Internal Colonialism by Eric H. Ash

Part I-  Fens at the Turn of the Century

The possibility of draining the English Fens had been considered and debated for at least a generation by 1616, when Ben Jonson satirized the whole idea by having Merecraft pitch it to a greedy and buffoonish Norfolk gentleman Fitzdotterel as a surefire, get-rich-quick scheme in The Devil is an Ass. Merecraft was Jonson’s caricature of a projector, an entrepreneurial and opportunistic promoter of various projects, and a figure with a somewhat shady reputation in early modern England. Land drainage was only one of Merecraft’s many schemes, but it was perhaps the one most closely identified with real contemporary events. Drainage projects had attracted the interest of the Crown and its advisers since Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, and in fact Jonson got into some trouble at court. Although James I did not object to the satire of fens drainage projects per se, he apparently considered Jonson’s reference to the “Duke of Drowned-land’ a bit too sensitive and told the author to remove it. James’s interest in drainage was due in part to the Crown’s being the single largest owner of land in the Fens, so improving its landholdings there would help to boost royal revenues at a time when additional income was sorely needed. But beyond their potential to help refill depleted royal coffers, drainage projects were part of the broader trends of state-building in 17^th century England. Thy were an expression of changing early modern attitudes towards proper management and exploitation of the natural environment and the state’s role in facilitating such.

In the first decade of the 17th century (probably in 1606), while the first of many large-scale drainage proposals were under discussion among local officials in the Fens and in the House of Commons, two anonymous commentators weighed in on opposite sides of the debate. 

The first, claiming to write on behalf of the fenland inhabitants, offered a variety of objections to the drainage. There was no precedent, he wrote, for the improvement and enclosure of such a vast area of common waste lands without the commoner's consent. The Fens’ abundant common wastes had long enabled small-hold farmers and even landless cottagers to keep small herds of livestock, which were fed on the plentiful grass that the moist rich soil provided. Even the poorest inhabitants, with no livestock to pasture, could scratch out a living by harvesting the natural produce of the wetlands: catching waterfowl, fish and eels to furnish the tables of wealthier urban consumers, collecting reeds and sedge forth thatching roofs; and digging out peat, which was dried and burned for fuel. Even if the drainage should prove a success  an outcome he considered ‘very improbable’ – it would only lessen the yield of grass, diminish the common wastes through enclosure, and deprive nearby market towns of valuable wetland goods. Most husbandmen would be hurt by the scheme, and poor cottagers left without any employment, so that ‘no way else to put bread in their mouths,’ they would be forced to ‘live on alms, beg, or starve.’

In concluding his objections, the author criticized the ‘justices and chief gentlemen of the fen countries,’ whom the king had commissioned to consider the project, and who had pronounced it  ‘a work of great commodity to the common weal.’ While acknowledging that they may be ‘wise, discrete gentlemen’ all, the author argued that since none of the commissioners depended on the fens for their very livelihoods, they could not ‘understand the commodities and discommodities of the fens as those who only live by them.’ They misguidedly sought to make the fens more productive and to stamp out the supposed idleness of the fenland inhabitants, yet in reality they threatened to make it impossible for the large majority of fenlanders to earn a living there. Rather than thinking of the ‘common weal’ as they were supposed to, they thought only of the propertied elite who stood to gain by improving and enclosing the wastes on their own estates. Most were large landowners themselves, moreover, and would ‘not speak all they know {about the project} because the drainage may be more beneficial to some of them, than to ten thousand others.’ Because the commissioners were ignorant of how best to exploit the flooded Fens, and may have had a private interest in seeing them drained, they could never provide a sound verdict on the putative merits of such a proposal, either for the great majority of fenlanders or for the commonwealth.

The pro-drainage respondent to these objections refuted them point by point, accusing the objector and his fellows of obstinately opposing ‘a work that is for the general good of themselves &the common weal.’ There was no precedent for improving and enclosing so much common waste all at once, he observed, because such a bold and ambitious drainage scheme had never been attempted before. Far from being ‘very improbable’, the proposed  project was held by knowledgeable men ‘to be both possible &profitable.’ Yet if it should prove otherwise, only the investors stood to lose anything by it, since they alone bore the costs and would gain no reward unless it was successful. Draining the Fens would increase both the quantity and quality of the pastureland for everyone: although some commons would be enclosed to pay for the project, the remainder would be much richer and more product than before. The notion drier soil would yield less grass than waterlogged soil was dismissed as ‘ a very ridiculous observation, so that ‘if the poorer sort make no benefit it is through their own laziness & idleness that they get no stock about them.’*

With respect to the diverse natural produce of the flooded fenlands, the pro-drainage author accused his opponent of being ‘merely ignorant’ of the true situation. Once they had been drained and improved, the Fens would not only support more livestock than ever before, they would also yield marketable crops on newly arable land, fetching a much greater profit per acre than wetland goods ever could.**Any assertion to the contrary was ‘a gross and palpable error.,’ based on a ludicrous overvaluation of eels, reeds, and peat turfs. As for the poor fenlanders who claimed to make a living from harvesting such things, he noted that ‘for one half & more a year, they live merely idle, and have no means to set them on work . . the beggarly life that the poor  idle wretches do lead, do manifest of what commodity it is to them.’ Nor would the drained fens be destitute of these same wetland resources; in fact, they should be easier to harvest when they are concentrated around drainage ditches and receptacles. The improved, navigable rivers and superior value of market crops, meanwhile, would allow the entire region to prosper through increased trade, exporting their various commodities to new urban markets and importing goods ‘from such places as they never dealt in before.’


*[By 1600 the traditional ecology and economy of the Fens were under mounting strain. A cooling climate and rising seas made the Fens ever more flood-prone; the dissolution of the monasteries had created upheaval and confusion, while bringing new, non-native landowners to the region; a rising population and in-migration were putting unprecedented pressure on the available common  wastes (there were growing numbers cottagers, squatters and ‘master-less men’ who took advantage of the common wastes even though many did not have customary use rights there); and broader market forces were creating an insatiable demand for food, especially grains that could only be grown on well-drain arable land. The complicated customary systems of intercommoning between fenland communities were breaking down, as scarcity prompted neighboring villages to challenge one another’s use rights within a shared fen. Larger landowners sought to enclose and improve portions of the common waste for their own profit but were vehemently resisted by commoners who feared an reduction of the waste in an already precarious situation would ruin them. And as the floods grew more persistent and problematic, local commissions of sewers quarreled endlessly with one another over who is responsible for repairing damaged works that were proving ever more inadequate.

In the events the Fens were drained, the land shrunk and the water in the ditches had to be pumped into the canals, at first with windmills, then by enormous electric pumps. The draining was not accomplished without controversy, riots, stationing of troops,  prisoners from the Scottish War brought in as ‘scabs’, delays, cost overruns, and the systematic interventions of the highest levels of government, ‘State building’ as the author puts it. Irrigation under these circumstances requires constant management and repair. Today it is generally supposed that it would be better to have more Fens. In some cases, in one case anyway, they have had to pump water to reclaim the fens, which, never-the-less, do come alive- nesting birds in great numbers returning to it,  etc. .. how all this came down is too much to tell, it’s a good fight between common law and government prerogative, among many other matters.]

**[Cereals , coleseed , rapeseed which produced oil useful in dyes for the Cloth industry; hemp to supply the navy with a vital source of linen cloth and cordage.

The lived reality of the fens was not bleak for most; throughout the Middle Ages the fenlanders had developed a number of ways to live and even prosper within their watery world. Though the floodwaters could be unpredictable in any given year, they were reasonably dependable over time and could usually be relied on to follow a certain pattern, arriving the autumn and receding in most areas by late spring. Nor, for all the trouble they sometimes caused, were they without benefit: while most of the land could not grow grain, the receding floods left riverine silt deposits that promoted the growth of abundant grass on meadows spanning hundreds of thousands of acres. Fenland agriculture was thus based primarily on livestock grazing, and in a good year the region even supported stock from neighboring uplands, whose owners could then put their drier, arable lands to more profitable use. Those fenland areas too wet for grazing yielded other valuable goods, including foodstuffs, building materials, and fuel . . .the traditional fenland economy did not exist in spite of the recurring floods, but because of them. The key to managing and profiting from the Fens was to regulate and control the floods, rendering them stable and predictable as possible, rather than eliminating them altogether. Specialized administrative bodies called ‘commissions of sewers’ were created for this purpose in the Middle Ages.]


Part II- Fens During the Commonwealth

The ‘Adventurers” (investors in drainage projects) might well be expected to insist that their project was legal, just and good for the Commonwealth. But in doing so they tapped into a rising intellectual current in England that saw the improvement and enclosure of waste land  as the greatest possible benefit, a sound investment for landowners and a sure means to increase the nation’s wealth and population. Such views were part of a wider enthusiasm for utopian reforms of all kinds that was especially prevalent during the turbulent years of the Interregnum. Among the most zealous, imaginative, and prolific reform advocates were Samuel Hartlib and his extensive network of correspondents. Born in Elbing to a prominent Baltic merchant and  his English wife, Hartlib emigrated to England in 1628 and remained there until his death. He was widely known among the educated social elite, in England and elsewhere, as an ‘intelligencer’ – one who collected, connected, and circulated valuable information. He was inspired by the philosophy of Francis Bacon and believed that valuable practical knowledge ought to be shared as widely as possible. Throughout his life, Hartlib exchanged letters with hundreds of correspondents all across Europe and served as a central node of a prolific communication and publishing network known today as the ‘Hartlib Circle.

The Hartlib Circle was most active and influential during the Interregnum, when so many among England’s political and intellectual elite believed that a new age of the world was at hand and that the opportunity to transform the nation into a true, godly Commonwealth was at last within reach. Hartlib was on good terms with key figures in the Interregnum state, including John Thurloe and Oliver Cromwell himself, as well as many members of Parliament. Given the strong interest of the Hartlib Circle in agricultural innovations and improvement schemes of all kinds, it was no wonder that some of their most important treatises fixed on fen drainage and the improvement of waste lands generally as a means to enhance the nation’s prosperity.

 In 1651 Robert Child published a letter commending the great improvements recently made in the great fen of Lincolnshire which, he was informed, recovered nearly 380,000 areas- such sweeping improvements as these, he wrote, were the best and godliest way for England to prosper because they increased the size and productivity of the nation through peaceful means, rather than conquest. After initial skepticism Walter Blith published a treatise in 1652 extolling the advantages of regaining drowned lands. No respecter of blind tradition when it came to agricultural practice, Blith believed that English farming could be vastly improved through any number of ingenious innovations, and he criticized English farmers for holding the entire Commonwealth back through their ‘sloth, prejudice and ill husbandry.’ He had an especially negative view of the Fens and their inhabitants and argued that age-old fenland practices such as intercommoning and unrestrained grazing of livestock had damaged the land and prevented more enterprising farmers from improving it. Both practices he viewed as ignorant, ill-considered, and irrational.- their conservative outlook, low standards, general laziness, and defeatist attitude had obviously discouraged innovation, serving only to ‘weary the minds, and weaken the hands of others that would endeavor it.’

Cessy Dymock, a Lincolnshire farmer, inventor and projector promoted various agricultural improvement schemes. His grand objective was to optimize the efficient use and exploitation of every acre in England though he concentrated on the drained Fens because they represented a unique tabula rasa- a newly created landscape ready to be surveyed, divided, enclosed, tilled and planted with novel crops. Dymock’s idealized vision of the improved and reorganized Fens is a neat geographical pattern of fields, drainage ditches, and navigation canals, weaving together a network of orderly and hierarchically arranged farmsteads, intended to achieve optimum efficiency through rational, mathematical organization. He believed a farm arranged by his plan , ‘merely in contrivance, with or besides any other improvement, shall make 100 acres, to all intents and purposes useful and profitable as 150 acres can be.’ If comprehensively adopted, Dymock’s geometrical plan promised almost miraculous returns: ‘the most perfect, right, and ample use of every foot of ground enclosed entire.” Besides being more profitable, moreover, his rationally organized estate would also be more pleasurable for its inhabitants: ’You may at all times with ease view and take account of your business, and yet be as neat and sweet as in a burgemaster’s house in Holland.’ The circular layout in particular was not only more efficient but had an undeniable aesthetic appeal for Dymock, even with respect to the manor house itself, ‘which I would also build round, which form I suppose to be of most beauty, and least cost to him that will give his mind to consider it rightly’. For Dymock, the rational, mathematical organization of one’s farm was literally its own reward.

The Hartlib Circle was also keen to improve agriculture in Ireland and the New World. Like the Fens on a larger scale, they viewed Ireland as a great tabula rasa on which their theories for manuring and improving the land could be tested, not only making Ireland more productive, rational and civilized, but also laying the ground for further improvements in England. Beyond Ireland ,Hartlib also supported a project to create a godly Protestant settlement in North America. Both imperial projects were founded on the Hartlib Circle’s view of the natural world as a disorderly, irrational place and their belief in the capacity for human reason and hard work to reform and improve it, ideas that also governed their understanding of the Fens.

Besides recouping a healthy return on their financial investments, the supporters of fen drainage projects and England’s other imperial adventures seem to have shared some larger goals in common: transforming the natural environment to make it more productive, overcoming the resistance of backward, ignorant natives to turn them into rational, governable, and civilized English subjects; and doing all this in the name of promoting English trade and economic growth. Whether undertaken at home or abroad, such projects were all linked to the same utopian, reformist, and imperial worldview, propagated by Samuel Hartlib’s network of would-be improvers and projectors. Fen drainage can thus be understood ideologically as an early modern instance of “internal colonialism.’

The Scotch by John Kenneth Galbraith

·       [There is ALOT of Scotch in Americans]

·       Galbraith was was born and raised in a Hard-shell Baptist community in South Ontario, lands on the western shore of Lake Erie. The area was originally granted to Irish Noblemen- Talbot and Airy*- eccentric and hard-drinking aristocrats who wanted English settlers, especially not Highlanders, but these were the only one’s available: Cambells, McPhails, Grahams, McFarlands, Mckellers, Camerons, Morrisons, Gows, Galbraiths, McCallums, McLeods, Pattersons . . .beginning in 1803.

      The clansmen had a distinctive stamp: One stroke of the axe and there’s a nose. Another and there are lips, the eyes gouged out with a great drill and without smoothing it, nature thrusts these faces into the world saying ‘This will do.’ There hands and faces were covered not with pink or white film but a heavy red parchment designed to give protection in extremes of climate for a lifetime . . . it had the appearance of leather and appearances were not deceptive .  . . additional protection provided for most of the week by a stiff bristled beard. They dressed in working garments: high bibbed overalls of blue denim- sweaters and trousers added underneath during winter.

Their names were Dan, Jim Angus, Duncan, Malcolm bit mostly John . . .   so just about everybody had a nickname which were often disagreeable: Lame, Dirty, Nosey or Piggy John – those who somehow escaped had no objection, those who hadn’t were glad to see others suffer.

Nightly baths were impractical, laundry was a burden: water had to be hauled and heated, the kitchen was the only warm room . . . better a mildly maloderous husband than a dead wife. A traveler in 1837 remarked on these folks clannish attachments, their thrifty, dirty habits, their pride and honesty. Nothing much had changed by Galbraith’s time.

In this community there were two opinions with regard to the size of a family, based on the economic role of offspring: those who regarded children as a valuable earning asset had large families, those ho regarded education as necessary had small families. Sometimes the economic value of a wife was questioned. A movie company producing a film  called ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers’ made a worldwide search for a real life situation: they found it in Galbraith’s community.


Virtue and marital fidelity were impressive. There was only one case to the contrary in local lore. The mother of an illegitimate child must inevitably marry a hired man or a drunk. He father of an illegitimate child might sacrifice his ‘citizenship for year. Intercourse under all circumstances was considered a sin, marriage was simply a license for misbehavior. At any rate, there were few places or circumstances  to engage in illicit sex,. There were people around all the time, bad weather, snow and mosquitoes .Uncertainty as to the state of conviction in the other person was a deterrent as well: Watching a bull do his business Galbraith remarked to his sweetheart: ‘ I think it would be fun to do that.’ She said ‘Well, it’s your cow.’

Never-the-less, among the rougher elements there were masters of salacious detail, with wonderfully imaginary stories which were not generally believed but provided a good hour or so of entertainment.

Money was the abiding passion of the Scotch community. Love of money meant that as the other passions receded, a man’s life did not become less meaningful- a man’s emotions were reliably engaged until the day he died. No casual reference was ever made to money. No one spoke of ‘Jack’, ‘Dough’, ‘Lettuce’, or “Long Green’. It was always  referred to respectfully as money or dollars. Some have always wanted money for what it could buy, some for the power it conferred, some for prestige – the Scotch  wanted it for its own sake.

Two technique for accumulating assets have always been in some measure in competition: one is to earn money, the other to avoid spending it- our neighbors enthusiastically employed both. A man who keeps his money has in reality more use from it than he can have by spending it, observed Dr. Johnson. And the passion for money reinforced continence and fidelity- faithful and chaste behavior is the least expensive.

But  just as people expect woman to love a man without being a nymphomaniac so the Scotch expected a man to love money without being a miser-such behavior could cause considerable adverse comment though usually cost one membership in society. ‘Codfish (the cheapest protein)John’ was said to have lifted the cover of his coffin and handed out his coat, waistcoat pants and undershirt. Never-the less an excessively frugal man was always called ‘very scotch.” (The comedian Jack Benny had great success playing an artless miser).Too much town bought food was a mark of profligacy but only the backward clans considered it a mark of merit to live completely from their land.

The agriculture of the Scotch did less for the landscape than most. Their architecture was intrinsically an eyesore, like themselves. They minimized gross outlay, hired few men, exchanged labor with neighbors, arranged tasks to avoid peaks and valleys in the need for labor. Each tried to keep himself reasonably employed year round. They had little experience in industrial drudgery but they did compare those tasks which had to be done every day with those that were related to the more spacious cycle of seasons and thus had to be performed but once year. These they preferred. The Scotch regarded the whole enterprise of W.W. I with great reserve – not regarding the slaughter as noble or necessary and they had instinctive misgivings about tye men who were in charge. It was said of those who went to fight (and, inevitably, were killed) that ‘he went because he was tired of doing chores.’

Just about everybody worked for himself. “It’s hard work but a man’s his own boss’ yet it was a highly stratified society. They talked constantly, clinically, unabashedly about each other: one’s farming methods, marketing decisions, livestock and machinery, wives, family, relatives, temperament, dinking habits, stomach complaints, tumors, personal expenditures, physical appearance, political, social and economic views – all dwelt on in detail by one’s neighbors. Out of this came a consensus- an agreeable certainty as to  where a man stood. At the top: men of standing, at the bottom: the average Scotsman[‘Scot’ as opposed to Scotch was pejorative].

Men of standing usually owned more than one hundred acres- but this was not a qualification if the extra acres were farmed badly. Thus he was a competent farmer, strictly sober and diligent, came from one of the better clans, was a very large size (tall, etc.), possessed distinguished animals: beef cattle, sheep, collie dogs of the best breed (not horses or cows.)He  possessed a useful wisdom. Every community needs a great many communal services. To pay for them is expensive and only a poor class of talent is available for money . . .men of standing acted to improve the community, bringing roads, telephones, making cooperative purchases, managing market fairs, bearing in mind neighbors’ concerns for saving money. Such work was rewarded with honor and esteem.

At the bottom were renters and hired men, a  50-acre man who was ignorant, who didn’t have the ability to put knowledge to a useful purpose, didn’t make any sense, drank too much, was un-neighborly or dishonest. A good man did not shrink from tasks of pure drudgery. though some indolent fellows could escape  condemnation if friendly enough. Excessive piety –wasting time in prayer- was not, however, an excuse for arriving late in the fields. These poor farmers, hired men or mail carriers- the outcasts and untouchables- often gathered at the country store for mutual sustenance and support. They didn’t say much that was important for, as they well knew, they weren’t suppose to have anything important to say. They favored topics not that engaged the mind but freed it from all pretense of effort.

Hannah MacBride, the store-keepers wife was spare, sallow and sharp-featured: the best informed woman in two townships. Her specialty was human frailty and personal disaster .If someone had consumption ,a quarrel with his brother, brother-in-law or hired man, was afraid her last baby was not quite bright or someone had been thrown in front of a disc harrow by an unruly horse, you herd about it first from Hannah. Once, no doubt she had passed along these grim tidings with a certain appearance of sorrow. But she was an honest soul and in time she abandoned pretense and came to issue her bulletins with the joy she really felt.

The average clansman got his views not from newspapers, magazines or books but from men of standing. Men of standing with some exceptions didn’t read either but they did keep a close watch on the Toronto Globe – the Bible of the Scotch- which was published by George Brown, Liberal Party. It was suspicious of wealth, influence and social position, stood for small enterprise, independent farmers, low tariffs and the Manchester School ((radicals and free traders originating in that City’s Chamber of Commerce and sponsors of the Anti-Corn Law League, supported Laissez-Faire and was against the growth of the colonial empire, led by Cobden and Bright. It advanced commercial Union with the U.S., defended the Sabbath and opposed alcohol. It was for public owner ship of utilities and suspicious of trade unions.

Even drink Scotch favored Prohibition. Scotch drank for one reason- to get drunk. A man did not get dead drunk but fighting drunk and the resulting battles- especially at the McIntyre house, the chief resorts of drinking Scotch- became part of folk history. Empty whiskey bottles, whole and broken , were the preferred weapons. The demonic shrieks of highlanders charging to their doom was often heard. These bars-theatres of combat- were the principal target of Prohibition.

Elections had the elements of a sporting contest – the matching of wits, lung power, talent for persuasion and insult, they justified belligerence in the high name of public service, constitutional government and effective democracy. And the imagined and hoped Tories suffered terribly in defeat. All public offices went to men of standing.

Galbraith’s father was a leading klberal in the communityfor50 years. He considered patronage even more damaging than public works. The better class of clansmen stuck to their farms, they could not be seduced by a job on the roads or running the post office. As a result government jobs went to the laziest and most feckless members of the community. These in turn became for the voters the exemplars of the government party.

He argued that only men of exceptionally inferior character sold their votes. Better have such people vote in response to a straight forward commercial transaction than in accordance with their own political convictions which were so patently nil.

The view of the community towards technological progress was that they were disinclined to gamble. ‘If it was good enough for my auld man its good enough for me’ combined decent respect for one’s ancestors with economy of thought. They had the conservatism of men with a small margin of error, for what was fully proven within the range of their eyesight, thought it was better to try for less and be safe. They scorned improvements which would add little of their income. They did not like accepting the council of men (farm agents) who did not have to live by the results of their advice. If things worked, they were copied. Most tried to avoid experiment which, should they turn out badly, might preclude eating for a year.

In  religion the Presbyterians were a full scale enterprise- Sunday school, morning and evening Sabbath services (evening somewhat a mating enterprise), choir practice and Wednesday prayer meetings. Their affairs were of interest even to those that did not belong. But Galbraith and the better clans belong in the Old School or were Hardshell Baptists. Their churches contained nothing but square oak pews and a plain wood pulpit, no choir, no organ, no collection (money  was weekday faith), no mission, no Sunday school, no salary for the minister. Usually the minister served four congregations. The held to uncompromising  predestination: one was saved or not. May meetings were large clan gatherings. After church meetings were  important secular colloquia. God was not talked about , public displays of piety frowned upon .

·       The conflict in education was between those who believed that education had an independent utility for improving a man’s position in the community and preparing for a profession and to who viewed education as a necessary but burdensome and even dangerous supplement to a strong back. These last wished to run the school at minimum expense- since it did little for them anyway- they opposed higher salaries for teachers and improvements, especially those that added comfort or convenience which they felt added to the debilitating effects of education. The issue was always compromised between the two groups. Progress in school, Galbraith says, was facilitated by a curriculum which was from from frills., ‘we were taught reading, arithmetic, and the geography and history of Canada.

A health book  sent down from the central government was discredited because of its utterly impractical advice that one should bath every night, which everyone knew was silly. The lesson which aid we should pick out as a partner in life a healthy person of good character whom we loved was discounted because no mention was made of property which we all knew to be very important.

The school yard itself was very rough and steeply sloped- no chance that it could be used for baseball, football, basketball, volleyball or any other group game. Few things, by the commonly advocated standards, are so bad for the youngsters of impressionable age as team sports. Instead of causing him to think first of his own self-interest they turn his mind to the problem of the group. He ceases to be an individualist and becomes a mere cog in a social machine. We were safe. Our only form of organized athletics was seeing how long, with the aid of snowballs, we could deny access to the girl’s outhouse.

The Scotch were handicapped by the belief that learning was not meant to be painless and the line between a stern task-master and a mere bully is not an easy one to draw.

When Galbraith returned to his community as a grown and successful man he was often asked if he ever found a place as good as this. He always said no for this could have been the truth and, when he faced up to it, he did not wish to have the people there think him irresponsible.

·       *Airy ordered the charge of the Light Brigade

    

Marx on the Jewish Question by Yuri Slezkine

Marx began the same way as Mazzini and Mickiewicz. The emancipation of the German, he wrote when he was twenty-five years old, is the emancipation of man. Or rather, as he had written a month or two earlier, emancipation from Judaism is the self-emancipation of our time. The emancipation of man was to proceed in stages.


The root of all evil was private proper and money. The view of nature attained under the domination of private property and money is a real contempt for, and practical debasement of nature .  .  . It is in this sense that Thomas Muntzer declares it intolerable ‘that all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth, the creatures too, must become free.’ To become free was to abolish private property and money. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities. No one worships it more than the Jews, who are the living embodiment of egoism. The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the great god of the world.

What is the  secular base of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest.
What is the worldly religion of the Jews? Huckstering.
What is his worldly god? Money

Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.

Whether Marx wanted to abolish money by abolishing the Jews or abolish the Jews by abolishing money, the real question was how it would be done. Or as it turned out, where it could be done. The answer was that the emancipation of man was the emancipation of Germany because Germany was an anachronism, a flagrant contradiction of generally recognized axioms , the nothingness of the ancien regime exhibited to the world. And what was a modern ancient regime? The comedians of a world order* whose true heroes are dead; nothing but wretchedness in office.

Fortunately for Germany this is not all.  If . . .the whole German development did not exceed the German political development, a German could at most  have of the share in the problems- of-the-present that Russia has. But the Germans are not Russians, their philosophical development did exceed their political development, as well as the philosophical development of the more advanced nations[*]. In politics, the Germans thought what other nations did, Germany was their theoretical conscience. The abstraction and presumption of its thought was always in step with the one-sidedness and lowliness of its reality.

The more profound the wretchedness, the better for the final outcome. Marx’s History was Faust’s Mephistopheles -  part of that power which the evil ever do ,and ever does the good. The lowliness of German reality had sharpened its thought, and the sharpness of Germany’s thought would help bring about the revolution, which would usher in the emancipation of man. The proliferation of people who, with the greatest facility and on the highest occasion, assumed the motions and gestures of inspired persons and prophesied the approaching end, signified that the end was, indeed, approaching. The greatest achievement of German philosophy would be to dethrone religion (by which Marx meant Christianity):

The abolition of religion as the the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

The performance of this task had begun –like most things in history- with the attempt abolish the opposite. It had begun in Germany’s revolutionary past, the Reformation

Luther, we grant, overcame bondage out of devotion replacing it by bondage out of conviction. He shattered faith in authority because he restored the authority of faith. He turned priests into laymen because he turned laymen into priests .  .  .But, if Protestantism was not the true solution to the problem, it was at least the true setting of it .  . .And if the Protestant transformation of the German layman into priests emancipated lay popes, the princes, with the whole of their priestly clique, the privileged and the philistines, the philosophical transformation of priestly Germans into men will emancipate the people.

Just as the revolution then began in the brain of a monk, so now it begins in the brain of the philosopher. Much of the work had been done by Hegel; it was up to the twenty-five year old Marx to complete he task by bringing history and politics together. One of the two 1843 essays that launched Germany’s- and the world’s- ultimate philosopher was the introduction to  A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

The fundamental questions were clear:

Can Germany attain a practice a la hauteur des principes – i.e. a revolution which will raise it no only to the official level of modern nations, but to the height of humanity which will be the near future of those nations? Will the monstrous discrepancy between the demands of German thought and the answers of German reality find a corresponding discrepancy between civil society and the state, and between civil society and itself? Will the theoretical needs be immediate practical needs? . Can[Germany] do a somersault, not only over its own limitations, but at the same time over the limitations of modern nations?

The answer was, by now, familiar: it was precisely the monstrosity of the discrepancy that would allow Germany to rise to the height of humanity. Germany, as the deficiency of the political present constituted a world of its own, will not be able to throw down the specific German limitations without throwing down the general limitations of the political present – its own and everyone else’s.

But how could it be done politically? Where, then, is the positive possibility of a German emancipation?

Answer: in the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetrated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood: a sphere finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating all the other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.

Just as the Jewish spirit was embodied in capitalism, the spirit of German was embodied in the proletariat. Just as the Jews stood for unbridled acquisitiveness and self-interest, the Germans stood for the creativity of absence and innocence. As  philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapon in philosophy. And once the lightning of thought was squarely struck this ingenuous soil of the people, the emancipation of the Germans into men will be accomplished. And once the emancipation of Germans into men was accomplished, the emancipation of man would be assured:

Let us sum up the result. The only liberation of Germany which is practically possible is liberation from the point of view of that theory which declares man to be the supreme being for man, Germany can only emancipate itself from the Middle Ages only if it emancipates itself at the same time from the partial victories over the Middle Ages. In Germany, no form of bondage can be broken without breaking all forms of bondage. Germany, which is renowned for its thoroughness, cannot make a revolution unless it is a thorough one. The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy , its heart is the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization of philosophy.

When all the inner connections are met, the day of the German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing of the cock of Gaul.

The solution to the German question followed from the solution to the Jewish question: Once society

has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism – huckstering and its preconditions – the Jews will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanized, and because the conflict between man’s individual-sensuous existence and his species-existence has been been abolished. On the one hand the social emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of society from Judaism, and the emancipation of society from Judaism is the emancipation of mankind from oppression. On the other, the emancipation of the German from all forms of bondage is the alliance of Germany philosophy with the universal proletariat in the name of the emancipation of man. The emancipation of man ultimately depends on the reformation of the Jews and the resurrection of Germany.

The entire edifice of Marxist theory- complete with its Meophistopelian frame and rich rhetorical ornamentation- was built on these foundations. Hegel’s preface to  his Philosophy of Right ends with the owl of Minerva spreading its wings at the approach of dusk. Marx’s introduction to his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right ends with the cock of Gaul (the gallus from Gallus) crowing at the dawn of the new day  the same one, presumably, that awoke the god of day and chased off the ghost of Hamlet’s father. As Marx himself would explain; the philosophers had only interpreted the world in various ways; the point as to change it- through revolution and resurrection. Marx’s discovery of the proletariat had accomplished this task.

The question of why Marx, of all the cocks heralding the German resurrection, ended up conquering much of the world is just as impossible and irresistible as the question of why Jesus, of all the Jewish prophets who assumed the motions and gestures of inspired persons, ended up founding one of the world’s most owl-resistant civilizations. One possible answer is that they were, in fact, quite similar. Marx, like Jesus and unlike Mazzini or Mickiewicz, succeeded in translating a tribal prophesy into a language of universalism. He was his own Paul (in case Engels proved ineffective); the emancipation from Judaism and the resurrection of Germany were buried under the weight of the emancipation from capitalism and the resurrection of humankind.

Perhaps most remarkably,, he succeeded in translating a prophesy of salvation into a language of science. As Celsus wrote about Jesus and the other would-be messiahs and their visions, “To these promises are added strange, fanatical, and quite unintelligible words, of which no rational person can find meaning: for so dark are they, as to have no meaning at all; but they give the occasion to every fool or impostor to apply them to suit his own purposes.” Marx too, combined oracular formulas that defied the comprehension of his future followers – much to their satisfaction, apparently. But Marx did not just alternate simplicity with complexity, clarity with obfuscation, striking metaphors with commodity-money-commodity equations, he expressed his eschatology in the form of a scientific forecast based on falsified claims, and most important, involving sociologically defined protagonists.

[There follows detailed comparisons and analogies between the, Marxist and Christian eschatology- or any Millenarian, and Apocalyptic prophesy, the central theme of  Yuro Slezkine’s The House of Government; A Saga of the Russian Revolution, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2017.]

* I use italics for Marx, bold for his italics, except here, which is my own emphasis. All this is novel to me. I’m watching how Slezkine/Marx  develop their implicit claim to literal truth, and the signifying by abstract concepts that goes on; how far their generalities condense and elide  the complexity of the phenomena the they purport to signify? What aspects of this polemic are really useful in the quest for social justice? That not just so much ‘theoretical’  wheel-spinning?

Anti-fraternal Traditions in the Middle Ages by Penn Szittya

Founded near the beginning of the 13th century, the fraternal orders were one of the most successful but also controversial innovations of the late-medieval church. By 1260, fewer than fifty years after St. Francis first gathered a small band of brothers (fratres, hence friars), there were four such fraternal and mendicant orders- Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, and Augustinians – with many thousands of members among them, saturating the cities and towns of western Europe and beginning to spread to distant parts of the earth.  Their business was apostolic preaching and pastoral care.

The friars verbal powers were famous.  The Dominican, the Ordo Praedictatorum, were founded specifically as a preaching order, and both they and the Franciscans developed powerful teaching techniques, including the use of anecdote, story, and fable, with broad appeal. Even the architecture of their churches was influenced by their preaching mission and its success. In cities all over Europe they built large but simple churches with little interior adornment, the naves being little more than great open spaces to accommodate the crowds that came to hear their newfangled sermons. The friar’s verbal skills were also known in another area . . .they were beginning to dominate the intellectual life of the University of Paris, as they would at other universities across Europe in the next century, and led the way in the flowering of Scholasticism with its new methods of argument and its emphasis on logic rather than theology, on Aristotle rather than Augustine. By the end of the century, in the person of such theologians as Aquinas, Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus, John Pecham, and Duns Scotus, the friars had taken over the intellectual leadership of the church .In less than a hundred years, these new orders had also affected drastically the progress of Papal centralization, the theology and practice of confession, the growth of nominalism, the revival of classical literature, the flourishing of lay piety, the spread of missionary activity as far as the steppes of Asia and more.

Though phenomenally successful, the fraternal orders were subjected, almost from their foundation, to a widespread campaign of attack on their legitimacy and on their mendicant way of life. From the 1250s until the 16^th century, they were denounced in sermon and polemic, by churchmen and academics, by monastic and secular clergy, by archbishops and heretical Lollards, in monastic chronicles and encyclopedias, in canon law summae, in Wycliffite compilations and commentaries, in Latin prose and vernacular lyric, by poets from Jean de Meun to Chaucer. In quantity, duration, and generic variety, there is nothing quite comparable to this literature of attack anywhere in the many outbursts of anticlericalism throughout the Middle Ages.

It is not just its wide range, however, that makes anti-fraternal literature of unique interest. Attacks against the friars come primarily in two normally quite disparate genres: on the one hand, anti-fraternal theology, polemical in nature and written by theologians whose professions lay within a church threatened, they said, by the new orders of friars; and on the other hand, anti-fraternal poetry, satirical in nature and written by men in the vernacular, like Langland, for the most part unconnected with the church professionally between the learned and lay literatures there was a surprising degree of continuity.

Langland’s Penetrans Domos in  Piers the Plowman  (@1370-90)can trace its genealogy, for example, back to a theologian writing in Paris in the 1250s. William of St Amour, a secular* master of theology at the University of Paris, attacked the friars in 1254 in an exegetical treatise that took its title from the first verse of 2 Timothy 3**, the same passage Langland alluded to a century and a quarter later. It was called De periculis novissimorum temporum (Concerning the Perils of the Last Times.) This extremely influential work not only began the long history of anti-fraternal theology; it also inaugurated a tradition of the use of the Biblical language against the friars for centuries, a language that identified them with a recurring set of Biblical malefactors- primarily the antichrists prophesied for the end of time, the false apostles of the New Law, and the Pharisees of the Old Law and described their faults in words taken from the texts of Scripture. Of that tradition, Piers Plowman is not the last but one of the most complex expressions.

This book is a history of that literary tradition and its language: its origin in the apocalyptic fears of the 1250s; its surreptitious circulation and dissemination from 13^th century France to 14^th century England; its symbolic conventions and canonical texts; its puzzling continuity in ecclesiastical controversy involving the friars, even when it becomes anachronistic and contradicted by history; and its striking impact on poetry, particularly of the Ricardian era, written by some of England’s greatest poets.

Anti-fraternalism, it should be said, was not solely a literary or traditional phenomena. The hypocrisy, worldliness ,and corruption that infected other elements of the church touched the friars as well, especially in the 14th century; certainly the struggle with the secular clergy was a real political battle for power, authority and income. Many of the material charges leveled at the friars were true, But as recent research into bishops’ registers and the Franciscans’ own statutes has shown, others were also clearly false. Recognition of the strain of Biblical (apocalyptic) language in anti fraternal writings will help to isolate the traditional from the local charges against the friars and to  ‘separate historical fiction from historical fact.’ [as the author would somewhat dubiously have it in a macrocosmic study like this].

* The term secular clergy refers to deacons and priests who are not monastics or members of a religious institute. They are referred to also as diocesan priests or sometimes, in the case of an archdiocese, as archdiocesan clergy.

**But know this also, that in the last days perilous times will come.
For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemous, disobedient to parent, unthankful, unholy . . .
Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from each turn away
For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with diverse lusts.

[ I anachronistically use the King James translation  of Paul’s letter to Timothy for effect, the author does not but, after all, anti-fraternalism was a still  thing in the 16th century. The ‘creep into houses’ reflects the anxiety of traditional clergy over the friars’ pastoral activities- marrying, taking confessions, attending the dying and burying the dead]

The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature by Penn R. Szittya; Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1986

The Capuchins of Velay's Institutes of Peace by Thomas Bisson

No fewer than seven or eight near contemporary accounts have survived, incontestable proof of the story’s impact. What is more, these records are sufficiently independent that one need only hold to what they have in common, or to what they disagree about least, to reconstruct the likely course of events.

On about Saint Andrew’s day ( 30 November) 1182 a humble carpenter named Durand went before  Bishop Peire of Le Puy and urged that he do something ‘to reform the peace.” Rebuffed by the bishop, Durand found many supporters, of whom more than four hundred swore to a first pact of peace soon after Christmas. By Easter their swelling numbers, having surpassed five thousand, could no longer be counted. All this according to the Limousin prior Geoffroi de Vigeois, who wrote within a year of these events. He goes on to say that Durand ‘instituted institutes of peace.’ These consisted of a uniform code of dress, a solemn oath preceded by a confession of sins, an annual payment of six pennies at Pentecost ‘in’ (or ‘to”] the brotherhood’, a once-for-life payment of one poyes in a leaden receptacle, and the commitment of the sworn men to fight when summoned. Canons and monks who swore were dispensed from fighting on condition of praying.

Conspicuous in white capes, with cloth pendants front and back resembling the woolen pallium worn by archbishops, the sworn brothers were visible moral force if not quite a rival clergy. Over their breasts hung an image of the Virgin and Son bearing the circular inscription Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem. Durand’s institutes were confirmed by his bishop in a festival assembly on Assumption Day (15 August) 1183. At( the time knights were joined in the cause by ‘princes, bishops, abbots, monks, clerics, and women without husbands’; and the sault on Castle-dun a few days later resulted in the killing of a ‘prince of robbers’ together with many hundreds of coterels (la compagnie sauvage).

What happened next is harder to reconstruct, for none of the other sources were so close (in time or space)n to the experience as Geoffrioi, who wrote no more. But Robert of Torigni and Rigord, writing in the 1180s, largely confirm his account of the first year, while setting the Capuchins in a wider context of explanation. Both represented Durand as motivated by a miraculous apparition of the Virgin Mary, while Rigord, having noted the atrocities that had provoked the poor carpenter, saw him and his movement as God’s choice to relieve suffering caused by the war between the King of Aragon and the count of Toulouse. Robert of Auxerre, whose annals for 1183 and 1184 may have been first written in those years, is the first to describe the Capuchin campaigns; he was also the first to record a massive reaction against this  motley force of (mostly) lesser men pretending to do without lords. Their arrival in ‘France’ (regions north of Velay) and their ‘insolent’ refusal to submit to their betters ended in their ‘destruction’ by the French princes. Conceding that they had begun well, Robert thought that the Capuchins had been overtaken by the ‘angel of Satan.’


Other texts carry this disapproval much further. Their authors knew that the Capuchins had a cause, knew that many regions of (greater) France had been infested by desperate and violent men – rouergats, Aragonese, Gascons, Brabancons-; men who looked and spoke differently (from us); mercenaries all. But these writers could no longer say anything to justify an association so manifestly subversive of lordship. For Guiot de Provins Durand was a venal imposter; for the ‘Anonymous of Laon’ a simple man deceived by a malicious canon  disguised as the Virgin. Brilliantly opinionated ,the ‘Anonymous’ touches on all points known from other texts and distorts them mercilessly, save for one alone that takes us to the very heart of the matter. The Capuchins, he wrote, were madmen from the start. For him the enabling assembly of the Assumption far from being a ratification of a grand impulse, was a self-indulgent orgy of worldly and (worse) mercantile opulence, its corruptly overheated materialism nurturing the foul trick played on Durand. Next comes the account of the conjuration, of which the commitments and pieties are made to look suspiciously unorthodox. The oath of the brethren fares no better: it was said to associate the ‘princes’ withy brigand-knights as enemies of the peace. And the peace-tax, plausibly amounting to 6d. in Geoffroi’s account, is doubled to 12d. in this version, resulting (it was claimed) in an ugly swollen treasury of abuse soon amounting to L400,000.

Over blow rhetoric? At its close this narrative sounds a different note, in to sentences. Here they are: “Everywhere the princes trembled, not daring to impose anything unjust on their people, nor presuming to require any exactions or impositions from them except their customary renders . . .[with these successes to boast of] their insane folly drove these foolish and undisciplined people to command counts and viscounts, and other princes as well, to treat their subjects more gently than was customary if they wished not to incur their indignation.’

Here was exposed the raw nerve of a clumsy aggregate of fortified societies that was hardly yet France. Nothing less than lordship itself seemed threatened by the hooded men of ‘peace.’ Outrageous that princes should be limited to just or customary impositions! In their pernicious solidarity, wrote the chronicler of the bishop of Auxerre, the hoods ‘had no fear, no reverence for higher powers,’ forgetting that servitude had been the just consequence of the sin by which people had lost their primal liberty. When Bishop Hugues and his knihts captured some Capuchins in his patrimonial village of Gy, he deliberately reduced them to elemental poverty so that ‘they learn that serfs may not rise up against their lords. The norm of power, even in kingless lands of castles and princes, was lordship: a precedence of affective superiority – indeed, of nobility – as well as armed might. And by this plausible account, when the Capuchins saw, with the pity of the archbishop of Sens, that they could not prevail against instituted lordships, however violent, their movement collapsed.

Were the frightened magnates right about the hoods? Had people lost faith in local lords? No more fundamental question can be raised in this book. And because we may be sure of the fright, it is possible to answer that some Capuchins, at least, had relished the idea of ‘getting even.’ For it is all but certain that from the moment when Durand’ as institutes were agreed upon, some distinction must have been made between the violence of the coterels, and Brabancons and that of the  lords. The early enlistment of magnates could only have rested on that consideration. Once the distinction was lost, the cause was lost.

Whatever the fears, the critics of the Capuchins were surely mistaken about one thing: the initial purpose. Geoffroi de Vigoeis got it right when, with honest plausibility, he described an original pact of associative action. Such event are not unheard of in previous generations, but they typically proved ephemeral or else, as in the organizing of urban utilities, went unrecorded. Durand’s ‘institutes of peace’ do not survive in writing, and may never have been written, but they are, as we know them, rational and socially purposive: the solemn oath ,surely bound to fight when summoned, the pecuniary assessment, and the uniform. . . all this was new in Durand’s day.

Power in the 12th Century by Thomas N. Bisson

What had been lacking before the 13^th century was a normal conception of associative (that is, in Aristotelian terms, political) power, rooted in practice, and distinct from lordship. The natural communities of valley and vill, where they survived at all were too distant and weak (and many too elevated) to impose their sociabilities as such. What Max Weber theorized as patrimonial domination was the prevalent mode of power in the post Carolingian societies; and lordship, sanctioned by fidelity and legitimated by protection, was a social-relational rather than a behavioral structure. It was sociologically personal, affective and unpolitical in nature. Counsel and (especially) consent were not political functions but devices for ensuring and imposing the lord’s will; for creating affective solidarities, typically in ritually ceremonious ways, in lord-kingships, principalities, even ecclesiastical lordships.

Accordingly, the historical problem is how this prevalent mode of lordly power begins to lose its passively affective character: not only how it became progressively institutionalized, as seems to have happened with accountability and office, but also how, in courts, causes, consultations, and parleys, a new kind of discourse emerged; talking less ceremonious and deferential than engaged with issues, in which interests as distinct from rights came to be articulated. Taken together these changes may be spoken of as ‘politicizing.’

There is reason to believe that this phenomena became general in the years around 1200  . . . but the evidence is unsatisfactory. “Politicizing” should not be confused with what has been called the ‘invention of the state.” The resort to ‘verbalized rules’ instead of custom, the recognition that power resides in law(s) rather than in the ‘effluence of character,’ may have been stimulated by the Investiture Conflict, and was widely diffused by the clergy in the 12^th century. The Historia Pontificalis is the work of a courtier-cleric ‘listening-in’ on a newly intense institutional life rooted in argument about right, offices, and claims. To secure such things the clergy knew how to make friends, how to exert influence. That ecclesiastical jurisdictions promoted rational, ruler-bound spheres of discourse is evident from the records of papal judges-delegate. But there is nothing in all this to show that political talk was common.

For in reality the Christian clergy and lawyers lived in a chiefly seigneurial world. They were the sons and brothers of barons and knights; they were all too familiar with the imperatives of lordship. They did not easily give upon lordly habits of approbatory consultation. Synods were held by bishops and legates who were respected and addressed as lords. Preoccupied by rights and wrongs the prelates in such assemblies were in no hurry, nor did they feel pressed, to reformulate their concerns as social causes worthy of autonomous debate and regulation. So that even in the church neither the formal adherence to written rules nor the presumably sharpened precision of curial discourse seemed to have hastened the politicizing of power. In 1215 the constitutions of the Fourth Lateran Council were promulgated as the lord-pope’s programme, contrived to conceal objections that may have arisen in its formulation; only for the dogmatic decrees on the Trinity and against heretical teachings did Innocent II so much as request the assemblies approval.

Still less do the records of lay power suggest that the interactiion in conventions, courts and assemblies was other than deferential, ceremonial, or judicially procedural towards 1200 . . .thye more one reads such records the more suspicious one becomes. How much is surely left out! What are we to make of the commitments of Italian communes to the Guelf cause, like that of Brescia, or to the Ghibellines, like Pisa? Yet the interested powers – let not us call them ‘parties’, For they themselves did not- cultivated alliances with communes, not causes as such . . the palpable changes of regimes in Genoa after 1190 and in Toulouse a decade later have the looks of factional action sprung from affective alliances rather than from principled commitment.

In other circumstances records could be more informative. If it had long been necessary for crusading leaders to seek consensus on ways, means, and tactics through debate, the enlarged problems of mobilization and costs imparted new urgency to decision-making at the end of the 12th century. The promotion of the Fourth Crusade was attended by a rarely explicit interaction amongst lord-barons and knights incapable of citing on their own . .  the predicament of the financially pressed crusading barons was no everyday situation. But for all his testimony to engaged debate about decisions and policy, Vikllehardouin is far from doubting the preponderance of lordship and nobility in his experience. . .[ here is a whole section on the crisis in Catelonia 1173-1205, prof. Bisson’s special area of expertise, see https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2018/05/artifacts-of-power-by-thomas-bisson.html ] . . .

 It was Professor Holt himself who pointed out that when John de Lacy and Gilbert fitz Reinfrey submitted to King John in January 1216 they were obliged not simply to renew their personal fidelity to John but also renounce their adherence to the ‘king’s enemies’ and to the ‘charter of liberties’ they had wrung from the king; their fidelity, that is, to a ‘cause’, to a ‘political progamme’. Whereas the king and the pope had rejected their enterprise as conspiracy, there is reason to believe that the rebellious barons had arrived at a new way of conspiring by subordinating their personal rights to a collective interest that was, indeed, subversive of lord-kingship. Of ‘politicking’ in our modern sense there must have been plenty, to be sure, but it is the avoidance of that meaning that holds the hope for making historical sense of power  in the crisis of the Magna Carta. John succeeded in sundering the adversarial solidarity of the barons, here again the sources resist all inflection of novelty. Circumstances pushed the rebels towards self-defining power that fell short of overt redefinition. Caps 12 and 14 of the Charter, which by prescribing ‘common counsel’; might appear to have spelt out a practical definition of collective interest, were silently dropped from the re-issues of 1216 and after. Yet as time swiftly showed, the insistent reality of a consultative  role for the general interest in English society had overtaken the reticence of custom.

[ Lordship was predicated on superior force exercised in the exaction of ‘tributes’ ( of which there all sorts both customary and ex tempore) from peasants, town folks and traveling merchants and supported by alliances formed with Kings, other Lords and barons both greater and lesser. The “Crisis of the 12^th  century” was precipitated by an expansion of world trade, innovations in technology and improvement in the climate which expanded wealth and gave rise, in the absence of systematic record-keeping or bureaucratic control by the great lords themselves well as their dependency on knights themselves to secure the tenures, to the ambitions of the vassals and retainers and lesser barons to secure financial independence and grandeur.

“When I first came to Leon,” wrote King Alfonso IX wrote in his preamble to his statutes of 1188,” I learned therefrom plaintiffs and my other vassals that my kingdom was greatly troubled by malefactors who had willfully perverted the state of the realm.’ Some seized property out of hatred. Others assaulted persons on the pretext of their servility, and their goods. Others just stole, secretly or openly. Other seized property as if it were pledged. Still others thought lightly of helping themselves to the food water, and fodder of neighbors or their tenants or of seizing by force from travelers. The easier it seemed to oppress lesser men the harder one tried.”

The castle building craze that spread across Europe during this period was directly related to spread of such banditry. Not only were they built by the forced labor of peasants, they served as secure bastions to exploit them, defend against self-aggrandizing neighbors and control routes of trade.

Though situated in a much later period, Allessandro Manzoni’s  romantic tale The Betrothed is an excellent representation of these sorts of affairs. Bisson’s account of the uprising  of the Capuchins of Velay @1182 against oppression challenging ‘customary’ patrimonial dominion also provides key insights into what was happening.

There was not enough wealth for all who wanted and had the capacity to seize it. The church and lay authorities gradually came to the conclusion that it was in their own interests to engage in the politics of common interest and public well being, thus laying the ever precarious foundations of European government as we have come to know it. . . I pray my synopsis is not too narrow or crude.]

Orientalism by Wael B. Hallaq

[ The book is an extensive critique of ‘secular humanism’ and the teleological notion of history which he represents as a key episteme in the discursive logic of Colonialism; an elaboration of Adorno’s view that “progressive readings of history serve as ideological impediments that block progress in the future” (Amy Allen in The End of Progress page 5). It is inspired by a qualified rendition of Michel Foucault’ archaeology of self. He references many scholars I did not know or with whom I am only faintly familiar: Max Scheler, Haydn White ,Michel De Certeau, the aforementioned Amy Allen and many others including representatives of Shari’a, Sufism, Kalam: the Islamic philosophical tradition called adab.

Human beings tend to construct in their minds a simple scheme for representing the world themselves which is easily remembered and convenient to use but is sometimes understood better by what it excludes (thoughts, events, concepts, material circumstances) than by what it positively  asserts; schemes whose premises remain largely unexamined.

 Representing the entirety of  Hallaq ‘s thesis or even giving an adequate summary within the limitations of what can be reasonably expected in this blog post is manifestly beyond my powers, however much his work has crystalized my own  thinking on a number of  historical and philosophical fronts, and intersects with other works I am currently reading.

The book is undertaken as a critique, not entirely negative, of Edward Said’s Orientalism. To give readers a general sense of what Hallaq is saying and for a kind of personal memory tool for myself, I have chosen to reproduce a short footnote (number 10) to the 5^th and final chapter of the book. At the beginning of part II of that chapter- Refashioning Orientalism- Hallaq writes: ”As I have been arguing, Said’s narrative, reflecting a particular and narrowly defined concept of power and knowledge, claimed to hail from Foucault, remained faithful to the Enlightenment notions of secular humanism and anthropomorphism.”*]


*Said’s humanism is not only “a gesture of resistance and critique,” but also part of a distinctly “secular intellectual tradition that sees in unafraid and unapologetic critiques the path to human freedom.” ( See Said, “Presidential Address 1999: Humanism and Heroism,” in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America [May 2000]: 285-91) Lumping together together and equating “ethnicity and sect” (read political violence) with “tradition” and “religion,” Said insists these are “neither adequate as guides to nor useful as modes” for the humanist in “making sense of history.” (See also Gil Anidjar, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry [Autumn 2006]:52-77.) Unlike Max Scheler and others ( including Said’s much admired Vico) who allowed religion the possibility of making as much sense of the world as secular humanist dogma, Said dismissed both tradition and religion out of hand. What remains useful for us in Said’s position on humanism is therefore reduced to that “gesture of resistance and critique.” (That his definition here remains confined to “gesture,” as Orientalist and colonial practices were confined to a “style” of domination, betrays much about the depth of his engagement.)Humanism then is never concerned with the problems of an anthropocentric existence, as his Humanism and Democratic Criticism as well as other writings attest.

Even when drawing on Vico, Said argues for taking seriously the philosopher’s stubborn insistence that men forge their own path and make their own destiny (through resistance and critique, and perhaps through striving). Yet, Said does not appropriate, and in effect entirely excludes, Vico’s idea of the central importance of religion and providence to society, a ‘Scandalous” “detail” that would perhaps tarnish, in Said’s mind, Vico’s image as an advocate of “human freedom”. Unlike Vico, and situating himself at the center-right of the Enlightenment, Said saw contradiction between religion and freedom, a contradiction resolved by secular humanism. On some aspects of Vico’s “scandalous” thought, see Robert C. Minor, Vico: Genealogist of Modernity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002).

[Thus, Said stands INSIDE the Orientalist/Colonial discourse rather than holding a recognizably critical position from OUTSIDE it. This Hallaq puts down to Said’s disinterest in Islam except in its modern expressions, already overcome by the penetration of Colonial ideology with its genocidal implications not only for the destruction of traditional societies, mass murder but the fate of the planet from an ecological point of view.  Despite the limits of Said’s point of view, he did open the door for discussion and, indeed, inspired a whole cottage industry within the academic professions, the contradictions and struggles thus engendered giving rise in a dialectical fashion to the penetrating insights found in Hallaq’s book and of which he is completely aware.

The author asserts that Europe  and America colonized themselves first, then expanded their project of enlightened progress, coupled with the ‘imperatives’ of capitalist economy to the rest of the world. The material, technical, scientific means and modes by which the colonial project advanced represent a potent force determining the epistemological schemes with which modern people explain the world to themselves. The author sees the entire academic establishment, in one way or another with exception, as a sort of handmaiden to Colonialism, even when it declares its opposition because no  “world view” ( another simplified scheme that can only be a kind of short hand), no matter how monopolistic, can appear plausible without an opposition. As long as that opposition receives a reasonable share of the benefits of colonialism- getting money and a degree of dominant status, they will not seek to overthrow the larger sovereignty in which they are entombed.

The notion that genocide inheres in the teleology of the enlightened cults of progress even at the level of the ordinary college professor and those of his or her students that might be identified as belonging to the ‘resistance’ is bound to be controversial, not simply on account of the various limited or expanded definitions of ‘genocide’ that can be put forward, including the various moral arguments as they might be applied to human intentionality. Results matter, never-the-less, and the specter of the extinction of the entire human race under the impact of climate change is not to be denied. The promised, gradual extinction of  folks  resistant to ‘compelling’ arguments of liberal secularists by a demographic flood of diverse ethnic identities, women and youth is a possible example of the genocidal instincts in the habitus of the American Polity.]