Chapter Six: From Politics to Statecraft

It remains one of history’s great ironies that the city, which reworked stagnant archaic systems of corporate life based on status and kinship into the innovative, free realm of politics and citizenship, was to produce the very factors that led to its own undoing. European cities, I have pointed out, were different from their ancient counterparts because of their inherent autonomy as civic entities. The increasing separation of the medieval town from the city’s traditional agrarian matrix produced not only a new kind of city with an identity of its own; it also produced a new type of economy, culture, and political structure that profoundly altered the countryside and slowly remade it into the city’s image. Today, we have no difficulty in recognizing this profound change—the “urbanization” of the land—as a logical step in a mythic ascent of societal life from what Marx lamely called “rural idiocy” to what we like to call “civilization.” Modern agribusiness is the patent “conquest” of agriculture by industry, a city-born enterprise and technics; so, too, is mass culture, which has urbanized as well as homogenized agrarian lifeways. What we do not fully sense is the extent to which early city dwellers would have regarded such a sweeping urbanization of the countryside as peculiar, nor could they have anticipated the extent to which it would have undermined civic life and citizenship. We have simply lost contact with the problem of urbanization as antithetical to citification—and to the extent that we are oblivious to the very existence of the issue itself, we have become its mute and unknowing victims.

How, then, did this remarkable change from civic autonomy to civic supremacy come about? And in what sense, institutionally and economically, did it begin to challenge the city s integrity, ultimately to raise the very real problem of its subversion as a realm of genuine politics and meaningful citizenship? Gur answers to these questions, so crucial to an understanding of modern urbanization arid the threat it poses to the city, oblige us to examine the new kind of economy and values that became preponderant in the communes of the late Middle Ages and the role they played in replacing civic life with the nation-state or, more precisely, politics with statecraft.

We must first look at the new economic relationships that began to link European cities and regions together—and I say “first” not because they are the sole, the “definitive,” cause that produced this new economic and political dispensation. Whether the European continent “necessarily” would have been changed from a loose association of towns, cities, baronies, duchies, and the allpresiding, if ineffectual, Holy Roman Empire into a clearly articulated group of nation-states is a problem in divination, not in social analysis. How Europe could have developed—whether toward confederal communities or toward highly centralized nation-states—is an open question. One can single out many reasonable alternatives European towns and cities might have followed that were, no less possible than the one that became prevalent in fairly recent times. No single course of development was “inevitable” or “predetermined” by the economic, social, and political forces at work. Indeed, that Italy did not become a nation-state until the nineteenth century must remain an utter mystery if a constellation of cultural, social, and political factors, particularly the role of its cities, is not invoked against strictly economic explanations. Seemingly, no area of Europe was more “modern,” “capitalistic,” or entangled in a market economy some 500 years ago than the Italian peninsula, and yet Italy was to lag behind western Europe’s trend toward nation-state building for centuries. Nor can we understand why it was only in England that a market economy virtually absorbed all other economic forms of life such that the British Isles became the “model” for a capitalistic society in the nineteenth century while Spain, which entered so early on in the development of nation-states, lagged behind Europe as a whole and remained a predominantly agrarian society until well into the 1930s.

This much is clear: from the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries onward, Europe—and, most notably, Italy—was the scene for an entirely new economic and social dispensation. The Italian city-states began to break with-traditional economic relationships that had been ingrained in ancient and early medieval civic life ways. From Italian ports and inland commercial cities—and in northern Europe from Flemish industrial centers—foreign trade began to bring a growing number of parochial communes into a new kind of commercial network, one that resembled what we would now regard as capitalistic. Trade, accumulation, and the reinvestment of profits into expanding and competitive business enterprises now became ends in themselves, not simply means to achieve personal wealth, land holdings, and aristocratic status. Not that this development was totally universal, as we shall see very shortly. But it occurred on a sufficiently wide scale to make it unique and to subvert the traditional agrarian lifeways that marked European society, merchant as well as noble, in past historical eras.

Yet new as this development was, I do not wish to overstate it. Our own society, a society that celebrates the ascendancy of “free trade” and a competitive capitalist economy, is ideologically imperialistic: it tends to cast the past too much in its own image. All the roads of European history do not lead to the triumph of the twentieth-century market economy. The fact is that feudal values, rooted in an elaborate system of rank and a strong orientation toward the ownership of land, were no less a part of received wisdom of the new, rising urban “bourgeoisie” than of the old agrarian nobility. Trade did not alter this received wisdom of feudal society for centuries to come. Indeed, like the merchants of antiquity, whose goal consisted of amassing enough wealth from the “sordid” operations of commerce in order to retire to a manorial life in the countryside, many Italian and Flemish merchants had very similar ambitions. Prestige gained by titles through intermarriage and by the ownership of landed property was still a desideratum among these early “bourgeois”—and such goals were to remain widespread in Europe well into the eighteenth century. On this score, the merchants of antiquity and their descendants in the Middle Ages were very much alike in outlook, particularly the most wealthy ones. In their psychology and sense of cultural self-definition, the city rich were similar to all the upper rural strata of the time. And we shall also see that these ambitions and this mentality exercised less of a hold among the more middling sort of city dwellers, such as artisans, ordinary merchants, and aspiring members of the plebeian orders. Differences in attitudes and wealth were to profoundly divide the medieval towns and cities internally, greatly complicating their relationships with the emerging monarchies.

For the present, it is important to emphasize that the wealthy merchants of the late Middle Ages differed from their ancient counterparts in the way in which they were committed to commercial operations. Although their outlook closely resembled a feudal one, their practice was very akin to a modern one. The tension between the old and new, between precept and practice, introduced ways of functioning that deeply altered European life. Ancient trade, generally speaking, was surprisingly simple in comparison to later medieval business transactions despite its Mediterranean-wide scope. Ordinarily it was local and more like barter than modern forms of exchange; the ancient economy was not as highly monetized as it is today. Money was conspicuous more by its absence than by its presence, and the extent to which ancient trade was a regulated affair would have chilled modern acolytes of laissez-faire doctrines.

Like the cities, which were usually religious and administrative centers, often as parasitic in their need for tribute from the surrounding countryside as in the exactations they placed on distant subject peoples, Mediterranean commerce found itself physically and culturally hemmed in by a distinctly agrarian world and a largely subsistence economy. Beyond the ancient cities that clustered along the shores of the Mediterranean or were planted strategically at intersections of inland waterways, the early trader faced a semifeudal world of crude manors and impoverished peasant villages, a world that dissolved into a forested, semitribal communal world. Both of these worlds, the manorial and the tribal, in antiquity constituted a very precarious, indeed hazardous, terrain for the merchant, for his caravans on the land and his ships in remote waterways.

The ancient merchant responded to these barriers accordingly. Trade was distinguished by its highly personalized and somewhat tentative character. The merchant and his sea captain or caravan leader were united by a specific enterprise rather than a highly organized business, although there were always many notable exceptions to this rule. Ships often went to sea and caravans with pack animals went inland to make a “killing” just as a wayfaring stock-market speculator today seeks his “lucky break.” In this sense, merchants were literally “merchant-adventurers,” and their “companies” had quasimilitary characteristics. They commonly went abroad as armed expeditions. Loans were often no less personal than the expeditionary techniques that brought a fleet of ships or a caravan of pack animals together. Although credit was fairly well developed by Roman times when the empire was already quite secure, in foreign trade to fairly remote parts, at least, credit was often seen more as a gamble than a safe investment. Such profits were high, and went into hoards or were invested in land rather than the expansion of on-going businesses. I speak here of foreign trade, not local trade; of the ancient world’s “merchant-adventurers,” not its home-based business enterprises, artisans, and commercial farmers.

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What the Italian merchants introduced in the Middle Ages was as close to a “revolution” as anything that goes by that name. A broad network of business houses, credit institutions, trading depots, warehouses, and affiliates began to interlink Italian city-states with numerous medieval European towns, and the movement of goods was gradually secured by treaties, tribute, and hired mercenaries from the predations of robber barons and bandits. The Venetian navy virtually swept the city’s Mediterranean trade routes of pirates, attaining a sea supremacy that rivaled the naval power of the more formidable empires around the basin. Business became systematic, safe, a predictable enterprise. Money was invested not only in the expansion and acquisition of landed property; it was also invested in larger commercial operations whose profits not only attracted ordinary people but also the local, nobility. The lure of this fairly safe source of wealth, still disdained culturally but crassly attractive to an increasingly practical and secularized world, was enormous. It opened new doors everywhere in late medieval society. Indeed, the social mobility of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries sharply contrasts with the social stagnation of the classical world. Well-to-do commoners were closely interlinked with nobles by marriage as well as by trade. Aristocrats offered titles and pedigree in exchange for the wealth and material security offered by merchants. Alliances were forged not only with families of the same social order but between families of different social orders. This melding of “classes,” largely feudal and “bourgeois,” has only recently received the attention it deserves and was to have a profound effect on the so-called “bourgeois revolutions” that marked the eighteenth century.

Finally, where elite orders were not interlinked by marriage, merchants and even professionals acquired aristocratic status by buying it outright, especially from the fifteenth century onward. A considerable portion of the revenue acquired by the French Bourbon kings, for example, came from the sale of titles, a sale that united the higher orders of society by a shared sense of titular nobility—even as it divided them by a sense of shared disdain between the purchased “nobility of the robe" and the hereditary “nobility of the sword.” In time, alliances and differences were to become as tentative and precarious as distinctions formed by wealth, when the rich of one day could easily suffer the pangs of penury after the misfortunes of another day.

What did last and expand, however, were the trade networks established between communities, particularly the larger towns of medieval Europe. But the enormous growth, continuity, and increased stability of this foreign trade—the nearest thing to a capitalistic enterprise the continent developed—should not cause us to overlook the rich elaboration of the local market that occurred within the medieval communes and their immediate environs. The decline of the Roman Empire and the eclipse of the administrative cities that held it together brought the European continent face-to-face with itself and threw it back on its own mainsprings.

No longer could the continent be sustained’and civilized, much less managed and exploited, by the Mediterranean basin with its rich granaries and sources of tribbte. Beyond the highly cultivated Roman-controlled territories of Europe lay great forests and bogs, a huge continent within the continent itself that was fairly pristine and open to new forms of social development. Communes began to appear in this virginal terrain that were now structured not only around religious and governmental institutions but, significantly, around the markets qf craftsmen and artisans. These artisan towns, to be sure, were crude and unpolished; they were more villagelike than urban. The work and the markets that emerged from this highly decentralized, localistic society were still mainly organized around religious and feudal values. Often collecting around churches and cathedrals—indeed, commonly under the sovereignty of a bishop—they nevertheless became productive towns with small markets arid family-operated workshops, living off the agricultural produce in their environs and providing rural folk with the more skillfully crafted commodities they could not make in the countryside.

Here we encounter something remarkably new: communes marked by a rich social fife, and with it a popular politics rooted in gilds, systems of mutual aid, a civic riiilitia, and a strong sense of community loyalty. The gild, the most important institutional center of a new kind of artisan society, should not be confused with the ancient collegia that it resembled structurally or with such strictly economic associations as modern trade unions, which it seems to resemble functionally. The Roman Empire exhibited a very low tolerance for nonstatist bodies that could challenge the authority of the monarchy and its bureaucracy. Hence ancient collegial associations of craftspeople were rarely permitted to extend their activities beyond those of burial societies and festive fraternities. They were allowed to have no economically regulative or protective functions. Essentially, they were cultural and quasireligious institutions. Modern labor unions, in turn, are primarily economic organizations and’ assume few cultural, much less religious; undertakings.

The medieval gild, by contrast, assumed the responsibilities of the ancient collegium, the modern labor union, and a great deal more. Possibly religious in origin, it became highly secular in many of its activities, fostering material as well as moral commitments. It was a sworn, covenanted brotherhood that punished its members for lowering the quality of goods or seeking higher than prescribed prices. It regulated personal, moral, and religious behavior as well as the output of goods. Not only did it care for widows and orphans, the ill and infirm of its own members, but it gave alms to the poor, performed charitable works of all kinds, celebrated feast days, punished its members for usury, blasphemy, gambling, and other presumably “immoral” infractions of good behavior.

What made medieval gilds particularly significant in ways that mark a sharp departure from towns of the past is that they attained a degree of legislative and governing authority that made them the principal municipal institution of many communes. However parochial they seem to us today, European towns by the thousands achieved a degree of autonomy that few municipal entities had acquired in times past or were to acquire later. This autonomy was pieced together corporately from a localized world of small artisans, craftsmen, and merchants—a feudal world, in fact, not a capitalistic one, however much it was centered around the marketplace—before European communes were to be networked together by foreign trade. The commune’s growth and elaboration took place organically, not artificially, within a highly decentralized agrarian society. In contrast to the Roman-controlled town, the European town was a unique phenomenon insofar as local autonomy became the rule rather than the exception. Control from below thrived at the expense of an institutionally weak feudal society that was beleaguered by overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions between landed nobles, urban bishoprics, papal legates, and insecure monarchs. The unending series of conflicts that these jurisdictions generated was exacerbated by an undeveloped system of communications and by a crude armamentorium, one that made civic militias a powerful military force in social life.

Foreign trade—more precisely the capitalistic carrying trade that emanated from the Italian city-states and the Flemish communes—definitely worked against this communal autonomy as surely as it played a role in interlocking Europe’s towns and cities. And in so doing, it posed a historic problem: would the commercial network created by intercity trade yield the formation of nation-states, centralized by monarchical and later republican systems of power, or would it give rise to confederal institutions, united in a shared continental system based on local community control? That the nation-state was to gain ascendancy over confederal systems of self-governance does not mean that its victory was predetermined by Europe’s history—nor does it mean that its victory cannot be undone. How that nation-state’s ascendancy was achieved is a story worth telling because it also brings to fight an achievement that was often very tenuous, owing to the resistance of the towns to centralism, a struggle that has not been definitively foreclosed by urban issues that are emerging today.

For the present, we shall confine our account of the nation-state to the way it was achieved, with the clear reservation that other alternatives continually existed, indeed dramatic alternatives that we will explore later. Initially, the intercity carrying trade that began to unite Europe economically from the twelfth century onward not only tore into a complex web of mutual personal and communal dependencies in which trade as well as behavior was carefully regulated; it also became the infrastructure for a new body of societal institutions—initially regional rather than local, later overwhelmingly national—that cut across the grain of a time-hallowed and intensely communal and decentralized mode of social fife. It eventually introduced nationalism, a distinctly European phenomenon that was to spread beyond the continent itself and acquire global dimensions.

The ancients, like the early Europeans, had very little experience with the notion of nationhood. Largely tribalistic or locafistic in outlook, they tended to look inward toward their traditional fifeways, to elaborate them rather than innovate new institutions and values. Even the Greeks and Romans, who were comparatively “forward looking” in their attitudes, were heavily guided by tradition. Cultural as well as economic “limits to growth” were deeply molecular: people owed their strongest allegiances to their kin group; next, to their community or perhaps region; rarely to a “nation.” The idea of a “nation” was alien to the ancient mind, a tribalistic form of mind that opposed the locality to the ecumene.

Although pan-Hellenism was very much in the air among the Greek polei shortly before Alexander brought the western world and the Near Eastern together institutionally, it quickly drifted into a cosmopolitan Hellenistic ecumene that adopted Greek for its lingua franca and Greek culture for its spiritual adornment. Hence a Greek “nation” never developed among the Greek polei.

Israel seems to have acquired a strong sense of nationhood after the Maccabean Revolt, but it was smothered by foreign invaders. Religion ultimately placed a stronger claim on the Jews than a sense of territorial nationhood, hence a budding form of nationalism was soon supplanted by a powerful belief in a spiritual community whose strength still defies the economistic explanations advanced by crude variants of Marx’s “historical materialism.” The great empires of the ancient world were nOt “nations” in any sense of the term. Indeed, it is difficult to associate them with the modern, class-based nation-state. In the Near East, these empires assumed a highly patronymic form: a “property,” as it were, of a deified, patriarchal monarch for whom the vast lands under his control were regarded as part of his oikos or household. Lands annexed to the monarch’s original inheritance became the tributaries of a centralized household rather than the territory of an institutionalized body politic. The Roman Empire, particularly in its imperial rather than republican form, inherited this Near Eastern tradition-bound state form, however much it was secularized and regulated by laws. Indeed it should be kept in mind always that the Roman state was managed primarily by patricians, a group of “fathers,” by definition, rather than by citizens. The emperors, in turn, were the “fathers” of their people, not simply their sovereigns,

European nations, by contrast, were pieced together by sterner stuff. However muph monarchical nation building, so redolent of ancient statecraft, went hand in hand with the market’s expansion, the infrastructure created by commerce laid a stronger foundation for nationalism than anything we encounter in the ancient i world. This new, continentwide commercial nexus, formed out of the interlinking of towns, produced material dependencies for goods that cut across the moral relationships fostered by traditional society. Even before the monarchs of Spain, France, and England asserted their authority over their respective nations, they shrewdly exploited the divided loyalties and value systems created by a growing commercial dependence on far-flung markets on the one hand and a powerful psychological dependence produced by a richly elaborated localist community on the other. Between the material wealth offered by the former and the spiritual security offered by the latter, many towns were to divide internally as sharply as they divided against the countryside. Hence the European commune was pulled in two opposing directions: between the desirability of the nation-state and an ideal of communal confederation. France ;was to provide an existential example of the first, the Swiss Confederation, in its early days, of the second.

Such alternatives did not really exist in the ancient world apart from Greece. The administrative cities of antiquity easily dissolved in the West into virtual villages with the decline of the empire, villages that formed the real community base of that society. Indeed, once sources, of tribute disappeared, the resources for maintaining the Roman imperial state disappeared as well and the West devolved into decentralized feudal society. Europe fell back on its own resources and its own authentic forms of social and economic organization.

The long history of Europe’s medieval development, a development that brings us to the opening of the modern era, totally changed the setting for urban evolution. European-wide trade, centered entirely around a new kind of self-sustaining municipality, opened sharply contrasting opportunities for development. The wealthy elites of the towns were riddled by the divided loyalties and interests to which I have already alluded. Among the rich merchants and their noble urban allies, a growing trend surfaced for unfettered trade, free of gild, restrictions and traditional moral constraints. On the other hand, the great majority of artisans, journeymen, small retailers, and professionals were to demand the perpetuation of traditional controls, their time-honored source of security and stability. What complicates this fairly conventional account of the “class struggle” within the medieval city is the very disconcerting fact that the medieval patricians and plebeians often united as readily as they fought with each other, notably against assaults from outside the city itself. Although by no means consistently, both “classes” commonly joined together to support their municipal privileges against landed nobles and, more strikingly, even against monarchs who were bent on achieving a highly centralized state. While the ordinary plebeian strata tended to be more consistent in their commitment to their civic rights, the more conflicted patrician stratum—feudal in outlook but decidedly bourgeois in its commercial practices—oscillated in its loyalties between the more popular elements in the city and the elite elements, noble and kingly, to which it felt a groveling loyalty that marks all parvenu elements in society. As we shall see, such alliances within the commune tended to be tentative and inconclusive, at times giving rise to serious urban revolts against the newly emerging absolute monarchs, at other times dividing the towns so seriously that they easily fell prey to monarchs who were to fashion the modern nation-state.

The reader who looks for an elegant and compact development toward a modern urban society will not find one here. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, when nation-states began to form, the continent’s towns and cities found themselves deeply entangled in a skein of shifting alliances and conflicts. Modern notions of “free trade,” largely confined to merchants engaged in the carrying trade of the Mediterranean basin and the continent, were nevertheless permeated by feudal values rooted in land ownership and status to an extent that would have seemed curious to the modern mind. “Capital,” in effect, was at war with itself and had very little identity of its own. Newly emerging capitalists of the high and late Middle Ages were often pulled in sublimely contrary directions by a fading past and a barely emerging future.

For their part, the plebeian elements of the towns were deeply committed to their ancient traditions, that is, to the corporative values of the medieval world. No affinity to “free trade” or notions of unregulated business practices were to be found among these less privileged groups. Despite their quasifeudal notions, however, they resolutely opposed territorial lords who sought to challenge the liberties of their towns, ironically in contrast to the wealthy merchant strata in their own communities who feared both camps in this conflict and variously allied themselves with one against the other. Finally, the newly emerging princes and monarchs who were to eventually piece together the nations of Europe were themselves deeply divided by this skein of tentative alliances and conflicts. They were more than willing to use the European communes against nobles who challenged monarchical authority. But they were equally willing to subdue the communes when they raised the cry for their ancient municipal liberties and autonomy.

It is within this highly unstable yet very traditional world—unprecedented in the ancient Mediterranean—that a new form of societal organization was to permeate very old ones: a centralized state apparatus structured around a distinct national entity. The ancient world had seen the centralized state in all its grandeur and power. And it had even seen in a bare, rudimentary form the outlines of the nation. But never before had the two—state and nation—been cojoined to produce a form of statism based on nationalism with its far-reaching sequelae for the modern world and the emergence of a highly corrosive global market economy.

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Within this rich, highly variegated, and fluid period of history, when societal development could have followed very different directions from the one toward which it moved, we must reexamine the conventional wisdom about the rise of the modern state and the formation of the nation.

That the state preceded the nation historically hardly requires emphasis here. The previous pages of this work have operated with this fact throughout. The professional institutionalization of power and the monopolization of violence by distinct administrative, judicial, military, and police agencies occurred fairly early in history. The state, so conceived, emerges as a highly compact entity whose persistence from ancient times to the present seems almost unchanged functionally, however much it has varied in form.

But so functionally similar an institution, seen only in terms of its “class character” and its coercive role, can be very tricky when it is treated without respect for the many nuances of its development. Among many social theorists, this simplistic notion of the state has given rise to images of various state forms as mere epiphenomenal expressions of a basic, deceptively unchanged structure—indeed, to use Marxian language, as the mere “superstructure” of an unaltered “base,” hence an institution that scarcely deserves searching analysis. In modern politics, this simplistic approach produced considerable mischief. The careless use of words similar to “fascist,” applied to established republican states as well as totalitarian ones, can generate very slovenly and crude political attitudes. States have been called fascist or, for that matter, democratic that are very far from being either one or the other; and their opponents have often disregarded hard-won civil liberties that deserve the most; earnest support by any ideological standards or values.

What is no less disturbing, there has been a gross disregard of democratic rights generally among self-styled “progressives” whose concerns for material justice have supplanted their concerns for social justice. The primacy given to economics, an emphasis uniquely characteristic of a market-economy mentality—and most evident, ironically, in socialist and syndicalist ideologies—has led to a troubling disregard for libertarian political institutions whose preservation and expansion is of immeasurable importance to the development of a new, municipally oriented politics. These institutions have often been contemptuously dismissed as “bourgeois” by many socialists and anarchists alike, although we shall have occasion to see that the “bourgeoisie” was never libertarian in outlook and rarely republican in its commitment to state institutions. Even liberal and conservative ideologies have used such words as “freedom” so ecumenically that both the content and form of the term have been absorbed into a meaningless “black hole” of sociological rhetoric.

The interchangeable use of the words “state” and “nation,” in turn, has been even more troubling. Trite avowals of “my country right or wrong!” imply no commitment to a republican state, even when the cry is justified by a country’s seemingly democratic or libertarian institutions. Patriotism today is nationalism, not democratism, although during the French revolution the two words could have easily passed as synonyms. “Love of country” may characterize the sentiments of a fascist, socialist, liberal, or conservative, and this love does not in itself commit any one of them to a particular state form, much less to a free community. Hence the development of the state and the emergence of the nation are not matters of academic interest. Their history is deeply entangled with the prevalent societal values of our time and profoundly affects our visions of society’s future, especially in a discussion of the municipality.

A close study of the state shows that there are and have been varying degrees of statehood, not simply the emergence of a finished phenomenon called “the state.” Indeed, the universal use of such words as “state” can impede a clear understanding of the ; extent to which “the state” exists at various levels of societal development—not only historically, but also today in modern society. Conceived in a processual way with due regard to the degrees of statism that have existed historically and functionally, I should emphasize very decidedly that “the state” can be less pronounced as a constellation of institutions at the municipal level, more pronounced at the provincial or regional leyel, and most pronounced at the national level. These are not trifling distinctions. We cannot ignore them without grossly simplifying politics. Differences in degrees of statification can have major practical consequences for politically concerned individuals and communities.

History, moreover, provides us with compelling evidence of germinal states, quasistates, partially formed, often very unstable states, and finally fully formed and all-embracing states. The Athenian polis and even the Roman Republic were not fully formed states—this in contrast, for example, to the fairly well-formed Roman imperial state and even more fully formed Egyptian state of Ptolemaic times. When applied to classical Athens, the use of the word “state” has a very limited meaning, despite the presence of slavery. Even in the modern nation-states we know best, municipalities are often less “statified” than nations, with the exception, to be sure, of the patently totalitarian states that have emerged in our own time. In practical terms, a modern municipal politics can be very different from a national parliamentary “politics,” as we shall see in the closing chapter of this book, and localist politics can rest on ideological traditions and premises very different from those we associate with the formation of the nation-state.

The fact is that we have been much too concerned with the origins of the state, conceived primarily as an instrument of class domination, to give due recognition to the history of the state: its evolution, its various unfinished forms, its varying kinds of structure, and its capacity to penetrate the social and political life of the community as well as the nation.

Living, as we do in “founded” republican states of one kind or another—states that are clothed in a panoply of “declarations,” “constitutions,” “charters,” and even highly personified “fathers” and “founders”—our images of “the state” tend to acquire a highly contractual, legalistic, and contrived form. “The state,” with its clearly dated documents, seems more like a social contract than a historically conditioned phenomenon. Behind the “contractual” state lies an anthropology and history that, carefully considered, desanctifies its rationalistic claims to authority and its mandate as the source of an orderly society. The state, in fact, had to fight its way into existence against claims that were no less rationalistic and morally valid than those that it advanced on behalf of its own legitimation. It had to emerge organically, that is to say, within the framework of social relationships and, later, political norms that were by no means consistent with and were, at times, highly antithetical to the formation of a state apparatus. Hence, it is fair to say that just as the constituted or constitutional state preceded the formation of the nation, so an organic state, uncertain of its pedigree and of dubious legitimacy, preceded the establishment of a constituted or “constitutional” state. The organic origins of the state, in turn, bring into question the extent to which the state can be validated wholesale on strictly rationalistic terms and, above all, its capacity to absorb the very aspects of social and community life in which it was gestated. To demystify the authority of the state as a rationalistic contrivance is to take the first step toward recovering the Hellenic notion of politics as a public activity, the domain of authentic citizenship—not as statecraft, the domain of the professional legislatures, military, and bureaucrats.

Contrary to rationalistic and contractual images of the state, state institutions emerged slowly, uncertainly, and precariously out of a social milieu that was distinctly nonstatist in character. In fact, the social and organic sources of the state had to be meticulously reworked before they could give rise to state institutions. The ancient temple corporation, actually a religious legitimation of tribal collectivity and public control of land, seems to have been the most likely source of the Near Eastern state. This was a time when priests commonly became kings or, at least, when the kingship often took on a priestly character. In either case, the temple and palace monumentalized as well as deified the tribal community.

Despite the increasing secularization of the state, notably m Greece and Borne, the state never completely lost its religious

trappings and its function as the custodian of the collectivistic community. This attribute, whether as an ensemble of feudal nobles or a monarchy and ultimately as an absolutist empire, remained with it well into recent times. The traditional “head of state,” be he a lord or king, always remained the “father of his people,” whether by divine right or as a divinity in his own right. Hence, prior to the rise of republican systems of governance, the state always appeared not as a constituted phenomenon but as a reworking of a very traditional, organic, patriarchal, indeed tribalistic body of relationships in which power was not simply conferred by the community as in the case of elected kingships but inherited along lineage and blood lines in a manner redolent of the ancient tribalist blood tie. The present always entailed a reworking of the past, a transmutation rather than a dissolution of traditional forms to meet new needs and imperatives.

It is notable that the rise of the centralized nation-state in Europe also followed this archaic and highly organic process of transmutation of old into new. Indeed, until “The Age of the Democratic Revolutions,” to use the title of R. R. Palmer’s distinguished book, it was not through the constitution of new states but the recovery of ancient rights that king and community were thrown into civil war with each other, a conflict that often took the shape of monarchy against municipality.{52} Neither one party nor the other sought to innovate new forms of governance but rather to restore old ones from the past. Characteristically, the earliest form of the European nation-state appears not as the emergence of a national economy, significant as this development proved to be, but as the increasing sovereignty of the kingly household itself—the monarchical oikos—and the image of the “nation” as a kingly patrimony.

The evolution of the kingly household into an authentic state is strikingly revealed by the evolution of the English monarchy. The reputation of England as a uniquely centralized state from the days of the Norman Conquest in 1066 tends to be overstated. Admittedly, William the Conquerer took firm possession of Anglo-Saxon England shortly after the defeat of Harold in the Battle of Hastings, but the area under Norman control was relatively small, almost provincial in size. Wales and Ireland had yet to be conquered and Scotland to be absorbed. William’s absolutism was not only restricted territorially; it was short-lived historically. The English state—and certainly its highly fragmented sense of nationhood—is notable not for its continuity but its discontinuity. Growing baronial strength clearly began to abridge monarchical rule in little more than a century after the conquest: the Magna Carta, to which John unwillingly set his seal at Runnymede in June 1215 is testimony not to the rise of English democracy, all legends about the charter’s intent aside, but to the power that the English barons acquired at the expense of the monarchy. Although John’s father, Henry II, had left his sons a state buttressed by a system of royal law remarkable for its time—extending the “King’s peace” to include civil and criminal cases, a rationalized system of trials, punishments, and juries, and a professional royal judiciary to translate this system into practice—many of these jurisdictions were to be reclaimed by the barons. Nominally centralized, England remained remarkably decentralized under the weaker monarchs who filled the long span between Henry II and Henry VII, a period of some three centuries. A centralized infrastructure had emerged from the conquest, but history had yet to flesh it out with effective royal institutions.

What makes the English state interesting is the challenge it raises to simplistic theories of state formation and rule. I refer to its organic roots and its evolution out of household offices. The English state was born not out of an administrative body of autonomous departments but rather it was formed out of the personal responsibilities of the king’s servants—his immediate household coterie—often in opposition to the doubtful loyalties of the king’s own feudal barons. Perhaps the foremost of these royal servants was the king’s personal secretary, his chancellor, who carried the royal seal and coordinated the emerging departments that comprised the administrative portion of the royal court. In time, the chancellor became the pole around which an increasing number of clerks, experts, and specialists in various governmental areas, and overseers of what was to become a fairly complex executive authority collected to form the all-important English chancery. Almost every aspect of monarchical rule fell within its purview, principally the king’s exchequer who saw to the collection of taxes and Henry II’s professional judiciary.

In fact, the English state was formed largely from the king’s bedroom, dining table, men-in-waiting, and household clergy, not from constituted principles of government that spoke in the interests of a specific “ruling class.” Class theories of the “origins of the state” to the contrary notwithstanding, the English state of the Middle Ages began as the elaboration of a patrimony rather than the institutionalization of one “class’s” authority over that of another. The English barons, who were to view the formation of this state with suspicion and later with overt hostility, found it difficult to claim it as their own. A continual tension; existed—occasionally expressing itself in a violent form—between the baronial infrastructure of English medieval society and the monarchy, which formed the originating impulse of an authentic, fairly complete state, In its patrimonial form, the English state is no exception to the “origins of the state” generally; this mode of state formation is very similar to the way in which the “barbarian” chiefdoms of, an earlier tribal society gradually extended their power from networks furnished by their personal retainers and clans. The journey from “valet” to “prime minister,” amusing as the juxtaposition may seem, is closer to the truth of state formation than the more “sociological” idea that the state emerged as an agency of class interest—whatever it was to become later in history.

I have dwelt in some detail bn the origins of the English state—in time to be regarded as the prototype of the nation-state par excellence—not because of its uniqueness but rather because of its continuity with the ancient past. The organic growth of the English monarchy parallels to a remarkable degree the rise of oikos forms of statehood. Historically, these forms go back to early Egypt, Persia, Babylonia, and even Rome before the empire became heavily bureaucratized.

Why did the English state become such a useful framework for the modern nation and for modern capitalism? An answer to this question lies precisely in the limits as well as the rationalistic and centralistic forms it assumed, both territorially and institutionally. Despite its exhausting adventures in France, the English state by Tudor times remained focused more fixedly on its own island territories than did its archaic antecedents. And institutionally, it never achieved a degree of absoluteness—or at least was never permitted to do so—such that it devoured its own bourgeois “golden goose.” It permitted a flexibility of market development that was rarely to be seen in the past, not only in the medieval world. Thus, while the absolute monarchs of England (principally Henry II and the Tudors) managed to hold a nation together, at least in the Anglo-Saxon core areas of the island, eventually integrating the Scots as well as the Welsh within a national framework, it provided ample space for its middle-class “commons” to flourish, prosper, and, in time, resist the exactations and arbitary demands Charles I imposed upon them. Throughout much of its history, England was burdened less by a bureaucracy than her rivals in western Europe. While the monarchy retained a well-knit bureaucratic structure, particularly in the administration of royal law and the collection of taxes, England was largely managed by its local squirearchy, a highly personalized system of management guided by the rationalized standards introduced by Henry II and the Tudor monarchs. The English Revolution of Cromwell’s time finalized this delicate balance between the king and his “commons” in a way that imparted a fictive quality to the English state as an ideal “bourgeois” political system. Indeed, it was England’s “constitutional monarchy” that was to have an almost hypnotic attraction for the progressive intelligentsia of the French and German enlightenments.

Ironically, it was France rather than England that was to create the kind of all-pervasive bureaucratic nation-state that characterizes present-day bourgeois state forms. Given the waywardness of history that defies attempts by historians to systemize the development of events in the name of historical materialism and other “scientific” explanations of the nation-state s emergence, France’s preeminence as the prototypic nation-state is explained not by her “advanced” development as a “bourgeois” society but rather by the lateness of that development, indeed by delays that were to significantly initiate that development in the midnineteenth century, well after it occurred in England. To be sure, French absolutism did not emerge in a sudden burst of centralization but quite to the contrary. Louis IX (“Saint Louis”), more than a century after Henry II of England, still issued his decrees with a terminology that is redolent of the early Frankish system of collective rule in which the Germanic kings were considered merely first among equals. The expression “We and our barons recurs in Louis’s pronouncements, a phrase that in no way suggests a commanding authority over the feudal community. But even more so than England, France began to enter into a phase of state evolution that was to induce many historians to regard French absolutism as the predecessor of all Europe—an overstatement, to be sure, but a sufficiently suggestive one to impart to the French Revolution, which overthrew it, a particularly incendiary challenge to absolutism as such.

By the end of the twelfth century, France had already begun to catch up with England by creating les officiers du roi (officials of the king) who shared power with the French barons in the traditional royal council. By degrees, the French began to outpace their English rivals. Functionaries, emerging from the royal household, acquired expanding administrative roles so that the kingly servants were soon to be royal bureaucrats rather than household administrators. In contrast to the English monarchy, the French carried this development much further: it encompassed time-honored local as well as royal jurisdictions. Already a huge hierarchy of petty officials had arisen, such that by the end of the thirteenth century, Philippe le Bel was obliged to place the host of lieutenants, sergents, and hedeaux who afHicted the French people on local and provincial levels under the scrutiny of controlleurs, a royal strategy that may have enhanced rather than diminished the bureaucratization of the nation. Royal commis· saires were to become permanent regional officials by the midsixteenth century and a far-reaching network of intendants, supervised by surintendants, acquired the odious status of a financial bureaucracy that particularly aroused popular hatred.

In time, the immense French bureaucracy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in theory answerable only to the monarchy, acquired a life—indeed an outlook—of its own. The emergence of a bureaucratic sensibility, permeating all levels of French society, can hardly be emphasized too strongly. A new, almost ubiquitous “nobility of the robe,” ennobled more as functionaries of the monarchy than by virtue of birth, began to overshadow the hereditary “nobility of the sword.” In contrast to so much of feudal Europe, the sons of the French middle classes began to regard the royal bureaucracy rather than the clerical hierarchy as the avenue toward upward mobility and power, a shift in perspective that linked the French “bourgeoisie,” whatever that word meant some two centuries ago, to the monarchy more tightly than historians of “class conflict would have us believe. The French Revolution, conceived as the “classic bourgeois revolution” of emerging capitalism, was to test this “class analysis” in the fiery crucible of insurrection, with more dismal results than later, nineteenth-century historians suspected.

Herder’s conclusion to the contrary notwithstanding, France was by no means the “precursor of all Europe.” It is beguiling to think that an even more centralized and bureaucratized “nation-state” was established in Sicily in the early thirteenth century, when Norman conquerors dispossessed the Arab rulers of their control over the island and established what many historians have variously called the “earliest modern state” and “absolute monarchy” in Europe’s history. Emperor Frederick II did, in fact, create an “omnipotent royal power” that led to the, “complete destruction of the feudal state” to use Jacob Burckhardt’s words, a state marked by a completely centralized legal system, a professional army (which the French monarchy introduced very early in its evolution), and an all-encompassing bureaucracy of professionally trained officials, all indubitable traits of Norman Sicily.

But these are traits of a kind that in no way made Sicily a “modern state,” much less a “nation-state.”{53} Such state forms, in fact, were to appear very early in human history. The Ptolemaic state that followed Alexander’s conquest of Egypt in ancient times did not differ in fundamentals from the structure that Frederick imposed’on Sicily some fifteen centuries later. Characteristically, both Alexander’s general, Ptolemy, and the Norman monarch, Frederick, wedded the economy of the Nile and of the island to the state itself. In both cases, key commercial operations, particularly the grain trade, became state monopolies and economic activity was. bound to statecraft. The Norman state in Sicily was an “Oriental despotism,” to use the language of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historiography, not a “modern state,” much less a “nation-state.” Administered t>y conquerors and their bureaucracies with highly regulated economies, the Norman state was no more “modern” than the Inca state in Peru or the Egyptian state in North Africa.

We are faced with the paradox that one of the earliest approximations to a centralized “nation-state” emerged in Spain, even before the Tudors in England and the Bourbons in France fully consolidated their rule. Yet Spanish absolutism and nationalism did not promote the development of a “bourgeoisie” or a “bourgeois society”—developments that have been associated with the emergence of the nation-state. In fact, Charles V and his successors were to virtually devour a flourishing Spanish burgher stratum, milking it of its wealth, preempting its power, and essentially subverting town life in the Iberian peninsula. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, a swath of almost meaningless royal parasitism and domestic extortion cut across Spanish history, eventually undermining a flourishing city network that enjoyed extraordfi nary wealth and autonomy. The extortions initiated by the Spanish state led, as we shall see shortly, to one of the greatest urban uprisings in western history, an uprising that decided the future of the new nation that had emerged from the Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula after centuries of Moorish rule. City life and commerce were to stagnate or decline for reasons that had much more to do with absolutism and its efforts to forge Spain into a nation-state than did the decentralization that marked the ensuing history of the country.

What is most intriguing is that neither absolutism nor the rise of a nation-state provides us with an adequate explanation for the rise of a “national economy” as Hannah Arendt suggests. Although Spain was to remain a largely agrarian society up to the 1930s, indeed a very traditional one, its Hapsburg kings were no less “enlightened” than the Bourbon kings of France and, with the exception of the two Henrys and Elizabeth, the Tudor and Stuart kings of England. Nevertheless, Spain moved into a period of economic decline that still weighs on her shoulders today while England became the “factory of the world” and France its cultural “perfumery.” Although European nation-states from the sixteenth century onward created the arena for a national economy, they did not necessarily create the forces that shaped it. Absolutism, which, sculpted a sense of nationhood out of feudal parochialism, played a very crucial role: it not only supplanted localism with, nationalism; it also stifled a highly decentralistic, localistic, and spontaneous society, marked by a rich diversity of cultural, economic, and communal attributes, replacing it with increasingly homogenized lifeways, bureaucratized institutions, and centralized state forms. In some cases, this absolutist alternative favored the later expansion of a market economy; in others, it led to state parasitism and outright regression. In all cases, however, it turned localist politics into nationalist statecraft, divesting citizenship of its classical attributes and turning vital, empowered, and strongly etched men and women into passive, disempowered, and obedient “subjects.”

This shift from a living people to deadened subjects did not occur without furious resistance. A belief in autonomy, regional and local identity, and citizen empowerment ran very high between the late Middle Ages and fairly recent times. The battle to retain these distinctly political qualities and rights was to be fought not in national political parties or by professional statesmen; rather, it was conducted on the level of village, town, neighborhood, and city life, where the ideals of confederation were to be opposed to demands for a nation-state and the values of decentralization were to be opposed to those of centralization. What lay in the balance was not only the future of the town and countryside but the development of political institutions as opposed to state institutions—and an active citizenry as opposed to a passive “constituency.”

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It has become somewhat conventional in urban historiography to treat “city-states” as though their relationships with each other were normally marked by endless petty squabbles and their relationship to absolutism by an almost unqualified degree of support. “City-states,” we are commonly told, were almost innately quarrelsome, hence the wars that were endemic on the municipal level of politics. Ultimately, so the argument goes, they were to show a unique commonality of interests in the support they gave to the emerging absolute monarchies and nation-states of the late Middle Ages. Like the monarchy, they opposed feudal lords who placed imposts on their commercial transactions and blocked the development of their markets with a self-enclosed manorial economy.

The partial truth this conventional view conveys is outweighed by the serious error it contains. It expresses a characteristically liberal and Marxist prejudice that prevailed a century ago against all decentralized societies, a prejudice that was to be placed in tho

ideological service of European nationalism and its gospel of the centralized state. Only today do we seem willing to recognize how reactionary and false was this imagery of ever-embattled, quarrelsome, and promonarchical cities, whose economic power was presumably placed with few if any qualms in the service of absolutism.

There is more than enough historical evidence to show that cities were as disposed to form,leagues and confederacies with each other as they were to fight with each other. Many of these leagues and confederacies, in fact, were not only networks of mutual aid; they were vigorously directed against absolutism and its threat to communal liberties. Finally, territorial lords were often quick to abandon their traditional feudal or manorial forms of rights and duties, to participate as vigorously in commerce as the most avaricious merchants. Indeed, English capitalism cut its first teeth in the countryside where many squires and nobles turned agricultural and common lands into sheep runs to meet Flemish demands for wool—perhaps the earliest example of agribusiness in modern times.

Confederacies or leagues of cities go back as far as Greek times when poleis entered into various associations with each other for mutual protection, shared religious beliefs, economic interests, even for quasitribal honorific reasons. At least fifteen of these confederacies of one kind or another, known more generally as koinoi, can be identified—many of which are very obscure but marked by fascinating examples of cooperation. These confederacies can often be traced back to tribal groups that were established as early as the Bronze Age. Tribalism never completely disappeared as a framework for the later confederations, Thus the famous Delian League that Athens developed was initially Ionian, composed of poleis that generally claimed a shared ethnic ancestry. By the same token, the Peloponnesian League that opposed it was largely Dorian, and the Achaean League claimed a shared ancestry with the archipelago’s early Mycenean settlers although “Achaea” itself was really composed of a mixed population of Dorians and their precursors, the simpler Arcadians.

A troubling feature of many confederations is that one polis tended to become the pole around which its confederates clustered, whether by inclination, necessity, or coercion. The Delian League formed by Athens eventually became so overarchingly Athenian in character that historians were to call its later phase an “Athenian empire,” This is an overstatement. That Athens battened itself on the revenues it extracted as “protection money” from the league and used coercion when persuasion failed to hold its confederates in line is doubtless true; but there is an inescapable irony in the fact that it foisted its own democratic institutions on poleis with limited freedoms of their own, whether they wanted a democracy or not. The internal politics of the league’s members stands in very sharp contrast to the despotic institutions we encounter in virtually all ancient empires. In fact the original confederal council of the league, formed early in the fifth century to check Persia’s advances into Greece, was distinguished by its high sense of fraternity. All members of the council had an equal vote, and its treasury was kept in the Temple of Apollo on the politically neutral island of Delos. Only later, when the Persian threat ended, did Athens assert complete sovereignty over the league, preventing Naxos and Thasos from seceding and bringing the league’s treasury to the Athenian acropolis.

We also know of confederacies, however, where poleis were permitted to function very much on their own. Pellene, for example, showed considerable independence in the Achaean Confederacy; conversely, Thebes was held in check by poleis that made up the Boeotian Confederacy, particularly after it was reformed toward the end of the fourth century B.C. The use of the word sympoliteia to designate many confederacies, particularly those that extended byeond traditional tribal areas, is significant. Taken literally, the word describes a union of poleis, presumably of equal status, in contrast to a patria or “fatherland” with its connotations of a capital city, or an ethnos, with its real or fictive tribal bonds based on blood ties. At the molecular level of the sympoliteia’s life, the human bond is based on citizenship, on the polites, not on some form of juridical national identity at one extreme or kinship ties at the other. Citizenship, in effect, is not dissolved into an impersonal national affiliation or a presumably biological or tribal one. And, in fact, many polites or citizens of a confederacy enjoyed rights in other confederal poleis that they normally denied to resident aliens. They could buy land, enjoy the full protection of a confederated polis’s laws, and, in some cases perhaps, participate in its ekklesia, although normally their political rights were linked to the institutions of their own cities. In short, the confederacies of ancient Greece were to enlarge the whole concept of citizenship, well beyond the parochial framework of early poleis, while still maintaining their decentralized civic lifeways.

How were the confederacies structured? Our knowledge of them is very limited and any extended discussion of their known institutions is precluded by lack of space as well as facts. But certain general outlines can be noted. Normally, a Greek polis consisted of magistrates, a board of generals, a council or boule, and a citizens’ assembly. This form of “government” existed in many Greek poleis from the fifth to the third century, when it was finally swept away by the Romans.

This is not an overstatement. The fact is that Greek poleis had very little experience with “representative” forms of governance; indeed it was very hard for the Greeks to think in terms of “representation” generally. They could understand the rise of an oligarchy, which they often identified with a tyranny or repressive control of some kind, and a democracy, which, in its Perikleaii form, seemed radical or “excessive” to its opponents. And republican-type structures did surface among them from, time to time. But these republics rarely produced stable institutional forms. Human scale—a distinctly municipal scale—continued to be the only congenial and comprehensible level of institutional form that seemed to satisfy Hellenic lifeways and modes of thinking. Any form larger than the polis or confederacies of poleis cut across the grain of the Gfeek mind and Greek social theory. The rise of the Macedonian empire, regaled with all the trappings of royalty, generally horrified the Greeks, and the Roman empire seems more to have fascinated them, as Polybius’s writings indicate, than attracted them until the very memory of political democracy had faded away, In any case, even when a republican regime did emerge among the Greeks, notably with the ascendancy of Rome, it was often called a demokratia and there was a tendency to trace its pedigree back to the polis of classical times. The Macedonian and Roman empires, in effect, constituted an annoying challenge to the Greek image of political consociation: its ethical as distinguished from administrative ways of visualizing or defining politics: its high regard for some degree of citizen participation in formulating policy or executing it. Just as a Roman in imperial times might look back nostalgically to the republica, so Greeks under foreign rule looked back endearingly to the demokratia and often used the word when it no longer applied to their institutions.

Not surprisingly, the boule and ekklesia the council and the citizens’ assembly—were to appear in many Greek confederations, not only within Greek poleis themselves. There is evidence that an ekklesia formulated policies for the Thessalian Confederacy in the closing decades of the fifth century B.C., possibly as an aristocratic body. But in time cities began to encroach upon the power of the territorial nobles. Apparently, a democratic faction, strongly influenced by the Athenians, successfully extended popular rule within the Thessalian cities and the confederacy itself, after which the confederacy eventually became more centralized and exclusive. The Boeotian Confederacy was, as J. A. O. Larsen puts it, “a land of hoplites” because the area itself favored small-scale farming.{54} But it is surprising to find that the Confederacy more closely approximates a republican state than any we encounter so early in Greek history. This may have been the result more of Spartan influence than the internal development of the Thessalian poleis, an influence that did not go unchallenged by a pro-Athenian faction in the cities that made up the confederacy. Unfortunately, the details of its development are closed to us by the lack of adequate historical data.

The Phocian Confederacy alternated between an oligarchy and a democracy: a strong executive made up of generals had to answer to a popular assembly that enjoyed the power to depose its military leaders. The Locrian Confederacy seems to have had a citizens’ assembly; indeed, from the scant evidence we have, democracy found a comfortable home here, often together with shared citizenship that made it possible for citizens of one polis to acquire property and to intermarry with citizens of another polis. In West Locris, the poleis were so indulgent that the Greeks generally singled them are out for their fairly humane and decent treatment of foreigners. The Aetolian Confederacy appears to have had an ekklesia in which all citizens not only had the right to vote but followed the Athenian fashion of voting as individuals, not as citizens of their own poleis. This extraordinary degree of political individuation within a confederacy—a rarity even in decentralistic and confederal social theories—should not go unnoticed. What the Athenians did within Athens and its environs, the Locrians did within a confederation of separate cities. Meetings of their confederal assembly were held twice a year—once in the spring when the military campaigning season began and again in autumn when it came to an end. We shall have occasion to emphasize that democracy cannot be disassociated historically from military associations when they involve the mobilization of citizens for warfare, changes in arms and military technique, or simply a high valuation that is placed on the image of the armed citizen.

The Achaean Confederacy, perhaps the best known of all Greek confederacies, became so democratic that it was in advance of Athens in some respects. Finally, in 417 B.C., Sparta was obliged to step in to impose oligarchic rule. This intervention stirred up a medley of reactions in which a pro-Athenian faction restored democracy that led to further Spartan intervention. Nevertheless, there seems to have been a persistent ekklesia on a local level that certainly was in existence in Hellenistic times, the era following Alexander’s conquests in the Near East and North Africa. Unfortunately, we know far too little about other Greek confederacies to provide even capsule descriptions about their structure and development.

What does it mean in very concrete terms to say that a Greek confederacy had a citizens’ assembly? It is tempting to think that in comparatively large confederal areas, such an assembly is simply a euphemism for a representative system of government, not a direct, face-to-face body of citizens. Actually, this is far from true. Judging from the Achaean Confederacy, citizens from various poleis were expected to attend it en masse. For those days, this would mean a journey over wide distances, hence assembly meetings would tend to attract only the well-to-do who had the means and leisure to attend them. But much the same could be said of the Athenian ekklesia. Attika was more than the environs of Athens, and for communities in the more distant parts of Athenian territory a journey to the city would have been a fairly difficult one. Like Athens, however, the poorer elements in the host city or ‘‘capital” of a Greek confederacy often outnumbered the well-to-do who could afford to make the journey and may have, provided it with a popular, indeed radical, ambiance.

Whatever may have been the possibilities and limits of ancient cities, municipal democracy withered and finally died under Roman rule. The Roman Empire, a purely parasitic phenomenon, was extremely wary of municipal autonomy. It provided cities with only enough freedom to police themselves and extract tribute from subject populations. In the centuries following Periklean democracy, city life as a political reality began to decline and, after the second century of the contemporary era, shriveled disastrously, at least in Europe and the northern rim of the Mediterranean basin. Nor was urban life to revive in this area until the eleventh century. But with this revival came the emergence of new confederacies, an extremely important aspect of European history whose story has been badly neglected. Peter Kropotkin’s work on the city confederacies and leagues of Europe, limited as it may be, may be cited as a truly pioneering effort.{55} The period of the French Revolution and the nineteenth century were to .witness a depressing shift in perspective from historical studies of localism and urban confederalism to the nation-state, a shift that reflects a distinctly centralistic bias in radical as Well as liberal historiography. The lacuna that exists in this field is by no means the result of oversight: it originates from a distinct political proclivity in Marxian historiography and liberal social theory to emphasize the role of the nation-state in fashioning the modern era, an emphasis for which we have paid dearly in evaluating the alternatives that face this era today with its increasing bureaucratization and centralization of social life.

Despite its brevity and incompleteness, Kropotkin’s work still provides us with a robust framework for recovering some sense of the vitality this municipal world offered as an alternative to the nation-state. “Already in the years 1130–1150 powerful leagues came into existence,” Kropotkin tells us, “and a few years later, when [Emperor] Frederick Barbarossa [of the Holy Roman Empire] invaded Italy and, supported by the nobles and some retardory cities, marched against Milan, popular enthusiasm was roused in many towns by popular preachers. Crema, Piacenza, Brescia, Tortona, etc., went to the rescue; the banners of the guilds of Verona, Padua, Vicenza, and Trevisa floated side by side in the cities’ camp against the banners of the Emperor and the nobles.”{56}

The following year saw the emergence of the first of the Lombard Leagues (1167), which numbered, sixteen cities at its height, followed by a second in 1198 and finally a third (1226) that collectively included nearly all the major cities of northern Italy. Not only was Milan a member of all three leagues but also Bologna, Verona, Brescia, Ferrara, Faenza, Vercelli, and Alessandria. Even Venice, proud and independent, joined the first of the leagues. A league of Tuscan cities was formed shortly after Henry Vi’s death in 1195, and still another two centuries later, guided largely by Rome during the papacy’s quarrels with the empire. The number of leagues that formed in Italy during this time are too numerous to examine here. Some clustered around powerful cities such as Florence, Venice, Milan, and the papal seat in Rome, surfacing in the Romagna and in Umbria as well as in northern Italy. With the passing of time, these leagues either fell apart into rival cities or formed genuine city-states—in fact, small republics or duchies, depending upon the internal political structure of cities that led them. By the thirteenth century, this structure was usually oligarchical: the popolo, had given way to signori, and Italy was to become a battleground for major’ European powers that tried to dip into the still very considerable wealth of the peninsula. Although eminent urban historians such as Lewis Mumford are highly disdainful of this development, particularly the continual discord between the cities that are believed ultimately to have fed the parcelization of the area, Kropotkin is careful to note that it was precisely “when separate cities became little States [that] wars broke out between them,” generally as, a “struggle for supremacy or colonies.”{57} Whether Italy’s parcelization is quite the overall “evil” that characterizes most historical accounts of the Italian city-states or a desideratum that delayed the emergence of an overly centralized nation-state has yet to be assessed.

The creation of city confederacies in central Europe followed a development that is very similar to what we encounter in Italy, but they were-also marked by characteristics that make them highly distinctive. That Italy led Europe in urban development is not surprising: the peninsula had been dotted by cities for centuries when much of the continent north of the Alps was still covered by forest. The German-speaking cities, however, were unique. Although they were to follow their Italian counterparts in time, they differed from them in social texture. They were burgher cities with sturdy domestic markets based on the ordinary staples of life to an extent we do not quite find in Italy (apart from Florence) or encounter in France. Cities involved in the Mediterranean trade made their fortunes largely from luxury goods such as silk, spices, gems, well-wrought armor, gold and silver ornaments, and the like, mainly transported from the Near East, North Africa, and Asia. By contrast, German’cities tended to deal in the making and sale of coarser cloths, tools, simple armor, food staples, and raw materials. These commodities gave rise to a stay-at-home artisan and merchant order that underpinned very stolid communities with a deep sense of rootedness and a strong appetite for security. Accordingly, a localist civicism and proclivity for autonomy persisted after the Italians had become relatively jaded in their municipal loyalties and yielded to despotic regimes. The German word Gemeinde has a special meaning in civic history for which other languages have poor equivalents. It denotes an organic community, a community that has a sense of identity and personality, indeed one in which city hierarchies are notable for the contribution they make to the collective good at each level rather than the oppression they inflict on subordinates.

Genoa and Venice acquired their wealth mainly from exotic goods and a Mediterranean-wide trade. Hamburg acquired its wealth from brewing and Liibeck from herring and the furs of east European forests. Merchant and artisan, trader and primary producer developed a symbiotic relationship that was relatively rare in the Latin cities of the south. The city confederacies projected their burgher traits onto their confederacies: cities and towns came together not only to protect their autonomy and liberties; they also joined to promote trade and share in a common prosperity, not simply as rivals whom circumstances forced into collusion with each other. The persistent conflict that marked so many Italian cities, especially when they developed into city-states that placed lesser communities under their control, was more subdued north of the Alps. Although bitter internal wars unravel this picture in the Flemish cities, where a nascent “proletariat” stood at loggerheads with a nascent “capitalist class” in the wool-processing industry of the time (a problem, I may add, that afflicted Florence no less than Bruges), the gild structures of central and northern Europe were more entrenched than elsewhere. They helped to create and empower a stratum of middling people, mainly artisans and small merchants, who enjoyed relatively comfortable lives and had a stabilizing effect on the community, cushioning the conflicts that were spawned by great disparities of wealth.

Thus, one has the sense that German cities formed more stable confederacies than did other urban entities in Europe. Indeed the Swiss Confederation, perhaps the most enduring and libertarian to emerge in Europe, rested heavily on the formation of the Graubunden or “Gray League,” the canton that was to be dubbed die kleine Schweiz or “little Switzerland,” partly because of its prototypic character as the home of Swiss democracy, partly too because of its ethnic diversity although its population is mainly German-speaking. Here, the Swiss recourse to referenda is reputed to have been born and “Nowhere through the whole range of history,” declared F. B. Baker exultantly, nearly a century ago, “is it possible to find a country where the democratic principle was more thoroughly applied ... or where the good and bad results of that principle have been more thoroughly demonstrated.”{58}

Mumford’s churlish statements about the municipal confederacies of central Europe to the contrary notwithstanding, what the cities of Germanic Europe lacked in durability, they tended to make up in recuperability.{59} Some four centuries of German history are marked by a large number of municipal confederations that continually bubbled up to the surface of political life. The Hanseatic League, perhaps the most durable of the lot, existed from 1241, when Liibeck and Hamburg signed a treaty of mutual protection, to 1669, when its last diet was convened. Officially, the league was never terminated and cities such as Hamburg and Bremen are still designated as “Hanseatic cities.” Largely based on the Baltic trade, the league at its height embraced between 60 and 80 cities (I have taken the most conservative figures at my disposal), including the wool-processing center of Bruges in Flanders. Nearly all the major Baltic ports belonged to this confederacy at one time or another, and its ships ranged widely from Novogorod in the east to London in the west and along the Atlantic coastline.

Still earlier, major confederacies appeared in parts of central Germany,; principally the short-lived First Rhenish League in 1226, followed by the Second in 1254, which lasted until 1258. Some eighty cities, virtually all the leading Rhineland communities, belonged to the league until its members drifted away after supporting contending claimants to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. Intermixed with the politics of the empire and endemically at war with nobles who preyed on their trade, their history weaves a story of enormous complexity and challenges. By 1384, a Swabian League had been formed that brought German cities to unprecedented influence. League members even advanced proposals to join the Swiss Confederation. Had the Swiss been responsive to these overtures, European history might have taken a very different turn than it did, possibly replacing nationalism with confederalism. But the union was not to be, and the cities, ever mindful of their autonomy and liberties, failed to prevail over the empire and the princes. Later leagues were to appear throughout Europe, even in England and, very significantly, in Spain. If we bear in mind the large number of municipal confederacies! that existed in Europe during the eleventh century and in the centuries that followed it, the certainty so prevalent in present-day historiography tliat the nation-state constitutes a “logical” development of Europe out of feudalism can only be regarded as a bias, indeed a misuse of hindsight that verges on a mystical form of historical predetermination.

Again, how, may we ask, were the Italian and northern European municipal confederacies structured? None of them created the popular intercity assemblies we encounter among the Greeks, Although citizen assemblies emerged within the cities, they did not appear between the cities. In Italy, the ad hoc nature of the confederacies did not create any serious problem of entrenched representatives who could defy the will of their constituencies: the confederacies were notable for their impermanence. They were little more than defensive alliances and disappeared as soon as they were not needed. The First Lombard League created a parliament of its own, but as Daniel Waley tells us, it simply assigned to its members areas of military responsibility and settled the price contributions of each to field armies (tallia milium) and garrisons.” This “parliament” never became a supracommunal authority.” Rather it functioned more like a temporary general staff. “To the communes,” Waley adds, “this societas or League was, like the Empire, an institution to be judged by its utility rather than by any theoretical implications: only an immediate imperialist threat could keep it in being.”{60} To the extent that we can speak of “capitalism” at this time, the highly aggressive entrepreneurial spirit of the Italian municipalities, fed by the enormous wealth of the Mediterranean-wide trade, fostered a degree of rivalry that inhibited cooperation between the cities and imparted a highly imperialistic spirit to the largest among them.

This was not entirely the case north of the Alps. German city confederations, for example, provide us with more enduring efforts to institutionalize intercommunal cooperation, efforts that reflect the prudent and deeply rooted burgher spirit of the communities that composed them as distinguished from the more reckless and venturesome features of the Italian merchants. The Second Rhenish League, shrewdly playing off the different candidates for the imperial throne, demanded and received formal recognition from William of Orange as a confederation—a civitates conjuratae—and avowed in its declaration that its citizens “have mutually bound [themselves] by oath to observe a general peace from St. Margaret’s Day (July 12, 1254).” This declaration was to go well beyond peacekeeping. Each member of the : league agreed to send four representatives to a city assembly or Städtetag—one at Worms for the upper Rhine, the other at Mainz for the lower—to remove excessive river tolls, provide for the common defense, add or expel new members, and foster the commerce and welfare of each of the league’s members to the benefit of all civic orders, including Jews and clergy, not only ordinary citizens. A board of arbitration was established to settle quarrels between confederate cities. Finally, an assembly meeting of the municipalities’ representatives was held on a quarterly basis, not on the usual annual one we encounter elsewhere.

The Swabian League followed almost naturally out of its Rhenish predecessor and functioned as a countervailing force to the empire and the territorial lords. Its very formation without imperial sanction was an act of defiance against the efforts of Emperor Charles IV to assert centralized control over the German cities, hence its articles of agreement have a markedly defensive tone. But it functioned very much like the Rhenish League. By the 1380s, the confederacy forced the princes into temporary submission and, in combination with the League of the Rhine, which it structurally resembled, formed one of Europe’s greatest urban confederacies.

The emergence of the celebrated Swiss Confederation or “Switzering anarchists” as Cromwell’s supporters were to call it centuries later, must be seen as an extension of the Rhenish and Swabian leagues, not an anomaly that stands at odds with the supposedly parochial traits imputed to European cities and their leagues. Switzerland was formed out of a milieu and modeled after examples that existed in central Europe as a whole.[9] The Swiss confederation, far from being an almost lonely “exception” to the confederal trends that existed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, was actually a product of them. That the creation of nation-states was to be so greatly delayed in Germany and Italy is due in great measure to the obstacles that the cities, their confederacies, and later the powerful impact of their traditions of autonomy and freedom exercised on political life as a whole. It was not localist “pettiness” and “parochialism” that kept central and southern Europe from achieving nationhood until well into the nineteenth century. Rather, the “delay” was in great measure the product of a strong tradition of municipal autonomy and a dramatic history of resistance to centralization, however perverted this history became in later times. The Hanseatic League’s Diet, the Städtetag of the Rhenish League, and autonomous confederal’ bodies elsewhere in Europe haunt the history of the continent like the unexorcised spirit of a more active public life and a vital civic politics. That the nation-state eventually did unite the laggard principalities of Germany, Italy, and, as we shall see, Spain into centralized states was not quite the happy dispensation it seemed to be at the turn of the present century, when nationhood was regarded as evidence of “modernity” and “progress.” Viewed with hindsight, the images of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco rise up to remind us that the ideological celebration of the nation-state, which marked social theory during the Victorian era, was grossly misplaced. We of a later generation have good reason to lament the loss of the confederal alternative that appeared at an earlier epoch in Europe, one that might have averted the terrifying turn “national unity” took between 1914 and 1945.

Confederalism was not merely an intuitive civic reaction to the feudal parochialism that marked so much of the medieval world at the time. There were theoretical not only practical considerations that were to surface almost simultaneously in two charismatic figures of western Europe. Heraldic rebels such as Cola di Rienzi in Rome and Etienne Marcel in Paris, contemporaries during the mid-fourteenth century, were to formulate the numerous moves toward confederal unity in very dramatic form. Rienzi’s efforts to restore a new Roman republic evoke images of the Gracchi and their efforts to restore Rome’s traditional republican virtues. His attacks on the venal nobility of papal Rome and his efforts to create a citizens’ militia were apparently part of a larger effort to unite Italy into civic leagues under Rome’s suzereinty. Present-day historians tend to depict Rienzi as a forerunner of Italian nationalism when they are not occupied with defaming him as a “demagogue” with strictly self-serving intentions. The greater likelihood is that he was a strident leader of Italian confederalism. As a self-styled “Tribune of the People,” a title redolent of the Gracchi rather than a Cincinnatus, Rienzi’s “parliament” was to be made up of delegates from Italian cities, not peninsular “provinces” that had yet to come into being. This effort was to be aborted when the papacy and nobility allied with each other, ultimately leading to his murder in 1354.

Etienne Marcel emerges from this stormy era in a far more favorable light. A “provost of the merchants” and economically well-to-do in his own right, Marcel was clearly a popular leader of the “Third Estate” in Paris whose efforts to enlarge the powers of the Estates Generale at the expense of the monarchy and nobility and make royal taxes more equitable developed into a wider challenge to absolutism and aristocratic power. Marcel’s own goals, in fact, were probably more “bourgeois,” possibly even more “republican,” than his own order would have been prepared to accept. Like Rienzi, he was to enjoy immense support until a royalist faction within the middle class itself assassinated him in 1358. The tendency of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians to read a “nation-state” mentality into men who lived in an era guided largely by feudal or confederal visions of political life is misleading. Underlying this bias is the: myth that Europe’s “bourgeoisie” was initially republican and basically nationalist in its convictions. Rierizi and Marcel rose to prominence because they spoke for artisans and the urban poor as well as merchant and professional strata, many of whom sided with the nobility against the ordinary people of Europe’s cities. Perez Zagorin seems to be much closer to the truth when be observes, “Grievances born of unfavorable conjoncture and wretched conditions underlay the popular upsurge, whereas Marcel himself was a revolutionary reformer who wanted to build an alliance of towns, strengthen the Estates General, and fasten political limitations on the monarchy. His movement also established some slight ties with the Jacquerie, the big peasant revolt that had broken out at the same time in the Ile-de-France and surrounding region.”{61} This judgment speaks to a confederal outlook, one that was more in tune with the period than a “nationalist” vision of a centralized France.

Zagorin’s reference to the Jacquerie reminds us that the period faced a series of major peasant tumults—not only in France but throughout western Europe. The English Peasant Rebellion of 1381, which followed the French Jacquerie by less than three decades, formed a high point in the restive village upsurges that finally led to the brief seizure of London by a peasant army. John Ball, an itinerant priest who’ was to color the rebellion with powerful declamations against social and economic inequality, gave the rising a larger-than-life image. Actually, the peasantry tended to rise in the aftermath of wartime ravages of the countryside or unpredictably in isolated pockets against feudal exactations, royal taxes, excessive “tithes,” upper-class highhandedness. To detail these uprisings would be impossible. Occasionally, they managed to cojoin with urban unrest into full-scale rebellions and to pose serious challenges to provincial and central authorities. Whether this connection was well-established—as was the case in the Hussite Wars of Bohemia during the fifteenth century—or assumed an emphemeral character, agrarian unrest became endemic throughout the centuries that followed and persists to this day in the Third World.

Ordinarily, peasant revolts were short-lived and fragmented. The climax of these uprisings in western Europe was to emerge from the Lutheran Reformation of the 1520s, when the cities and countryside of Germany were thrown into years of persistent unrest. Between 1524 and 1526, German peasants rose on a mass scale; sweeping over large areas of the western and southern parts of the country and entering into historical annals as the famous “Peasants’ War.” Presumably, this was regarded as a “revolution” by chroniclers, who were eager to distinguish it from the many “rebellions” that exploded sporadically in the countryside from medieval times to the Enlightenment. The medley of ideologies, sentiments, and interests that are imputed to the German peasant uprising has endeared it to Marxists, liberals, romantics, theologians, and nationalists alike. It has been variously’ seen as a precursor of modern communistic movements, a striking example bf class war, an effort at moral regeneration, even as a forerunner of the German nation-state or a force that shaped’ its development. Most of these appraisals do not give sufficient emphasis to the deep-seated communitarian impulses that moved the peasants to action: their attempts to preserve the rural Gemeinde from fern dal, commercial, and clerical encroachment. If there is any unifying drama to the upheaval, it is the peasantry’s effort to preserve its organic communal ties, its traditional village universe that encompassed time-honored values, institutions, and lifeways as well as landholdings that were challenged by princely and baronial encroachments. It is this universe, so much of a piece with the civic values of traditional society as such, that makes the Peasants’ War of 1524–26 so fascinating to theorists and historians of municipal development.

The fortunes of this conflict, with all their varied interpretations, have been explored extensively enough to require no detailed treatment here. Thomas Munzer’s legendary “communist” tenets of the time probably articulated the peasantry’s commitment to its traditional networks of mutual aid, its timeless visions of a “golden age” based on equality, its precarious reality of collective management of land and goods that marked the Gemeinde—all village-based traditions rather than “anticipations” of socialist and communist theories that appropriately stem from a sophisticated industrial society rather than an old agrarian one. To the romantics who found in the peasantry the embodiment of a German ethnos, the conflict offers no inspiring myths of a united people motivated by a sense of blood and soil. The Peasants’ War was as fragmented as the society from which it stemmed. Only once do we hear of a really earnest effort to bring what were separate uprisings into a unified struggle. A “peasant parliament” was convened at Memmingen to form a “Christian Union of the Peasants” and coordinate the peasant armies of Upper Swabia. The union brought together the three Haufen or corps that were in revolt into common military operations, each led by a chief and four councilors, a structure that completely replicated the administration of the peasant village. The village form, in effect, was projected onto the shared command structure of the mili tary forces, mirroring the traditional society that it was meant to preserve.

The Memmingen “parliament” also formulated and adopted the famous “Twelve Articles” of the peasant revolt, a program worded in terms of scriptural authority. The articles “humbly” petition the secular authorities for the right of the villages to choose and depose their own pastors, to fix their own “tithes” according to the needs of the pastor and the poor of the community, to abolish serfdom, diminish corvee labor, reduce feudal dues and rents, and, finally, to restore all enclosed common land to the village and end further enclosures definitively. Allowing for many local variations, the Memmingen Articles became the basic program of the rebellious German peasantry and was soon the most widely circulated document of the war. Given its tone of humility, recourse to scriptural legitimacy, and humane demands, it completely expressed the spirit and values of the Gemeinde, It was the voice of a traditional village world by which the municipal life of the era was nourished and from which it drew its vitality. Herein lies the real continuity of the articles with German civic life: its strong solidarity as an ethical covenant.

The German princes were to unite and crush the Peasants’ War in a terrible bloodbath. Although city support of the peasants was very widespread, it was often qualified and prone toward compromise. The Twelve Articles resonated with the urban poor and lower classes, and its moral tone and appeals to scripture won it considerable clerical support. The almost evangelical nature of the uprising gave it the qualities of a crusade for human rights and decency, traits that were not lost on many of the educated strata of the cities. Despite its radical rhetoric, Frederick Engels’s appraisal of the Peasants’ War is pervaded by all the prejudices of the last century. The war’s “chief result,” we are told, was the “strengthening of German decentralization which, in turn, was the “cause of [the war’s] failure.”{62} One is disposed to ask if victory by the peasants would have yielded a “centralization” of Germany that would have overcome the fragmentation created by the German princes. Accordingly, the Peasants’ War was either a “revolution,” as Engels claimed, or a crude anachronism as he should have claimed by his own standards of “historical materialism,” in which case it belonged not to the truly “revolutionary tradition” of Germany but to a “reactionary” one. His appraisal becomes all the more entangled when he rejects confederacy as a valid solution to Germany’s problems, a solution that the peasants intuitively seem to have desired. This problem is not an academic one. It raises the crucial question of whether or not seemingly “undeveloped” peoples today are to achieve what we so flippantly call “modernization”—by confederalism or nationalism, decentralism or centralism, libertarian institutions or authoritarian ones. We have not removed these questions from the future of our civilization nor can they be concealed from purview by the veil of history. If anything, hindsight has made them as searing today as they were in earlier times, when the terrifying future that now looms before us was very far removed from the eyes of men and women in the sixteenth century.

This much must be emphasized: the attempts to create a nation-state in western Europe four centuries ago did not occur without considerable resistance from the free cities of the era, rebellious villages, and aroused artisans, not only recalcitrant nobles. The sixteenth century, which was decisive in the rise of European absolutism and ultimately nationalism, bears witness to a veritable deluge of village, provincial, and urban uprisings. Even England was not spared from dramatic agrarian unrest: Kett’s Rebellion of 1549, while more of a mass protest against land enclosures than a revolutionary challenge to royal authority, required the use of thousands of troops before it could be subdued. In France, the rebellion was followed by the rising of the Croquants between 1592 and 1595, a struggle more redolent of German demands for village autonomy than the English one. Such revolts, generally localized and easily subdued, were to become endemic as France passed deeper into absolutism and ultimately revolution. Indeed, it was not until the Napoleonic Era that they came to a definitive end, and a once rebellious peasantry was turned into a conservative pillar of the Bonapartist monarchy.

None of these rebellions produced confederations or developed into serious challenges to the emerging nation-states of the West. The civic roots of the English Revolution have rarely been appraised from a municipal viewpoint, although the revolution that began in England in the 1640s was to find a remarkably democratic fulfillment in the townships of New England. (This is a development we must reserve for a later and fuller discussion.) The Great French Revolution, in turn, was to evoke the ideal of communal confederation without giving it permanent reality. Indeed, the Jacobin “dictatorship,” if such it can be called, was to turn France into one of the most centralized nation-states in Europe. But the ideal did not die. Later, it acquired a brief and glowing moment of reality in the subsequent Paris Commune of 1871, a commune or “city council” that called upon all the cities of France to join’it in a huge civic confederation—only to be crushed in bloody fighting with troops of the Third Republic after some two months of existence. With magnificant stubbornness, the Paris Commune of the nineteenth century had tried to bring to life what its predecessor of the eighteenth century had entertained in its conflict with the Jacobin-controlled Convention during the last years of the Great Revolution.

Ironically, the most serious threat to absolutism and the nationstate by a confederation of municipalities was to emerge during the sixteenth century in a country where absolutism seemed virtually triumphant: Spain under the rule of Europe’s sternest and politically least yielding monarch, Charles V. The period directly preceding the final subjugation of the Moors in 1492 was marked by a remarkable burgeoning of city life and the consolidation of Spanish absolutism under the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. Spain’s prosperity and its movement toward a nation-state seem like an almost textbook example of collaboration between a monarchy and an urban “bourgeoisie.” That monarchy and city could have eventually entered into conflict with each other would have seemed inconceivable at the time if it did not actually happen. Isabella, following an active policy of fostering city life and playing urban strata against landed magnates, promoted internal commerce, scrupulously respected municipal rights, and worked closely with the Spanish Cortes, the country’s “parliament.” This policy was intended to develop institutions and forces countervailing the rapacious Spanish territorial lords. The gilds, long the objects of royal hostility, were permitted to extend their ordinances and confirmed in their Tights to control production operations. The ‘‘crusade” against the Moors was shrewdly used to increase popular enthusiasm for the monarchy, indeed to give it a centrality in Spanish life and religion that, it had never enjoyed. The image of a morally regenerated Christian Spain evoked hopes of a stable, unified, and powerful nation whose restive nobility and centrifugal regionalism had to be brought under rigorous control.

This image was translated into a certain measure of fact, especially in Castile, the Spanish heartland. Castile formed the bulwark of the newly emerging nation, the source of its prevailing dialect, its manners, and the “prototypic” Spanish character, which held such linguistically, ethnically, and culturally disparate “Spains” as the Basques, Catalans, and largely Moorish Andalusians together. Here, tod, the monarchy in later years was to choose its future capital, Madrid, and turn the city into the administrative center of the country as a whole. This state machinery was one of the most sophisticated in Europe. At the same time, the Catholic kings began to shore up their relationship with the cities, deflecting urban hostility from the monarchy to the nobility and drawing upon urban wealth to consolidate royal rule, Ferdinand and Isabella enlarged their bureaucratic control over the independent cities of the province. The corregidores or town officials of the crown were given extended powers to bring the urban noble clans under control and protect the cities from landed magnates who exploited them.. Municipal land that the magnates had illegally seized were restored in some measure; tax farmers, whose actions verged on outright plunder, were replaced by the encabezamiento system in which the main tax, the alcabala, was collected by local officials; the Royal Council was staffed by university trained lawyers, the letrados, and a supervisory hierarchy of officials to oversee the burgeoning bureaucracy from secretaries to visitadores who provided for redress from abuses and grievances. A centralized and professional judiciary, together with various councils of brotherhoods, the Inquisition, and the Cortes itself balanced out a bureaucracy and provided for close royal supervision of nearly all aspects of Spanish life.

This machinery, partly traditional and partly new, was destined to have a very limited life span. Although the French monarchy was to install a similar one that lasted for some two centuries, the Spanish state machinery began to weaken appreciably even during the reign of the Catholic monarchs. The final struggle against the Moors essentially brought the conflict between the monarchy and nobility to an end. Despite her fears of the landed magnates, Isabella was obliged to use them militarily to complete the reconquest, and the magnates claimed their full rewards for supporting the state. Increasingly, the lost municipal lands were recovered by the aristocracy, their taxing powers were increased, their abilities to sidestep disagreeable court decisions were enhanced, and their financial control of the monarchy increased immensely. When in 1519 Charles V became king of Spain as Carlos I and entered his claim to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, the monarchy was largely under aristocratic control. Born and raised in Flanders, Charles quickly earned the mistrust of his Spanish subjects as a foreigner whose principal concerns were his own imperial ambitions and who lived mainly abroad to advance them. Virtually all strata of Castilian society viewed the newly installed king as a man who regarded Spain as a resource for his squabbles abroad, freely bilking the country of its wealth.

To exacerbate matters still further, the central administrative apparatus was all but taken over by a coterie of Flemish advisers that was notable for its insensitivity to Spanish traditions and interests. Inept and clumsy, Charles’s Flemish surrogates turned the monarchy into a parasitic entity in which the aristocracy was the main beneficiary of the new dispensation. Increasing taxes, a grave decline in the honesty and effectiveness of the corregidores, a breakdown in the road system that led to higher, often unbearable financial levies on impoverished village and town populations, a failure by inept or corrupt supervisory officials to discharge their responsibilities in controlling the bureaucracy and aristocracy, a decline in the integrity of the court system, a military system that quartered ill-paid and unruly troops with an increasingly impoverished population—all, well underway before Charles became king, were exacerbated by alien rulers, a suspect monarch, the declining prestige of the royal power, and the growing encroachments of a self-serving aristocracy.

On May 30,1520, a crowd of woolworkers seized a hated member of Segovia’s Cortes delegation and hanged him, leading to a revolt in the city that forced all its royal officials to take to their heels. This seemingly local act of crowd violence was to unleash one of history’s most extraordinary municipal “revolutions,” as many historians call it, the rising of the Comuneros (literally translated as Communards). Although this comunidad or community revolt was fairly short-lived, it is outstanding for its institutional creativity. The action of the woolworkers in Segovia pales before the more serious rebellion that developed when Toledo’s city council, challenging an unfavorable change in royal tax policy, wrote to all the cities represented in the Cortes and defiantly called upon them to establish a common front against the royal government. What may have appeared like one of many urban tax revolts that marked the whole period soon turned into a full-scale revolution. Within months, city after city in Castile began to collect and impound all taxes collected for the monarchy. Civic militias were organized, and far-reaching changes were introduced to democratize and enhance the autonomy of municipal governments. On Toledo’s suggestion, a national junta was established with delegates from all the Cortes cities. The Comuneros, in effect, had established a parallel or “dual” power in opposition to the prevailing royal administration.

Early reactions to this development ranged from the enthusiastic to the tolerant. Even the landed magnates, ever mindful of an opportunity to gain from any diminution of the central government, placed a tactful distance between themselves and the monarchy. By mustering an impressive army of citizens with an infrastructure and added detachments of professional soldiers, the Comunero Junta moved speedily toward a series of victories that threatened to replace the entire royal state with a municipal confederation. The Comuneros had created their own military system, an administrative apparatus that reached deeply into most of Castile’s social order, tax resources, and a tremendous reservoir of popular goodwill, cutting across seemingly insurmountable “class” barriers (including clerical ones) that seemed irresistible in the early months of the junta’s existence.

What brought this movement to an end in April 1521 when its last major field detachments were defeated, near the village of Villalar? Toledo, it should noted, held out against royalist forces until February 1522, and other cities tried to resist after the battle of Villalar. Perhaps the most strategic military fact was the swing of the nobility from a generally neutral position over to the monarchy. No less important was the support that the royalists slowly acquired from the city elites—the knights or Caballeros who lived in urban areas, well-to-do merchants, the higher clergy, and generally more prosperous strata, who were alienated by the radicalization and democratization of civic life. The Comuneros, like their heirs centuries later in Paris, were stridently urban in outlook and retained a basic hostility to the peasantry (who actually were their natural allies) as a class controlled by the nobles. Finally, the Comuneros could not extend their movement beyond the center of Spain. Viewed as Castilians by the other “Spains” that surrounded them, the movement was seen as the work of a privileged population that had revolted against its even more privileged overlords. The Catalans, Basques, and Andalusians, to cite the most well-known regions hostile to Castilian hegemony, could not be brought to identify with a Castilian cause, however much the Comuneros solicited their support

It is easy in view of these reasons to see the revolt of the Comunidades as a strictly “class” movement, to speak of it variously as “atavistic” because it posed a mere municipal challenge to a seemingly “progressive” nation-state or to regard it as a conflict of interests between vague, indefinable class strata: nobles, a “bourgeoisie,” a “nascent proletariat,” and the like. The term “nascent” is what makes such a “class analysis” questionable. Of all the clearly definable “classes” that were to play a major role in later Spanish history—apart from Spain’s enduring peasantry-only the landed magnates survived the era as a cohesiye stratum and were to carry on intact until recent times. The others are more properly “orders” in their indefinability, that is, in their paucity of economic roots, their wavering stability as social groups, and the murkiness of their concerns. What we have here is a typical, quasifeudal “Third Estate,” ranging from well-to-do, even wealthy, strata to an amorphous mass of artisans, merchants, “intellectuals” of various sorts, clerks, and clerics, to which we may add a considerable number of servants, laborers, and beggars. This “Third Estate” was united by its urbanity, literally by a shared culture as town dwellers. Despite the many material differences that were to separate them, either they were citizens Of a particular city or they aspired to be. Their ideological unity came from the primary loyalty that the city claimed and from the political arena it created. It was the city, not their “class,” that evoked in them a real feeling of place, a meaningful commitment of service, and a clear sense of self-definition. This collective loyalty to a patria chica, to a “small fatherland,” so intense among urban dwellers during that era, is difficult to convey today when nationalism has invaded all public sentiments of local loyalty. In the sixteenth century it was intense enough to impart an alien, almost exogenous, quality to the central power and to focus one’s devotion on the village, town, or city in which one lived rather than the still-emerging nation-state.

Nowadays, we would be inclined to believe that such varied economic groups would be in chronic conflict with each other, a conclusion that seems to be supported by the internal conflicts that engulfed many cities of Europe, particularly the Flemish and Italian ones. Actually, this is a very one-sided picture of urban fife in the past. It is easy for historians to forget how readily disparate strata in a city united against invaders or other city rivals, despite their divergent economic interests. In fact, it would be hard to understand why the Comuneros could unite in the first place, given the disparities in wealth and social position that existed in their cities, and why a strong sense of unity existed to the very last, even after urban elites began to fall away from their movement. Their royalist opponents did not win all the well-to-do strata of the Castilian cities; in fact, there was resistance to the very end, especially in Toledo, which held out against royalist opponents for nearly a year after the battle of Villalar. What the royalists succeeded in achieving was enough of a division between these strata to tip the balance in their favor and bring the greater military prowess of the aristocracy into an advantageous position over relatively inexperienced civic militias.

What the Comuneros really achieved has yet to be fully grasped by some of its historians. The movement opened civic life on a scale that had rarely been seen in Europe since Hellenic times. It expanded the very meaning of the word “politics,” not only at a confederal, city, or town level but at a neighborhood or parish level. Comunero demands were strikingly radical even for our day: a Cortes, composed of city delegations, which would greatly limit royal authority, and a municipal democracy whose extent varied from one city to another. In a group of articles formulated in Valladolid, the Comuneros demanded that delegates for the Cortes be chosen with the consent of parish assemblies instead of city councils, the practice followed by the monarchy. These delegates in turn were to be guided by the mandate of their electors and were to acquire the right to consult with their cities if their instructions did not adequately cover the problems that surfaced at the Cortes, a right that the monarchy had consistently denied city delegates to the parliamentary body. Had these demands been realized, Spain would have seen the emergence of a broadly based local democracy, one deeply rooted in city neighborhoods as well as municipalities. Such a democracy, in fact, went far beyond radical conceptions of political representation. They were an open invitation to revitalize the entire public sphere, opening it to all strata of the population and advanced urban concepts of citizenship that were all-inclusive and completely grass-roots in character. In cities such as Toledo and Valladolid, this neighborhood democracy was not merely a demand; it became a working reality, one that was rarely to be achieved again until the rise of the Parisian sectional movement in the Great French Revolution.

Many Comunero demands constituted a sixteenth-century “Bill of Rights.” The Cortes was to meet regularly and all the grievances of the Comunidades were to be addressed before it could terminate its proceedings. The Comuneros, of course, called for the protection of property from legal confiscation except in cases of treason; freedom from harsh punishment in criminal cases; limits on the quartering of visiting royalty; prohibition of the sale of public offices; reforms of judicial and appeals procedures; and the complete “Castilianization” of the court, which Charles had filled with aliens who knew very little about Spanish problems. The demands contained a strong, basically egalitarian appeal for choosing officials according to their personal merit, professional qualifications, and moral probity rather than for their status and social background.

Charles’s victory over the Comuneros signaled the triumph in Spain of statecraft over politics, of the nation-state over confederalism. It was a victory that was attained primarily by the force of arms, not by a hidden logic of history. The struggle of the Comunidades with the monarchy—it was never a struggle against monarchism as such although it came very close at times to a challenge of monarchical rule in its sixteenth-century form—had been preceded by similar conflicts between city leagues or confederacies almost everywhere on the European continent. It was to be followed by greater or lesser struggles of a similar nature after nation-states had been well-established. If Spain, one of Europe’s strongest absolute monarchies in the sixteenth century, is singled out for study, the Comunero movement did not establish a tradition that an “ascending” bourgeoisie could claim for itself. Quite to the contrary: the Comuneros found a later, albeit highly modified, expression in Pi y Margall’s Federalist movement of the late nineteenth century, which distinctly resisted state centralization, and finally in the largest anarchist movement in Europe.

Charles V did nothing to foster a capitalist society. Indeed, absolutism became a lethal cancer in a once prosperous country that was devitalized by massive state expenditures for imperial adventures abroad. The Comunero movement, by contrast, tried to rein this monarchy and ultimately drastically diminish its power. Its failure was followed over a period of time by an incredible decline of Spanish economic and urban life. Cities sank into lethargy, agriculture stagnated under the rule and mismanagement of the magnates, roads were permitted to decay, and the wealth of the country was vastly diminished. On the other hand, the Industrial Revolution in Europe, which presumably dates the ascendancy of urban capitalism over traditional society, did not foster a city development in Spain that was wholesome or vital. It did not revive community life; rather, it replaced what remained of community with urbanization, anomie, and, under Francisco Franco, with a ferociously terrorist regime that has variously been called “nationalist” by its admirers and “fascist” by its opponents. Whether or not the two terms actually reveal the convergence of a development that was to yield centralized authority in its most brutal forms is a problem that we have yet to resolve in our own time.

That there is a logic in certain historical premises, one that unf olds more as a tendency than a necessity, is certainly not arguable: nationalism does foster totalitarianism, and the centralized state tends to develop into an all-embracing state. But it is certainly difficult to argue, that a suprahuman phenomenon called “history” exists and predetermines a society’s development. The Comuneros had opened a pathway to a cooperative, unified Spain that could have yielded a very different dispensation from that which came with a centralized nation-state. So, too, had earlier city confederacies, whose achievements meet with so much disdain. Politics had to be structured around a community of one kind or another, whether as a polis, Gemeinde, burg, commune, or city. Lacking the flesh and blood of politically involved people and comprehensible self-governing institutions, the human phenomenon we call “society” tends to disintegrate at its base, even as it seems to consolidate at its apex.

Centralization becomes most acute when deterioration occurs at the base of society. Divested of its culture as a political realm, society becomes an ensemble of bureaucratic agencies that bind monadic individuals and family units into a strictly administrative structure or a form of “possessive,” more properly acquisitive, individualism that leads to privitization of the self and its disintigration into mere egoism. The city, in turn, is no longer united by any sort of ethical bond. It becomes a marketplace, a destructured and formless economic unit, a realm in which the Hobbesian war of “all against all” becomes a virtual reality, ironically designated as a “return to nature.”

Such a condition and the mentality it produces constitute a dissolution of nature and society’s evolutionary thrust toward diversity, complexity, and community, a problem that appropriately belongs to the newly developing field and philosophy of social ecology rather than urban sociology. It is a social problem because we are talking about one of the most elemental forms of human consociation—the city—where people advance beyond the kinship bond to share, create, and develop the means of life, culturally as well as economically, as human beings. Here, humanitas as distinguished from the “folk” comes into its own. And it is an ecological problem in the sense that diversity, variety, and participation constitute not only the basis for the stability of human consociation but also for the creativity that is imparted to us by diversity, indeed, ultimately, the freedom that alternative forms of development allow for the evolution of new, richer, and well-rounded social forms.

Urbanization, which I see as the dissolution of the city’s wealth of variety and as a force that makes for municipal homogeneity and formlessness, is a threat to the stability, fecundity, and freedom that the city added to the social landscape. A critical analysis of how urbanization emerged, its genesis partly in the nation-state, partly in industrialism, and generally with the onset of capitalistic forms of production and distribution—all examined from the viewpoint of social ecology—is a problem of crucial importance for our time, indeed one that will help us define the future of the city, politics, and, above all, citizenship.