Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism: A Review

sold or manumitted, and were collective rather than
individual property.&dquo;3
Athens, on the other hand, introduced full commodity slavery as did many other Greek city-states.
Great social differentiation among the free citizenry
was arrested in this case by the intercession of the
&dquo;tyrants&dquo; on behalf of the small and medium farmers.
Slaves provided field labor and domestic service but
were probably outnumbered by free laborers in agriculture. Athenian armies were mainly composed of
medium farmers armed at their own expense, their few
slaves tilling the land in their absence. &dquo;The precondition of later Greek ’democracy’ or extended ’oligarchy’ was a self-armed citizen army. &dquo;4 This selfarmed citizen army rested upon a basis of slavery.
The limits of Athenian expansion were soon reached.
Direct participation by a free citizenry prevented the
development of bureaucracy necessary to administer
conquered territories. Likewise, the ruling classes of
subordinated states were precluded from Athenian
citizenship because their interests diverged from those
of the class of medium and small farmers which supported the Athenian state. Rome overcame both of
these obstacles.
A patrician aristocracy dominated the Roman
Republic from its inception. Ownership of land became more and more concentrated and the economic
base of the small and medium farmer class was continually eroded. Cities were filled with masses devoid of
land or any other property. The Roman Republic was
the first to unite &dquo;large agrarian property with gangslavery... on a major scale.&dquo;5 Citizenship no longer
implied direct participation in government. The
massive slave base for the civilian economy released
large proportions of the free adult male citizenry for
permanent conscription into the armies. The full
potential of the slave mode of production was completely released.
The predatory militarism of the Roman Republic
was its main lever of economic accumulation. War
tribute
brought lands, tributes and slaves; slaves,
and lands supplied the matériel for war.66
Because of the intimate connection between the slave
mode of production and economic expansion by conquest, the decline of Rome was foreshadowed by the
closing of the frontiers of the Empire.
For, unlike the feudal economy which succeeded
it, the slave mode of production of Antiquity possessed no natural, internal mechanism of selfreproduction, because its labour-force could
never be homeostatically stabilized within the
Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism
by Perry Anderson (London New Left Books, 1974).
REVIEWED BY DAVID JAMES
For some three decades, an important theoretical debate in Marxist historiography has focused on central
questions concerning the character of feudalism and
the transition from it to capitalism.’ Many of the questions raised in this debate have never received adequate
answers. These include questions concerning (1) the
nature of the feudal mode of production, in particular
the social relations peculiar to feudalism and the dynamic internal to feudalism which results from them;
(2) the nature of the feudal state, its class character and
role with respect to feudal social relations; and (3) explanations for the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
Recent works by Perry Anderson bear frontally on
the first two of these questions. His Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and its sequel Lineages of the
Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974)
comprise the first half of an incredibly ambitious research project covering all of Western history from
ancient Greece to the present. The first of these two,
and the book which receives primary attention in this
review, examines &dquo;the social and political world of
classical antiquity,&dquo; the nature of the transition to and
the resultant structure and process of European feudalism. The second question concerning political relations and the feudal state is partially addressed by
Passages but is more completely confronted by its
sequel Lineages. Those who are primarily interested in
an examination of the transition from feudalism to
capitalism will have to wait for the completion of
Anderson’s project. The planned third and fourth volumes will cover the &dquo;great bourgeois revolutions, from
the revolt of the Netherlands to the Unification of Germany ; and with the structure of the contemporary
capitalist states that eventually emerged from them. &dquo;2
Anderson argues that feudalism was born as a
synthesis of two prior modes of production: the
ancient or slave mode of production developed in its
purest form by Rome; and the primitive, communal
mode of the Germanic peoples of Western Europe.
Thus, his analysis of feudalism logically required an
analysis of classical antiquity and the process which
led to the synthesis.
The first social formations dominated by the slave
mode of production were the city-states of Greece. The
Sumarian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Egyptian empires
had known slavery, but nowhere did it provide the preponderence of the rural work force. By contrast, citizens of Sparta possessed land which was tilled by
&dquo;helots&dquo; owned not by individuals but by the state.
This freed the citizenry for military duties and resulted
in a high degree of egalitarianism among the politically
enfranchised. Spartan development, however, was
limited because of the &dquo;undeveloped form&dquo; of slavery
represented by helotry; slaves &dquo;could not be bought,
system.’
Even though Rome’s economic base was constricting,
to the growing imperial state was later added the huge
clerical bureaucracy of the Church, both primarily
supported by slave labor. Fresh supplies of slaves to till
the large estates and maintain the state apparatuses be-
and more expensive. In response, slave
labor was increasingly converted to permanent ascription to the soil. A new class of dependent producers
came more
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emerged: the colonus, a dependent, peasant tenant, tied
the primacy of the real over knowledge of the real.&dquo;13
Thus, for Hechtor, if ideas prevented Romans from
innovating when the material conditions of their con-
to the estate of a landlord and paying rents in kind or
cash, or farming on a share-crop basis. The colonus,
distinct from slaves and free small-holders, anticipated
tinued existence required it, a clear violation of the
materialist premise has occurred.
Anderson’s argument is less than clear at this point.
Some of his statements seem to support Hechtor’s
interpretation while others point to material although not exclusively economic conditions - which
mitigated against routine technical innovation. 14 To
pose the question as one of ideas versus economic
conditions is to raise a false dilemma. The Marxist
premise, in my view, is not that the economic base completely specifies the superstructure but that it places
limits on the variation of those superstructures.
Clearly, from the standpoint of the individual, political
and ideological structures are no less material than the
economic structures which constrain, shape, create the
social relations in which the individual participates.
Within these limits, ideological (and political) structures enjoy a relative autonomy from the economic
base. The &dquo;relative&dquo; modifier of autonomy implies a
notion of limits rather than degree of autonomy. When
these limits are exceeded, crises result which either
bring ideology back within limits or production relations are transformed creating different limits on ideological structures. Erik Wrigh tl5 has given greater conceptual precision to the different meanings incorporated within the Marxist concept of determination
which should help dispel some of the confusion around
this issue.
But how are structural limits imposed on the consciousness of individuals? On this subject Anderson is silent and perhaps justifiably so since his self-assigned
task was quite different. An adequate answer to this
question is beyond the scope of this article but an outline of an answer can be suggested. 16 Material relations
(structures) create the ideational categories through
which individuals become subjects. Individuals are
reconstituted as subjects - become aware of themselves - through the labels imposed by structures.
Thus, an ideological structure is not composed of ideas
but is a material structure which evokes those ideas. To
choose a contemporary example, the physical separation of mental and manual labor within the organization of production in the factory is an ideological
structure which simultaneously creates the need for
and legitimates the presence of experts, lower pay for
non-experts, etc. Another example is provided by the
American South in which political and economic structures enforced racial segregation and created subjects
who were either &dquo;black&dquo; or &dquo;white.&dquo; The category
&dquo;citizen&dquo; without racial distinction did not exist materially and therefore the probability of people having that
image of themselves in their social relations with others
was greatly reduced. Thus, the difficulty encountered
in creating alliances between black and white members
of the working class was structurally determined.
Similarly, the pre-feudal political and economic structures of Rome created individuals-subjects who were
either Roman citizens and landowners or slave laborers
the dominant form of land tenure under feudalism.
Anderson argues, however, that the emergence of the
colonate did not displace the dominance of slavery and
its inherent productive limits and resistance to the
implementation of technical innovation. The slavemode of production was based upon the
annexation of labor rather than the exploitation of
land [under feudalism] or the accumulation of
its labor-additive
capital [under capitalism]
type of growth constituted a structural field ulaltimately resistant to technical innovations,
8
them.$
exclusive
of
not
initially
though
...
Slaves have no incentive to increase their productivity.
What’s more, the availability of slave labor sets the
upper limit on the productivity of free labor. Slaves
continued to be employed in key sectors, particularly
in support of the state apparatuses as well as in the
rural agriculture of Italy and Spain. Thus, slavery
placed its limits on productivity until the end of the
Empire.
Technology received no impetus from the conversion
of
slaves
into
coloni.
The forces of
production of Antiquity remained locked at their
traditional level.9
In his review of Passages and Lineages, Michael
Hechtor concludes that Anderson’s argument is weak
at this point.’° Part of his disagreement with Anderson
stems from his criticism of Anderson’s use of the con-
cept &dquo;mode of production&dquo; and the relation between
&dquo;superstructure&dquo; and &dquo;material base&dquo; of which more
will be said below. The rest of his disagreement rests
upon what I believe to be a misunderstanding of Anderson’s argument. Hechtor states that
[t]he major problem with [Anderson’s] analysis is
that it cannot easily explain why technological
development was not spurred once the cost of
slave labor began its precipitous rise.&dquo;
Hechtor believes that Anderson primarily attributes
this stagnation to an ideology which debases labor and
is thereby diverted from labor-saving invention:
Why should the Romans’ antipathy toward
manual labor and their resulting disinclination to
develop labor-saving techniques have persisted
despite crucial changes in the very process of pro-
duction ? In such an argument, part of the superstructure, the ideology of the ancient mode of
production, is not only autonomous from the
material base, but actually becomes determinative of production. 12
,
Hechtor’s criticism is an expression of one of the
central problems of Marxist social theory: what is the
relationship between material conditions of existence
and social consciousness? In Poulantzas’ phrase,
Marxists assert the &dquo;primacy of being over thought;
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and later coloni. Landowners were subjects who were
citizens, politicians, and soldiers rather than the supervisors and organizers or labor. To be actively engaged
in production was to forfeit the privileges and responsibilites of landowners. The innovations required to
save the landowning class, the most crucial of which
was the reorganization of that class to give it a more direct role in agriculture, could have occurred only
through the transformation of that class. The moral de-
his estate in order to give the law to his subjects, it created a joint interest with the peasantry in increasing
production in order to provide for the support of private armies.
Even the development of the colonus, the dependent
producers tied to the land which anticipated feudal
relations of production, did not provide the impetus to
increase productivity. The state (and the church) still
rested upon slave labor as did the provision of household service for the nobility. The colonus was a selfmanaging producer. His principal advantage to the
landowner was that he &dquo;alleviated problems of largescale management and supervision.&dquo;18 Thus, the failure to systematically introduce technology in agriculture was not just a matter of choice, but was an &dquo;unreasonable&dquo; strategy for landowners given the political
gradation of labor was the ideational expression of
material structures which elevated non-producers at
the expense of the direct producers in such a way as to
make technical and organizational innovation improbable rather than the reverse.
It follows that the question of central importance is
what were those structures which precluded innovation in agriculture? If Anderson’s argument depends
upon the content of ideas per se, namely, the moral degradation of labor, then Hechtor’s criticism is well
placed. If the material possibility existed whereby the
Roman noble class could have survived by adopting a
new form of labor control, the argument that an idea,
the moral degradation of labor, prevented such adoption by the entire class is extremely weak. Surely a few
daring landlords existed who would have pioneered
innovation when threatened by failure and economic
ruin. The success of these few would have spurred imitation by other landlords when the survival value of
the new form of labor control was demonstrated.
Anderson doesn’t indicate the relative importance of
ideational factors as compared to structural factors and
fails to make explicit arguments which are implicit in
Passages and Lineages. A more adequate explanation
can be constructed from points he makes in other
and economic structures of Rome. What was rational
from the point of view of the individual citizen-landowner was irrational from the point of view of the
class.
Whatever the reasons for Rome’s decline, it left two
important legacies. The Church, under the impetus of
&dquo;saving souls,&dquo; contributed to the Romanization of
Western Europe by introducing Latin to the underlying populations. Until then, about the third century
A.D., only the dominant classes had knowledge of
Latin; the dominated classes had continued to speak
their native languages and were, thereby, denied access
to letters and science, Latin being the only written language in the West. The Romance languages resulted
from the popularization of Latin. The missionary task
of the early Church had the effect of transmitting the
cultural and legal forms of Rome to the great majority
of the population in the Western half of the Empire
and, thus, to the feudal and capitalist future. In regions
where the Empire was defeated before this Latinization
took place, Roman social forms disappeared with hardly a trace. In the Eastern half of the Empire which already possessed four written languages besides Latin
and where Rome never imposed the slave mode of production so thoroughly as in the West, the Roman cultural and legal impact was greatly altered. Feudalism
never developed autonomously in the East.
Of particular importance in the West was the legacy
of Roman civil law. Rome’s was the first legal system to
develop the concept of &dquo;absolute property,&dquo; which
made the &dquo;novel distinction between mere’possession’
factual control of goods, and ’property’ - full legal
title to them.&dquo;’9 Although this concept of private property was to virtually vanish under feudalism, its rebirth during the Renaissance was to play an important
role in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This
argument, however, is only sketched in outline
form and awaits full development in Anderson’s proposed future volumes.
places in these works.
First of all, the dominance of slave labor placed constraints on the productivity of free labor.
Slave-labour was not in general less productive
than free, indeed in some fields it was more so;
but it set the pace of both, so that no great divergence ever developed between the two, in a common economic space that excluded the application of culture to technique for inventions....
Technique as premeditated, progressive instrumentation of the natural world by man was
incompatible with wholesale assimilation of men
to the natural world as its ’speaking instru-
-
ments’.17
Secondly, and this point is more implicit than explicit in Passages, a unitary sovereignty - the Greek city
Imperial Rome - placed the responsibility
for supporting the armies on the state. Competition
between landlords did not depend on their ability to
support armies with the surplus from their estate but
on their success in winning high offices in the central
state. Thus, landowners had to leave the supervision of
production to others. In the case of Rome, the supervisors of slave labor were often slaves themselves. By
contrast, the parcellization of sovereignty under
feudalism not only required the presence of the lord on
states and
*
*
*
*
*
The communal mode of production existing
throughout Europe beyond the frontiers of the Empire
had been in a process of transformation because of its
long-term contact with Rome. Originally, it was
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characterized by an absence of private property in
land:
here that serfdom first emerged; a manorial
system was developed; seigneurial justice was
most pronounced; and hierarchical subinfeudation became thickest.23
North of this zone, a free, allodial peasantry with
strong communal institutions survived for some time.
South of this zone, &dquo;Roman legal conceptions of property as free, heritable and alienable, qualified feudal
landed norms from the start. &dquo;24 This line of reasoning,
especially as finally developed and qualified in
Lineages, provides a provocative, if controversial, explanation for the differential development of feudalism - and capitalism - in Eastern and Western Europe.
Anderson’s greatest contribution in Passages is to
give the concept of &dquo;feudalism&dquo; a precise theoretical
meaning. Whatever the merits of his interpretation of
the historical evolution from Antiquity to feudalism
and beyond, he has performed a major service in specifying the crucial attributes of European feudalism.
The power of his specification follows as a result of his
comparative method. Comparison of a large number of
feudal and non-feudal societies allowed him to identify
key political attributes of feudalism which have not
been clearly conceptualized in earlier definitions. 25
Anderson’s concept of feudalism is completely applicable only to Europe: outside of Europe, only Japan
had important feudal characteristics contributing,
Each year the leading men of a tribe would determine which part of the common soil was to be
ploughed and would allocate sections of it to respective clans, who would till and appropriate the
fields collectively: the periodic redistributions
prevented great disparities of wealth between
clans and households, although herds were privately owned and provided the wealth of the leading tribal warriors. There were no peacetime
chieftains with authority over a whole people: exceptional military chiefs were elected in time of
war.zo
Trade with Rome as well as the development of or-
ganization capable of contending with Rome militarily
led to internal differentiation and increasing stratification within the tribal societies. Land was increasingly
allocated to individuals rather than clans. Many Germanic warriors saw service with the Roman Legions
and by example or personal intervention contributed
political and military organization. The tribes closest to the imperial
borders were the most affected; thus, the increasing
military pressure exerted upon Rome was to a large extent the &dquo;structural consequence&dquo; of Rome’s &dquo;existence and success.&dquo;
Itt is in this context that Anderson describes
feudalism as a synthesis of two prior modes of production, both in a state of decline. He emphasizes the notion of synthesis as something more than mere mixture
in explaining the advent of feudalism. In fact, the failure of a combination of similar elements in South-East
Europe to achieve such a synthesis provides an important counter-example to his central argument .2’ No
western-type feudalisms ever developed in the Balkans.
What were the elements of the feudal synthesis?
Anderson sketches in the outlines of the evolution of
several of the most important feudal institutions from
their roots in the primitive communal and slave modes
of production: the feudal manor from the GalloRoman villa; serfdom from the Roman colonus and
from the slow degradation of free German peasants;
the fusion of
’vassalage’ (personal homage) and
’benefice’ (grant of land),&dquo; both with roots in Germanic
and Roman social forms, to create the ’fief’ (&dquo;a delegated grant of land, vested with juridical and political
powers, in exchange for military service&dquo; ); 22 the hybrid
legal system with aspects of folk justice emphasizing
reciprocal obligation between rulers and ruled as well
as codified and written law, an aspect of the Roman
to the transformation of &dquo;barbarian&dquo;
perhaps, to its amazing capitalist development at a later
time. Nevertheless, critical elements were absent in
Japan, notable free towns, which prevented an autonomous transition to
&dquo;
compulsion&dquo; :
legacy.
Viewing feudalism as a synthesis implies that its
character will vary geographically with the strength of
the two anterior modes of production which produced
the synthesis.
[T]he core region of European feudalism was that
in which a ’balanced synthesis’ of Roman and
Germanic elements occurred: essentially, Northern France
capitalism.26
Anderson’s definition of feudalism appears familiar.
(1) The peasant producer was bound to the soil, the
means of production, by a specific legal relationship:
glebae adscripti, literally, bound to the earth. Neither
labor nor its product were commodities. (2) Under
feudalism, the rights to property in land were conditional rather than absolute as under the Empire or
later under capitalism. The peasant cultivators did not
own the land, but neither did the lord. While the lord
exercised control of his land and subjected the peasantry to his legal jurisdiction, he held rights to the land
from a feudal superior only in return for knight-service
in time of war. &dquo;The liege lord in his turn would often
be the vassal of a feudal superior, and the chain of such
dependent tenures linked to military service would extend upwards to the highest peak of the system - in
most cases, a monarch - of whom all land could in the
ultimate instance be in principle the eminent domain.&dquo;27 (3) The class of feudal lords extracted a surplus from the peasantry by &dquo;politico-legal relations of
This extra-economic coercion, taking the form of
labour services, rents in kind or customary dues
owed to the individual lord by the peasant, was
exercised both on the manorial demesne attached
directly to the person of the lord, and on the strip
tenancies or virgates cultivated by the peasant.28
This combination of political compulsion and economic exploitation personified by the dominance in
both by the feudal lord is the basis of the now familiar
and zones contiguous to it .... It was
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statement that feudalism is characterized by the unity
of political and economic relations. (4) But, while economic and political relations were coterminous at the
moment of extraction of the economic surplus, political power was far from unitary as it had been during
the Empire.
The consequence of such a system was that political sovereignty was never focused in a single
centre. The functions of the State were disintegrated in a vertical allocation downwards, at
each level of which political and economic relations were, on the other hand, integrated. This
parcellization of sovereignty was constitutive of
the whole feudal mode of production. 29
self-governing communes, enjoying corpolitical and military autonomy from the
nobility and the Church.&dquo;35 This created a dynamic
opposition of town and country not possible in earlier
modes of production. The importance of the towncountry nexus in explaining the dynamism of feudalism as well as the transition from it to capitalism is an
tures
were
porate
area
of growing consensus among students of these
periods. Some, like Hechtor consider it the sole cause of
the feudal dynamic but few argue that towns (and
trade) are external to feudalism as did Sweezy during
the classic debate of the 1950’s.36 Anderson appears
he gives to the influence of
neglecting other crucial factors.
The third &dquo;structural specificity&dquo; of feudalism identified by Anderson is only a more elaborate statement
of the consequences of the parcellization of sovereignty. The resources of monarchs were essentially limited
to those of their personal domains as lords. They enjoyed no direct access to the population as a whole;
feudal relations between the king and his noble vassals
mediated this access. Extra-suzerain exactions from the
noble class (e.g. taxes) were subject to the collective
consent of the nobility. Thus, the absence of a powerful integrating force at the top of the feudal hierarchy
posed a problem for its survival. &dquo;A complete fragmentation of sovereignty was incompatible with the
class unity of the nobility itself, for the anarchy implied
by it was necessarily disruptive of the whole mode of
production on which their privileges rested.&dquo;3’
Throughout the sequel Lineages, this theme is replayed
time and again to explain the success or failure of feudal
social formations in forming absolutist states. The parcellization of sovereignty mitigated against the formation of a strong, central bureaucracy. The inherent anarchy of the noble class was given greatest expression
when the nobility was strong; thus, Poland was partitioned by absolutist states with noble classes united by
strong monarchs.38 Peasant revolts always inspired a
transient unity among the nobility. A unity imposed
from above was often more permanent but stability was
far from guaranteed. The centralized political authority
of Rome or the Asian Empires was always more stable.
The dynamism of feudalism was reflected in the cultural achievements and agrarian progress of the High
Middle Ages (about 1150-1300 A.D.). By the middle of
the fourteenth century, however, feudalism was in
crisis. Anderson argues that the &dquo;basic determinant&dquo; of
’seizure’ of the mechanisms of
the crisis lay in a
correct in the emphasis
towns while not
Finally, the articulation of these aspects of the feudal
mode gave rise to three &dquo;structural specificities of
Western feudalism.&dquo; All three of these features, and in
contrast to Hechtor’s reading of Anderson, are important determinants of the &dquo;dynamic&dquo; of the feudal mode
of production .30 &dquo;Firstly, the survival of communal
village lands and peasant allods from pre-feudal modes
of production, although not generated by the latter,
was not incompatible with it either.&dquo;3’ This &dquo;scalar
structure of property&dquo; had two aspects: the separation
between manorial property, on the one hand, and
village communal lands and allods held by peasants
outside of the direct control of a feudal superior on the
other; and secondly, a separation within the manor itself between &dquo;the lord’s demesne, directly organized by
his stewards and tilled by his villeins, and the peasant
virgates, from which he received a complementary surplus but in which the organization and control of production was in the hands of the villeins themselves.&dquo;32
Scalar property created a margin in which a portion
of improved productivity could accrue to the direct
producer. A structure was thereby established which,
within limits, rewarded technical innovation. In fact,
agricultural productivity increased dramatically during
the medieval period. In order to realize the maximum
surplus from peasant labor, the nobility introduced
some organizational rationality (e.g. crop rotation) and
fostered the introduction of new techniques, notably
the water-mill. Nevertheless, the small space allowed
the direct producer to realize the fruits of his/her own
labor was probably the most important factor affecting
productivity. The greater productivity of feudalism in
Western Europe, which had a smaller proportion of the
peasant’s labor devoted to the lord’s demesne as compared to Eastern Europe, is important suggestive evidence in support of this contention.33
&dquo;
reproduction.&dquo;39 Demographic expansion coupled
with the diminishing returns from extensive rural expansion, given the level of the forces of production,
Secondly, parcellized sovereignty provided an
growth of medieval towns.
at the core of the crisis. The urban economy also
encountered obstacles to its continued development.
Silver, the basic medium of exchange, became increasingly scarce. Part of the reason for this scarcity
was again the low level of development of the forces of
was
autonomous space for the
As was the case with peasant allods and communal
urban commodity production predated
feudalism. &dquo;But the feudal mode of production nevertheless was the first to permit it an autonomous
lands,
production. Deep shaft mining was technically impractical and silver-mining almost vanished by the end of
the fourteenth century. The shortage of metals led to a
spiralling inflation and a widening gap between the
prices for urban manufactures and agricultural goods.
development within a natural-agrarian economy.&dquo;34
The towns and cities of Antiquity and of the Asian
Empires were subordinated to a central political
authority. &dquo;By contrast the paradigmatic mediaeval
towns of Europe which practised trade and manufac68
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of the mode of production.
The result was a decline in seigneurial revenues,
which in turn unleashed an unprecedented wave
of warfare as knights everywhere tried to recoup
their fortunes with plunder.4°
The second issue concerns the causal relationship
between base and superstructure or, in other words,
how the mode of production determines politics and
ideology. Clearly, the wide variety of superstructural
forms which coexist with the same or similar economic
base precludes any simple one-to-one causal path from
the base to the superstructure. As has been argued
above, a more adequate claim is that the economic
structure places limits on the range of possible variation of the forms of state and ideology which are
compatible with it. There is less controversy concerning the claim concerning limits than there is with
regard to the first issue mentioned above. Nevertheless, the absence of a general Marxist theory of politics
at the mode of production level has meant that the
major dynamic of societal transformation has, by default, had to be a narrowly conceived economic one.
The inclusion of political elements in explanations of
the transformations of concrete social formations has
had an ad hoc quality and often appears to substitute a
variety of historicism for the economistic bias of the
more general treatments of the problem of transformation. Recent contributions to the debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism have tended to retain this economic one-sidedness despite Hilton’s early
(1952) warning that &dquo;political conditions need closer
attention. &dquo;44
To these endogenous causes of the crisis was added the
devastation of the Black Death; perhaps 40 percent of
the population perished by 1400 creating a serious
labor shortage. The increasing pressure from the
nobility &dquo;to reinforce servile conditions and make the
producing class pay the costs of the crisis now met with
wild, violent resistance ...&dquo;4’ Massive peasant revolts
swept through Europe.
The ultimate consequences of these revolts and their
defeat were very different in Western and Eastern
Europe. The presence of viable towns in the West had
already led to a weakening of feudal relations due to
market relationships and peasant flight to the urban
areas. Additionally, many towns in the West actively
supported peasant rebellions. Although all peasant revolts were eventually defeated, the crisis was &dquo;the
turning-point in the dissolution of serfdom in the
West.&dquo;42 Because of the weakness of the towns in the
East, the crisis had the opposite consequences: the
famous &dquo;second serfdom&dquo; resulted with an increasing
degradation of the peasantry. But this is the main story
of the sequel. In Lineages, Anderson develops these
arguments in a case by case examination of the most
important feudal formations.
The most penetrating criticism of Passages and
Lineages has come from reviewers who disagree with
Anderson’s use of the concept &dquo;mode of production.&dquo;
For example, Hechtor and others object to the inclusion
of &dquo;superstructural elements,&dquo; namely, parcellization
of sovereignty, within its definition.43 These criticisms
appear to stem from a misunderstanding of Anderson’s general theoretical usage of the concept of mode
of production as well as its specific application in the
case of feudalism. Because I expect that other readers
will misunderstand his approach and will therefore
tend to underate the theoretical importance of his
work, the remainder of this review will be devoted to a
clarification of Anderson’s theory and how it appears
to have advantages over what is perhaps the most
common usage among Marxists of the concept of mode
of production.
There are two inter-related issues here which are
often confused in debates on this topic. The first concerns the level of abstraction with which it is possible
to theorize about superstructure; that is, can the superstructure be analyzed at the same level of abstraction as
the mode of production or must theoretical statements
about superstructure be confined to the social formation level. To make the contrast more explicit, can a
general theory of the feudal state be constructed in a
fashion similar to a general theory of the feudal mode
of production or must we confine our analyses of
feudal politics to concrete social formations dominated
by the feudal mode of production? Anderson’s theory
of feudalism and the slave mode of production is of the
first type. The inclusion of parcellization of sovereignty within the definition of feudalism is a theoretical statement about political structure at the level
Anderson’s Passages and Lineages are first attempts
to correct this theoretical lacuna. It is
for
Marxists to assert that extra-economic coercion is required to separate the direct producers from the economic surplus in pre-capitalist modes of production.
commonplace
The specificity of that extra-economic coercion is
determined by a particular concatenation of political
and economic relations, namely, parcellized sovereignty
and scalar property in the case of feudalism.
Thus, Anderson appears justified in asserting that
&dquo;precapitalist 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. &dquo;45
Anderson’s formulation is convincing because it
both accounts for the diversity of feudalism across
Europe and provides a plausible explanation of its
development thereafter. Thus, the &dquo;proof&dquo; of the
theory offered in Passages is to be found in Lineages:
the explanation for the &dquo;second serfdom&dquo; in Eastern
Europe, the partition of Poland, the emergence of the
Absolutist state are examples. No other single theory of
which I am aware has such wide explanatory power.
Even so, perhaps the adequacy of Anderson’s approach cannot be fully evaluated until the arrival of his
promised third volume which will address the question
of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Of
course, works of such scope as Anderson’s are not
without fault. Some may feel that Anderson neglects
the economic base in his attempt to incorporate the
political. Certainly it lacks the depth of theoretical insight and historical detail into the dynamics of the
feudal economy that one can find in Witold Kula’s An
Economic Theory of the Feudal System.46 In fact, I find
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Kula’s book to be a valuable compliment to Anderson’s
work in that it examines the implications of scalar
property within the Polish historical context while pre-
ticular societies are unlikely to be satisfied with Anderson’s brief sketches .41 On the other hand, non-specialists will require the assistance of a good historical atlas
in order to follow Anderson’s arguments concerning
the inter-relationships of the myriad political units involved. He provides no maps. Nevertheless, Anderson
supposing (without mentioning) parcellized sovereignty. Surely Anderson will have provided a great service if his work inspires an analysis of feudal politics
which is as detailed as Kula’s analysis of the feudal
has confronted the &dquo;theoretical problems&dquo; of historical
materialism with the &dquo;empirical issues posed by historians&dquo; as was his purpose and surely to the advantage of his readers.
David James
economy.
One critical omission from Passages is an adequate
explanation for the closing of the borders of the Roman
Empire. Why did Rome at its height abandon further
expansion which, Anderson contends, was crucial for
its long-run survival? And as Keith Thomas has noted,
Dept. of Sociology
University of Wisconsin
Madison, Wisconsin
specialists acquainted with the complexity of parNOTES
1. See Rodney Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to
Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1976); Karl Marx, PreCapitalist Economic Formations, introduced by Eric J. Hobsbawm,
(New York: International Publishers, 1964).
2. Lineages, p. 11.
3. Passages, p. 36.
feudalism was "politically decentralized" and that the feudal lord held
certain "judicial or quasi-judicial functions in relation to the
population" but neither systematically developed the implications of these aspects of their definition. Hilton (ed.), op. cit., p. 34.
26. Lineages, pp. 435-461.
27. Passages, p. 148.
4. Ibid., p. 33.
5. Ibid., p. 60.
6. Ibid., p. 62.
7. Ibid., p. 76.
8. Ibid., p. 79.
9. Ibid., p. 95.
10. Michael Hechtor, "Review Essay: Lineages of the Capitalist
State," American Journal of sociology, 82 (March, 1977), 1063-1064.
11. Ibid., p. 1064.
12. Ibid.
13. Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London:
New Left Books, 1973), 12.
14. See Passages, p. 27.
15. Enk Wright, Classes, Crises and the State (London- New Left
28. Ibid., p. 147.
29. Ibid., p. 148.
30. Hechtor, op. cit., pp. 1066-1067.
31. Passages, p. 148.
32. Ibid., p. 149.
33. See Ibid., pp. 260-262 for some of the qualifications which must
be given this interpretation.
34. Ibid., p. 150.
35. Ibid.
36. Hechtor, p. 1067. Paul M. Sweezy, "A Critique," The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism: A Symposium, Maurice Dobb
and others, (New York: Science and Society, 1967), pp. 1-20. Sweezy’s
article originally appeared in Science and Society, Spring 1950, and is
also included in Hilton, loc. cit.
37. Passages, pp. 151-152.
38. Lineages, pp. 236-359.
39. Passages, p. 197.
40. Ibid., p 200.
41. Ibid., p. 202.
42. Ibid., p. 204.
43. For example, see Hechtor, p. 1063-1064 and Theda Skocpol and
Mary Fulbrook, untitled review of Passages and Lineages, Journal of
Development Studies 13 (April, 1977), 290-295
44. Hilton, ed., op. cit., p. 154.
45. Lineages, p. 404.
46. (London: New Left Books, 1976).
47. Keith Thomas, "Jumbo History," New York Review of Books,
22 (April, 17, 1977), pp. 26-30.
Books, 1978).
16.
depen-
dent
My approach to the problem follows that suggested by Louis
Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin
and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1971).
17. Passages, p. 27-28.
18. Ibid., p. 95.
19. Ibid., p. 67.
20. Ibid., p. 107.
21. Ibid., pp. 265-293.
22. Ibid., p. 139.
23. Ibid., pp. 154-155.
24. Ibid., p. 155.
25. For example, Sweezy seems to accept Dobb’s definition that
theory’s limiting assumptions, analytical ambiguities
and empirical anomalies, Thurow has added an addi-
Generating Inequality: Mechanisms of
Distribution in the U.S. Economy
by Lester Thurow (New York Basic Books, 1975)
tional nail to the coffin of neo-classical economics.
In the neo-classical paradigm an individual’s income
is determined by their productivity (i.e., the marginal
productivity of the factors of production the individual possesses). Not so, Thurow persuasively argues.
An individual’s earnings are determined by the
distribution of job opportunities (and a corresponding
rigid wage distribution associated with these jobs) and
by one’s position in the &dquo;labor queue.&dquo; Employers rank
$5.95.
REVIEWED BY ANDREW ZIMBALIST
In certain respects, Lester Thurow’s Generating
Inequality is to the marginal productivity of wages
what the Cantabrigians are to the neo-classical theory
of capital. In exposing the marginal productivity
70
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