7 - Retrospect

Summary

The preceding chapters have touched upon three modes of perception of society – the nature and flux of systems of legal abstractions, the realities of political history, and the development of economic society. Emphasis has, of course, been primarily on the latter, as it must be in a book devoted to economic history, but my endeavor has been to interweave these themes without according dominance to any one in particular. To do so would be to falsify history. A crude economic determinism that made legal abstractions bend and political systems evolve solely in response to changes in the economic foundation of society would be a gross distortion and oversimplification of an extraordinarily complex period. So, too, would the converse view, which claimed that the dissolution of thirteenth-century value systems and the shattering of older, accepted legal and philosophical premises acted as the prime stimulus for the economic changes of the period and controlled their direction by redefining man and his relationship to the economic environment. Equally unsatisfactory would be a view that credited political leaders with the power to act in independence of the world around them or even the capacity to pose economic questions beyond the limits set by their own value systems.

The truth does reside, it seems to me, in the tension and interaction between and among the three elements that we have considered.