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Secret origins of the state: the structural basis of raison d'état

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2010

Justin Rosenberg
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Extract

The Italian city-state system occupies a special place in the canon of orthodox international relations. For, as Martin Wight says, ‘it was among the Italian powers that feudal relationships first disappeared and the efficient, self-sufficient secular state was evolved, and the Italian powers invented the diplomatic system’. And of course this was not all they invented. In addition to the earliest modern discourse of Realpolitik (‘Machiavelli’, Carr tells us, ‘is the first important political realist’), it is in the Italian city-states that we find the first routine use of double-entry book-keeping, of publicly traded state debt, of marine insurance, of sophisticated instruments of credit (such as the bill of exchange), of commercial and banking firms coordinating branch activity across the continent, and so on. Here, too, the citizen militias gave way earliest to the mercenary armies that would later characterize European Absolutism; and within the town walls, a population given over increasingly to commerce and manufacture elaborated new forms of urban class conflict.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , April 1992 , pp. 131 - 159
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1992

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References

1 I am grateful to Simon Bromley and Fred Halliday for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

2 Wight, Power Politics (Leicester, 1986), p. 30Google Scholar. This is a fleeting reference. Neither Wight, nor Bull, nor Hinsley gives any systematic consideration to the question of what the conditions of this (by their own account) world-historical development might have been.

3 Carr, E. H., The Twenty Years' Crisis (London, 1946), p. 63Google Scholar.

4 Petrarch, cited in Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974), p. 149Google Scholar.

3 Less commonly remarked is the reappearance in strength of another prominent classical institution: slavery. Hay, Denys (Europe in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (London, 1966), pp. 374-5Google Scholar) suggests that in fourteenth-century Genoa, slaves may have accounted for 10 per cent of the population. However, as Anderson emphasizes, these tended to be domestic servants, slave labour in production being confined to the overseas sugar plantatio n an d mining colonies (Absolutist State, p. 151).

6 Wight asks (without finding any answer) whether certain schools of thought in the China of the Warring States could provide another example. See his Systems of States (Leicester, 1977), p. 39Google Scholar.

7 ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Surveys from Exile (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 149Google Scholar.

8 It is not at all obvious that the seeming familiarity of Italian and Greek geopolitics derives primarily from the condition of a plurality of sovereignties which they share with our own system. Consider the following. In the first third of the eleventh century, the collapse of the Caliphate of Cordoba in the Iberian peninsular yielded 20 to 30 Moslem successor states (the taifa kingdoms) which proceeded to spend several hundred years wheeling and dealing, fighting each other, making alliances, organizing geopolitical balances and so on. But no one produces studies of the taifa state-system. Conversely, when the Absolutist states of early modern Europe sought to redefine their sovereign powers, they revived and modified the legal codes of a long-dead empire: Rome. Whatever it is that we recognize as ‘modern’ in Rome but not in Moslem Spain, it cannot be ‘anarchy’. On grounds of straightforward empirical consistency therefore, the Realist claim that the latter captures what is most distinctive and fundamental to our own modern geopolitics is rather suspect.

9 Halliday, ‘State and Society in International Relations: A Second Agenda’, Millennium, 16, 2 (1987), p. 217Google Scholar.

10 The Communes were by no means united in their hostility to the Empire. Many of them had, after all, sealed their independence from episcopal rule by winning Imperial recognition of their autonomy. See Waley, D., The Italian City-Republics, 3rd edn (London, 1988), pp. 32-4Google Scholar. And the Papal-Imperial contest would continue to provide the ideological form—though decreasingly the actual content—of both geopolitical and internal factional conflicts for many years to come. On the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, see Waley, City-Republics, pp. 145–56, who also gives instances where this diplomatic partisanship continued to have a very real material basis—e.g. Florentine Guelfism (p. 148).

11 Anderson, Absolutist State, p. 143.

12 Mattingly, Garrett, Renaissance Diplomacy (Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 65Google Scholar.

13 The ruling groups of the early communes were the major landholders; the later rise of trade did not produce a landless commercial bourgeoisie (an index perhaps of the very weakness here of seigniorial power). By contrast with the cities of northern Europe, ‘th e quintessential burgher & is not identifiable’ in Italy (Waley, City Republics, p. 118).

14 Holmes, G., Europe: Hierarchy and Revolt 1320–1450 (London, 1975), p. 81Google Scholar.

15 The procedure for the election of the Venetian Doge comprised no less than^v e sequent ballots, each one (except the last) immediately stymied by a further selection by lot. See Hay, Europe, p. 120, and the further examples, Waley, City-Republics, p. 37.

16 See Waley, City-Republics, pp. 42–3.

17 Waley, City-Republics, p. 43.

18 , Anderson, Passagesfrom Antiquity to Feudalism (London, 1974), p. 192Google Scholar.

19 Sereni, A., The Italian Conception of International Law (Columbia, 1943), p. 42Google Scholar.

20 ‘& medieval treaty law was usually contained in the glosses and commentaries on contract law & individuals rather than sovereign states were the principal subjects of international law &’ Holgrefe, J. L., ‘The Origins of Modern International Relations Theory’, Review of International Studies, 15 (1989), pp. 13–14Google Scholar.

21 Mattingly, Diplomacy, p. 53.

22 Waley, City-Republics, p. 68.

23 For a brief but pregnant discussion of the operation of religious legitimation in hierarchical modes of domination, see Wolf, Eric, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, 1982), p. 83Google Scholar.

24 Cited in Sereni, International Law, p. 14.

25 Waley, City-Republics, p. 88.

26 Waley, City-Republics, p. 49.

27 Sereni, International Law, p. 11.

28 Giddens observes the simultaneous and interlinked emergence of domestic and international political structures with respect to the rise of the nation-state. See especially, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar, chapter 4.

29 Waley, City-Republics, p. 42.

30 Holmes, Europe: Hierarchy, pp. 81–2.

31 Matteo Visconti secured the Imperial Vicariate in 1294 (Hay, Europe, p. 167).

32 Among the exceptions were Venice and Florence, which had expanded sufficiently to secure their own defences.

33 Cited in Waley, City-Republics, p. 158. For a discussion of the formal survival of republican institutions, see Martines, Lauro, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (New York, 1979), pp. 102 ffGoogle Scholar.

34 Martines observes that ‘For all their original violence, signori knew that they could endure only by regularising procedures and affecting to side with the rule of law& The major legislative bodies survived in nearly all the cities that fell subject to signorial rule’ (Power and Imagination, p. 103).

35 Cosimo held supreme public office for only three two-month terms during the entire period of his ascendancy. Hearder & Waley, A Short History of Italy (Cambridge, 1963), p. 85Google Scholar.

36 Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie’, reprinted in Sayer, D. (ed.), Readings from Karl Marx (London, 1989), p. 116Google Scholar.

37 See Holzgrefe, ‘Origins’, p. 12.

38 Sereni, International Law.

39 For an illuminating discussion of the historical evolution of the concept of society, see Frisby, David and Sayer, Derek, Society (London, 1986)Google Scholar, ch. 1.

40 ‘On the Jewish Question’, reprinted in Sayer (ed.), Readings, p. 125.

41 See for example, D. Sayer, ‘The Critique of Politics and Political Economy: Capitalism, Communism and the State in Marx's Writings of the mid-1840s\ Sociological Review, 33 no. 2 (1985).

42 Sayer (ed.), Readings, p. 124.

43 Sayer (ed.), Readings, p. 124.

44 For a discussion of the last three of these, drawn from the same texts, see Sayer, ‘Critique of Polities’, pp. 230–3.

45 Hill's phrase, A History of Diplomacy in the International Development of Europe, Vol. I (London, 1911), p. 359Google Scholar. Butterfield similarly allows that for many commentators ‘the states of the Renaissance & formed a neat closed area & an arena of limited size & a field of interacting forces such as can be envisaged for the most part in isolation.’ Butterfield, H. and Wight, M. (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations (London, 1966), p. 133Google Scholar. Holsti's, K.International Politics (Englewood Cliffs, 1988 edition)Google Scholar, rare in giving systematic comparative attention to the premodern systems, concurs in the restriction of the discussion to northern Italy. This reflects a broader weakness in his methodology: like Wight, he accepts the territorial self-definition of the city-states as constituting the ‘boundary’ of the system and hence as defining the scope of empirical study. As a result, th e crucial insertion of the city-states into the wider formation of feudal Europe slips through the net of his analysis. Mattingly's gripping history, by concentrating on the emergence of ambassadors, has this same disadvantage. And viewed from the other side of the Alps, this geopolitical isolation has a similarly deceptive effect: Renaissance Italy is one of the stranger silences of Mann's, M.Sources of Social Power (Cambridge 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 The lack of a common culture does not appear to have inhibited the growth of a flourishing ‘international society’ in the eastern Mediterranean at this time: ‘It must be especially stressed that Italian states attributed more or less the same legal value to agreements concluded with Mohammedan sovereigns as to those concluded with Christian states &’ (Sereni, International Law, p. 28). On the contrary, all the cultural and political authority of the Church itself seems to have been unable to suppress Christian intercourse with the Moslem world: ‘This constant repetition of ecclesiastical prohibitions was an indication of the laxity with which they were observed’ (ibid.).

47 Waley, City-Republics, p. 8.

48 Braudel, F., The Perspective of the World. Vol. III of Capitalism and Civilisation 15th-18th Centuries (London, 1984), p. 109Google Scholar.

49 Adelson, H., Medieval Commerce (New York, 1962), p. 74Google Scholar.

50 Waley, City-Republics, p. 28.

51 For the following, see Adelson, Commerce, pp. 76–7.

52 Sereni, International Law, p. 22.

53 Sereni, International Law, pp. 19–20.

54 Braudel, Perspective, p. 143. The Portuguese, however, never established effective control over supply in the Far East. And, in addition. Levantine demand for European products such as copper helped divert the flow of eastern spices back into their old caravan routes (Krist of Glamann, ‘European Trade 1500–1750’ in Cipolla, C. (ed.), The Fontana Economic History of Europe: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Glasgow, 1974), pp. 478-9Google Scholar). Hence, by the middle of the century, the Levant trade, measured by volume, had returned to its old levels. See Parry, J. H., The Age of Reconnaissance (London, 1973), p. 69Google Scholar.

55 Hobsbawm, Eric, ‘The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’, in Aston, Trevor (ed.), Crisis in Europe (London, 1965), p. 16Google Scholar.

56 Holmes, Hierarchy, p. 71.

57 Braudel avers of Venice, ‘Probably the leading industrial centre in Europe’, that ‘The primacy of commercial capitalism over industrial capitalism until at least the eighteenth century is not seriously challenged’ (Perspective, p. 136).

58 Davis, Ralph, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies (London, 1973), pp. 26-7Google Scholar.

59 Waley, City-Republics, p. 23.

60 Holmes, Hierarchy, 72. Braudel describes how ‘all the international aspects of the Champagn e fairs were controlled on the spot or at a distance by Italian merchants’ (Perspective, p. 112), while Davi s gives an instance of their more long-lived financial dominance: as late as the 16th century, ‘At Lyon, the most important financial centre in the West, 143 out of 169 leading houses & were Italian’ (Davis, Economies, p. 27).

61 Holmes, Hierarchy, pp. 68–9, Hay, Europe, p. 376.

62 Holmes, Hierarchy, p. 95.

63 Anderson, Passages, p. 193.

64 Holmes, Hierarchy, p. 96.

65 Which itself, as Anderson notes, was made possible by the ‘parcelisation of sovereignty’ characterizing the feudal mode of production as a whole (Passages, p. 193).

66 He ploughs not, he sows not, he reaps not (Braudel, Perspective, p. 108).

67 Francesco Gucciardini, 1536, reprinted in Ross, J. B. and McLaughlin, M. M. (eds.), The Portable Renaissance Reader (Harmondsworth, 1968), pp. 280-1Google Scholar.

68 One of the most dramatic (though slightly later) demonstrations of this came when the merchants of Genoa, which ‘was constantly surrendering to other powers, either forcibly, voluntarily or out of prudence’ (Braudel, Perspective, p. 158) imposed terms on the King of Spain: ‘When in 1575, the king of Spain quarrelled with them and decided to do without their services, they succeeded in blocking the circulation of gold. The unpaid Spanish troops mutinied and sacked Antwerp in November 1576. And the king was eventually obliged to give in’ (p. 168).

69 These included not only textiles and eastern luxuries, but, in the case of Milan especially, a considerable quantity of weapons.

70 Cf. Waley, City-Republics, p. 92, Adelson, Commerce, pp. 74 & 79–80 respectively.

71 Marx, Capital (London, 1959)Google Scholar, III, chapter XX, ‘Historical Facts About Merchant Capital’, p. 325. The full sentence is worth reproducing: ‘Since merchant's capital is penned in the sphere of circulation, and since its function consists exclusively of promoting the exchange of commodities, it requires no other conditions for its existence—aside from the undeveloped forms arising from direct barter—outside those necessary for the simple circulation of commodities and money.’ This contrasts drastically with modes of production, feudal, capitalist etc. which require very extensive economic and political conditions for their existence.

72 See Waley, City-Republics, p. 23, who says that ‘the population was certainly not rooted to its home city. In the case of the larger cities much involved in long-distance trade & a quite sizeable proportion of the adult male citizens must have been away on business’.

73 Anderson, Lineages, p. 153.

74 Mattingly, Diplomacy, p. 65.

75 See Mattingly, Diplomacy, pp. 186–7.

76 Waley, City-Republics, p. xvi.

77 Sabine's charge (p. 352) that Machiavelli misread the spirit of the age insofar as he advocated raison d'etat on the eve of the Wars of Religion, is thus not wholly satisfactory: if these conflicts brought religion to the fore, it was precisely because they mediated the final collapse of Christiandom and the rise of the secular state-system. Every confessional dispute, by receiving a secular settlement, itself became part of the emergence of the ‘political state’. Thus Mattingly notes of the new doctrines of extraterritoriality which emerged in the 16th century: ‘Probably the largest single factor in preparing men's minds to accept this extraordinary fiction was the embassy chapel question’. Something similar applies to the precept of cuius regio eius religio, another secular principle founded explicitly upon a reorganisation of religious Sabine, authority. G., A History of Political Theory (London, 1941), p. 352Google Scholar; Mattingly, Diplomacy, p. 266.

78 See for example Waltz's comments reprinted in Keohane, R. (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics (New York, 1986), p. 127Google Scholar.

79 R. Gilpin in Keohane (ed.), Neorealism, p. 306.

80 , Dougherty and , Pfaltzgraff, Contending Theories of International Relations (Ne w York, 1981), p. 469Google Scholar.

81 Thucydides, History of The Peloponnesian War (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 49Google Scholar.

82 Thucydides, History, pp. 400ff. [5, 84–115].

83 Systems of States (Leicester, 1977), p. 66Google Scholar.

84 Butterfield and Wight, Diplomatic Investigations, p. 127.

85 For example, Purnell, Robert, ‘Theoretical Approaches to International Relations: The Contribution of the Graeco-Roman World’, in Taylor, T. (ed.), Approaches and Theory in International Relations (Harlow, 1978), pp. 19–20Google Scholar.

86 As David Hume observed: ‘the maxim of preserving the balance of power is founded so much on common sense and obvious reasoning that it is impossible it could altogether have escaped antiquity’. (‘Of the Balance of Power’, reproduced in Wright, Moorhead (ed.), Theory and Practice of the Balance of Power 1486–1914 (London, 1975), p. 189Google Scholar).

87 Purnell, ‘Approaches’, p. 27–8. Sabine observes similarly: ‘The modern distinction between the state and society is one which no Greek thinker made clearly and adequately’ (Political Theory, p. 109).

88 Anderson, Passages, p. 43.

89 For example by Weber at some length in a section of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft reproduced as Martindale and Neuwirth (eds. & trans.), The City (New York, 1962)Google Scholar and more concisely by Anderson in Lineages, pp. 150–6.

90 For the latter, see Hopper, R. J., Trade and Industry in Classical Greece (London, 1979), p. 74Google Scholar.

91 Hopper, Trade, p. 11.

92 Finley, M. I., The Ancient Greeks (London, 1963), p. 28Google Scholar. It seems also to be the case that the waves of colonization in the eighth and seventh centuries which created the multipolar Greek system were undertaken not in pursuit of trade but under the pressure of demographic and agrarian crisis in the early communities. See Finley, Greeks, pp. 26–7.

93 See Hopper, Trade, p. 57. Curtin, Philip, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar suggests that by the fifth century BC there were perhaps 10,000 metics in Athens (p. 77).

94 Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade, p. 65.

95 Finley, Greeks, p. 78.

96 Anderson, Passages, p. 19.

97 Anderson, Passages, p. 22.

98 . Finley, Greeks, pp. 65–6.

99 Burn, A. R., The Pelican History of Greece (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 245Google Scholar.

100 Finley, Greeks, p. 66.

101 See Finley, Greeks, p. 36, Anderson, Passages, p. 36.

102 Weber, City, p. 214.

103 The Doge's speech is reprinted in Adelson, Commerce, p. 188–90.

104 This comparison is perhaps less arbitrary than at first it appears, inasmuch as there is no evidence that Greek equivalents of the Doge's balance-sheet were systematically maintained: ‘It is to be regretted that the Athenians, and indeed the Greeks in general, were so uninterested in economic statistics’ (Hopper, Trade, p. 53). Tribute lists were a different matter.

105 See Anderson, Lineages, pp. 150ff, where these point s and others are fleshed out.

106 Thucydides, Peloponnesian, p. 145. The Athenians went to the remarkable length of using Scythian slave police ‘so that no citizen might have to lay violent hands upon another’ (Burn, History, p. 239).

107 See Burn, History, p. 213.

108 Finley, Greeks, p. 33.

109 Finley, Greeks, p. 56.

110 Thucydides, Peloponnesian, pp. 212–23. Diodotus says of the inhabitants of Mytilene whose fate is to be decided following the crushing of their revolt against Athens: ‘I might prove that they are the most guilty people in the world, but it does not follow that I shall propose the death penalty, unless that is in your interests; I might argue that they deserve to be forgiven, but should not recommend forgiveness unless that seemed to me the best thing for the state & [Tjhis is not a law-court, where we have to consider what is fit and just; it is a political assembly, and the question is how Mytilene can be most useful to Athens.’ [219–20]. Compare this with Anderson's observation that in feudalism ‘justice & was the ordinary name of power’ (Passages, p. 153)—i.e. political rule was legitimated and exercised via legal right (‘privilege’ in the sense used by Marx in the earlier discussion above) not common interest and the votes of political equals.

111 ‘There was no bureaucracy or civil service and despite the large number s of officials, no hierarchy of offices—everyone being responsible solely to the demos itself (Finley, Greeks, pp. 68–9).

112 Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State’, Early Writings (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 138Google Scholar.

113 Same text, different translation: Marx, Precapitalist Socio-Economic Formations (Moscow, 1979), p. 29Google Scholar. For the alternative translation, see Marx, Early Writings, p. 91.

114 See Hopper, Trade, p. 74.

115 Hopper, Trade, pp. 54 & 58 respectively.

116 Finley, Greeks, p. 80.

117 Notably the Corinthians. See Thucydides, Peloponnesian, pp. 73–7.

118 Doyle, M., Empires (Ithaca, 1986)Google Scholar, chapter 2, clearly distinguishes the mechanisms of Athenian and Spartan external power, calling the one imperial and the other hegemonic.

119 Doyle, Empires, p. 46.

120 Doyle, Empires, p. 68.

121 Thucydides, Peloponnesian, p. 77.

122 Thucydides, Peloponnesian, p. 95. See also Burn's treatment of this incident, History, pp. 210–11.

123 ‘Potidaea’, the Corinthians protested, ‘is the best possible base for any campaign in Thrace, and Corcyra might have contributed a very large fleet to the Peloponnesian League’ (Thucydides, Peloponnesian, p. 74).

124 Burn, History, p. 261. Of the 150 odd poleis in the Athenian empire, all but three were, or were obliged to become, democracies. See Doyle, Empires, p. 56.

125 Thucydides, Peloponnesian, pp. 36 & 38.

126 As Doyle puts it: ‘Athenian power was not only large relative to any one of its subordinate allies in the Delian League, it was also different from that of Sparta and different from, and not just larger than, that of the subordinate allies’ (Empires, p. 65).

127 This argument is developed at length in Rosenberg, J., ‘What's the Matter with Realism’, Review of International Studies, 16 (1990), especially pp. 294-6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

128 Doyle, M., ‘Thucydidean Realism’, Review of International Studies, 16 (1990), p. 237CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

129 Finley, Greeks, p. 88.

130 Marx, Capital (Moscow, 1959), III, p. 791Google Scholar.

131 See Wood, Ellen, ‘The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism’, New Left Review 127 (May/June 1981)Google Scholar, for an illuminating exploration of these pitfalls. Incidentally, it might be argued in this context that Gramsci chased the wil’-o’-the-wisp of ‘power’ back and forth across the modern institutional frontier between state and civil society so many times that if finally became unclear whether his intellectual legacy was one of social revolution or social democracy. See Anderson's ‘The Antimonies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review, 100 (1976/7)Google Scholar, especially the section entitled ‘Illusions of Left Social-Democracy’, pp. 27–9.

132 As Wolf, E. calls it in Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, 1982)Google Scholar, chapter 2.

133 See Anderson's discussion of this in the ‘Conclusions’ to Lineages.

134 In other words, ‘freedom’ in both senses. (Reproduced in Sayer (ed.), Readings, p. 122.)

135 Sayer (ed.), Readings, p. 116.

136 See Finley, Greeks, p. 49.

137 See Sereni, International Law, p. 14.

138 See the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: ‘just as the Christians are equal in heaven, but unequal on earth, so the individual members of the nation are equal in the heaven of their political world, but unequal in the earthly existence of society' (Sayer (ed.), Readings, p. 120). In Italy and Greece, ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ also exist but do not share the same membership. Their co-extension in capitalist societies makes modern citizenship problematic in ways quite foreign to Italy or Greece.

139 Wood, ‘Separation’, p. 82.

140 Marx, Capital, III, p. 331. In this connection, Marx also observed: ‘So long as merchant's capital promotes the exchange of products between undeveloped societies, commercial profit not only appears as outbargaining and cheating, but also largely originates from them.’ [ibid. p. 330]. The Greeks, for their part, mapped out the complex relations involved in a different, but hardly less penetrating idiom: Hermes, the god of trade, was also the patron of (among other things) messengers, boundary stones—and thieves.

141 Wood, ‘Separation’, p. 82.

142 To these structural limits we can also add some more circumstantial, though no less real, impediments to any generalization of the Greek or Italian systems. Among these are the restrictions on geographical and demographic scale due to the need for face to face contact in a pre-industrial participatory polity, and relatedly the unique facilitating role of the Mediterranean Sea as a medium of communication in both civilisations. These observations should not, however, license a fetishising of technology: after all, the emergence of agrarian capitalism in England preceded the Industrial Revolution.

143 Precapitalist Economic Formations (London, 1964), pp. 78-9Google Scholar.

144 ‘Goodbye to All That’, Marxism Today, October 1990, p. 21.

145 One suspects that advocates of ‘the critical turn in international theory’, insofar as they seek to ground their anticipations in contemporary political realities, would indicate such a possibility as crucial. This, however, is speculative, since these writers persistently shy away from identifying concrete historical agencies of change at the international level. See, for example, Linklater's discussion of Habermas in Beyond Realism and Marxism: Critical Theory and International Relations (London, 1990), especially pp. 26-7Google Scholar.

146 Conversely, this suggests why sovereignty could not be admitted as a doctrine of external relations in the feudal world, where territorial expansion premised upon labour tied to land was the key mechanism of intra-seigniorial accumulation—and why it remained moot and unrealized within the Soviet system.

147 For a sympathetic critique of one attempt to square this circle (e.g. to promote capitalist representative government as the lever of a wider realisation of democracy), see Anderson, P., ‘The Affinities of Noberto Bobbio’, New Left Review, 170 (July/August 1988)Google Scholar.

148 The German Ideology, reprinted in Sayer (ed.), Readings, p. 130.