CHAPTER XXVIII

CITIZENSHIP ¹

In the concept of citizenship (Bürgertum) as it is used in social history are bound up three distinct significations. First, citizenship may include certain social categories or classes which have some specific communal or economic interest. As thus defined the class citizen is not unitary; there are greater citizens and lesser citizens; entrepreneurs and hand workers belong to the class. Second, in the political sense, citizenship signifies membership in the state, with its connotation as the holder of certain political rights. Finally, by citizens in the class sense, we understand those strata which are drawn together, in contrast with the bureaucracy or the proletariat and others outside their circle, as “persons of property and culture,” entrepreneurs, recipients of funded incomes, and in general all persons of academic culture, a certain class standard of living, and a certain social prestige.

The first of these concepts is economic in character and is peculiar to western civilization. There are and have been everywhere hand laborers and entrepreneurs, but never and nowhere were they included in a unitary social class. The notion of the citizen of the state has its forerunners in antiquity and in the medieval city. Here there were citizens as holders of political rights, while outside of the occident only traces of this relation are met with, as in the Babylonian patriciate and the Josherim, the inhabitants of a city with full legal rights, in the Old Testament. The farther east we go the fewer are these traces; the notion of citizens of the state is unknown to the world of Islam, and to India and China. Finally, the social class signification of citizen as the man of property and culture, or of one or the other, in contrast with the nobility, on the one hand, and the proletariat, on the other, is likewise a specifically modern and western concept, like that of the bourgeoisie. It is true that in antiquity and in the middle ages, citizen was a class concept; membership in specific class groups made the person a citizen. The difference is that in this case the citizen was privileged in a negative as well as a positive sense. In the positive sense in that he only—in the medieval city for example—might pursue certain occupations; negatively in that certain legal requirements were waived, such as the qualification for holding a fief, the qualification for the tourney, and that for membership in the religious community. The citizen in the quality of membership in a class is always a citizen of a particular city, and the city in this sense, has existed only in the western world, or elsewhere, as in the early period in Mesopotamia, only in an incipient stage.

The contributions of the city in the whole field of culture are extensive. The city created the party and the demagogue. It is true that we find all through history struggles between cliques, factions of nobles, and office-seekers, but nowhere outside the occidental cities are there parties in the present-day sense of the word, and as little are there demagogues in the sense of party leaders and seekers for ministerial posts. The city and it alone has brought forth the phenomena of the history of art. Hellenic and Gothic art, in contrast with Mycænean and Roman, are city art. So also the city produced science in the modern sense. In the city civilization of the Greeks the discipline out of which scientific thinking developed, namely mathematics, was given the form under which it continuously developed down to modern times. The city culture of the Babylonians stands in an analogous relation to the foundation of astronomy. Furthermore, the city is the basis of specific religious institutions. Not only was Judaism, in contrast with the religion of Israel, a thoroughly urban construction—a peasant could not conform with the ritual of the law—but early Christianity is also a city phenomenon; the larger the city the greater was the percentage of Christians, and the case of Puritanism and Pietism was also the same. That a peasant could function as a member of a religious group is a strictly modern phenomenon. In Christian antiquity the word paganus signified at the same time heathen and village dweller, just as in the post-exilic period the town-dwelling Pharisee looked with contempt on the Am-ha-aretz who was ignorant of the law. Even Thomas Aquinas, in discussing the different social classes and their relative worth, speaks with extreme contempt of the peasant. Finally, the city alone produced theological thought, and on the other hand again, it alone harbored thought untrammeled by priestcraft. The phenomenon of Plato, with his question of how to make men useful citizens as the dominant problem of his thought, is unthinkable outside the environment of a city.

The question whether a place is to be regarded as a city is not answered on the basis of its spatial extent.² From the economic standpoint, rather, both in the occident and elsewhere, the city is in the first place the seat of commerce and industry, and requires a continuous provision of the means of subsistence from without. From an economic standpoint, the various categories of large places are distinguished by the source from which supplies come and the means by which they are paid for. A large place which does not live on its own agricultural production may pay for its imports by its own products, that is industrial products, or through trade or rents, or finally by means of pensions. The “rents” represent salaries of officials or land rents; subsistence on pensions is illustrated by Wiesbaden, where the cost of imports is met by the pensions of political officials and army officers. Large places may be classified according to the dominance of these sources of income to pay for the imports of subsistence goods, but this is a condition common to the world at large; it belongs to large places and does not distinguish a city.

A further general characteristic of a city is the fact that in the past it was generally a fortress; throughout long periods a place was recognized as a city only if and so long as it was a fortified point. In this connection the city was regularly the seat of government, both political and ecclesiastical. In some cases in the occident a civitas was understood to mean a place which was the seat of a bishop. In China it is a decisive characteristic that the city is the seat of a mandarin,³ and cities are classified on the basis of the rank of their mandarins. Even in the Italian Renaissance the cities were distinguished by the grade of their officials and upper class residents, and the rank of the resident nobility.

It is true that outside the western world there were cities in the sense of a fortified point and the seat of political and hierarchical administration. But outside the occident there have not been cities in the sense of a unitary community. In the middle ages, the distinguishing characteristic was the possession of its own law and court and an autonomous administration of whatever extent. The citizen of the middle ages was a citizen because and insofar as he came under this law and participated in the choice of administrative officials. That cities have not existed outside the occident in the sense of a political community is a fact calling for explanation. That the reason was economic in character is very doubtful. As little is it the specific “Germanic spirit” which produced the unity, for in China and India there were unitary groups much more cohesive than those of the occident, and yet the particular union in cities is not found there.

The inquiry must be carried back to certain ultimate fundamental facts. We cannot explain the phenomena on the basis of the feudal or political grants of the middle ages or in terms of the founding of cities by Alexander the Great on his march to India. The earliest references to cities as political units designate rather their revolutionary character. The occidental city arose through the establishment of a fraternity, the συνoικισμóς in antiquity, the coniuratio in the middle ages. The juristic forms, always relating to externals, in which the resulting struggles and conflicts of the middle ages are clothed, and the facts which lie behind them, cannot be distinguished. The pronouncements of the Staufers against cities prohibit none of the specific presumptions of citizenship, but rather the coniuratio, the brotherhood in arms for mutual aid and protection, involving the usurpation of political power.

The first example in the middle ages is the revolutionary movement in 726 which led to the secession of Italy from the Byzantine rule and which centered in Venice. It was called forth especially by opposition to the attack on images carried out by the emperors under military pressure, and hence the religious element, although not the only factor, was the motive which precipitated the revolution. Previous to that time the dux (later doge) of Venice had been appointed by the emperor, although, on the other hand, there were certain families whose members were constantly to a predominant extent appointed military tribunes or district commandants. From then on the choice of the tribunes and of the dux was in the hands of persons liable to military service, that is, those who were in a position to serve as knights. Thus the movement was started. It requires 400 years longer before in 1143 the name Commune Venetiarum turns up. Quite similar was the “synœcism” of antiquity, as for example the procedure of Nehemiah in Jerusalem. This leader caused the leading families and a selected portion of the people on the land to band themselves together under oath for the purpose of administration and defense of the city. We must assume the same background for the origin of every ancient city. The polis is always the product of such a confraternity or synœcism, not always an actual settlement in proximity but a definite oath of brotherhood which signified that a common ritualistic meal is established and a ritualistic union formed and that only those had a part in this ritualistic group who buried their dead on the acropolis and had their dwellings in the city.

For the fact that this development took place only in the occident there are two reasons. The first is the peculiar character of the organization for defense. The occidental city is in its beginnings first of all a defense group, an organization of those economically competent to bear arms, to equip and train themselves. Whether the military organization is based on the principle of self-equipment or on that of equipment by a military overlord who furnishes horses, arms and provisions, is a distinction quite as fundamental for social history as is the question whether the means of economic production are the property of the worker or of a capitalistic entrepreneur. Everywhere outside the west the development of the city was prevented by the fact that the army of the prince is older than the city. The earliest Chinese epics do not, like the Homeric, speak of the hero who fares forth to battle in his own chariot, but only of the officer as a leader of the men. Likewise in India an army led by officers marched out against Alexander the Great. In the west the army equipped by the war lord, and the separation of soldier from the paraphernalia of war, in a way analogous to the separation of the worker from the means of production, is a product of the modern era, while in Asia it stands at the apex of the historical development. There was no Egyptian or Babylonian-Assyrian army which would have presented a picture similar to that of the Homeric mass army, the feudal army of the west, the city army of the ancient polis, or the medieval guild army.

The distinction is based on the fact that in the cultural evolution of Egypt, western Asia, India, and China the question of irrigation was crucial. The water question conditioned the existence of the bureaucracy, the compulsory service of the dependent classes, and the dependence of the subject classes upon the functioning of the bureaucracy of the king. That the king also expressed his power in the form of a military monopoly is the basis of the distinction between the military organization of Asia and that of the west. In the first case the royal official and army officer is from the beginning the central figure of the process, while in the west both were originally absent. The forms of religious brotherhood and self equipment for war made possible the origin and existence of the city. It is true that the beginnings of an analogous development are found in the east. In India we meet with relations which verge upon the establishment of a city in the western sense, namely, the combination of self equipment and legal citizenship; one who could furnish an elephant for the army is in the free city of Vaiçali a full citizen. In ancient Mesopotamia, too, the knights carried on war with each other and established cities with autonomous administration. But in the one case as in the other these beginnings later disappear as the great kingdom arises on the basis of water regulation. Hence only in the west did the development come to complete maturity.

The second obstacle which prevented the development of the city in the orient was formed by ideas and institutions connected with magic. In India the castes were not in a position to form ritualistic communities and hence a city, because they were ceremonially alien to one another. The same facts explained the peculiar position of the Jews in the middle ages. The cathedral and the eucharist were the symbols of the unity of the city, but the Jews were not permitted to pray in the cathedral or take part in the communion and hence were doomed to form diaspora-communes. On the contrary, the consideration which made it natural for cities to develop in the west was in antiquity the extensive freedom of the priesthood, the absence of any monopoly in the hands of the priests over communion with the gods, such as obtained in Asia. In western antiquity the officials of the city performed the rites, and the resultant proprietorship of the polis over the things belonging to the gods and the priestly treasures was carried to the point of filling the priestly offices by auction, since no magical limitations stood in the way as in India. For the later period in the west three great facts were crucial. The first was prophecy among the Jews, which destroyed magic within the confines of Judaism; magical procedure remained real but was devilish instead of divine. The second fact was the pentecostal miracle, the ceremonial adoption into the spirit of Christ which was a decisive factor in the extraordinary spread of the early Christian enthusiasm. The final factor was the day in Antioch (Gal. 2; 11 ff.) when Paul, in opposition to Peter, espoused fellowship with the uncircumcised. The magical barriers between clans, tribes, and peoples, which were still known in the ancient polis to a considerable degree, were thus set aside and the establishment of the occidental city was made possible.

Although the city in the strict sense is specifically a western institution, there are within the class two fundamental distinctions, first between antiquity and the middle ages and second between southern and northern Europe. In the first period of development of the city communities, the similarity between the ancient and medieval city is very great. In both cases it is those of knightly birth, the families leading an aristocratic existence, who alone are active members in the group, while all the remaining population is merely bound to obedience. That these knightly families became residents of the city is entirely the consequence of the possibility of sharing in trade opportunities. After the success of the Italian revolution against Byzantium, a portion of the Venetian upper class families collected in the Rialto because from that point commerce with the orient was carried on. It is to be remembered that in the sea trade and naval warfare Venice still formed a part of the Byzantine system although it was politically independent. Similarly in antiquity, the wealthy families did not carry on trade on their own account but in the capacity of ship owners or money lenders. It is characteristic that in antiquity there was no city of importance which lay more than a day’s journey distant from the sea; only those places flourished which for political or geographical reasons possessed exceptional opportunities for trade. Consequently Sombart is essentially incorrect in asserting that ground rent is the mother of the city and of commerce. The facts stand in the reverse order; settlement in the city is occasioned by the possibility and the intention of employing the rents in trade, and the decisive influence of trade on the founding of cities stands out.

In the early middle ages the course of events in the rise of a new individual in Venice was somewhat as follows. He began as a trader, that is a retailer; then he proceeded to travel overseas, securing from the upper class families a credit of money or goods which he turned over in the Levant, sharing his profit on his return with those who provided the loan. If he was successful he got himself into the Venetian circle either by way of land or ships. As a ship owner or land owner the way was open for his ascent into the nobility, down to the closing of the Grand Council in 1297. The ordinary designation of the members of the aristocracy living on the rent of land and of capital —both resting on trading profit—is in Italy scioperato, in Germany ehrsamer Müssiggänger—“honorable idler.” It is true that among the nobility in Venice there were always families which continued to carry on trade as a profession, just as in the period of the Reformation noble families who had lost their wealth turned to the quest of a livelihood by way of industry. But normally the full citizen and member of an urban noble class is a man who possesses land as well as capital, and lives on an income but does not himself take part in trade or industry.

Thus far the medieval development coincides with that of antiquity; but their ways part with the establishment of democracy. At the outset, to be sure, there are similarities to be noted in this connection also: ñμoς, plebs, popolo and Bürgerschaft are indifferent words which refer in the same way to the breaking in of democracy; they designate the mass of citizens who do not pursue the knightly life. The noble, the man of knightly station and feudal qualifications, is watched, deprived of the suffrage and outlawed, as the Russian bourgeoisie were by Lenin.

The basis of democratization is everywhere purely military in character; it lies in the rise of disciplined infantry, the hoplites of antiquity, the guild army in the middle ages. The decisive fact was that military discipline proved its superiority over the battle between heroes.⁴ Military discipline meant the triumph of democracy because the community wished and was compelled to secure the co-operation of the non-aristocratic masses and hence put arms, and along with arms political power, into their hands. In addition, the money power plays its role, both in antiquity and in the middle ages.

Parallelism is also manifest in the mode in which democracy establishes itself. Like the state in the beginning, the popolo carries on its struggle as a separate group with its own officials. Examples are the Spartan ephors as representatives of the democracy against the kings, and the Roman tribunes of the people, while in the Italian cities of the middle ages the capitano del popolo, or della merca-danzao, are such officials. It is characteristic of them that they are the first concededly “illegitimate” officials. The consuls of the Italian cities still prefix the dei gratia to their titles but the capitano del popolo no longer does so. The source of the power of the tribune is illegitimate; he is sacrocanctus precisely because he is not a legitimate official and hence is protected only by divine interference, or popular vengeance.

The two courses of development are also equivalent in regard to their purpose. Social and not economic class interests are decisive; it is a question primarily of protection against the aristocratic families. The popolani know that they are rich and have fought and won the great wars of the city along with the nobility; they are armed, and hence feel themselves discriminated against and are no longer content with the subordinate class position which they have previously accepted. Similarity exists also, and finally, in the means available to the officials of the separate organization (Sonderbund). Everywhere they secure the right of intervention in legal processes in which the plebeians are opposed to the aristocrats. This purpose is served by the right of intercession of the Roman tribune as well as the Florentine capitano del popolo, a right which is carried out through appeal or through lynch justice.⁵ The Sonderbund sets up the claim that the statutes of the city shall be valid only after they have been ratified by the plebeians, and finally establishes the principle that only that is law which they have determined. The Roman legal principle: ut quod tributim plebs iussisset populum tenerit has its counterpart in the Florentine ordinamenti della giustizia, and in the exclusion of all non-workers from Lenin’s labor dictatorship.

The further instrumentality of democracy in establishing its domination is compulsory entry into the plebs. In antiquity the nobles were forced to enroll in the tribus and in the middle ages in the guilds, although the final significance was not, in many cases, perceived. Finally, there is everywhere a sudden and quite enormous multiplication of offices, a plethora of officialdom called forth by the need of the victorious party for remunerating its members with the spoils of the contest.

Thus far there is coincidence between the democracy of antiquity and that of the middle ages. But alongside the points of agreement there are categorical differences. At the outset there is an ultimate distinction as regards the divisions into which the city falls. In the middle ages these consist of the guilds, while in antiquity they never possessed the guild character. Scrutinizing the medieval guilds from this point of view we notice that different guild strata successively rise to power. In Florence, the classical guild city, the earliest of these strata, became distinguished as the aggregate of the arti maggiori from the arti minori. The first group includes on the one hand merchants, dealers in exchange, jewelers, and in general entrepreneurs who require a considerable industrial capital; on the other hand it includes jurists, physicians, apothecaries, and in general the “persons of property and culture” in the sense of the modern bourgeoisie. In regard to the guilds made up of entrepreneurs one may assume that at least 50% of the members lived on income or soon came to do so. This category of persons of property and culture was known as the popolo grasso, the “fat” people. Exactly the same expression is found in the Psalms, which are specifically the poetry of resentment of the virtuous and pious against the superior class of annuitants and nobility, against the “fat,” as they are repeatedly called in the psalms themselves.

In the arti maggiori are included the small capitalists, while to the arti minori belong the butchers, bakers, weavers, etc., who in Italy at least, were situated at the border of the working class although in Germany to some extent they became large entrepreneurs. The mere laborers, on the other hand, the ciompi, only very exceptionally achieved power, as a rule only when the nobility allied itself with the lowest strata against the middle class.

Under the domination of the guilds, the medieval city pursued a special type of policy, called town-economy. Its objective was in the first place to maintain the traditional access to occupation and livelihood, and, in the second place, to make the surrounding country subservient to the town interest to the utmost extent through banalités and compulsory use of the town market. It sought further to restrict competition and prevent the development toward large-scale industry. In spite of all, an opposition developed between trading capital and craft work organized in guilds, with a growth of domestic industry and of a permanent journeyman class as a forerunner of the modern proletariat. Nothing of all this is to be found in antiquity under the rule of democracy. It is true that in the early period there are vestiges of such conditions. Thus in Rome, the fabri of the military organization of Severus, hand-workers, army smiths etc., are perhaps such a survival. But in the period of fully developed democracy, there is no mention of anything of the sort, and not until the late Roman period are traces again found. Thus in antiquity the guild, as the ruling power in the town, is absent, and with it guild policy, and also the opposition between labor and capital which is present even at the close of the middle ages.

In place of this conflict we find in antiquity the opposition between the land owner and the landless. Proletarius is not, as Mommsen avers, a man who can only serve the state by providing children, but rather the disinherited descendant of a land owner and full citizen, that is of an assiduus. The entire policy of antiquity was directed toward the prevention of such proletarii; to this end servitude for debt was restricted and debtor law alleviated. The ordinary contrast in antiquity was that between urban creditor and peasant debtor. In the city dwelt the money lending patriciate; in the country, the small people to whom it lent its money; and under the ancient law of debt such a condition led readily to the loss of the land and proletarization.

For all these reasons, the ancient city had no subsistence policy like that of the middle ages, but only a policy directed to maintaining the κλñρoς, the fundus, on which a man could live and fully equip himself as a soldier. The aim was to guard against weakening the military power of the community. Hence the great reforms of the Gracchi must absolutely not be understood in the modern sense as measures pertaining to a class struggle; their objective is purely military; they represent the last attempt to maintain the citizen army and avoid the substitution of mercenaries. The opponents of the aristocracy in the middle ages were, on the one hand, the entrepreneurs and, on the other, the craft workers, while in antiquity they were always the peasantry. Corresponding to the distinction between these conflicts, the city of antiquity is divided along different lines than the medieval. In the latter the noble families are compelled to join the guilds while in the ancient city they were forced into villages, (demoi, tribus), districts made up of rural landholders, in which they came under the same law as the peasant holder. In the middle ages they were made into craftsmen, in antiquity into peasants.

The development of ancient democracies is further characterized by the fact that different strata differentiate within the democracy itself. First, the classis rose to power, the stratum of the πλα παρεχoμενoι, who were able to equip themselves fully with the coat of mail and shield and who consequently could be employed in the front rank. Next, in consequence of the naval policy in a portion of antiquity, especially Athens, the non-possessing class rose to domination because the fleet could only be manned by including all strata of the population. The Athenian militarism led to the result that in the popular assembly the sailors finally secured the whip hand. In Rome the analogous course of events first took place with the invasion of the Cimbri and Teutones. However, it did not lead to the granting of citizenship to the soldiers, but to the development of a professional army with its Imperator at the head.

In addition to these distinctions between the ancient and the medieval development, there is a further distinction in class relations. The typical citizen of the medieval guild city is a merchant or eraftsman; he is a full citizen if he is also a householder. In antiquity on the contrary, the full citizen is the landholder. In the guild city, accordingly, class inequality obtains. The non-landholder requires the landholder as his Salmann (“truehander”) in order to acquire land; he is at a legal disadvantage and this subordinate legal position is only gradually equalized and not everywhere completely. In his personal relations, however, the citizen of the medieval city is free. The principle “town air makes free” asserted that after a year and a day the lord no longer had a right to recall his runaway serf. Although the principle was not everywhere recognized and was subjected to limitations, especially by the legislation of the Hohenstauffens, it corresponded to the legal consciousness of the city citizenship which on the basis of it pressed its military and taxation interests. Hence the equalization of classes and removal of unfreedom became a dominant tendency in the development of the medieval city.

In contrast, antiquity in the early period emphasized class distinctions similar to those of the middle ages; it recognized the distinction between the patrician and the client, who followed the knightly warrior as a squire; it recognized relations of dependency and slavery as well. But with the growth of the power of the city and its development toward democracy, the sharpness of class distinctions increases; slaves are purchased or shipped in in large numbers and form a lower stratum constantly growing in numbers, while to them are added the freedmen. Hence the city of antiquity, in contrast with that of the middle ages, shows increasing class inequality. Finally, no trace of the medieval guild monopoly is to be found in antiquity. Under the dominance of the Athenian democracy we find in the sources relating to the placing of the columns of the Erechtheion that free Athenians and slaves worked together in the same voluntary group and slaves are placed over free Athenian workers as foremen, a relation which would have been unthinkable in the middle ages, in view of the existence of a powerful free industrial class.

Taken in its entirety the foregoing argument leads to the conclusion that the city democracy of antiquity is a political guild. It is true that it had distinctive industrial interests and also that these were monopolized; but they were subordinate to military interests. Tribute, booty, the payments of confederate cities, were merely distributed among the citizens. Thus like the craft guild of the closing period of the middle ages, the democratic citizens’ guild of antiquity was also interested in not admitting too many participants. The resulting limitation on the number of citizens was one of the causes of the downfall of the Greek city states. The monopoly of the political guild included cleruchy, the distributing of conquered land among the citizens, and the distribution of the spoils of war; and at the last the city paid out of the proceeds of its political activity theater admissions, allotments of grain, and payments for jury service and for participation in religious rites.

Chronic war was therefore the normal condition of the Greek full citizen, and a demagogue like Cleon was conscious of his reasons for inciting to war; war made the city rich, while a long period of peace meant ruin for the citizenship. Those who engaged in the pursuit of profit by peaceful means were excluded from these opportunities. These included the freedmen and metics; among them we first find something similar to the modern bourgeoisie, excluded from the ownership of land but still well-to-do.

Military reasons explain the fact that the city state of antiquity, so long as it maintained its characteristic form, developed no craft guilds and nothing similar to them, that instead it erected a political military monopoly for the citizenship and evolved into a soldiers’ guild. The ancient city represented the highest development of military technique in its time; no equivalent force could be sent against a hoplite army or a Roman legion. This explains the form and direction of industry in antiquity with relation to profit through war, and other advantages to be attained by purely political means. Over against the citizen stands the “low-bred”; anyone is low-bred who follows the peaceable quest of profit in the sense of today. In contrast with this the center of gravity of military technique in the early middle ages lay outside the cities, in the knighthood. Nothing else was equal to an armed feudal host. The result was that the guild army of burghers—with the single exception of the battle of Courtray in 1302—never ventured offensive operations but was only defensively employed. The burgher army of the middle ages could therefore never fulfill the acquisitive guild function of the ancient hoplite or legion army.

Within the western world we find during the middle ages a sharp contrast between the cities of the south and those of the north. In the south, the knighthood was generally settled in the city, while in the north the opposite is the case; from the beginning they had their dwellings outside or were even excluded. In the north the grant of privileges for a city included the specification that it might prohibit the residence of high political officials or knights; on the other hand the knighthood of the north closed its ranks against the urban patriciate and treated the latter as inferior by birth. The cause is found in the fact that the founding of the cities took place in different epochs in the two regions. In the time when the Italian communes began their rise the knightly military technique was at its height; hence the town was forced to take the knights into its pay or to ally itself with them. In their essence the Guelph-Ghibelline wars between the cities are struggles between different knightly groups. Hence the city insisted upon the knights taking up their residence or forced upon them the inurbamento; it did not wish them to operate from their castles to make the roads unsafe and it wished to secure for its citizens the task of providing for their needs.

The most extreme contrast with these conditions is found in the English city which, as distinguished from the German and Italian, never formed a city state and with rare exceptions never was able or never sought to dominate the surrounding country or extend its jurisdiction over it. For this achievement it had neither the military power nor the desire. The independence of the English city rested on the fact that it leased the taxing power from the king, and only those were citizens who shared in this lease, according to which the designated sum was furnished by the city as a unit. The special position of the English city is explained in the first place by the extraordinary concentration of political power in England after William the Conqueror, and further by the fact that after the 13th century the English communes were united in Parliament. If the barons wished to undertake anything against the crown, they were compelled to resort to the pecuniary aid of the towns, as on the other hand the latter were dependent upon them for military support. From the time of their representation in Parliament the impulse and the possibility of a political policy of isolation on the part of the towns were removed. The opposition between city and country disappeared early and the cities accepted numerous landed gentlemen into their citizenship. The town burghers finally secured the upper hand, although down to the most recent times the nobility retained formal leadership in affairs.

Turning to the question as to the consequences of these relations in connection with the evolution of capitalism, we must emphasize the heterogeneity of industry in antiquity and in the middle ages, and the different species of capitalism itself. In the first place, we are met in the most widely separated periods with a multiplicity of non-rational forms of capitalism. These include first capitalistic enterprises for the purpose of tax farming—in the occident as well as in China and western Asia—and for the purpose of financing war, in China and India, in the period of small separate states; second, capitalism in connection with trade speculation, the trader being entirely absent in almost no epoch of history; third, money-lending capitalism, exploiting the necessities of outsiders. All these forms of capitalism relate to spoils, taxes, the pickings of office or official usury, and finally to tribute and actual need. It is noteworthy that in former times officials were financed as Cæsar was by Crassus and endeavored to recoup the sums advanced through misuse of their official position. All this, however, relates to occasional economic activity of an irrational character, while no rational system of labor organization developed out of these arrangements.

Rational capitalism, on the contrary, is organized with a view to market opportunities, hence to economic objectives in the real sense of the word, and the more rational it is the more closely it relates to mass demand and the provision for mass needs. It was reserved to the modern western development after the close of the middle ages to elevate this capitalism into a system, while in all of antiquity there was but one capitalistic class whose rationalism might be compared with that of modern capitalism, namely, the Roman knighthood. When a Greek city required credit or leased public land or let a contract for supplies, it was forced to incite competition among different interlocal capitalists. Rome, in contrast, was in possession of a rational capitalistic class which from the time of the Gracchi played a determining role in the state. The capitalism of this class was entirely relative to state and governmental opportunities, to the leasing of the ager publicus or conquered land, and of domain land, or to tax farming and the financing of political adventures and of wars. It influenced the public policy of Rome in a decisive way at times, although it had to reckon with the constant antagonism of the official nobility.

The capitalism of the late middle ages began to be directed toward market opportunities, and the contrast between it and the capitalism of antiquity appears in the development after the cities have lost their freedom. Here again we find a fundamental distinction in the lines of development as between antiquity and medieval and modern times. In antiquity the freedom of the cities was swept away by a bureaucratically organized world empire within which there was no longer a place for political capitalism. In the beginning the emperors were forced to resort to the financial power of the knighthood but we see them progressively emancipate themselves and exclude the knightly class from the farming of the taxes and hence from the most lucrative source of wealth—just as the Egyptian kings were able to make the provisions for political and military requirements in their realms independent of the capitalist powers and reduce the tax farmers to the position of tax officials. In the imperial period of Rome the leasing of domain land everywhere decreased in extent in favor of permanent hereditary appropriation. The provision for the economic needs of the state was taken care of through compulsory contributions and compulsory labor of servile persons instead of competitive contracts. The various classes of the population became stratified along occupational lines and the burden of state requirements was imposed on the newly created groups on the principle of joint liability.

This development means the throttling of ancient capitalism. A conscript army takes the place of the mercenaries and ships are provided by compulsory service. The entire harvest of grain, insofar as regions of surplus production are concerned, is distributed among the cities in accordance with their needs, with the exclusion of private trade. The building of roads and every other service which has to be provided for is laid on the shoulders of specific personal groups who become attached by inheritance to the soil and to their occupations. At the end the Roman urban communities, acting through their mayors in a way not very different from the village community through its common meeting, demand the return of the rich city councilmen on property grounds, because the population is jointly responsible for the payments and services due to the state. These services are subject to the principle of the origo which is erected on the pattern of the íδα of Ptolemaic Egypt; the compulsory dues of servile persons can only be rendered in their home commune. After this system became established the political opportunities for securing gain were closed to capitalism; in the late Roman state, based on compulsory contributions (Leiturgiestaat) there was as little place for capitalism as in the Egyptian state organized on the basis of compulsory labor service (Fronstaat) .

Quite different was the fate of the city in the modern era. Here again its autonomy was progressively taken away. The English city of the 17th and 18th centuries had ceased to be anything but a clique of guilds which could lay claim only to financial and social class significance. The German cities of the same period, with the exception of the imperial cities, were merely geographical entities (Landstadt) in which everything was ordered from above. In the French cities this development appeared even earlier, while the Spanish cities were deprived of their power by Charles V, in the insurrection of the communeros. The Italian cities found themselves in the power of the “signory” and those of Russia never arrived at freedom in the western sense. Everywhere the military, judicial, and industrial authority was taken away from the cities. In form the old rights were as a rule unchanged, but in fact the modern city was deprived of its freedom as effectively as had happened in antiquity with the establishment of the Roman dominion, though in contrast with antiquity they came under the power of competing national states in a condition of perpetual struggle for power in peace or war. This competitive struggle created the largest opportunities for modern western capitalism. The separate states had to compete for mobile capital, which dictated to them the conditions under which it would assist them to power. Out of this alliance of the state with capital, dictated by necessity, arose the national citizen class, the bourgeoisie in the modern sense of the word. Hence it is the closed national state which afforded to capitalism its chance for development—and as long as the national state does not give place to a world empire capitalism also will endure.