The Ellen Meiksins Wood reader

349 Pages·2012·1.404 MB·English

by  Patriquin, Larry, Wood, Ellen Meiksins

The Ellen Meiksins Wood Reader
Historical
Materialism
Book Series
Editorial Board
Sébastien Budgen, Paris – Steve Edwards, London
Marcel van der Linden, Amsterdam – Peter Thomas, London
VOLUME 40
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm
The Ellen Meiksins
Wood Reader
Edited by
Larry Patriquin
LEidEn • BOSTOn
2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Wood, Ellen Meiksins.
The Ellen Meiksins Wood reader / edited by Larry Patriquin.
p. cm. — (Historical materialism book series ; v. 40)
includes bibliographical references and index.
iSBn 978-90-04-23008-8 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Political sociology. 2. Political science—Philosophy. 3. Political science—Philosophy—
History. i. Patriquin, Larry. ii. Title.
JA76.W66 2012
306.2—dc23
2012008346
iSSn 1570-1522
iSBn 978-90-04-23008-8 (hardback)
iSBn 978-90-04-23009-5 (e-book)
Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke Brill nV, Leiden, The netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill nV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing,
idC Publishers and Martinus nijhoff Publishers.
All rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
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Fees are subject to change.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Contents
Preface .............................................................................................................. ix
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................ xi
introduction: The ‘Method’ of Ellen Meiksins Wood ................................ 1
1. Capitalism ................................................................................................... 18
The ‘economic’ and the ‘political’ in capitalism ................................ 18
Class-power and state-power ............................................................... 21
Feudalism and private property .......................................................... 23
Capitalism as the privatisation of political power ............................ 26
The localisation of class-struggle ......................................................... 27
England vs. the dominant model of capitalism ................................. 30
The bourgeois paradigm ....................................................................... 32
Begging the question ............................................................................. 37
Opportunity or imperative? .................................................................. 39
The commercialisation-model .............................................................. 40
Marx on the transition ........................................................................... 42
Towns and trade ..................................................................................... 44
Agrarian capitalism ................................................................................ 46
Market-dependent producers ............................................................... 50
A different kind of market-dependence? ............................................ 58
Competitive markets .............................................................................. 59
2. Precapitalist Societies ................................................................................ 62
Class and state in China and Rome ..................................................... 62
Rome and the empire of private property .......................................... 66
The city-states of Florence and Venice ................................................ 69
Master and slave vs. landlord and peasant ........................................ 72
Free producers and slaves ..................................................................... 74
Slavery and the ‘decline’ of the Roman Empire ................................ 76
The ‘logic’ of slavery vs. the logic of capitalism ................................ 77
The ‘slave-mode of production’ ........................................................... 79
vi • Contents
Agricultural slavery and the peasant-citizen ..................................... 82
The nexus of freedom and slavery in democratic Athens ................ 88
3. The State in Historical Perspective .......................................................... 92
Class and state in ancient society ......................................................... 92
The emergence of the polis in ancient Athens .................................... 94
The ‘essence’ of the polis ........................................................................ 97
Class in the democratic polis ................................................................. 101
Village and state, town and country, in democratic Athens .......... 106
The rise and fall of Rome ...................................................................... 109
The culture of property: Roman law ................................................... 114
From imperial Rome to ‘feudalism’ ..................................................... 120
Absolutism and the modern state ........................................................ 131
The idea of the state ............................................................................... 132
The peculiarities of the English state ................................................... 135
Contrasting states: France vs. England ............................................... 136
4. Social and Political Thought ................................................................... 141
The social history of political theory ................................................... 141
Political theory in history: an overview .............................................. 146
Plato .......................................................................................................... 150
The Greek concept of freedom ............................................................ 156
Jean-Jacques Rousseau .......................................................................... 163
John Locke ............................................................................................... 172
Revolution and tradition, c. 1640–1790 ............................................... 178
5. democracy, Citizenship, Liberalism, and Civil Society ....................... 183
Labour and democracy, ancient and modern .................................... 183
From ancient to modern conceptions of citizenship ......................... 185
Capitalism and democratic citizenship ............................................... 189
The American redefinition of democracy ........................................... 192
A democracy devoid of social content ................................................ 196
From democracy to liberalism .............................................................. 198
Capitalism and ‘liberal democracy’ ..................................................... 202
Liberal democracy and capitalist hegemony ..................................... 206
The idea of ‘civil society’ ....................................................................... 210
The civil-society argument .................................................................... 213
‘Civil society’ and the devaluation of democracy ............................. 217
Contents • vii
6. The Enlightenment, Postmodernism, and the Post-‘new Left’ ........... 221
Modernity vs. capitalism: France vs. England ................................... 221
From modernity to postmodernity ...................................................... 224
Modernity and the non-history of capitalism .................................... 226
Themes of the postmodern Left ......................................................... 228
Enlightenment vs. capitalism: Condorcet vs. Locke ......................... 232
Enlightenment-universalism ................................................................ 236
The periodisation of the Western Left ................................................. 238
Left intellectuals and contemporary capitalism ................................ 241
7. Globalisation and imperialism ................................................................. 244
Globalisation and the nation-state ....................................................... 244
nation-states, classes, and universal capitalism ................................ 246
The indispensable state ......................................................................... 248
Precapitalist imperialism ....................................................................... 250
The classic age of imperialism .............................................................. 254
Globalisation and war ........................................................................... 256
Globalisation and imperial hegemony ................................................ 260
The contradictions of capitalist imperialism ...................................... 262
8. Socialism ...................................................................................................... 267
The end of the welfare-state ‘compact’ ............................................... 267
There are no social democrats now ..................................................... 271
Market-dependence vs. market-enablement ...................................... 275
Left strategies of market-enablement .................................................. 276
The political implications of competition ........................................... 278
The working class and the struggle for socialism ............................. 281
Class-conflict and the socialist project ................................................ 283
Socialism and democracy ...................................................................... 286
The state in classless societies ............................................................... 292
Liberalism vs. democracy ..................................................................... 296
‘Universal human goods’ ...................................................................... 298
The self-emancipation of the working class ....................................... 304
The socialist movement ......................................................................... 305
democracy as an economic mechanism .............................................. 307
Bibliography of Works by Ellen Meiksins Wood, 1970–2012 ................... 311
References ........................................................................................................ 317
index ................................................................................................................. 325

Preface
Edited readers are becoming more important for both students and academ-
ics. Readers are ideal for those who are unable or unwilling to peruse thou-
sands of pages of an author’s output – and who would not know where to
begin, even if they had the time. With the publication of eleven books (two
co-authored) and dozens of articles, the writings of Ellen Meiksins Wood
have reached a point where an edited collection is needed. This reader serves
as an overview of her ideas; it will be helpful especially for those just begin-
ning to encounter her works.
Like similar texts, the excerpts are presented in thematic, rather than chrono-
logical, order. Unlike many readers, however, i have refrained from the com-
mon practice of incorporating whole chapters or entire articles from the author.
This approach seems to me to defeat the purpose of a reader. At the same
time, i have avoided, for the most part, cutting the original texts into small
fragments, which would have given the work a ‘prison-notebooks’ feel. i have
tried to strike a middle-ground, in effect incorporating Wood’s ‘greatest hits’,
consisting of pieces both long and (relatively) short. The result, i believe, is
a showcase for Wood’s groundbreaking scholarship, with important insights
on every page. Those making use of this collection are obviously free to skip
through the text, though I recommend that it be read from start to finish, as the
material in the opening chapters on capitalism, precapitalist societies, and the
state informs, in important ways, the theoretical arguments developed in later
chapters.
in the chapters, sections are taken from a variety of Wood’s texts. Even
when they are excerpted from the same book or article, however, the sections
reprinted here often do not follow consecutively in the original works, so
readers should assume the presence of an ellipsis before each sub-title. When
excerpts do not begin at the start (or finish at the end) of a paragraph (as
found in the original publication), these excerpts are preceded (or followed)
by an ellipsis. Ellipses have also been used occasionally to remove sections of
material, either large or small, though they have been employed typically to
eliminate phrases such as ‘in the previous chapter’, ‘as we have seen’, and so
x • Preface
on. Editorial interjections are made inside square-brackets. if information has
been placed in square-brackets in the original works, ‘ – EMW’ appears before
the closing bracket.
Small changes were made to Wood’s footnotes for consistency of style and
to update information on cited works noted as forthcoming in the original
publications. A few discursive notes were left out. One footnote was added
in brackets, a brief explanation of the phrase ‘new “True” Socialism’. i have
also made slight changes to some sub-titles and added sub-titles when there
were none in the original publications (for example, where Roman numerals
were used in place of sub-titles).
Some of the excerpts are from books co-authored with neal Wood. How-
ever, in the case of Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory, the preface (p. x)
indicates that while ‘both of us have criticised and amended each other’s
works’, Chapters Two and Four, from which material is included here, were
written by Ellen Meiksins Wood. The other book is A Trumpet of Sedition, from
which i have used a small excerpt on John Locke.
The ‘Bibliography of Works by Ellen Meiksins Wood, 1970–2012’, found at
the end of the reader, does not include translations (which have appeared in
more than a dozen languages), though it does include a few works (in Ger-
man and French) which have not yet been published in English. A number of
the entries in the bibliography are reprints of earlier works, some expanded
and further developed, others reproduced ‘as is’. Many of the articles have
been incorporated, typically with revisions, into Wood’s books (see the rel-
evant acknowledgements-pages of these books for further details).