Representative outcomes in East and West differed and previous chapters considered possible explanations.
Fully comparing cases is hardly posÂsible in such a broad study, so I have examined the factors that leading social scientists, especially historians, have identified as crucial.
The main conditions militating against constitutional outcomes in such accounts have been “state control of land,” the imposition of conditional service, and the “weak” conditional property rights these entail. Yet these hypothÂeses counter the genetic account of English institutions offered in this book, which shows these factors to be fundamental. The account thus has expanded the dimensions on which non-Western regimes display crucial similarities with Western ones, especially England. It thereby has supÂported arguments in Russian and Ottoman history that have revised stereotypical assumptions about these regions.Yet, profound differences do exist between these regimes and Western ones, so accounting for them remains challenging. Intriguingly, scholars working in very different fields have converged on a similar assessment of the underlying difference: in the West, depersonalized forms of exchange developed enabling collective action, whereas the two non-Western cases, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, remained confined to personalized exchange. Personalization precluded a language of rights, which by defÂinition apply to whole groups, not individuals. From Russian history to Ottoman economics to general social science theory, the above verdict seems recurrent.
Russian historians have rejected simplistic views of the regime as “desÂpotic,” as seen in Chapter 12,[1383] by stressing the emerging pluralism and language of claims against the state, especially in the seventeenth century, whilst identifying their limitations and divergence from the West.[1384] Valerie Kivelson argued that Russian “subjects” differed from Western European “citizens” by being confined to pre-democratic forms of political expression, namely petitions, but also supplications, riots, and consultÂation.
The absence of representative institutions flowed from “the absence among subjects of a self-conscious claim to freedom as a citizen’s right.”[1385] For Nancy Kollmann, Russian autocracy was different from the West’s “in that it allowed a multiplicity of interests to be represented without tolerating social pluralism in politics.” Power was the sovereign’s private prerogative, but it carried no obligation.[1386] This same atomism meant that in Russia actors in court politics “did not constitute a privileged corporative class, and their political struggles were not expressions of class-based antagonisms. Struggles at court were not over policies and rights, but over personal power as defined in terms of kinship and personal alliances.”[1387]From such a view, it was unsurprising that assemblies failed; deputies “could not proceed from a consciousness of their interests to a consciousness of their rights,”[1388] part of the general lack of social coheÂsiveness in Russia.[1389] The provincial gentrymen remained linked to the center in a “limited, individualized, and fragmentary” manner. Their autonomy allowed them to engage in “highly particularistic, local competitions.”8 This created the impression of “the Muscovite gentry’s seeming lack of interest in political participation.”9
So, as Kleimola also emphasized, it was not the lack of dissent but of collective dissent that distinguished Russia.10 This cannot therefore be attributed to differences in demand for rights across cases: a very strong sense of “what [the gentry] expected as their due, an understanding of their �rights’” existed. The difference was, instead, that this demand was “couched in the language of right and wrong rather than that of corporative charters of laws,” as in the West.11 Individual abuses were actively opposed; there was only insufficient institutionalized effort to stop them.
This language of corporative demands and extensive institutionalizaÂtion echoes classics of sociological theory and seminal historical accounts where corporate estates are central to the development of the modern state and constitutional order.12 It was the self-conscious organization of similarly placed individuals under a corporate entity, an estate, that allowed them to claim rights against the state, in such accounts. But these themes also echo the conclusions of major social science studies of economic development and social order proceeding from very different premises. These focus on the absence/presence of corporations or other
Petitions, Collective Responsibility, and Representative Practice 277 “perpetually lived organizations.”[1390] Chapter 11 briefly discussed corporÂations, bodies legally authorized to act as individuals, created by royal charter or legislative act and endowed with perpetual rights. They were adopted in the West in different domains, such as municipalities, univerÂsities, or in commerce.[1391] Their absence helps explain why the Ottoman economy diverged from the West for economist Timur Kuran. Such formal and informal bodies underlay the transition from the “natural state” to modern “open access orders,” for Douglass North and his coÂauthors Wallis and Weingast: they allowed the depersonalization of social relations, which, in turn, generated organizations able to pursue complex goals beyond the capacities of individuals.15
Although specialists may disagree about the adequacy of these explanÂations, they do capture an important aspect of reality - corporations were after all absent in both Russia and the Ottoman Empire and collective rights had low articulation.16 Do these points help explain variation in representative practice? Historians seem to gravitate in the same direcÂtion. The absence of a cultural template - corporate bodies, citizens’ rights - often suffices to explain differential outcomes.
But what the preceding genetic account of Western, especially English, institutions has shown is that these cultural templates were not a fortuitous presence in Western intellectual flora. Nor was the capacity for collective action - which is necessary for any concept of general rights to be articulated - a natural given that grew spontaneously in Western social structures. It cannot be reduced to economic factors, I have argued, as these were endogenous to the political conditions in place.17 Military pressures don’t explain variation systematically either, except in ways that also reflect prior levels of political organization. Weakly organized polities cannot wage extensive war and the “lack of military pressures,” as seen in the early history of Russia or Poland for instance, often simply reflected the lack of wherewithal to meet them.Rather, where they shaped constitutional outcomes, the cultural temÂplates emerged in direct relation to the powers of rulers to impose uniform obligations. The Western cases diverged foremost whenever the state could summon to the center groups across society and systematically impose collective obligations that were state-defined rather than tradition-derived; other variations were endogenous to this primary condition. The language of rights developed to the degree that state power forced social actors to transcend their differences and think of their interests in more collective terms. It was their common subjection
to royal power that elicited inclusive representative outcomes at the polity level, not their independent corporate structure. In fact - and this is a widely ignored paradox - the more robust the corporate structure of estates in the West, as in France, Italy, or the Holy Roman Empire, the weaker the representative outcomes; that is where absolutism thrived. The common emphasis on the “corporate” structure of Western social groups in fact misleads our understanding of the conditions for a broadly- based representative polity, as distinct from narrow representative pracÂtice, as argued below.
Two components of the narrative advanced here on Western represenÂtative practice - the legal principle of representation and the demand for justice mediated through petitions - were, however, independent of royal power, as we have seen. Their absence could also account for divergent outcomes in non-Western cases.[1392] The first task of this chapter is thereÂfore to show that both components were present outside the West. It is not thus cultural templates or any demand for rights that initially differed. Though present, these components were, however, just not cultivated at the supra-local level, and the question is why, especially since the land regimes across cases shared the dependence of land rights on the ruler. The chapter’s second task is then to show that what differed was the initial capacity to organize demands for justice, to impose obligations across social orders, and to enforce interaction at the center, initially on the ruler’s terms. This involves an analysis of how collective responsibility was organized across societies and the role of corporate structures.
This analysis does not imply that, if state capacity had been consistently present in the two non-Western cases, the outcome would have been necessarily identical with the West. My argument is not one of sufficiency but of necessity. It only suggests that even if preferences had been identiÂcal, the capacity was absent, and that factor has to be registered before assumptions about “collectivist” identities or authoritarian preferences are projected on the non-Western cases.
13.1