Adam Smith's analytic-synthetic method and the ‘system of natural liberty’

In the present paper I shall deal with Adam Smith's application of the analytic-synthetic method, which he considered to be the scientific method par excellence. I shall concentrate on some shortcomings in Smith's arguments and endeavour to explain them as resulting from a particular interpretation of the aforesaid method. The peculiarity of Smith's interpretation was that he omitted the analysis and that he thought the synthesis reflects the composition of an object out of pre-existing elements which are endowed with ‘essential qualities’. I shall then try to show that this methodological concept presupposed the view that society is a compound of independent individuals, i.e. an aggregate of Robinson Crusoes. Finally I shall discuss possible political reasons for this view. On the systematic level, I shall argue that political and scientific partisanship do not necessarily stand in contradiction to objective knowledge, and on the historical level, I shall plead for a ‘Social History of Ideas’.¹     

Robert,earl of Gloucester,and the daughter of Zelophehad

Robert, earl of Gloucester, the leader of Mathilda's party in England during Stephen's reign, has a good press because the main source for his activities is his admirer, William of Malmesbury. This article re-assesses Robert's role and character by concentrating on chroniclers other than Malmesbury and on charter evidence. It finds, by these methods, that Earl Robert may have been in some ways an attractive man, but that he was also a practised curialist, a ruthless factionalist, a plunderer of church lands, and a man who made acquisition of his neighbours' lands one of his main objects. New evidence is presented to account for his behaviour in the crucial months at the end of 1135 and beginning of 1136 when Stephen made himself king. Robert is found to have had little choice but to cross to England because his lands in the southern Marches were under threat from a Welsh rising. His alienation from Stephen in the next few years is traced to a failure at court against his rivals, the Beaumont group. His subsequent private war against the Beaumonts in Dorset and Worcestershire is further evidence against Malmesbury 's portrayal of him as a man of pure principle. conduct of the war against Stephen after 1139 can be shown to have had serious flaws. The result was a rebellion against him by his own sons and the repudiation of his methods (if not his acquisitions) by his successor Earl William. Evidence is presented that Earl William sparked off the movement amongst the magnates to draw up private treaties to contain the Anarchy. In view of all this, it is not surprising to find indications that Earl Robert lacked any real commitment to the claims of his half-sister, the empress.     

St Anselm and the English investiture controversy reconsidered

The Investiture Controversy in England has generally been viewed as a two-sided contest between king and pope. But in reality the struggle was between three parties — king, pope, and primate. St Anselm, devoted to his duties as God's steward of his office and its privileges, worked against both King Henry I and Pope Paschal II to bring into reality his idea of the proper status of the primate of all Britain. Anselm had a vision of a political model which he conceived as God's ‘right order’ in England, and all his efforts were directed toward fulfilling this vision.The Investiture Contest may be divided into two parts. The first phase began when Anselm was thwarted by Henry I's duplicity in the archbishop's attempt to force the king to accept the decrees of Rome at the height of a political crisis. Anselm may have seen these decrees as beneficial to the Canterbury primacy. From 1101 to 1103, Anselm wavered between supporting either party completely, meanwhile securing from Paschal all the most important privileges for the primacy of Canterbury. Each time Paschal refused to grant a dispensation for Henry, as Anselm requested, he granted Anselm a privilege for the primacy. Thus Anselm's vision of the primate as almost a patriarch of another world, nearly independent of the pope, was fulfilled by 1103.At this point, Anselm abandoned his vacillation between king and pope, and worked seemingly on behalf of Paschal, but in reality on behalf of the Canterbury primacy. During this second phase, Anselm's political adroitness becomes clear by a correlation, never before made, between the church-state controversy and Henry's campaign to conquer Normandy. By careful maneuvering and skilful propaganda, Anselm forced Henry to choose between submitting to the investiture decree or failing in his attempt to conquer Normandy. At the settlement, a compromise was worked out, Henry conceding on investitures, and Paschal conceding on homage. But investiture was only secondary to Anselm. He ended the dispute not when Henry submitted on investitures, but only when he had gained from Henry concessions which made the primate almost a co-ruler with the king, as his political vision demanded. Only after a public reconcilliation with his archbishop did Henry feel free to complete the Norman campaign.Thus the Investiture Controversy was a three-way struggle. Both king and pope compromised, each giving up some of their goals. But Anselm emerged from the contest having won nearly all his political objectives.     

Celestine V,Boniface VIII and the authority of parliament

During the troubled pontificates of Celestine V and Boniface VIII, publicists argued that because general councils of the Church represented the whole congregation of the faithful, they had the power to remove a pope found guilty of crimes ranging from obdurate heresy to personal insufficiency. In 1327, Isabella and Mortimer based much of the justification for their deposition of Edward II on these newly popularized ideas. Nevertheless, since these theories were for them very much rationalizations of the moment, they were quickly abandoned, with the result that Edward III's parliaments look little different from Edward I's, though in more mature form. In 1399, however, Henry IV was forced to rely on the precedent of 1327 when supplanting Richard II. Because the then-prevalent conciliar theories generated by the great schism gave even greater immediacy to the ones which had explained that first deposition, and because Henry's approach was many times to be imitated in the depositions of the fifteenth century, parliament began to take on the character of a corpus mysticum, one which could speak with the authority not just of the king, but of God and the realm. This background may shed light on some of the reasons for Henry VIII's success in using parliamentary statute to break with Rome, and it may even have contributed to some of the parliamentary positions expressed during the seventeenth-century struggles with the crown.     

The spring,the seed and the tree: Gregory of Tours on the wonders of nature

In the preface to his liturgical calendar The reckoning of the course of the stars Bishop Gregory of Tours (538–594) — author also of Ten books of histories and Eight books of miracles as well as of a Commentary on the understanding of the Psalter (of which, however, only fragments are preserved) — declares God's “wonders” of the natural world to be superior to the seven ancient wonders of the world. The reason for this is that the latter, being works of men, are subject to decay and destruction, while the former, as miraculous works of God, are divinely sustained and renewed daily or annually, thereby becoming imperishable. An examination of the associative contexts in which two of these wonders — the sea (enlarged to include water in its various forms) and plant life — occur in the rest of Gregory's works reveals several essential themes of his thinking not only about nature, but also about God, man and society. Thought, for him, nature as a (divinely sustained) system of regularities does exist as a kind of backdrop, sudden unpredictable divine — and sometimes diabolic — action in and through phenomena occupies the center of the stage. Gregory tends to see this action in the shape of what he regards as pre-existing images or patterns of invisible spiritual truth, to which the visible, even material, structure of events must necessarily conform. He shows, too, how this action could reflect as well as meet various needs of the individual and of society as a whole. An association which recurs almost constantly in his treatment of divine action in these natural phenomena, which he sometimes describes as analogous to that in man, is precisely that with the cluster of closely related concepts of renewal, rebirth and creation ex nihilo. Together with what appears as an extreme, as it were ‘poetical’, sensitivity to sudden perceptions and intuitions, something like a longing for and surrender to what he describes as “astonished admiration” may have helped to make possible his recognition of that which he designated as divine creative power in the world of visible reality as well as in man's inner experience. His seeing this as an essential dynamic of the holy may mean that he felt it to be a fundamental need and concern not only of the individual personality but also, more obscurely, of the society in which he found himself.     

Duke Richard of York's intentions in I450 and the origins of the wars of the roses

The return of Richard, duke of York, from Ireland in 1450 represents his first overt attempt to remedy certain grievances. His criticism of the Lancastrian régime eventually brought him leadership in the Wars of the Roses. The grivances of 1450 are contained in two bills addressed to Henry VI. At first, the duke harboured personal grievances — fear of attainder and having his claim to the throne bypassed, resentment at his counsel being ignored and his debts unpaid — which were exaguerated by unsertainty and the king's readiness to believe the worst. Richards apreciation of the widespread hostility towards the government and the disarray of the king's Household after Suffolk's murder enabled him to convert grievances into public criticisms in his second bill. He encouraged investigations into official oppression in southeastern England, and his supporters may have stimulated risings there to demonstrate support for him. Compared with Henry's nervous reaction to York's first bill, he firmly checkmated the pretensions of the second, and Yorks achievement in 1450 was limited. But he had taken a first step towards appealing for support by converting personal grievances into a general bid for sympathy. Whether he aid so for personal or public motives — or both — remains an open question.     

The discourse of the past: phenomenology,structuralism and historical geography

Historical geography has to be predicated on a critical examination of past and present discourses, and this necessarily involves a rejection of positivist epistemology. This was, in more general terms, the basis of Husserl's critique, but two alternatives to this are the constitutive phenomenology of Alfred Schutz and the linguistic structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Both present major difficulties. Schutz fails to recognize the necessity of a hermeneutic understanding of past societies and cannot account for the genesis and temporality of meaning, while Lévi-Strauss provides for a formalism which is directed towards the structure of the human mind rather than the historically specific structures of particular discourses. The connections and contrasts between these two positions suggest several ways in which the examination of discourse might be constituted in order to contribute to a structural history.     

Observations on the open fields: the present position of studies in British field systems

Debate over the orgins and development of field systems in the British Isles continues within the framework provided by a collection of studies published in 1973. Some of the criticisms made by reviewers of that collective volume are answered here but this discussion paper focuses principally on two sets of arguments which have given a different emphasis to the debate on field systems during the past six years. This paper considers first McCloskey's view of open fields as products of behaviour towards risk and then Dodgshon's re-interpretation of the evolution of field systems in relation to changes in law.     

Toward a reappraisal of William the Great,duke of Aquitaine (995–1030)

William, duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou, has won a glowing reputation from historians for his personal piety and his active support of religious reform. Scholars have given him the sobriquet ‘the Great’, and he is traditionally regarded as one of those overmighty subjects whose fame and power eclipsed their less accomplished Capetian contemporaries. As count and duke, however, William clearly had responsibilities that went beyond support of the Church. In the present study an effort has been made to examine the more secular aspects of William's career to see if, in fact, he justly deserves to be considered one of the outstanding figures of the early eleventh century.     

Pioneers,politicians and the conservation of forests in early New Zealand

In pioneering societies there is usually little interest in resource conservation, and scant concern for the consequences of environmental disturbance. Yet legislation to conserve the extensive forests of New Zealand was introduced soon after settlement began, and despite a general desire for material improvement. Ultimately, this paradox is attributable to George Perkins Marsh's demonstration of the ecological consequences of man's impact on his environment in Man and nature. The arguments of this work published in 1864 were soon heard in New Zealand. But a mere handful of New Zealanders recognized the importance of Marsh's ideas. For the most part, they were immigrants from the middle and upper ranks of British society, drawn to the colony by the prospects it offered, and removed from the general struggle to tame the land. Their concern was essential in promoting interest in the questions of environmental disturbance and conservation in the 1870s. The immediate reason for the introduction of the New Zealand Forests Bill in 1874, however, was Prime Minister Julius Vogel's recognition of the applicability of the conservationists' arguments to the New Zealand scene. Thus character and circumstance combined to heighten the impact of Marsh's writing and to temper the ethic of exploitative land use in the pioneering environment of New Zealand.     

Charles the bold and the crusade: politics and propaganda

The pressures on Charles the Bold (duke of Burgundy from 1467 to his death in 1477) to lead, or lend his support to, a crusade were many. His Italian allies and the papacy all pleaded for his help and participation; and these appeals were augmented by the exhortation contained in much of the literature popular at the Burgundian court and by the presence there of refugees from the East.Charles's response was mixed. Political and moral pressures made it impossible for him to ignore the question of the crusade, but, even if his attitude should be characterized as cautious rather than as indifferent, he never did go on crusade. Equally, however, he repeatedly justified his comparative inaction and, at the same time, made propaganda against his enemies by suggesting that their hostility alone prevented him from embarking on an expedition to drive back the infidel.This response, since it was not untypical of the princes of his generation, helps explain the West's failure to unite against the Turks. From the point of view of Burgundian history, Charles's cautious attitude towards the crusade tends to support the revisionists who argue that he was far less ‘rash’ than the traditional historical view allows.     

The development of the chapter of the diocese of Exeter 1050–1161

At the same time as Bishop Leofric (1046–1072) transferred the seat of his cathedral from Crediton to Exeter in 1050, he introduced the rule of Chrodegang as the basis for the government of his church. The rule itself, therefore, is the best guide to the way the canons lived during Leofric's episcopate. During the episcopates of Leofric's successors (Osbern 1072–1103, William Warelwast 1107–1138, Robert I 1138–1155, Robert II 1155–1160) evidence from a variety of sources allows us to perceive some changes in the administration of the rule and aspects of the development of the chapter. It is with these changes and developments that this paper is concerned.     

Aratea: a review of the literature concerning MS. Vossianus lat. q. 79 in Leiden University Library

The beautiful, well-known, but highly problematical, illuminated Carolingian MS. of the classical astronomical work called the Aratea or the Syntagma Arateorum, once owned by Isaac Vossius, has long been a prized possession of Leiden's University Library. Aratos of Soli, the Greek poet (about 315-270/23;9 B.C), was the author of the earliest version of this work, which he called the Phaenomena; Germanicus Caesar, Cicero and Festus Rufus Avienus produced Latin translations of it. Over the years an extensive literature has developed concerning the many problems raised by this MS. This literature is reviewed in detail in what follows and an attempt made, as it were, to clear the air ready for the further research which is shown to be necessary.     

The world picture of Philip the fair

During the arrest and early months of the trial of the Templars in 1307 and 1308, a number of documents emanated from Philip IV's chancery which are not only valuable evidence of the regime's administrative concerns during the trial, but also, in the language used, convey a sense of contemporary concepts of the medieval world order as seen either by the king himself or by his chief advisers. Royal motivation for the arrests is still a matter of controversy, but it does not seem inconsistent to believe that Philip both sought the Templars' wealth to alleviate immediate financial problems and came to convince himself that the Templars had transgressed the laws upon which the whole ordering of society was based. It is upon this second aspect of Philip's mental outlook that this discussion concentrates. This paper aims to examine these concepts and to relate them to other contemporary polemical views on the trial.     

Giotto: artistic realism,political realism

The conventional view of Giotto is that he was a great narrative and dramatic painter. In addition his art was ideologically aligned with the Guelph party in Florence and its allies: the papacy, the Franciscan establishment and the house of Anjou. This can be traced in his paintings, especially the fresco cycles. Internal evidence suggests that in addition to his acknowledged cycle for the Scrovegni family in Padua he was the principal artistic deviser of many of the disputed frescoes in the nave of the Upper Church at Assisi, including the paintings of the life of St. Francis.There is also evidence that many of his frescoes in various parts of Italy (including cycles no longer extant) were undertaken at the behest of the Florentine commune as part of its diplomacy. He was in fact the first artist to become part of the bourgeois ruling class, and his spatial and plastic realism was in complete accord with their interests.The Scrovegni cycle is more complex than has been realised, involving a profound allegory which fulfils the needs of the patron, expresses Giotto's world view, and at the same time serves the diplomatic interest of Florence.     

Isabelle of France,queen of England— a reconsideration

In speaking of historiographical attitudes towards Edward III, Professor May McKisack points out “a problem of historical reputation” (1960:1). If, indeed such a problem exists, it is not unique to Edward III. Indeed McKisack's analysis applies also to the case of Edward's mother, Isabelle of France. The political interplay between Isabelle of France, Edward II, the English nobility and the townsmen raised some enigmas surrounding the queen: a stranger of French birth in England, just ten years before the outbreak of the Hundred Years' War, Isabelle succeeded in uniting all the vital powers of the kingdom under her flag and in bringing about an unprecedented action—the deposing of the king of England. Contemporary sources ascribe an indescribable beauty to Isabel, also devotion and moral strength. Yet contrasted to the figure emerging from the contemporary sources, often in violent contrast to it, is the she-wolf image, perpetuated by research in the context of Isabelle's activities. The wide gap separating the she-wolf from the charming figure of the sources creates a paradox, even a challenge, which requires explanation.     

Jeremy Bentham, the French Revolution and political radicalism

An unresolved debate in Bentham scholarship concerns the question of the timing and circumstances which led to Bentham's ‘conversion’ to democracy, and thus to political radicalism. In the early stages of the French Revolution, Bentham composed material which appeared to justify equality of suffrage on utilitarian grounds, but there are differing interpretations concerning the extent and depth of Bentham's commitment to democracy at this time. The appearance of Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts and other essays on the French Revolution, a new volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, containing definitive texts of Bentham's writings at this crucial period, offers an opportunity to reassess this debate. First, Bentham's most radical proposals for political reform came not in the so-called ‘Essay on Representation’ composed in late 1788 and early 1789, as has traditionally been assumed, but in his ‘Projet of a Constitutional Code for France’ composed in the autumn of 1789, where he advocated universal adult (male and female) suffrage, subject to a literacy test. Second, it may be doubted if the very question as to whether Bentham was or was not a sincere convert to democracy is particularly helpful. Rather, it may be better to see Bentham as a ‘projector’ during this period of his life. Third, the nature of Bentham's radicalism was very different at this period from what it would become in the 1810s and 1820s, for instance in relation to his commitment to the traditional structures of the British Constitution. Having said that, his attitude to the British Constitution remained complex and ambivalent. At his most radical phase, in the autumn of 1789, he advocated wide-ranging measures of electoral reform while at the same time harbouring aspirations to be returned to Parliament for one of the Marquis of Lansdowne's pocket boroughs. To conclude, it was, arguably, the internal dynamic of Bentham's critical utilitarianism, rather than the events of the French Revolution, which was ultimately responsible for pushing him into a novel form of radical politics.     

The naval battles of Roger of Lauria

Roger of Lauria's family was exiled from the kingdom of Sicily by Charles I of Anjou for its support of the Hohenstaufen cause but in the service of Aragon he became the most feared and renowned warrior of his generation. His six great naval victories during the War of the Sicilian Vespers closely determined the outcome of that struggle.Lauria's fame has been diminished by the minor place awarded to the War of the Vespers by modern medievalists and by its overshadowing by the Hundred Years War. But in fact it was an extremely important war in medieval history, witnessing the decline of the papacy and the kingdom of Sicily and the rise for a brief time of a new power in the Mediterranean: Aragon. Moreover, it was in this war that medieval warfare first began to acquire attributes characteristics of the later middle ages: supremacy of archers and infantry over mounted and mailed knights, appearance of disciplined and professional companies of mercenaries led by professional war leaders, and decline from chivalric warfare into nationalistic hatred and ferocity.Lauria's success lay in the superior qualities of his crews and in his own genius. Handling galley fleets successfully required mastery of the difficult nexus between land and sea for Mediterranean galley warfare was more amphibious than naval in the modern sense of the word. Lauria proved to be the greatest master of the science in the middle ages; a war leader deserving to be ranked with Richard Coeur de Lion, the Black Prince, and Nelson.     

King John and St Wulfstan

In accordance with the terms of his will, King John was buried near to the shrine of St Wulfstan in Worcester cathedral despite his apparent intention earlier in the reign to be buried in a Cistercian house. When and why John might have developed his particular interest in Wulfstan, the last Anglo-Saxon bishop, are considered and attention is drawn to the relevance of a famous legend linking Wulfstan and Edward the Confessor to King John's dispute with Innocent III over the king's authority in the appointment of bishops. The revival of Wulfstan's cult, which led to his formal canonisation in 1203, is seen as part of a general interest in indigenous saints, both Anglo-Saxon and contemporary, in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The suggestion is made that this concern with national saints provides the context for John's devotion to St Wulfstan and for the significant choice of his place of burial.