The Theory of Transitional Conjunctures and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism in Western Europe

Review of Radical Political Economics

Volumn 11, Issue 3, 1979, Pages 3-22

  Resnick, Stephen ^a   Wolff, Rick ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS   (United States)

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EID: 84970727877     PISSN: 04866134     EISSN: 15528502     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/048661347901100302     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. Cf. Althusser, “Elements of Self-Criticism,” in Essays, pp. 105-125; and “Is it Simple.…,” in Essays, pp. 165-173. Althusser's views on the relationship of science to ideology underwent very significant changes from Reading Capital to Essays; see the discussion in Goran Therborn, Science, Class and Society (London: New Left Books, 1976), esp. 50-66. A careful and profound investigation and development of Althusser's notion of science appears in Dominique Lecourt Marxism and Epistemology, trans. B. Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1975). See also Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper and Row,
2. 1976), p. 186, passim;
3. and Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 61-92 for closely related formulations.
4. Our critique of epistemology — both empiricist and rationalist — owes much to the work of the English sociologists Hindess and Hirst: see Barry Hindess, Philosophy and Methodology in the Social Sciences (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1977), pp. 1-22 and 188-228;
5. and Paul Q. Hirst and Barry Hindess, Mode of Production and Social Formation (London: Macmillan Press, 1977), pp. 1-33. Our critique of essentialism derives from a similar critique which underlies nearly all of Althusser's work. (We do, however, disagree with Althusser's attribution of a simple essentialism to Hegel).
6. Rather than selecting, in an inevitably arbitrary manner, among the vast number of examples of such empiricist formulations within Marxism, we prefer to cite an essay which not only repeatedly exemplifies such formulations but uses its footnotes to quote identical formulations from many other well-known Marxist writers: Oskar Lange, Political Economy, Vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 278-342.
7. Althusser's critique of humanism is most succinctly expressed in “Marxism and Humanism (1965)” in his For Marx, pp. 219-247;
8. “Reply to John Lewis (1973)” in Essays, pp. 34-99;
9. and “Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy” in Essays, esp. pp. 195-207. See also Coward and Ellis, Language and Materialism, pp. 61-92.
10. See, for example, Hirst's critique of Perry Anderson's view that European capitalism is the unique result of a unique origin in antiquity which endured to be effective within European feudalism: Paul Hirst, “The Uniqueness of the West,” Economy and Society 4:4 (November, 1975), pp. 446-475.
11. See Engels' letter to J. Block of September 21-22, 1890 in Marx and Engels. Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.), pp. 498f.
12. This point is argued forcefully in Hindess and Hirst, Mode of Production and Social Formation, pp. 1-33. These authors here criticize their own use of this concept of “dominance” in their first book, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975).
13. Marx, we believe, makes this point himself in Capital, Vol. 3 (New York: International, 1967), p. 791:
14. Our concepts of “fundamental” and “subsumed” classes are derived directly from Marx's suggestions. The term “fundamental” is Marx's in his 1857 “Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy,” see Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 108. Marx's reference to merchants as a class in Capital, volumes 2 and 3 and as absolutely different from either performers or extractors of surplus labor suggest an adjective such as subsumed for such a merchant class. Our concept of “subsumed classes” has some affinity to certain arguments in Hindess and Hirst, Mode of Production and Social Formation, pp. 63-75, but is both a considerable development beyond those arguments and a critique of them. We offer a full specification of Marxian concepts of classes, fundamental and subsumed, in another paper.
15. Cf. Althusser, Essays, p. 130, where he articulates the concept of Marxism as taking a “revolutionary class theoretic position in philosophy.”
16. “The production of commodities and their circulation in its developed form, namely trade, form the historic presuppositions under which capital arises” Capital, Vol. I, trans. B. Fowkes (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 247. This is a far better and far more faithful translation of Marx's German sentence than that of the 1967 International Publishers edition, p.146. Strictly translated, the core of Marx's sentence about capital's origins — “Es erscheint nur dort, wo … Handel, eine gewisse Höhe der Entwicklung erreicht haben” — should read: “it appears only where … commodity trade has reached a certain level of development.”
17. Capital, Vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), pp. 59-60.
18. See Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London, 1946);
19. The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism expanded edition, introduced by Rodney Hilton, (London: New Left Books, 1976);
20. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York, 1974). A recent critical review of the Sweezy-Frank-Wallerstein line in the debates does a good job of criticizing its reliance upon commodity relations without, however, specifying just what role such relations did play in transition:
21. see Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review 104 (July-August, 1977), pp. 25-93.
22. Since we only intend in the next two sections to provide an illustration of our approach, we omit detailed footnoting. However, we list here several texts that provided us with especially useful and adaptable (for our purposes) summaries of various historians' conceptualizations of a feudal social formation and the transition in Western Europe. The transitional conjuncture from the “Dark Ages” to the feudal social formation has been surveyed recently in P. Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, (London, 1974). This work is valuable and interesting, but we do not agree with the particular methodology followed. Other useful surveys were G. Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy (Ithaca, 1974), Parts One and Two, and an older but still helpful book by P. Boissonnade, Life and Work in Medieval Europe (New York, 1964). A complex intertwining of cultural, political and to a lesser degree economic aspects of a feudal social formation can be found in the classic two volume history by M. Bloch, Feudal Society (London, 1961);
23. G. Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West (London, 1968); the rest of his book, The Early Growth of the European Economy;
24. and H.S. Bennett, Life on the English Manor (Cambridge, 1971). The particular complexity of vassalage was presented in F.L. Ganshof, Feudalism (New York, 1964) and in C.W. Previte-Orton, The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History (Oxford, 1972). The latter work also offered a fine survey of church history as did W. Ullman, Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages (1972). Our approach of conceptualizing the feudal class process was stimulated initially by B. Hindess and P. Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London, 1975), Chapter Five — a most interesting and important chapter in this provocative book. We were also informed, of course, by Dobb, Studies, and especially by K. Takahashi, “A Contribution to the Discussion” in R. Hilton, ed., The Transition, and by most of what R. Hilton has written on feudal class relations, e.g., Bond Men Made Free (New York, 1973) and his short but excellent survey, The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England (London, 1970). Other texts used were E.A. Kosminsky, Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the 13th Century (New York, 1956) and M. Bloch, French Rural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1970). Besides these books, we used three others to particularly focus on feudal technical processes. They were: B.H. Slicher Van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe (London, 1963), L. White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford, 1962), Chapter 2, and G.C. Homans, English Villagers of the 13th Century (New York, 1975). A concise historical specification of the feudal expansion and decline of commodity circulation and prices, town development, population, etc. from about 1100 to 1550 can be found in three books;
25. R.S. Lopez, The Commerical Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950-1350 (Englewood Cliffs, 1971), H. Miskimin, The Economy of Early Renaissance Europe, 1300-1460 (Englewood Cliffs, 1969), and G. Hodgett, A Social and Economic History of Medieval Europe (London, 1972). These books, along with H. Miskimin, The Economy of Later Renaissance Europe, 1460-1600 (London, 1977), M.M. Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society (Middlesex, 1975), N.J.G. Pounds, An Economic History of Medieval Europe (London, 1974), and with Duby's contributions, provided a good survey of the historians' varied constructions of several economic aspects of feudal development. In particular, the development of feudal towns and merchants was of concern to us. We examined the following: H. Pirenne, Medieval Cities (New York, 1956), J. Merrington, “Town and Country in the Transition to Capitalism” in Hilton, ed., The Transition, and A.B. Hibbert, “The Origins of the Medieval Town Patriciate,” Past and Present, Feb. 1953. Two books focused on the process of merchanting. They were: E.M. Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant Venturers (London, 1967), and S.L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London (Ann Arbor, 1968).