No More Learning

To sum up: the myth of the mega-machine enables us to think of capital
not as a material-productive apparatus, but as a symbolic architecture of social power. Operating through the price system, this architecture quantifies
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and reduces qualitatively diverse power processes into the universal language of capitalization, and by so doing absorbs them into the process of accumu- lation. Very little remains out of reach: power that can be priced is power that can be capitalized.
Yet it is precisely this encompassing feature that makes the capitalist mega- machine difficult to reconcile with existing theories of society. For if capital tends to absorb and internalize other forms of organized power, how can we differentiate it - and, indeed, should we differentiate it - from bureaucratic organization in general and the state in particular?
Consequent to these ambiguities, the historical ascent of the capitalist mega-machine has been grossly misunderstood - often to the point of putting the whole process on its head. The first misunderstanding concerns the sepa- ration of accumulation from organization within the corporation. The second, broader misunderstanding involves the relationship between corpo- rations and capital on the one hand and governments and state on the other. We deal briefly with the former and then turn to the latter.
Owners and technocrats
Begin with the inner compass of the corporate unit. As we saw in Chapter 4, the Weberians latched onto social mechanization as evidence that 'capital' - an entity that they erroneously equated with machines and productive artefacts - was actually on the decline, and that class analysis therefore had become irrelevant if not totally misleading.
For John Kenneth Galbraith (1967; 1983), a famous voice of this school, mechanization spelled the ascent of a new social strata: the 'technostructure'. Following the conventional creed, his starting assumption was that 'property' applies only to capital goods as distinct from organizations: the capitalist proprietors still own the physical productive apparatus, but not the organiza- tion and management of knowledge. And since in his view production has grown more dependent on the latter relative to the former, it follows that property owners must have lost their primacy to corporate technocrats and government regulators. Galbraith himself provided no evidence that this transformation had indeed occurred - although, following The Modern Corporation and Private Property by Berle and Means (1932) and The Managerial Revolution by Burnham (1941), he was not alone in inferring that ownership was becoming increasingly separate from control.
Despite their popularity, though, the 'separation thesis' and the conse- quent belief that capital was on the decline were founded on pretty shaky grounds. As Maurice Zeitlin (1974) convincingly showed, the direct evidence, including in Berle and Means's own study, was dubious from the very start: the separation of ownership from control was never much more than a 'pseu- dofact'. Neither the earlier data nor those furnished by subsequent attempts, he argued, showed that such separation had actually taken place, a claim that
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has since been corroborated by numerous writers. 3 Other, less hostile critiques, like those of Baran and Sweezy (1966) and more recently Screpanti (1999), accepted that ownership was increasingly separate from day-to-day control. But in their view, this separation only subjugated executives to the rigid dictates of accumulation, turning the corporation into an even more effective 'profit machine'. 4
This last point is certainly confirmed by the evidence. As we shall see later in the chapter, when the European bourgeoisie took the lead from the declining feudal nobility, its ascent was manifested through a marked redistribution from landed income to pecuniary return on investment. If capitalists were indeed losing ground to the technostructure as Galbraith and others have argued, we would expect to see a similar redistribution - this time from profit and interest to the salaries of technocrats and professionals. And yet this redistribution never happened. Indeed, judging by the facts, capital seems to have grown stronger, not weaker.
Figure 13. 1 pertains to the United States, for which there are systematic historical data going back to the late 1920s. The series in the chart shows the income share of capitalists, measured by the proportion of pre-tax profit and interest in national income. The historical picture painted here is unambig- uous. First, we can see that the income share of capitalists has trended upward, from an average of 12 per cent in the 1930s to 16 per cent recently. 5 Second, the chart shows that the volatility of the income share, indicated by the narrowing distance between the upper and lower dotted lines, has declined. Given that capitalization is boosted by higher earnings and lower risk, the combination of these two processes attests to the extent to which the mega-machine of capital has strengthened its grip over society. 6
3 According to Zeitlin, Berle and Means used an excessively high ownership cut-off point. They considered as managerial a corporation whose lead owner has less than a 20 per cent equity stake, while in fact effective control often can be exercised with as little as 10 or 5 per cent. They then went on to make a bad situation worse by overstating the number of firms that actually fulfilled this already loose criterion.
4 For more analyses of the 'separation thesis' and evidence on ownership and control, see Moore (1983), Scott (1997), La Porta et al. (1999) and Morck (2005).
5 The share of after-tax profit and interest in national income followed a similar trajectory. After the Second World War, sharp increases in corporate taxation reduced this share, which fell to 6 per cent in the mid-1940s. Subsequently, though, the effective tax rate drifted down- wards - a reduction that helped the corporate share of after-tax national income reach nearly 15 per cent by the mid-2000s.
6 As noted in footnote 15 in Chapter 12, unlike many radical political economists we do not consider rent and the earnings of unincorporated business as capitalist income. The US national-income share of these two components has declined from 20 per cent in the late 1920s to 10 per cent presently, causing the overall share of non-labour income to fall from 37 per cent to 27 per cent. This drop gives the impression that capital has been losing ground, while in fact the very opposite is true.
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20
18
16
14
12
10
8 6 4
1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
Figure 13. 1 Capital's share of income in the United States
Source: U. S. Department of Commerce through Global Insight (series codes: ZBECON for
pre-tax corporate profit; INTNETAMISC for interest; YN for national income).
Evidently, then, knowledge of production techniques is not a prerequisite for exacting obedience. In the final analysis, it is not the engineers and bureaucrats, but the capitalists who are in the driver seat. The ultimate drive of their corporate organizations is not 'continuity', 'security', or 'sales growth' as the managerialists would have us believe, but accumulation. And whether the capitalists are absent or present, the logic of their mega-machine seems to enforce this accumulation on society with increasing mechanical exactitude.
State and capital
Still, even with this evidence, students of capital have remained uncertain about how to link it to power. The main reason is simple enough. As Marx pointed out, historically, the regime of capital emerged together with the nation-state. Yet, as we have seen earlier in the book, theoretically, this joint emergence was fractured from the very start. The conventional bifurcation of 'politics' and 'economics' associated capital with production, leaving the state, and power more broadly, at the mercy of political scientists. Therefore,
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it seems that in order to understand capital as power we need not only to debunk the economists, but also to question what the pundits tell us about the state.
Now, state theory is wide-ranging and complex - but then it is worth noting that its intricacies are a fairly new phenomenon, and that the exces- sivly complex and indecipherable texts probably owe more to the post-war explosion of research budgets and the mass media than to the inherent diffi- culty of the subject matter itself. Our purpose here, therefore, is to simplify. Rather than provide yet another scholastic account, we offer an alternative outline of how one may think about the issue.
The need for such alternative thinking is evident, if only indirectly, from the growing unease of state theorists themselves. Over the past couple of decades, the very association of states with command and power on the one hand, and markets with production and well-being on the other, has become increasingly difficult to defend. 7 There have been several attempts to fix the problem, including revising the meaning of the two concepts, altering their relative importance and historicizing their co-development. But as the following illustrations suggest, none of these solutions touches the real problem.
Metamorphosis
The revisionist method is typified by the writings of leading US realist Robert Gilpin. During the 1970s, when statism was riding high in the halls of academia, Gilpin distinguished state and markets based on their goals. The former, he said, is seeking power, the latter wealth (Gilpin 1975). By the late 1980s, however, when governments no longer seemed omnipotent, he changed his mind. His new position was that state and markets share the dual goal of power and wealth, and that the difference between them is mainly the means they use to achieve this goal (Gilpin 1987).
This is a major shift for a leading state theorist to make, so one may wonder what prompted it. One possible answer is that, between the first and second edition of his book, states and markets had gone through a metamorphosis and that Gilpin was only reporting this change. Another plausible explanation is that Gilpin made a mistake in the first edition and corrected it in the second. And then there is the third possibility - that Gilpin has changed his mind simply because he doesn't know how to differentiate the two institutions.
Reordering
An easier and much more popular solution, particularly among liberals, is to rearrange the order of significance. According to this creed, 'globalization'
7 The literature on state and society often refers to 'capital' and 'market' as if they were synonymous. Although the two concepts are fundamentally different, we follow this conven- tion here for the sake of simplicity.
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has reshuffled the power cards, putting markets on top of states. This perspec- tive is forcefully advanced by Susan Strange in her aptly titled book, The Retreat of the State:
The argument put forward is that the impersonal forces of world markets, integrated over the postwar period more by private enterprise in finance, industry and trade than by the cooperative decisions of govern- ments, are now more powerful than the states to whom ultimate political authority over society and economy is supposed to belong. Where states were once the masters of markets, now it is the markets which, on many crucial issues, are the masters over the governments of states.
(Strange 1996: 4)
Of course, reordering cuts both ways, and, indeed, not everyone thinks that the state is in retreat. Weiss (1998) and Hirst and Thompson (1999), for example, argue that the belief that states are capitulating in the face of capital mobility and transnational corporations is factually unfounded - if only because, in their opinion, capital mobility is lower now than a century ago and the large corporations are not nearly as transnational as the 'globaliza- tionists' would have us believe. Others, like Helleiner (1994), claim that globalization and deregulation, insofar as they exist, do not attest to the victory of the market - primarily because, in his view, these processes result from the deliberate (and reversible) decisions of state officials.
Contradictory interdependency
Perhaps the most interesting analyses of these questions are offered by Marxists. As we have seen in Chapter 4, Marxists see the state not as separate from, but as embedded in society. Furthermore, given the capitalist nature of this society, the state, almost by necessity, has a pro-capitalist bias. Beyond this point, however, there is significant disagreement. There is dispute over the extent to which state officials are autonomous from the overall logic of accumulation and the pressures exerted by particular interest groups; over whether the state is 'predatory' or 'developmental'; over whether the capital that the state regulates is productive and useful or speculative and wasteful; and, finally, over the degree to which these characteristics are inherent or change over time.
Underlying these numerous interpretations, though, the basic bifurcation remains. No matter how much the two entities change and regardless of their many interactions, capital stays anchored in production and the state in power. The former generates surplus through economic exploitation, the latter regulates accumulation through political oppression.
One of the more sophisticated attempts to transcend this static duality is offered by the work of Giovanni Arrighi and his co-writers on the joint evolu- tion of state and business from the Venetian city states till the present (for
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example, Arrighi 1993, 1994; Arrighi and Silver 1999). Combining the neo- Leninist tradition of Magdoff (1969) and others with a world-systems perspective, Arrighi et al. suggest that, over the past half-millennium, the emphasis if not locus of power has gradually shifted from organizations bounded by territory, primarily states, to ones defined by virtual command over scarce resources, mainly business entities. The shift itself has been highly dialectical. According to Arrighi, Barr and Hisaeda, there is a basic 'contra- dictory interdependency' (our term) between the two entities, with business agencies, because of their non-territorial nature, growing 'ever more depen- dent on, but also ever more subversive of, the power of the hegemonic state' (1999: 98).
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the joint-stock compa- nies, chartered first by Holland and later by England, were still half govern- mental, half business organizations, acting simultaneously both as state and as capital. By the nineteenth century, however, the substitution of British for Dutch hegemony, together with the emerging domination of British manu- facturers, established a more efficient division of labour between territorial and resource-based power. The new firms, relieved from the burden of formal government, were now free to exploit their economic prowess. But that relief only made them dependent on state power for protection and expansion. Furthermore, their competitive organization did little to enhance the state power on which they relied, and when larger business amalgamates began to emerge in Germany and the United States, the British-based system was superseded. By the early twentieth century, a new, American-based forma- tion of state and business gained dominance - although, according to Arrighi, the contradictory interdependency of this new formation is even more pronounced than that of its predecessors. US-based multinational compa- nies, while relying on American state power to keep the world open for (their) business, are actively subverting that very power. The global accumulation of these corporations, particularly in the area of financial intermediation and capital flows, have worked to destabilize the post-war economic order created by US hegemony, and by so doing have undermined the very basis of their prosperity.
The long history of this contradictory interdependency, Arrighi argues, could be useful in understanding 'epochal leaps' in the underlying nature of both state and business. Initially, a new hegemonic state typically supports and promotes its own business institutions. Eventually, however the hege- mon's power and the monopolistic profit of its companies attract outside contenders and generate internal inequities and strife. In parallel, business concerns seeking to break their spatial barriers increasingly 'subvert' the terri- torial power on which they rely. Historically, the consequence of these mount- ing contradictions has been global instability and, eventually, 'systemic chaos'. The resolution of this systemic chaos, at least so far, has always involved the emergence of a new hegemon - although, according to Arrighi, that latter aspect was less important. The more crucial feature of the transition was the
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emergence of a qualitatively new state-business formation, one that helped resolve the earlier contradictions and that over the past few hundred years worked to shift the focus of power from territoriality to accumulation.
The argument is intriguing, and it certainly takes us further than most accounts in trying to understand the historical interaction of state and busi- ness. And yet, even here, the duality persists. State and business, although constantly changing through mutual interaction, are still seen as fundamen- tally distinct, and it is this basic distinction that we need to rethink.
In what follows, we argue that capital and state do not stand against or function together with each other. They do not complement or undermine one another. They neither interact nor interplay. And the reason is simple: they are no longer separate. Capital itself has become an emergent form of state: the state of capital.
Notions of space
Cosmic space
The troubled relationship between state and capital could be conceived, meta- phorically, by thinking about the notion of space. In his Foreword to Max Jammer's Concepts of Space (1954: xi-xv), Albert Einstein contrasts two interpretations of the concept: (1) space as the container of all material objects, and (2) space as the positional quality of the world of material objects. The two views are radically different in origin and implications. 8
The container concept, associated with Democritus, Plato, Descartes and, eventually, Galileo and Newton, assumes that space exists independently of what it contains, and that space is absolute rather than relative; in other words, that space acts on its contents (as an inertial system, for instance) but the contents do not react back on space. By contrast, the positional concept, traceable to Aristotle and Spinoza and developed by Leibnitz and Huygens, interprets space not as independent of the things, but rather as the order of the things. This type of space is defined by the very relations of the entities that 'make it'. The first interpretation sees space itself as inherently 'empty'. In the second interpretation 'empty space' is an oxymoron.
According to Einstein, Newton won the day largely because of the mathe- matics: his container concept could be described with available Euclidean geometry, while Leibnitz's relational concept could not. In due course, though, Newton's perspective has proven inferior, or at least insufficient. The development of electromagnetism and field theory on the one hand, and of non-Euclidean geometry on the other, paved the way for Einstein's notion of a four-dimension space-time - a Leibnitz-like framework in which gravity and curvature are two sides of the same thing. In this ontology, to know the rela- tional properties of bodies is to know the shape of their space - and vice versa.
? 8 Our account in this sub-section draws on the analysis of Agassi (1969).
Social space
The space of mainstream political economy is much like a Newtonian container. 9 But unlike in physics, this container is forever partial. In the liberal version, the container is market-space. Its particles - the utility maxi- mizing investors-consumers - act and react on one another according to the rules of the market, but they have no bearing on the rules as such. These rules are eternally fixed, making market space independent and absolute.
Unfortunately, liberal society also has non-economic entities, organiza- tions and institutions, the most important of which is the state (or the govern- ment). Unlike the individual investor-consumer, these latter entities often are very large, sometimes irrational and often disobedient of market rules. And since market-space is by definition independent and absolute, there is no way to incorporate these non-economic entities into its logic. They remain 'exogenous'.
This fact makes market-space inherently partial. And since the external units cannot be wished away, even by liberals, the only solution is for market- space itself to inflate and deflate in response to their varying pressures. This is why liberals tell us that when politicians 'intervene' the market has to 'contract', and when the market expands the state must 'retreat'.
The realist container is more or less a mirror image of the liberal. Instead of a market-space populated by calculating utility seekers, we have state- space swarming with equally rational power-mongers. 10 Realist actors struggle over power resources and capabilities, and the state is the arena in which they carry out their Hobbesian all-out wars. In some editions the state itself becomes an actor - fighting against other states on the global stage or against other social actors in the national arena. But in all versions the space rules are eternally fixed. To be included in this space you have to seek and use power. If you are after something else - say wealth for 'its own sake' - you have to remain in 'outer' space.
As we have seen, some writers, such as Gilpin, try to bend the rules by describing states and markets as seekers of power as well as augmenters of wealth. But this solution breaks down on its own implicit assumption - namely, that wealth and power are distinct to begin with. Since the produc- tion of utility presupposes the harmonious equilibration of perfectly competitive production and consumption, it follows that wealth can never be created in the Mad-Max violence of state-space. In the end, the market must remains outside of state-space. If the former inflates, the latter must deflate, and vice versa.
9 Note that we refer here to the space of political economy, not to the treatment of space by political economists. The latter issue, popular among postmodernists, has no bearing on our discussion here.
10 Note that, with 'economic imperialism', power could be defined as a form of utility, making realism a subset of liberalism. For argument's sake, we don't press this dilution here.
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The Marxist framework is very different from both the liberal and realist. Instead of market-space or state-space, it articulates production-space. And this space, at least in its abstract articulation, is Leibnitzian rather than Newtonian. When Marx speaks about a 'mode of production', he has in mind a totalizing system that determines individual action while simultaneously being shaped and reshaped by that action. This production-space is not eternal, but rather historical and dialectical. In the capitalist epoch, the main logic of this space is surplus value and the drive for accumulation. This logic incorporates both the economic processes of production and the political institutions of power and state, and it constantly changes. Energized by its internal relations, the capitalist production-space is ever evolving until it eventually crumbles under the weight of its inner contradictions.
And yet, when we get to the details, the devil appears and the Leibnitzian metaphor breaks down. As we have seen earlier in the book, although Marx was striving for an encompassing explanation, his theory of value and accu- mulation remained locked in the Newtonian mechanics of productive labour. This narrow emphasis may have seemed sufficient in the mid-nineteenth century. But as the world changed, the concept of productive labour proved too narrow and, ultimately, impossible to accept. Inevitably, Marxists found themselves having to separate production from power, economics from poli- tics and capital from state. The unit and logic of their economic accumulation could no longer be reconciled with the broader power aspects of capitalism. And as the schism widened, the totalizing Leibnitzian-like space was fractured.
State as a mode of power
In our view, hierarchical social orders are better understood not as modes of production, but as modes of power. Every mode of power, whether based on slavery, feudalism or capitalization, has its own particular configuration. Each of these configurations obviously depends on production, narrowly under- stood. But production as such is merely part of the story of power. Beyond providing the material preconditions for social life, its significance for under- standing the hierarchical structure of society lies not in its efficiency or ineffi- ciency per se, but in the way that efficiency or inefficiency bears on power.
We propose to think of the mode of power of a society as the 'state' of that society. Obviously, this conception of state is very different from conven- tional definitions. In common parlance, a state is a political entity that exer- cises sovereignty, backed by force, over a definite territory. 11 This political
11 In the pedantic words of Max Weber, 'A ruling organization will be called "political" insofar as its existence and order is continuously safeguarded within a given territorial area by the threat and application of physical force on the part of the administrative staff. A compulsory political organization with continuous operations will be called a "state" insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order' (Weber 1978, Vol. 1: 54).
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entity is both (1) an organization, typically consisting of government organs (the administration, bureaucracy, legal apparatus and the military/police), and (2) a set of institutions, legal and habitual, that enable the political entity to exercise its rule.
This definition may seem relatively unambiguous when applied to pre- capitalist centralized regimes, where the organizations and institutions of power were usually associated with and commonly fused in a single entity - 'estate', 'palace', 'king', 'emperor'. But with capitalism, this application is no longer straightforward. Capitalism alters the very nature and meaning of power - as a result of which the organs and institutions of power no longer reside in a single entity (let alone a 'political' one), the scholars no longer agree on what these organs and institutions are, and the capitalist state no longer fits into the conventional box. With this glaring exception, the definition ceases to be universal.
Our own notion of state as a mode of power is broader and more flexible. First, it transcends the analytical distinction between economics and politics. As noted, this distinction may be valid when viewed from below and at lower levels of abstraction, and in that sense it remains 'enfolded' in our explana- tion. But it could be very misleading when considered from above and in rela- tion to the overall architecture of power. The latter perspective no longer differentiates between 'economic power' and 'political power', between 'exploitation' and 'oppression', or between the 'power of the market' versus the 'power of the state'. Organized power can take different forms, central- ized or decentralized. But insofar as the overall structure is hierarchical, it constitutes a single nomos of power.
Second, the nomos of power is not fixed. It changes as the social order evolves, and it is occasionally replaced when a new mode of power emerges. In this sense, one cannot speak of 'the state' as an abstract form with an unchanging definition. The state is never an empty Newtonian container. Instead, it is a Leibnitzian-like space: an ever-changing, historically specific relational entity that both comprises and is shaped by the bodies that consti- tute it.
In contemporary capitalism, the key organizational bodies of the state are corporations and government organs. These are the concrete incarnations of the capitalist mode of power, and although separate they are deeply interre- lated. First, both bodies are conditioned by the same nomos of capitalized earnings and its associated rituals. Regardless of whether their departments overlap or exist at arm's length, regardless of whether their personnel are separate or share a revolving door, and regardless of whether they cooperate or bicker, they are both part and parcel of the same architecture of mecha- nized social power. Second, they presuppose each other: there are no capi- talist corporations without a capitalist government, and there is no capitalist government without corporate or proto-corporate organizations. And, third, by incessantly seeking to redistribute capitalized earnings, whether at cross purposes or in unison, corporations and governments end up shaping and
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reshaping the very patterns of power that define capitalism. In the final anal- ysis, there are no profit expectations without state prisons: at the zenith of its capitalist power, nineteenth-century Britain had more political prisoners than Tsarist Russia, just as the United States today boasts the world's largest inmate population.
We call this Leibnitzian-like space the state of capital. Mumford insight- fully saw the modern state as a resurrected mega-machine. But this mega- machine is historically unique. It is not a state in the abstract, but one that both consists of and is defined by capital as power.
The feudal mode of power
The above account of course is a stylized abstraction. To understand where the state of capital comes from historically and how it developed its unique features as a modern mega-machine, it is useful to take a step back and examine, if only briefly, some of its feudal roots.
This type of inquiry, to be certain, is hardly novel. The feudal origins of capitalism have received more than ample theoretical scrutiny, particularly from Marxists. There are even two famous controversies about the issue. The first, the 'Transition Debate', launched by Maurice Dobb (1946) and Paul Sweezy (1950), concerned the significance of 'production' versus 'circulation'. The second, the so-called 'Brenner Debate', beginning with the work of Robert Brenner (1977; 1978) and still going, focuses on the relative impor- tance of 'forces of production' as opposed to 'relations of production'. 12
However, the question these debates seek to answer is fundamentally different from our own: whereas they are concerned with the transition between modes of production, our own interest is the transition between modes of power. 13
The feudal state
Understood as a mode of power, the 'feudal state' consisted of a hierarchical network of voluntary military dependencies among free men. 14 This decen- tralized state was born out of the ruins of the Roman Empire. Lack of central authority and fracturing inheritances fostered something akin to a war of all against all and a heightened sense of insecurity. The initial response was
12 Key contributions to these two debates are included in Hilton (1978) and in Aston and Philpin (1985), respectively.
13 The analysis that follows focuses exclusively on Europe. However, it should be noted that a feudal mode of power developed in other places as well - including Medieval Japan, the Ottoman Empire and Ethiopia, among others - and with features that were often remark- ably similar to Europe's.
14 Our account in this and the following three sections draws mainly on the historical works of Bloch (1961), Ganshof (1964), Le Goff (1965; 1988), Lopez (1967), Pirenne (1937) and Tuchman (1978).
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the formation of armed gangs based on personal loyalty and mutual protec- tion. This arrangement later bloomed into a full-fledged system of intricate lord-vassal obligations.
The key hallmark of the feudal regime was violence. The lords despised work and creativity, which they viewed as infinitely inferior to their life of honour and exploit. The person and possessions of others were a means to an end. They were seen partly as a source of loot, but mostly as the target of differential sabotage:
The Bayeux Tapestry of the Queen Mathilda - that remarkable story in pictures from the end of the eleventh century, narrating the 1066 Norman conquest of England - shows us how, after the landing, a big feast was held and blessed by the hegemon, and how the war expedition was launched with the burning of a house. And, indeed, war in the Middle Ages was marked by systemic devastation. Its purpose was not so much to defeat the enemy militarily, as to undermine its economic and social power (by burning and destroying crops, houses and villages).
(Le Goff 1965: 29, emphasis added)
This inherent violence determined both the form and content of the feudal contract. Ceremonially, the legal bond (nexus iuris) between the lord and the vassal consisted of two acts: a fusion of their persons symbolized by the 'mixing of hands' (immixtio manuus), and an oath of fealty (sacramentum) which indicated that the vassal was giving himself voluntarily, as a free man. 15
Substantively, the bond was mostly negative, a sort of mutual insurance policy designed to reduce uncertainty. Each side promised not only to protect the other - but more importantly not to harm the other. 16
15 The 'mixing of hands' may have been the precursor of the bourgeois handshake, while violation of the vassal's oath of fealty (or 'foi'), developed into the English and French 'defiance' (Ganshof 1964: 26-27, 98-99).
16 In AD 802, the Carolingian emperor Charlemagne imposed on his subjects a new oath of fealty that added positive aspects to the existing negative ones. These negative features are highlighted by the emperor's decree, where he says that, from now on, the new oath is
'not as many have thought up to now, involving simply fidelity to the lord emperor as far as his life is concerned' - i. e. the obligation of refraining from any action against him which will put his life in danger - 'and the obligation of not introducing into his kingdom any enemy out of hostility toward him, and of declining to be part to the disloyalty toward him of others or keeping silent regarding such'.
(Quoted in Ganshof 1964: 34-35, emphases added) Another set of instructions from AD 1020 articulates this negativity in six different ways:
He who swears fealty to his lord should always have these six words present to his memory: 'safe and sound', sure, honest, useful, easy, possible. Safe and sound, because he must cause no injury to the body of his lord. Sure because he must not injure his lord by giving up his secrets or his castle, which are the guarantees of his security. Honest,
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In addition to not attacking his lord, the vassal was obliged to provide a certain quota of military services - so that the lord could protect himself as well as attack others. These services took various forms, but gradually they converged on the basic particle of feudal power: the fully-equipped knight.
In order for vassals to produce, train and supply knights on a permanent basis, they needed access to agricultural land and tillers, organized through the autarkic manorial system. And so, gradually, the homage between the lord and the vassal came together with the granting of a benefice, usually in the form of a landed fief, or 'feodum' - hence the term 'feudalism'.
The cost of reproducing a single knight and his accessories was pretty hefty, requiring roughly 150 hectares of land according to some estimates. Based on this ratio, a fair-size fief of a count, made up of 200-250 agricultural communities, could supply no more than 150-200 mounted warriors. These modest numbers had an important implication: they meant that a larger army could be assembled only by networking the separate commitments of many different vassals (Le Goff 1965: 54-55).
This networking formed the basis of the 'feudal state'. The arrangement first emerged in the eighth century, when the Carolingian rulers, seeking to consolidate their power and increase obedience, sowed confiscated church lands as well as their allodial territories with royal vassals. The vassals, who in turn wished to reduce their own uncertainty and if possible leverage their power, further parcelled their fiefs to subordinate vassals, and so on. The end result was a dense network of mutual military obligations tied to agricultural manorial production, a standardized pattern of power that later spread throughout much of Europe.
It is not difficult to see here the principle that later informed both Hobbes's Leviathan and Locke's 'social contract': the individual being (vassal or bour- geois), torn between his desire for freedom (independence) and quest for secu- rity (to annul his fear of death), finds the compromise in merging himself with a larger mode of power (the feudal network or the sovereign state).
because he must do nothing to injure the rights of justice of his lord or such other preroga- tives as belong to his well-being. Useful because he must do no wrong to the possessions of his lord. Easy and possible, because he must not make difficult for his lord anything which the latter may wish to do, and because he must not make impossible to his lord that which the lord might otherwise accomplish. It is only right that the vassal should abstain from injuring his lord in any of these ways.
(Quoted in Ganshof 1964: 83, emphases added)
Even the 'positive' vow of protection was inherently negative, in that it was directed against everyone else. A French document from the thirteenth century recommends the following declaration by the vassal:
I promise this because you have granted to me and to my heirs such and such a prop- erty, as long as we shall remain your vassals, and also because you have promised to defend me and mine against every man.
? (Quoted in Ganshof 1964: 154, emphases added)
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During the Middle Ages, royal power, although often existing de jure, usually was conditional on and subsidiary to feudal obligations. In some places, such as France of the twelfth century, power was so diffused that the king, although claiming 'sovereignty', was no more than a glorified lord whose authority hardly extended beyond his own feudal domain. In other places, such as England after the Norman conquest of the eleventh century, power was highly centralized in the hands of the king. But that centralization was still feudal insofar as the entire country was the property of the king and every feudal agreement was supplemented by allegiance to the monarch (a duality that perhaps hastened the development of British capitalism).
There was an important novelty in this arrangement. In imperial struc- tures, power could expand in two ways: conquest and marriage. The 'feudal state' introduced a third alternative: voluntary military contract. Of course, because of their larger number, individual feudal lords could not match the power of emperors. But their added ability to cut and paste slices of power in a quasi-amicable way - a precursor for the capitalist buying and selling of vendible corporate 'shares' - made the structure of power more flexible, easier to realign, and perhaps less vulnerable to external blows. 17
The limits of feudal power
Feudal flexibility, though, had three hard limits. First, the feudal bond was personal and deeply religious. Its material aspects were merely instrumental. The primary purpose was the establishment of direct loyalty and mutual obli- gation between two people. Second, the bond was total. The lord exercised something akin to sovereignty over the very person of the vassal. And third, the contract was permanent. Save for instances in which the no-harm clauses were violated, the feudal link could not be unilaterally terminated. It ended only with the death of one of the sides.
Over time, these features started to strain the structure of feudal power. One problem was that the chain of personal commitments was highly unreliable.
17 Feudal remnants occasionally crop up in flattering reports on the amalgamating victories of present-day magnates. The following account of Woodbridge, the family investment arm of the Thomson family, is typical:
As president of Woodbridge . . . Mr Beattie, 48, is often described as the consigliere or e? minence grise of the family. . . . 'Woodbridge exists for one reason - to create value for its shareholders, who are all descendants of Roy Thomson. ' In the 30 years to 2005, he says, that value grew from $300m to $30bn.
But even when the unit of power is still clannish, in capitalism its methods of expansion are detached and impersonal:
. . . Thomson family members have been unsentimental traders of assets. . . having an uncanny sense of when an industry is on the turn.
? (Edgecliffe-Johnson 2008, emphases added)
286 Bringing power back in
As a contract between two people, the feudal bond gave the lord direct power over his own vassals, but not over his vassals' vassals. Unlike a capitalist owner who has legal right and effective power over the corporation's entire chain of subsidiaries, the leverage of a feudal lord depended on the good will of his vassals, who, when called on for a military operation, might or might not bring along their own subcontractors. In places where the feudal links were complicated, the task of quickly assembling a large army became a real headache. In some cases, the large lords and kings found themselves at a significant disadvantage - for instance, against the easy-to-organize popular militias of the bourgs, or relative to the centralized and partly monetized armies of the English king.
Another difficulty was how to prioritize different commitments. The vassals, seeking to leverage their power and security, often allied themselves with more than one lord. These multiple commitments, though, were inher- ently contradictory. Unlike the capitalist limited-liability contract - which has a definite magnitude denominated in dollars and cents, and hence a pro-rated structure depending on the relative magnitude of the priced pledges - the feudal contact was total. The vassal was obliged to serve his lord completely and without reservation. Those with overlapping obligations could therefore face multiple claims from different lords, each demanding the very same services. As a result, there emerged various systems of 'rating' - some based on the size of the fief, others on the time it was granted, and still others on the relative position of the lord - all designed to somehow reconcile the overlapping obligations.
The most serious limit, though, was the non-alienated nature of the fief. The fief was the property of the lord. It was a unit of power 'granted' to the vassal so that he could serve his master personally. But given the personal nature of the service, the transfer was always 'temporary' and was annulled by death. In this sense, any attempt to parcel, transfer or sell the fief was a direct challenge to the very purpose of the feudal contract. Over time, though, the pressure to alienate the fief mounted - coming initially from vassals who sought to pass it on to their heirs, and subsequently from lords who were both lured by and forced into the new pecuniary logic of the bourg. The solution was found in the form of 'relief' - a sort of ransom paid by the heir to the lord for giving up the property. In the beginning the relief was arbitrary. But around the twelfth century in France there emerged something like a 'normal rate', whereby the lord would alienate the fief in return for a sum equal to the property's annual revenue (Ganshof 1964: 136-39).
The capitalization of feudal power
The weakening of the feudal mode of power was marked by the colours of capitalism. One important change was the inversion of the feudal contract. Originally, the fief was a means to an end. The vassal made an oath of fealty to the person of the lord, who in return gave him the fief so that he could fulfil
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that oath. But toward the second part of the Middle Ages, the order had changed, with the fealty and service becoming preconditioned on the granting of the fief. The fief was now increasingly a matter of 'real estate', and feudal relations gradually shifted from a personal to proprietary footing.
A parallel change was the increasing monetization of both sides of the feudal contract. In many cases, the fief itself took the form of a stipend, or feodum de bursa, whereby the vassal received a payment for his keep rather than a direct allocation of land. The same happened to the services. Although these assumed a variety of forms from the very start, initially the key service was military. However, from the eleventh century onward in England and somewhat later on the Continent, the significance of military services declined, giving way to pecuniary payments.