and cities gained some autonomy precisely during the period of disunity in Chinese history, and this finding has received support from later research.21 Elvin notes that the quality of coinage provided by states tended to improve during this period for the simple reason that traders would not return to or trust governments that manipulated the coinage too much for their own ends.22 The general principle is clear. ‘Competition between equals, whether the Southern Sung and the Mongols, or the contestants in the Japanese civil wars, or the states of early modern Europe, is an indispensable condition of progress in military technology.’23

There is something like conclusive proof of this point. Much of the interest shown by the Sung in military matters resulted from their nomadic neighbours in fact having the edge over them. Thus the Mongols made the greatest use of gunpowder: this forced the Sung into making use of it as well. Yet once the empire was firmly reunited under the native Ming dynasty it proved possible for many decades to downplay gunpowder. The nomads to the north, even when they continued to use gunpowder, could always be defeated by sheer logistical weight; and it was best that gunpowder was controlled since it could all too easily aid the further disunification of the empire. Only an empire, free of rivals of equal status, could afford this sort of policy; in Europe it would have spelt destruction, probably within a single generation.

But once imperial rule was securely established, most clearly under the Ming, market forces began to be controlled. This can be seen clearly in urban affairs, cities again becoming centres of government and thereby losing their autonomy. Very little is known about the causes for the collapse of the iron and steel industry of Sung China, but it is plausible, perhaps likely, that imperial interference in pricing policy, with an eye to revenue gains, undermined this spectacular success story. However, there is sufficient information available to be fairly definite when discussing the collapse of the other great Sung achievement, its naval strength. The navy retained some strength even under the Mongols, but the foundation of a native dynasty together with an improved Grand Canal, no longer requiring ocean-going transport from south to north, led to a series of edicts that undermined its position. Most obviously, between 1371 and 1567 all foreign trade was banned. This is not to say that trade in fact ceased; instead it was organized by ‘pirates’, often of Japanese origin, in conjunction with local gentry, who thereby gained considerable profit. But such a ban must have had a great effect; certainly the ban instituted in 1430 against the construction of further ocean-going ships led eventually to technological amnesia.

However, the most spectacular way in which politics could affect the economy concerns the fate of the explorations undertaken by the eunuch admiral Cheng-Ho in the 1430s. As befitted an empire, these expeditions to the Pacific and Indian oceans were mounted on a large scale. They were, moreover, entirely successful, and they placed China in a position in which she could have reaped the benefits that were shortly to fall to the Portuguese, Dutch and British. But the character of politics in China, in this case largely court politics, determined that none of this was to happen. The mandarins were always extremely jealous of the emergence of sources of power alternative to their own, and were thus naturally opposed to Cheng-Ho precisely because he was a eunuch whose cause was promoted by the eunuchs at court. They had good reason for their opposition; eunuch generals had recently led the army to defeat in Annam, while sudden renewed nomadic pressure on the northern frontiers allowed them to argue that resources had to be spent to meet a more immediate problem. In a centralized system relatively minor conflicts and pressures could thus have important effects.

Let us return to Max Weber’s dictum that bureaucracy killed off capitalism in the pre-industrial world. Certain reservations must be made about such a blunt formulation. On the one hand, this view tends to underplay economic advance within empires, in particular agricultural advance, to which the state did, so far as its limited resources allowed, sometimes contribute. On the other hand, Weber’s formulation occasionally gives the impression that the state was all powerful, and that bureaucratic interference in pre-industrial and industrial societies is somehow of the same character. In fact, as noted, he was well aware that bureaucracy in pre-industrial societies was puny and that, as we shall see, a stronger state might have been able to foster economic advance.

Ultimately, however, Weber’s argument gains support from the Chinese case. It is true that there is one undeniably intangible point. The Ming were perhaps unusual compared with other empires in history in, as it were, stepping backward by abandoning coinage and creating a purely natural economy. Had they continued along the path laid down by the Sung, it is possible that greater tax revenues could have enabled them to provide the greater social infrastructure their society needed for economic take-off. Perhaps the character of the Ming was historically peculiar and specific, and certainly that character was possible only in an extremely isolated geographical context. But there seem to be plenty of factors suggesting that the habitual character of imperial politics was exerting its sway.

Such politics deserve to be labelled ‘capstone’ in character. The interest of the mandarinate/state lay in preventing horizontal communication of any sort between the series of laterally insulated areas on the top of which it sat. It sought control rather than efficiency. This was true in many areas. The mandarins undermined the positions of generals, Buddhist monasteries, eunuchs and capitalists because they felt that their power was dependent upon social passivity, rather than upon social mobilization. This can be seen particularly clearly by means of a brilliant analysis of Ming taxation. The main task of the administration of the Ming was that of imperial cohesion: ‘As the Ming administrators saw it, to promote those advanced sectors of the economy would only widen the economic imbalance, which in turn would threaten the empire’s political unity. It was far more desirable to keep all the provinces on the same footing, albeit at the level of the more backward sectors of the economy.’24 Of course, this meant that they would seek their revenue in taxation from the land. The Ming initially sought to have this taxation paid mostly in kind, as noted, and to that end did not provide a sound copper currency. Probably the fundamental reason for this change was political. The Ming did not wish monetary supplies and surpluses to be located at any single point where they could be seized and thus support rebellion. ‘The empire’s fiscal operations were so fragmented as to make them virtually safe from capture, and the mere knowledge of this fact was sometimes sufficient to discourage potential rebels.’25 It is worth remembering that the empire founded by the Ming, and continued by the Manchu, lasted from 1371 to 1911, and that this represents the longest period of uninterrupted imperial rule in history. The capstone system did remove all alternative bases of power and there were no successful internal revolts for half a millennium. The Ming and Manchu had learnt how to perfect capstone government.

Chinese capstone government blocked the fully fledged emergence of intensive capitalist relationships, but this is not to say that the impact of the state upon capitalism must always be negative. On the contrary, a different type of state, the European organic state, proved capable, once capitalist relationships were established, of providing crucial services for this type of economic system. It is very noticeable that Chinese capstone government was incapable of providing equivalent services, and again Huang firmly offers what should now be a familiar explanation for this. The Ming aim was to create a stable agrarian state based on a healthy peasantry. This was the traditional Confucian view, which considered that the land was the provider of all that was meritorious, and perhaps the origin of the Ming in a peasant rebellion helped ossify this view. But the fixing of once-and-for-all equal tax revenues at the beginning of the dynasty proved, in this connection, to be a terrible mistake, especially given that the administration was initially conceived on such a small scale. The trouble proved to be that the administration was underfinanced, and thus too weak to take advantage of such expansion of the population as took place. The image of a strong peasantry could only have been achieved had the state been powerful enough to establish decent currency and credit arrangements, instead of allowing the peasantry to be exploited at will by money-lenders and gentry; the dynastic cycle resulted in part because the state taxed too little rather than too much. The weakness of the government can be seen in other ways:

It must be pointed out that in the late Ming most of the service facilities indispensable to the development of capitalism were clearly lacking. There was no legal protection for the businessman, money was scarce, interest rates high and banking undeveloped. Such an environment was hardly favorable to industrial production and the efficient circulation of goods. At the same time merchants and entrepreneurs were hindered by the frequent road blocks on the trade routes, government purchase orders and forced contributions, the government’s near monopoly of the use of the Grand Canal and active involvement in manufacturing. On the other hand, the security and status of land ownership, the tax-exemption enjoyed by those who purchased official rank, and the non-progressive nature of the land tax increased the attractions of farming to the detriment of business involvement.26

Nor could the state play much of a role in helping recovery from those natural disasters that so plagued Chinese ecology.27 The weakness of the government is beautifully caught in a dilemma in which they found themselves when administering the salt monopoly. Quotas for salt had initially been set without an eye to expanding consumption, and the government simply had no machinery by means of which it could itself increase production, even though it would thereby have made substantial profits. Merchants did start new production, and they were soon able to undercut government-produced salt. When government revenue fell, the state decided to clamp down on private production, even though this caused widespread hardship.28

Trahison des Clercs

It is now possible to develop the rest of the argument with greater speed. There is not sufficient space to consider the origins of Christianity, although it is worth emphasizing that the Roman state felt nervous about it precisely because it was based on a non-official, horizontal communication channel. However, it is necessary to describe briefly the concordat reached between church and state between the conversion of Constantine and the fall of the Empire. How well did both sides do from this new relationship?

The church gained enormously from détente. It became extremely rich. More importantly, its very form of organization, the hierarchy of bishop, deacon and presbyter, was modelled on that of the secular state. The church also called upon the state to help it in its battles. Throughout the fourth century it pushed the state towards a position increasingly hostile to traditional paganism, even though such paganism was especially strong amongst the traditional landed and Roman aristocracy. Augustine had no compunction whatever in using the secular arm to hunt out those he considered to be heretics; Christian persecution to establish a single church organization rapidly took the place of the earlier persecution of Christians.

But what of the state? How well did it do from the bargain? The hugely interesting answer is that it did very poorly indeed out of the deal: it is proper to talk only of an attempted takeover of the church, since that attempt in fact failed.

One imagines that Constantine himself might have had some disquiet by the end of his reign. In the course of the two decades after the adoption of Christianity he found himself in a hornet’s nest of controversy. Donatism in North Africa asserted that those who had apostatized during the persecutions should not be accepted as leaders of the church. This might seem a trivial point but a very great deal was involved in it. The Donatists wished to emphasize the purity of the church community – that is they wished to remain a sect opposed to a world that would sully their purity; perhaps in this Donatism was a rallying cry for disaffected provincials tired of Rome’s overlordship. Constantine also found himself deeply involved in the long-running squabble between Arius and Athanasius as to whether Christianity was to be rigidly monotheist or not. Constantine attempted to compromise at the Council of Nicaea between those who believed God had made Jesus (and was thus the only true God himself) and the Trinitarians, by saying that Jesus, God and the Holy Spirit were ‘essentially of the same substance’: but this did not resolve the conflict, which indeed continued in the Middle Eastern provinces, in the form of monophysitism, until the Islamic conquests.

But are these matters not theological in another sense entirely, that is trivial and unimportant to most Christians? Even more important, was not the empire beginning to gain loyalty from the church? Certainly Eusebius of Caesarea positively welcomed his role as an adviser in a sort of Caesaropapist doctrine centred on Constantine, and it seems that some Western bishops were also rallying to the empire. Augustine, after all, fiercely attacked the Donatists and did so with some success.29 Yet we must note the arguments he used against the Donatists. He accused them of lacking imagination in wishing to be a sect, an anti-society. He was quite as puritanical as they were, but insisted that a much greater historical opportunity lay in front of them: the church could become society rather than merely constitute an opposition to it. So if the church integrated people into society, it is vital to insist that the society in question was Christian rather than Roman. There is a distinct difference here between East and West, caused perhaps by the fact that the emperor spent so much more time in the Eastern provinces, and finally of course cemented by the fact that the emperor did save the Eastern empire. And Augustine was one of the socially mobile provincials, who came first to Rome and then to Milan, where he was elevated to a Professorship of Rhetoric. The influence of St Ambrose upon him in Milan led him to abandon the service of the empire, and to retreat to private study, first in Cassiacum and then in North Africa, before becoming a servant of the church. Of course, his City of God, perhaps the single most important theological work in medieval Christendom, famously argued that God’s kingdom could not be associated with the destiny of Rome. God’s timetable was his own, and should not be conflated with the destiny of Rome. This was a remarkable, indeed foolhardy, judgement given that, at the time, the basic infrastructure of the church – that is literacy-was not yet provided by the church but was the general product of Roman civilization.

In the West the church moved from ingratitude to, and scorn for, the state to a realization that it could in fact do without it. It was the church that negotiated with the barbarians at the walls of most cities, and arranged for them to be saved rather than destroyed. Where Chinese intellectuals refused to serve barbarians until they accepted the imperial form, and thus put themselves on the road to assimilation, in Western Christendom exactly the opposite was the case. The elite broke ranks.