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Review of Lineages of the Absolutist State by Perry

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Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 25, No. 1, Spring 2002 (°

C 2002)

Comparisons Within a Single Social Formation:

A Critical Appreciation of Perry Anderson’s
Lineages of the Absolutist State
Richard Lachmann1

Perry Anderson’s Lineages of the Absolutist State uses a comparative and narra-
tive historical method to reconceive the social dynamic of late feudalism. Anderson
explains differences in economic development among European countries by com-
paring class dynamics within a single social formation: the absolutist state. This
article makes explicit the factorial analysis implicit in Anderson’s case studies,
and highlights the ways in which Lineages overcomes the logical flaws in much
previous work. Anderson’s inability to explain why some absolutist states ended
in bourgeois revolutions exposes the ultimate limitations of Marxian categories
for explaining the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Anderson fails to take
full advantage of the analytical possibilities opened by his reconceptualization
of absolutism. His schema allows for complexity within absolutism. This article
concludes by showing that such complexity can be understood better in terms of a
double dynamic of elite and class conflict rather than with just the class categories
employed by Anderson.
KEY WORDS: capitalism; state; origins.

How did capitalism develop within feudal societies? Did a political, demo-
graphic, economic and/or cultural dynamic within feudalism generate capitalist
social relations? Or was feudalism “a chronic condition” (Weber [1922]1978,
p. 1086) that could only be undermined by external forces?
Scholars have defined themselves by their answers to these two questions.
Marx, while vague on the historical details of the process, presented class conflict
as the dynamic within feudalism that gave rise to a bourgeoisie and to capital-
ism. The perceived inability of Marx and his successors to draw a clear causal
1 Correspondence should be directed to Richard Lachmann, Department of Sociology, State University
of New York at Albany, Albany, NY 12222; e-mail: RL605@csc.albany.edu.

83
°
C 2002 Human Sciences Press, Inc.
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84 Lachmann

connection between feudal class conflict and capitalism has led most subsequent
scholars, Marxist and non-Marxist alike, to give the opposite answer from Marx,
answering the two questions with No and Yes: No, there was no dynamic within
feudalism that could yield capitalism, and yes, it was an external dynamic that
set in train the transition from feudalism. The external dynamics are variously
urban markets, a world system, demographic crisis or expansion, the Protestant
Ethic, or intellectual and technological innovation. The difficulty with this po-
sition is that the favored external force had such widely varying effects across
time and space. The urban centers of medieval Europe did not become the loci
of subsequent economic development, despite their advantages of greater capital
accumulation and their control over existing trade networks. Similarly, not all the
original Protestant regions of Europe became early centers of capitalist enterprise.
Technological innovations often took centuries to be adopted, and the original uti-
lizers of a new technology often failed to achieve market dominance, or lost their
advantage selling their know-how to rivals.2
The Black Death of 1348 is seen by most historians as the great divide in the
history of feudal agrarian economies. Thereafter, the peasants of most of Eastern
Europe were reenserfed while most English and French tenants won greater degrees
of autonomy from their manor lords. Authors who see the Black Death as the
external force that undermined feudalism have been unable to explain the divergent
results of the common European demographic decline (Brenner 1976, 1982).
Maurice Dobb (1947), sees the Black Death as precipitating a transforma-
tion of agrarian class relations in Western Europe that created a “petty mode of
production” characterized by the commercial leasing of land and limited prole-
tarianization. Dobb argues that full-fledged capitalism awaited the destruction of
guild and aristocratic power in the 1640 English Revolution.
Dobb’s analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism suffers from
two major flaws. First, he is unable to explain why there was a two-century lag from
the abolition of servile labor after the Black Death to the development of private
property in land and the proletarianization of a plurality of peasants in the century
following the Henrician Reformation (Lachmann 1987, p. 17). Second, Dobb is
unable to explain why similar petty modes of production, and similar late feudal
political systems, produced a bourgeois revolution in England a century and a half
earlier than in France. Dobb fails, on this second count, because he never identifies
a dynamic internal to the petty (or feudal) mode of production that generated an
English bourgeoisie capable of defeating the aristocracy in 1640 while stunting
the growth of a similar class in France.
Anderson’s Lineages overcomes the flaws in Dobb’s work, and in the argu-
ments of other students of feudal dynamics, by focusing upon the absolutist state
2 Thisarticle is concerned with understanding the internal dynamics of feudalism and therefore I do
not offer a detailed critique of “external forces” arguments here. See Lachmann (2000, pp. 17–38 and
passim) for a discussion of those theories.
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Comparisons Within a Single Social Formation 85

as the site of class conflict and social transformation in the centuries between
the Black Death and the rise of capitalism. Anderson explains that the fourteenth-
century crisis did not produce capitalism directly because there was no bourgeoisie
at that time. Rather, the absolutist state was the aristocracy’s response to that crisis,
“a redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination designed to clamp
the peasant masses back into their traditional social position . . . The result was a
displacement of political-legal coercion upwards towards a centralized, militarized
summit—the Absolutist state. Diluted at village level, it became concentrated at
national level” (1974a, pp. 18–19).
Anderson gives primary emphasis to class struggles between nobles and peas-
ants. He regards conflicts among aristocratic factions as relatively unimportant in
the development of absolutist states, even though he acknowledges that “for many
individual nobles,” absolutism “signified indignity or ruin, against which they
rebelled” (p. 47). However, “no feudal ruling class could afford to jettison the ad-
vances achieved by Absolutism, which were the expression of profound historical
necessities working themselves out right across the continent, without jeopardiz-
ing its own existence; none, in fact, ever was wholly or mainly won to the cause of
revolt” (p. 54). Most aristocrats, in Anderson’s view, had no choice but to remain
loyal to absolutist monarchies upon which they depended for the power and legal
legitimacy necessary to extract resources from peasants.
Anderson’s Lineages thus reconceives the social dynamic which followed
the Black Death. Feudalism was not destroyed. Feudalism did not become newly
vulnerable to external forces, nor was it replaced by a new “petty mode of produc-
tion.” Instead, feudalism was reconstituted, as the aristocracy’s dominance was
exerted through the larger social form of the absolutist state rather than within
local manors.
Anderson’s model has the great advantage of parsimony. Differences in sub-
sequent economic development, between Eastern and Western Europe and among
the countries of Western Europe, can be explained by comparing class dynamics
within a single type of social formation: the absolutist state. Anderson feels free
to ignore conflicts and changes that are not centered upon the state.
Anderson’s main concern, indeed the reason for writing Lineages, is to ex-
plain the origins of a bourgeois class from within absolutism. Anderson views the
bourgeoisie as the inadvertent outcome of absolutist state policies designed by aris-
tocrats to safeguard their collective interests. Anderson’s thesis differs from those
of Charles Tilly and Michael Mann, who view absolutist rulers as self-interested
and willing to work with any class as long as it helped them to aggrandize state
power. Anderson also differs from Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private
Property, and the State ([1884]1972) and Marx himself in The German Ideology
([1846]1970) (and from Poulantzas 1975), who contend that absolutist monar-
chs played off equally powerful aristocracies and bourgeoisies against one an-
other. That argument suffers from its authors’ inability to explain where such
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86 Lachmann

strong bourgeoisies came from, the problem which is resolved in Anderson’s

model.3
Anderson sees “a potential field of compatibility . . . between the nature and
programme of the Absolutist State and the operations of mercantile and manufac-
turing capital” (p. 41) with both state and capital growing and profiting from the
monetization of taxes and rents, the sale of state offices, and the establishment of
protected monopolies domestically and of colonial ventures abroad. Anderson’s
task, in Lineages, is to explain why that potential compatibility became reality in
some European countries but not others, and how aristocratic-bourgeois coopera-
tion within the state fostered capitalism outside the state.
As monarchs gathered power once vested in localized aristocracies, the abso-
lutist state gained the ability to draw ever more resources from peasants. Monarchs’
abilities to pay for war-making depended upon the size of the commodity sector,
while expenses for weapons procurement enriched emergent bourgeoisies.
Monarchs’ capacities to control peasants were grounded in state offices, which
provided opportunities for nobles and merchants alike to amass capital and to re-
alize profits through the sale of offices. Mercantilism created circumscribed, but
expanding, opportunities for entrepreneurship.
Three factors emerge implicitly, in Anderson’s country-by-country analyses,
as crucial in shaping the absolutist state’s capacities to exploit peasants and to
foster a bourgeoisie. First, Anderson compares the extent to which aristocrats were
organized into estates capable of protecting their particular and local interests. In
Spain and France, where estates were strongest, the crown had the hardest time
developing centralized control. The disorganized and isolated aristocrats of Eastern
Europe were quickly subordinated into service nobilities. Ironically, those nobles
least able to protect their particular interests found themselves incorporated into
powerful absolutist states that were best able to reenserf peasants and so safeguard
the aristocracy’s collective class interest.
Second, Anderson notes that highly autonomous towns in England, France,
and Italy counterbalanced the strong aristocratic estates of Western Europe. As
a result, absolutist rulers were able to prevent nobles from sustaining regional
hegemonies that provided no point of entry for central rule. Towns and peasants
both challenged the feuding factions of sixteenth-century France. “The French
nobility started to close ranks [behind an absolutist monarchy] as soon as there
was a real danger from below” (p. 93). Western European aristocrats found re-
wards within absolutist states fattened with revenues from a robust commercial
sector spearheaded by autonomous towns in France, England, and Italy, or by
American treasure in Spain. Anderson concludes that the “Absolutist State in the
West was . . . a compensation for the disappearance of serfdom, in the context of
3 At times, Anderson too falls into the same trap, as when he argues that Western absolutism was
determined by landlord-peasant conflicts, “but it was secondarily over-determined by the rise of an
urban bourgeoisie” (pp. 22–23). Most of the time Anderson is careful not to assume the pre-existence
of a bourgeoisie whose origins he must explain.
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Comparisons Within a Single Social Formation 87

an increasingly urban economy which it did not completely control and to which
it had to adapt. The Absolutist State in the East, by contrast . . . was a device for
the consolidation of serfdom, in a landscape scoured of autonomous urban life or
resistance” (p. 195).
Military competition among increasingly powerful centralized states is the
final factor in Anderson’s analysis. Once aristocrats, and their military and fiscal
resources, were consolidated within absolutist states, the level and cost of military
force needed to stave off invasion rose dramatically. Nobles had to subordinate
themselves to the state if they wanted to save themselves from foreign domination.
In the East, that imperative accelerated the development of service nobilities under
rigid central control.
The new military reality was decisive, in Anderson’s view, in shaping the
nature of the English polity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. England
became demilitarized domestically in the sixteenth century, as it transferred its
resources into a navy, abandoning the hopeless task of keeping up with the more
populous French and Spanish states in continental warfare. The navy helped
England control trade routes and grab colonies abroad, which ultimately fostered
the largest commercial sector and bourgeoisie in Europe.
Anderson, then, has a way of explaining the different trajectories along which
absolutist states developed in Europe from the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries.
Eastern European nobles, lacking strong estates, were drafted by their monarchs
into military-administrative service designed to force a disorganized peasantry into
serfdom. For the reasons Dobb first articulated, reenserfed peasants were unable to
employ the technological innovations that doubled agricultural yields in Western
Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries (Allen 1992, p. 131). Service
nobilities were unable to convert their rotating offices into capital that could be
invested or used for collateral elsewhere. Eastern European towns were doubly
constrained by their lack of autonomy and by being marooned within backward
rural economies. Thus, there was no opportunity for significant bourgeois class
development in any Eastern European country.
Space for bourgeois class formation opened in Western European at those
points where the absolutist state was too weak to override local or corporate rights.
State offices, protected by estates and other corporate bodies, became forms of
semi-liquid capital. Towns enjoyed sufficient autonomy to exploit opportunities
for commerce in the countryside through limited manufacture, and for English and
Dutch burgers in foreign trade. Landholders and wealthier peasants, in England
and in parts of France, were able to keep a large enough share of productivity
increases to justify further investment and commercialization of agriculture.
The strength of Anderson’s method is revealed in his discussion of Japanese
feudalism. His focus on the interactions between state forms and feudal class rela-
tions allows him to look past the cultural differences which blinded Marx as well as
most non-Marxists to the vital similarities between Japanese and European feudal-
ism. Anderson finds that in Japan, as well as in Europe, aristocratic organization
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88 Lachmann

and urban autonomy shaped Japanese feudalism along Western European, and,
most closely, English lines. As with England, outside military pressures provided
the coup de grace to Japanese feudalism.
Anderson’s comparisons, while presented in a narrative form that does not
allow his factorial analysis to emerge with full clarity, do explain how a bourgeoisie
developed within absolutism and why feudalism did not end with the Black Death.
Anderson analyzes enough cases—five for Western and four for Eastern Europe—
to ensure that he is building a theory that is broadly applicable to the range of
feudal experience. The case studies support the summary chapters that introduce
the two parts of Lineages on Western and Eastern Europe. Perhaps most vitally,
Lineages inadvertently highlights the remaining difficulties with a purely Marxist
interpretation of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
Lineages was intended as the precursor to a subsequent volume on the bour-
geois revolutions.4 Anderson’s inability to produce that final volume over the
quarter century since the publication of Lineages can perhaps be explained by the
logical corner into which he wrote himself in his study of absolutism. Anderson
shows how a new social group, the bourgeoisie, developed at particular sites
within certain absolutist states. He never attempts to explain why the bourgeoisie
was unable to continue to pursue its interests within absolutism. Instead, we are
treated to summary sentences at the end of a few chapters which merely assert
that “[t]he aristocratic reaction against Absolutism [in France] . . . passed into the
bourgeois revolution which overthrew it” (pp. 111–112), or “English Absolutism
was brought to crisis by aristocratic particularism and clannic desperation on its
periphery: force that lay historically behind it. But it was felled at the centre by
a commercialized gentry, a capitalist city, a commoner artisanate and yeomanry:
forces pushing beyond it. Before it could reach the age of maturity, English
Absolutism was cut off by a bourgeois revolution” (p. 142).
Anderson ends up treating seventeenth-century England almost as a black
box into which go strong kings and rebellious Parliaments and out of which come
weak kings and limited bureaucratic government. He asserts that a bourgeoisie
developed in eighteenth-century France, but he never explains why officeholders,
urban merchants, or commercial farmers came to have different interests at the end
of the ancien regime than they had in its earlier centuries. As a result the English
and French Revolutions seem, in Anderson’s narration, like oversized aristocratic
rebellions that somehow brought down weakened absolutist states. Anderson is
unable to explain why the new, post-revolutionary states took bourgeois forms
rather than merely ushering new aristocratic coalitions into power.
Anderson fails to take full advantage of the analytical possibilities opened by
his reconceptualization of absolutism. His schema allows for complexity within
4 Lineages is preceded by Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974b) which traces the development
of feudalism after the collapse of the western Roman Empire. Just as Passages sets the stage for
the history in Lineages, so Lineages was intended to culminate in an explanation of the bourgeois
revolutions that Anderson believes inaugurated capitalist social formations.
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Comparisons Within a Single Social Formation 89

absolutism—divisions within aristocracies, the formation of various strata with

differing interests among peasantries, and urban oligarchies with shifting orienta-
tions toward trade. Class fractions and political factions can adopt different stances
toward their absolutist rulers, and assemble in shifting alliances to overthrow or
defend the state. Anderson does not address the importance of intraclass conflicts
because he still assumes that classes have unified interests.
The crucial divisions within feudalism cannot be reduced to class or fractional
conflicts that are defined by specific relations to a mode of production. Anderson
provides evidence of other sorts of conflicts in his narrative, and he alludes to the
bases of intraclass differences, when he writes in his theoretical summary chapters
about how absolutism saved aristocratic classes while dooming many individual
nobles. Anderson’s commitment to a Marxist analysis prevents him from probing
for a theoretical basis to explain the divisions engendered by absolutism. Instead,
he resorts to ad hoc discussions of foreign wars, internal rebellions, or economic
crises in the most advanced feudal societies.
Would Anderson have been able to overcome the limitations in his argument if
he had been more explicit about his methodological assumptions and procedures?
Anderson makes a five-step causal argument:

1. Landlord-peasant class conflict after the Black Death forced a reorganiza-

tion of the aristocracy.
2. Politico-legal coercion was displaced upward into absolutist states.
3. The different forms of those states in Eastern and Western Europe were
determined by the three factors (organization of aristocrats into estates,
urban autonomy, foreign military pressures) discussed above.
4. The form of each state determined the degree and extent to which a bour-
geois class developed under and subordinate to absolutism.
5. The bourgeoisie overthrew the absolutist states in Western Europe, making
possible the unfettered development of capitalism.

Lineages is convincing in drawing causal connections along the first four steps
and in drawing contrasts between absolutism in Eastern and Western Europe.
If Anderson only sought to explain the development of the bourgeoisie within
feudalism, and to demonstrate that the bourgeoisie remained subordinate to the
aristocracy under absolutism (and that therefore absolutism was the final political
expression of feudalism), then his methodological vagueness would do no harm.
The shortcoming in his work, and therefore the point at which more rigor is
needed, is the inability to link causes and effects within absolutism (steps 1–4)
to the outcome he ultimately wants to explain—the subject of his unwritten
follow-up volume—the bourgeois revolutions in Western Europe. Anderson’s
causal analysis is weakest where, not surprisingly, his methodological vague-
ness is greatest—in the specification of agents. Lineages highlights broad cate-
gories of actors—aristocrats, peasants, bourgeois—all defined in Marxian terms.
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90 Lachmann

Anderson’s theoretically derived comparisons work well enough for Eastern

Europe, where aristocratic agency was organized almost entirely through estates,
and where almost all bourgeois were holders of state-granted urban privileges.
Anderson’s categories are sufficiently precise to analyze landlord-peasant conflict
in Western Europe through the first three steps of his causal argument.
Anderson’s inattention to the specification of agents becomes most problem-
atic at the climax of his argument, in steps 4 and 5 when he seeks to explain
how a bourgeoisie with interests opposed to the aristocracy developed within ab-
solutism and why that bourgeoisie became revolutionary in its opposition to the
ruling aristocratic class. Anderson never offers a methodology for identifying the
new bourgeois. The sites of bourgeois class formation he identifies—state offices,
autonomous towns, manufacture, and foreign trade—also were inhabited by aris-
tocrats. How can we impute different class identities to occupants of the same
sites? What factors allow us to know when actors realign their interests away from
those of the states that once privileged them?
Anderson never answers those questions explicitly. Readers of Lineages never
learn how distinctions among aristocratic and bourgeois actors and their interests
could be made within or across states. Anderson’s answers to those questions
are implicitly grounded in a Marxist analysis of class fractions. But since that
assumption is not made explicit, and since bourgeois revolutions that provide the
crucial test of that analysis are left for the unwritten next volume, we never get a
clear opportunity to see the limitations of Anderson’s model within Lineages.5
If Anderson had engaged in an explicit discussion of methodology, would
Lineages have been a different book? I don’t think it would have led Anderson
to modify his theoretical position. Rather, he would have elaborated a discussion
of class fractions compatible with his broader argument, leaving it for historically
informed readers to determine how far that depiction was from the actual record
of political conflict in each case.
Such an explicit methodological discussion would have had the virtue of
making the shortcomings in Anderson’s overall model clearer. It took me a long
time to figure out the extent to which Anderson’s inability to explain bourgeois
revolutions was due to an inadequate theoretical framework as opposed to merely
requiring a more detailed historical treatment. A more explicit presentation of

5 Some recent, non-Marxist scholars also fail to specify how actors and their interests can be derived
from their locations in particular types of states. As a result they, like Anderson, produce typologies
of absolutism that allow them to correlate outcomes with the characteristics of regimes, yet fail to
explain the ultimate overthrow of absolutism in bourgeois revolutions.
Ertman (1997) distinguishes between two aspects of states: their absolutist or constitutional
political regimes, and their patrimonial or bureaucratic state structures. He also separates absolutist
states based upon whether they were early- or latecomers to geopolitical competition. Yet, in the
end, Ertman, like Anderson, is unable to explain how England’s unique array of features produced
its seventeenth-century transformation. Similarly, Porter (1994) and Downing (1992) correlate wars
with changes in the characteristics of states without really specifying how military conflicts set off or
altered subsequent social conflicts and structural transformations.
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Comparisons Within a Single Social Formation 91

methodological assumptions and methods would have made it easier for readers
to see what is not explained with his particular theoretical approach. On the other
hand, Anderson’s methodological opaqueness forced me into a detailed study
of the history of absolutism. Such a focus on historical evidence is ultimately
necessary for formulating a counter-model that can overcome the defects revealed
in a methodological critique of Lineages.
Nevertheless, Lineages teaches us to look within the absolutist state for the
sites at which conflicts are fought and resolved. “[S]ecular struggle between classes
is ultimately resolved at the political—not at the economic or cultural—level of
society” (p. 11). Close study of Lineages makes it possible to understand something
Anderson never discusses: that it is elites, defined and grounded within institutions
and not just through relations of production, that pursue their interests through
absolutist states.
Anderson, then, consistently upholds one of the rules of his analysis—the
Marxian precept that it is class struggle that propels social change. Lineages falls
short in explaining the origins of bourgeois revolutions because Anderson does not
follow through on the implications of his other analytical rule: that the terrain of
struggle changes when absolutist states come into being. That is his original con-
tribution. It allows us to see what Anderson did not acknowledge (perhaps because
it would have moved him past Marxist historiography): Absolutism redefined the
aristocracy itself, as well as feudal class relations.
When Anderson writes of feudal power being redeployed within states, he
opens up the possibility that power within feudalism can be lodged in, and ex-
ercised through, various institutional mechanisms. Clergies, provincial blocs of
nobles, estates, corps of officeholders, chartered merchants, and monarchs and
their retainers all thrived through the exploitation of feudal peasantries. They all
were part of a feudal ruling class. Yet, as Anderson shows in his sequential nar-
ratives of cases, the forms of domination and exploitation can change. Because
each type of feudal privilege is institutionally grounded, and not always through
manors, it becomes possible to visualize the inhabitants of each type of absolutist
institution as an elite. Conflicts among elites can then be understood as a distinct
dynamic, operating prior to and alongside feudal class conflicts and international
warfare as a contingent cause of structural change. Elites became bourgeois at the
end of long chains of contingent conflict. Capitalist interests and class relations
emerged as solutions to the double-barreled problems of feudal elite and class
conflict within absolutist states.6
Lineages allows us to see, even though Anderson himself never identified, the
actual origins of capitalism within feudalism. Anderson makes a vital methodolog-
ical contribution when he draws comparisons within the single social formation
of the absolutist state to show when and where feudal conflict did generate a new,

6 Fora working out of the interactions between elite and class conflicts, and their implications for state
formation and capitalist development, see Lachmann (2000, chapter 4 and passim).
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92 Lachmann

capitalist, social order. His method allows us to see that if we hope to identify the
mechanisms that transformed feudal social actors into capitalists we must look in
detail at the conflicts that generated and developed absolutism across Europe. Al-
though Anderson’s exclusive focus on Marxian class conflicts prevents him from
identifying the causal mechanisms that produced the bourgeois revolutions, his
carefully detailed comparisons among absolutisms does expose the richness of
divisions within feudal classes. In so doing, Anderson makes it possible for us to
construct an historical explanation for the transition from feudalism to capitalism
that does not need to draw upon undifferentiated external forces to explain the
contrasting and contingent developments within absolutism.

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