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Antony Black - Guild & State: European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present

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Guild & State: European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present
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Antony Black
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Transaction Publishers
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Guild and State examines the values of social solidarity and fraternity that emerged from medieval guilds and city-communes, and the effect of traditional corporate organization of labor on socioeconomic attitudes and theories of the state. What ordinary guildsmen and townsmen thought about these issues can be gleaned from chronicles, charters, and reported slogans. But in tracing attitudes toward the guilds of early Germanic times to todays equivalent-trade unions-a distinction must be made between popular ethos and learned philosophy.

In Europe, from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, the corporate organization of labor and of town-market communities developed side-by-side with the ideals of personal liberty, market freedom, and legal equality. Both affected the ideology of the European commune and city-state in specific and discernible ways. Self-governing labor organizations and civil freedom developed together as coherent practices. The values of mutual aid and craft honor on the one hand, and of personal freedom and legal equality on the other, formed the moral infrastructure of our civilization. Alternate ideals balanced, harmonized, and even cross-fertilized one another-as in the principle of freedom of association.

Contrary to preconceptions, however, corporate values were seldom expressed philosophically in the Middle Ages. Political theory and the world of learning from the start emphasized liberal values. It was only after the Reformation that guild and communal values found expression in political theory. Even then only a few philosophers acknowledged that solidarity and exchange-the poles around which the values of guild and civil society, respectively, rotate-are not opposites but complementary, and attempted to weave these together into a texture as tough and complex as that of urban society itself.

The Enlightenment and industrialization led to an apotheosis of liberal values. Guilds disappeared and were only in part replaced by labor unions; the values of market exchange have since been in the ascendant-though Hegel, Durkheim, and more recently, advocates of liberal corporatism maintain the possibility of a symbiosis between corporate and liberal values. In Guild and State there emerges an alternative history of political thought, which will be fascinating to the general as well as the specialist reader.

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GUILD & STATE

Guild & State

European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present

Antony Black

With a new preface, introduction and conclusion by the author

Originally published in 1984 by Methuen & Co. Ltd.

Published 2003 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2002072678

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Black, Antony.
[Guilds and civil society in European political thought from the twelfth
century to the present]
Guild and state: European political thought from the twelfth century to the
present / Antony Black; with a new preface, introduction, and conclusion
by the author, p. cm.
Originally published: Guilds and civil society in European political thought
from the twelfth century to the present. London: Methuen, 1984.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7658-0978-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Corporate stateHistory. 2. Political scienceEuropeHistory.
3. GuildsEuropeHistory. 4. Labor unionsEuropeHistory. 5. Civil
societyEuropeHistory. I. Title.
JC478 .B43 2003
306'.094'0902dc21
2002072678

ISBN-13: 978-0-7658-0978-0 (pbk)

To my Colleagues, at Dundee and Elsewhere, Present and Past

Contents

Guide

This is a history of medieval and modern political thought from the viewpoint of the guild and the values that have been associated with it. It is a history of the idea of the corporate organisation of labour and how it does or does not tie in with theories of the state. I have examined both the writings of philosophers and everyday beliefs.

This is intended for the general reader as well as the specialist, and for the student as well as the professional scholar. It presents new evidence and new interpretations. And I believe the wider public implications are important.

I set out on this work during the 1960s and 1970s partly because, as a convert to Catholicism with a socialist soul, I wanted to uncover an authentic European past that would combine Christian piety with a political praxis based on 'the people' and their values. Among other things, it aspired to be a counter-Marxist and counter-secular account of European development. No doubt it was my English public school past that made me renew this agenda of certain nineteenth-century romantics. But I hope the results transcend these origins.

This may also explain in part why, as will become only too obvious, this book at times straddles both the history of ideas and prescriptive political thought. Provided I have not obscured the boundary, I make no apology for this. In the end, this book turns out to be almost a history of 'the third way.'

I am surprised, on revisiting topics after some twenty years, at how much I left unsaid and how many implications of my research I failed to bring out clearly. I am therefore deeply grateful to my friend Gary Nederman for telling me about Transaction Publishers, and to Irving Louis Horowitz of Transaction Publishers for his encouragement in publishing this reissue.

Guilds and Civil Society (as the first edition was called) was published by Methuen; I am grateful to Janice Price for the interest she showed in it. Soon afterwards Methuen became part of Routledge and the book went out of print. Some scholars continued to express interest, or even wanted to buy it, although it had become unobtainable. Habent sua fata libelli.

). For this reissue, I want to thank Richard Dunphy, Robert von Friedeburg, Chris Storrs, and Jim Tracy for their comments on the Introduction; and Brian Baxter and Nick Hopkins for their comments on the Conclusion. I have not been able to meet all their points and any mistakes that remain are my own.

I would like to thank all those with whom I have discussed these topics over many years, especially Peter Blickle, Mauro Calise, Jonathan Chaplin (who spotted my old-fashioned use of 'civil society': see below, pp. ), Gerhard Dilcher, Wolfgang Mager, Cary Nederman, Otto Gerhard Oexle, Diego Quaglioni, Chris Storrs, and Jim Tracy.

It is tragic that, in the era of the European Union, scholars seem more divided by language barriers than 100 years ago. Scholarship is becoming globalised through the wider use of English, but all too often we simply do not read what scholars in our own field are writing in other languages. Let us oppose this appalling trend.

I want to thank my colleagues in the Department of Politics at the University of Dundee, in other departments here, and in many other places. This re-issue is dedicated them. We in our profession are enormously lucky in the sheer comradeship that our work can generate. May we long drink together from the same wells and barrels.

I would like to thank the University Libraries of Dundee, especially the inter-library loans staff, St. Andrews (especially Mr. Hargreaves of the Rare Books section), Edinburgh, and Cambridge; and the Cambridge college libraries of Trinity (especially Mr. Kaye), Gonville and Caius, and St. John's. I am very grateful to the Nuffield Foundation for a research fellowship in 1980-81, which enabled me to range more widely and compose with fewer distractions; and to Ann Aitken, formerly a secretary in our department, who generously helped me with typing.

It is a privilege to be able to revisit one's work, and to revisit in my mind the little garden study where I wrote the first edition. My four older childrenStephen, Thomas, Esther, and Matthew, who played in that garden as I wroteand now my younger son Christopher have all helped to keep me partly sane.

Style

I have used the author-date system of reference for all secondary works. Primary works are referred to by title (and author when this is not obvious from the context). 'Cit. Bloggs...' indicates that a primary source is quoted in a secondary work by Bloggs. I have listed medieval and renaissance authors by their second names except where there is a strong contrary convention.

I embarked on this research with the intention of recovering an older, atavistic notion of community, of endorsing its legitimacy by proving its antiquity, and of reintroducing the modern reader to the affective language of Europe's communal heritage. The notion of tightly knit, affective community is notoriously alluring to modern westerners; we tend to associate it with an ideal past, and to see in its restoration a focus for our hopes for a better society. It is an ideal which liberals, socialists, and conservatives can, each in their own way, espouse. Great scholars like Gierke and Michaud-Quantin seemed to point the way. But the spirits of Karl Popper and Quentin Skinner stood impishly at my elbow. The facts of cultural and intellectual history moved at a tangent to the myth that liberal individualism has steadily replaced a strong sense of community. The diverse themes of the present book are the result.

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