Kings, Encyclopedias and Pantheons: The Limits of Economic-Political History

            It might be useful here to begin to discuss some of the economic roots of atrocities. The economic dimension is certainly important, though its importance is vastly exaggerated by the fashions of our time. The obsession with money and material progress as opposed to the value of life and beings distorts much of history, as it does our social reality. But economic realties are part of how knowledge and power operate in our society, so the history of the rise of economic consciousness and the creation of economic identities like Kings and the development of corporations out of gods and kings, cannot be avoided,

            The basic pattern of Imperial world domination remains substantially the same today as it was in 1600. The "core" countries, to use Wallerstein's phrase, control the "peripheral" nations by first exploiting their own populations, and then using this income to fuel a merchant-military state that exploits overseas trade, countries and resources fueling merchant warriors to explore and conquer yet more territory. [1]  England appears to be the Classic example of this, with the enclosure movement dispossessing the peasants, and the land then being used primarily for profit in grain and wool, and the resulting income together with other factors, like influx of Spanish gold and silver into English and Dutch hands, allowing further exploitation overseas in the slave trade and the colonial, murderous dispossession of Native American peoples and lands-  this helping to eventually bring about the Industrial Revolution. The English learned well from the Dutch, so much so that the Anglo-Dutch wars from 1652 to 1674 appear to be about the "attempt to restrict or destroy Dutch trade and shipping and gain control of the lucrative slave trade".[2]  

            An example of this process whereby the northern Protestant merchant warriors took advantage of and expanded the now declining power of the Spanish drive for Empire is Jan Peiterszoon Coen, who was governor-general of The Dutch from 1618-29. Through him and the newly formed Dutch East India Company imperialism greatly expanded its domain of influence over the international system of trade. He and his successors drove the Portuguese from the East Indies and Mollaca and Ceylon, developed inter-Asian trade and set up a base on Formosa(Taiwan) from which Asian trade routes could be controlled. Most often this was accomplished by force of arms and bloodshed, mostly of the native population. Coen advocated and justified the brutal exploitation of indigenous people's in these areas.  He explained, 

May not a man in Europe do what he likes with his cattle? Even so does the Master do with his      men, for everywhere, these, with all that belongs to them, are as much the property of the Master, as are the brute beasts in the Netherlands. The law of the land is the will of the King and he is King who is the strongest".[3]

                  Elsewhere Coen will expand on these proto-Darwinian sentiments, as when he writes to the directors of the Dutch East India Company, that "trade should be conducted and maintained... with the aid of your own weapons and... those weapons must be wielded with the profits gained by the trade. So trade cannot be maintained without war and war without trade".[4] Coen's remarks define fairly well the relations of  a state acting as the abstract system of support  for  military trading systems. Imperial states since the Dutch state have all followed this pattern.  Coen also defines the racism that is indispensable to the imperial-colonial enterprise.  The Dutch and the English had developed the basic pattern of capitalist exploitation of the poor, investment in trade and imperial expansion, with the means of insuring that the rich would not pay for their own losses, but rather losses would be displaced onto the poor and the conquered. Capitalism has always taken the wealth of the poor and middle classes to pay for the greed and purposes of the rich. This is as true today as in 1700.

            We no longer have Kings, but 'democracies'. Of course, there is no democracy in any meaningful way, but the ideology is a useful construction, rather as the god idea once was similarly useful, as it implied a merciful concern with the general population that was rarely actually practiced, but invoked when the Church was criticized. Gods Kings and 'democracies' are useful mythologies which justify power. As indicated Coen thought that the "law of the land" was the will of the strongest, and then the King was the strongest. Coen notion of the freedom of Kings to treat men like cattle raises the question of the political and ideological function of the idea of 'kings'. The function of the idea of 'King' has been replaced by corporate individuals, so it may be difficult for us to understand concretely what it must have been like to live under a King. But on the other hand the corporation is a development of the idea of Kings, and the resulting injustices have a certain similarity. Be this as it may, the notion of Kingship is important to the history and development of knowledge and power.

            One could perhaps simplify the evolution of the Idea of the European concept of King into 3 stages. In the first stage Church and state, emperor and pope were one entity and identity. Constantine and Justinian were both King and Pope. The metaphysical enunciation of the doctrine of Christ as "true Man and true God", made into a dogma at Chalcedon, was a symbolic expression and mythological justification  of the unity of the Emperor and the Church. For Constantine, the enemies of the state were also the enemies of God. The ideology of Kingship under Constantine was essential to the maintenance of a theocratic state. Christ was god, king and state and thus the summation of authority and the standard to which submission was due.

            The second stage of Kingship in Europe is highly problematical. The church and state began to separate after Charlemagne. Charlemagne was crowned by the Pope in 800, C.E.. But right after the Pope crowned him,  the Pope prostrated in front of the new King, thus indicating, symbolically, an ambiguous and conflicting relationship between Church and state that would last until the American and French revolutions.

             By the time of Napoleon, who crowns himself, the Church has ceased to have a central role in the power of the state. Religion declines as the central fact of state power and in its stead comes the rise of economic nationalism and the religion of patriotism. The grand individual and eventually, the corporation or the Leninist state becomes the successor of the Kings. The power of the " individual", first identified with a Church, then with a state becomes secularized into the civil religion of science, the abstract individual and the corporate state. Christ, in a sense is the ancestor of the corporate state. he is the First Man, as it were, and the beginning of History as well as its end; he called himself, reportedly, the "Alpha and Omega". The Last Man, the "end of history"  is He who is the "unique Incarnation".

             But with the loss of power of religion and the rise of science, the mythological center of Western culture changes. The Christian pattern of knowledge and power is adapted to new purposes, and changed in the process. The nation state, the university and the corporate or collective individual takes over from the medieval conception of knowledge/power, which was symbolized by the image of Christ as King and god. After Napoleon, power and authority are seen not as flowing from the Bible and Revelation, but from Man conceived of as a collective and quasi-universal being. After Napoleon, economic concerns, rather than religious ones, determine power and authority, and science becomes the touchstone whereby power is preserved and increased. The supremacy of 'Reason', symbolized by science and the enlightened individual, both evolved from and replaced Christ, as the arbiter between the real and the unreal, the true and the untrue. In this sense, it can be said that Christ and Christianity begin the historical trajectory towards the Manifest Destiny of the builders of the Atom Bomb.

            If this last sentence is somewhat shocking, there could be two reasons for it. First, we still live in a predominantly Christian civilization, however hypertrophically, but more to the point, there is considerable reluctance, on the part of historians, to write or consider the history of symbols and abstractions. This is unfortunate, because the Conquest and all its horrors cannot be understood without some understanding of how symbols and abstractions, including those that derive from religion, orchestrate and structure both world views and worlds.

         In any case, the otherworldliness of the image of Christ as King is already, in symbolic terms, a motion towards Conquest of the world devalued by Christian ideology of transcendence.  One of the major reasons, perhaps, that historians resist the questioning of history itself, as opposed to the practice of history, is that history is largely a Christian creation. The ideology of the god-man entering into time and dictating its meaning, with all subsequent events being determined in relation to the Incarnation is a powerful myth. Both capitalism and Marxism take their fundamental direction from this historical impetus, however they may have altered it to serve other needs. In any case, the ideology of power, the glorification of knowledge and will, and the pursuit of a total apocalyptic control over the earth, mastery of nature and power over a homogenous social network all descend from Christian ideals and concerns.  The total civilization that was the aim of the Christian world view generated a "them verses us" mentality which saw other nations and peoples, especially if their skin were a different color, as evil heathens, pagans or devil worshipers, to be eliminated.

            By slow degrees the conquest of the world devolves upon Christians and then Merchants serving Christian Kings until finally the perfection of the Market comes to serve itself as a quasi-religious value. With the fading of Christianity the faith in power and knowledge and the drive for conquest does not abate. As Chomsky observes,  

centralized state power dedicated to private privilege and authority, and the rational and organized use of savage violence, are two of the enduring features of the European conquest.  Others are the domestic colonization by which the poor subsidize the rich and the contempt for freedom and democracy. Yet another enduring theme is the self-righteousness in which plunder, slaughter and oppression are clothed.[5]

       The long term process  is one of the development of an imperial culture dictating a world system of knowledge/power. Wallerstein defines capitalism as "the constant absorption of economic loss by political entities [ paid for by the lower and middle  classes], while economic gain is distributed to 'private hands'". [6] Chomsky simplifies this and quotes Adam Smith's "vile Maxim of the Masters: "All for ourselves and nothing for other people". [7] While Wallerstein's definition is accurate and can be seen occurring both in the 17th century and today, Wallerstein largely ignores the process by which this system of exploitation is culturally justified. People must be convinced that they must sacrifice their goods and substance for the elite in business and the state. This process of increasing secularization reflects increasing replacement of property rights in the place of divine right. Perhaps more accurately, one could say that property rights are on outgrowth of the doctrine of divine right, and something of the notion of 'divinity', or of mystification and the fetishism and magicians trick of commodity glorification still inheres in the practice of amassing private property.

          Some insight comes from Clifford Geertz,  in an essay the "Symbolics of Power". In this essay, he discusses the means by which various Kings and Queens, including Elizabeth I, as well as leaders in Morocco and Java, used symbolic, religious rituals to symbolize and justify the supposed truth on which their social dominance was based, 

Thrones may be out of fashion and pageantry too: but political authority still requires a  cultural frame in which to define itself and advance its claims, and so does opposition to it...what died in 1793...was a certain view of the affinity between the sort of power that moves men and the sort that moves mountains... The "political theology" of the twentieth century has not been written...and until it is understood...a great deal of the public life of our times is going to remain obscure. The extraordinary has   not gone out of modern politics, however much the banal has entered; power not only still intoxicates, it still exalts.[8]

It is the tendency of power to intoxicate and exalt that needs to be questioned, and moreover, the systems of understanding and knowledge that serve to culturally justify the will to power and its exercise are only beginning to be questioned.

Thus, what is left out of much of the political, economic and social history of today, in Wallerstein's case as in other writers, is the relation of political economic history to the cultural element.[9] Said writes:

We live...in a world not only of commodities but also of representations, and representations - their production, circulation, history and interpretation- are the very element of culture.  In much recent theory the problem of representation is deemed to be central, yet rarely is it put in its full political context, a context that is primarily imperial.  Instead we have on the one hand isolated cultural sphere, believed to be freely and unconditionally available to weightless theoretical speculation and investigation, and on the other, a debased political [and economic] sphere, where the real struggle between interests is supposed to occur.  To the professional student  of culture - the humanist, the critic, the scholar - only one sphere is relevant and, more to the point, it is accepted that the two spheres are separated, whereas the two are not only connected but ultimately the same.  (emphasis mine)

A radical falsification has become established in this separation. Culture is exonerated of any entanglements with power, representations are considered only as apolitical images to be parsed and construed as so many grammars of exchange, and the divorce of the present from the past is assumed to be complete.  And yet far from this separation of spheres being a neutral or accidental choice, its real meaning is an act of complicity [ which helps prevent questioning or a struggle over the question of empire itself.[10] 

            This, I think is an important insight, as it brings into question not only the relation of culture to imperialism, but the relation of science and other forms of knowledge and belief and their relation to power into question.

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