The Seas will be made of Lemonade

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sun Oct 24 23:00:59 PDT 1999


Hi Jim:
>So for example, Christopher Hill precis the Leveller programme at the
>Putney Debates:
>
>'The Leveller leaders wanted the vote to be given to "freeborn
>Englishmen". Unless they had fought for Parliament, servants and those
>in receipt of alms - that is wage labourers and paupers - were excluded
>from the franchise, because these two groups were not economically
>independent. Thinking in terms of small household industrial and
>agricultural units, these Levellers held that servants - apprentices and
>labourers as well as domestic servants - were represented by the head of
>the household no less than were his womenfolk and children.' (The
>Century of Revolution, p111)
>
>I certainly don't cite this to take away from them. On the contrary, I
>would say that they were right in judging that women, wage-labourers and
>servants were, at this stage in history, lacking in that degree of
>economic independence that would make their votes anything more than
>additional votes for their masters. It is a harsh lesson, perhaps, but
>principles do not escape their time.

I agree that the Leveller leaders were not much different from other men of their times (actually that's Hill's point). One thing that Hill notes repeatedly is, though, that there was a wide gap between the Leveller leaders and rank-and-file: hence the title of one of the book's chapters: "Levellers and True Levellers."


>But the commons, like the German Mark (see Engels on Peasant Wars in
>Germany) was a property form that was a barrier to social development.
>It is certainly true that enclosure was a vicious form of appropriation,
>but it was the condition of the emergence of the working class.
>Projecting that class back into an age where it does not exist is just
>bad history.
<snip>
>If you make communism a possibility at any point in history, regardless
>of whether the social and productive conditions that could ground it
>exist, you depart from the materialist theory of history in favour of
>idealism.

Obviously I'm not making such a utopian argument. I'm simply pointing out the social forces whose needs and desires that Locke, Kant, etc. had to address, partially incorporate, neutralize, and beat back at the same time. In other words, the Enlightenment was not simply made by philosophers whose names everyone remembers, though the 'history of ideas' would have us believe that it was. The question I'm interested in is, "What was the Enlightenment?"

Yoshie



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