Review: Comment on John Kautsky's the Politics of Aristocratic Empires. AReview Article

Reviewed Work(s):The Politics of Aristocratic Empires by John Kautsky

S. N. Eisenstadt

Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 27, No. 1. (Jan., 1985), pp. 135-137.

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Comment on John Kautsky's The Politics of Aristocratic Empires. A Review Article S . N . E I S E N S T A D T

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

John Kautsky's book on The Politics of Aristocratic Empires (Chapel Hill, 1962) is an ambitious attempt to provide an overwhelming analysis of politics of agrarian empires. In the words of the book's jacket copy,

. . . this work adopts an analytical, explanatory and comparative approach and clearly distinguishes aristocratic empires from both primitive and more modem, commer- cialized societies. It develops generalizations that are supported and richly illustrated by data from many empires and demonstrates that a pattern of politics prevailed across time, space and cultures from Ancient Egypt five millennia ago to Saudi Arabia five decades ago, from China and Japan to Europe, from the Incas and the Aztecs to the Watutsi.

Katusky argues that aristocrats, because they live off the labor of peasants, must perform the primary governmental functions of taxation and warfare. Their perfor- mance is linked to particular values and beliefs, and both functions and ideologies in turn condition the stakes, the forms, and the arenas of intra-aristocratic conflict-the politics of the aristocracy.

The author also analyzes the roles of the peasantry and the townspeople in aristo- cratic politics and shows that peasant revolts on any large scale occur only after commercial modernization. He concludes with chapters on the modernization of aris- tocratic empires and on the importance in modem politics of institutional and ideologi- cal remnants of the old aristocratic order.

Kautsky's major conclusion-or emphasis-is that the politics of these empires are moulded by the fact that most of them have been established through conquest and that the exploitation of peasant masses by the aristocrat- ic conquerors is the central factor in shaping the politics of these empires- and in setting the limits of such politics.

These limits can be changed only through commercialization. It is only with growing commercialism-a commercialization which can be also found in some cases, as in the Islamic empires, in the very beginnings of the establishment of these empires-that some new dimensions of politics, in which urban groups are more autonomous, as well as peasant rebellions, start to develop.

0010-417518511805-9944 $2.50 8 1985 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

The major strength of the book does lie in the analysis of the conquest and exploitation aspects of agrarian empires and of this mode of politics of con- quering aristocracies-which are illustrated in the book from a wide range of settings. Basically Kautsky provides a sort of ideal type of the mode of such aristocratic politics in which the exploitation and competition over the state of such exploitation constitutes the major focus of relatively static politics. But it is here indeed that the major problem and the basic weakness of his analysis stand out. Only rarely are these parameters the major or sole factors shaping the contours even of relatively noncommercialized empires. Perhaps the cases of the Aztec or Inca empires on the one hand and above all the Mongol conquest empires on the other approach relatively close to such ideal types. But in the other empires-indeed probably in most of such empires-these elements are but one component, even if a relatively important and in some cases or situations an even central one, within the institutional structure of these empires in general and of their political format in particular.

In most agrarian empires there have existed several crucial forces or com- ponents, which alone or together with different patterns for commercialization provide additional and crucial dimensions to the political struggle, and which are either disregarded or unjustifiably minimized by Kautsky.

Thus, first of all, there is almost total disregard, or rather simplification, of the role of religious groups or institutions. The analysis of the role of religious groups as simple parts of the aristocratic groups may apply to some degree to some patrimonial empires such as the Inca and Aztec ones, the ancient Egyp- tian, or the Mongolian conquest empires. It certainly is not true of those empires (such as the Chinese, Islamic, Byzantine, to some degree even the Hellenistic and Roman ones) having universal or semiuniversal religious or cultural orientations, in which the religious (or legal) groups and institutions have constituted an autonomous political force contending not only for con- crete benefits within the parameters set by the aristocratic conquerors, but also often for the very shaping of the major parameters of political institutions of the society. Indeed, sometimes, as in the case of the Chinese empire, their influence in the shaping of the contours was a very major one. To equate Chinese literati with conquest aristocracies belittles not only their difference both from conquest aristocracies and from other churches or religious institu- tions, but also their very specific role in the shaping of the political dynamics of the Chinese-as differing from other such empires.

A second major lacuna of Kautsky's analysis occurs in his analysis of the relations of different aristocratic groups to the centers of their societies- especially their relative autonomy with respect to the king and the consequent modes of their participation in the political struggle in their empires. Here, of course, the major difference is between feudal and patrimonial or fully "im-

O N K A U T S K Y ' S P O L I T I C S O F A R I S T O C R A T I C E M P I R E S 137

perial" empires; not to recognize the principled difference between the politi- cal struggles of the Magna Carta as against those of Ancient Egypt indicates to my mind an extremely basic weakness of Kautsky's analysis.

The lack in general of difference between patrimonial empires, which to some degree approach Kautsky's mode, and the more imperial ones, charac- terized already by a coalition of religious, political, and sometimes-but only sometimes-urban forces, is a gross simplification of the picture. In many ways these forces may be of much greater importance in the shaping of the political dynamics of these empires than is the onset of commercialization. Very often these are precisely the forces-as can be seen best of all in the Chinese empire-that have also been a great influence on the mode of com- mercialization, as well as on its impact on the political dynamics of these empires.

The constellation of these forces is also of crucial importance for the understanding of the response of the different empires to the impact of mod- ernity or of modernization; without taking all these forces into account, it is very difficult to achieve the aim which Kautsky has set himself in this ex- tremely detailed and well-documented book.