Historical Materialism 27.

3 (2019) 191–209

brill.com/hima

ʻHow Bourgeois Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?ʼ

Remarks on Neil Davidson’s Book

Heide Gerstenberger
University of Bremen
gerstenb@uni-bremen.de

Abstract

While the overview concerning debates on bourgeois revolutions is impressive, it

cannot elucidate the theoretical concept of bourgeois revolutions. Neil Davidson’s own
suggestion centres on the removal of hindrances to the breakthrough of capitalism,
especially the pre-capitalist state. This formalistic definition is based on the assumption
that revolutions occurred when the superstructure became a hindrance to the further
development of productive forces. It deprives the theoretical concept of bourgeois
revolutions of any concrete historical content. This paper suggests restricting the use
of the theoretical concept ‘bourgeois revolution’ to those revolutionary changes of
domination and appropriation which occurred in European societies of the ancien
régime.

Keywords

bourgeois revolutions – specific historical conditions – the bourgeois form of capitalist

state-power

A Short Note on Methodology

In the Introduction to his monumental work, Neil Davidson states that it is

‘essentially an exercise in the history of ideas’.1 And, indeed, in Part I of his
book, Davidson ‘explains’ the prehistory of bourgeois revolutions as well as
their ‘abdication’ by reference to the writings of contemporaries. In Part II he
convincingly argues that, for the longest period of its history, the concept of

1  Davidson 2012, p. XVIII.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi:10.1163/1569206X-12341529

Downloaded from Brill.com03/04/2020 09:45:24PM by juan@grigera.com.ar
via Juan Grigera
192 Gerstenberger

bourgeois revolution has been developed, debated and rejected in the context
of debates on the possibility of a socialist revolution. In other words: it was
understood as a predominantly strategic concept. As such, its impact on his-
torical developments, if not often achieved, was always intended. And as far
as historical analysis was concerned, it was subordinate to the analysis of the
conditions which the proponents of the concept wanted to change. There are
numerous examples in Davidson’s book of the insights which can be gained
from this type of analysis. I, for one, was especially intrigued by his explanation
of Trotsky’s integration of ‘the international’ in his concept of combined and
uneven development.
Parts III and IV, however, are not easily ranged under the heading of an ex-
ercise in the ‘history of ideas’. Instead, Davidson introduces his own analytical
concept of bourgeois revolutions. Since this proposition is developed in the
context of Marxist debates it is simply not possible to avoid historical analysis.
Davidson, however, argues that one can debate ‘revisions, reconstructions, al-
ternatives’ by focusing on interpretations because

in the debates over the bourgeois revolutions it is rarely the facts that are
in question and almost always the interpretations that are put on them.2

Well, here we do part company. But it is Davidson himself who contradicts this
statement, when he mentions that the members of the Historians’ Group of
the Communist Party of Great Britain tended to look for empirical illustrations
of their preconceived explanations of bourgeois revolutions. And, indeed, it
took a lot of very painstaking archival studies, often limited to developments
in only one region or one town, before Eric Hobsbawm admitted that when
they used to start their analyses they ‘already knew’,3 or before Régine Robin,
having been engaged in a similar debate on the French Revolution, conceded
that one could not convincingly argue that ‘feudalism’ is the appropriate de-
scription for French society right up to 1789.4 At the outset of his book, Neil
Davidson explains that as far as events are concerned he relied on writers such
as G.A. Pocock or Robert Brenner, whose interpretations of these events he
criticises.5 This attitude is commendable, and much too rare amongst histori-
ans, especially those writing about bourgeois revolutions. Its proof, however,

2  Davidson 2012, p. XX.

3  Cited in Davidson 2012, p. 263.
4  Robin 1977.
5  Davidson 2012, p. XX.

Historical Materialism 27.3 (2019) 191–209

Downloaded from Brill.com03/04/2020 09:45:24PM by juan@grigera.com.ar
via Juan Grigera
Remarks on Neil Davidson ’ s Book 193

requires that one is willing to have one’s own theoretical explanations cast into
doubt by the empirical historical material which has been brought to light by
opponents of one’s own interpretation. If this analytical practice is, indeed,
present in How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?, I have failed to
detect it.

Terminology and Theory

For Neil Davidson, the historical content of bourgeois revolutions is the re-
moval of those political structures which hindered capitalism from becoming
dominant within a certain political entity. In other words: he proposes to theo-
retically conceive of ‘bourgeois revolutions’ as the revolutionary establishment
of capitalist political structures. In this analytical context, the structural rele-
vance of the overthrow of the feudal-Absolutist regime of Ethiopia and the lib-
eration of the Portuguese colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Angola, or Mozambique
are taken to equal the structural relevance of the French Revolution.
Davidson legitimates his terminology – and hence theory – by pointing out
that it was only in 1870 that Marx made use of the term ‘capitalism’, while in the
1840s he was still writing of the ‘bourgeois mode of production’.6 Accordingly
Davidson stresses that Marx and Engels

did not tend to make the kind of pseudoscientific etymological distinc-

tions between various terms in the way that so obsesses some of their
followers. In particular, they did not distinguish between bourgeois and
capitalist.7

I would range myself amongst those who advocate a distinction between

bourgeois capitalist states and non-bourgeois capitalist states, hence between
‘bourgeois revolutions’ and revolutions which resulted in the establishment of
non-bourgeois forms of capitalist state-power. Since historical materialism is
not exegesis, it does not bother me one bit that this distinction is not yet pres-
ent in the writings of Marx and Engels.

6  Davidson 2012, p. 131.

7  Davidson 2012, p. 132.

Historical Materialism 27.3 (2019) Downloaded

191–209 from Brill.com03/04/2020 09:45:24PM by juan@grigera.com.ar
via Juan Grigera
194 Gerstenberger

Davidson’s Reconstruction of the Theoretical Concept ‘Bourgeois

Revolution’

Davidson commences Part III of his book by recapitulating the debates on

bourgeois revolutions since the 1950s. He concludes that the orthodox Marxist
concept ‘bourgeois revolution’ can no longer be upheld, because critics of this
concept correctly insist that these revolutions were not brought about by ‘a
bourgeois class subject consciously seeking to establish its own rule by revolu-
tionary measures’.8
In spite of the fact that revisionists were not able to propose a coherent
alternative, the inherent weaknesses of the orthodox concept cannot be over-
come ‘simply by accumulating more supporting empirical detail’.9
Davidson therefore concludes that

the concept had either to be reconstructed on a defensible basis or

replaced by an alternative explanatory framework.10

I heartily agree with this conclusion. Alas, Neil Davidson’s reconstruction

comes at a theoretical price, which I, for one, would not want to pay.
In order to reconstruct (save?) the concept ‘bourgeois revolution’ Davidson
suggests its separation from any assumption about specific revolutionary
agents, instead focusing on the (long-term) outcome, i.e. on the consequences
of a revolution. There is, however, only one outcome in which Davidson is really
interested: did or did not the revolution contribute to capitalist development?
If the answer is ‘yes’ then the revolution in question is to be termed ‘bourgeois’.
In Davidson’s opinion, this brand of consequentialism has been spelled out not
only by Alex Callinicos but also by Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn.11
The reference to Alex Callinicos is convincing, and, indeed, in the mean-
time Callinicos himself has stated that he concurs with the gist of Davidson’s
reasoning. But Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn’s argument had a very differ-
ent focus. At the time of the publication of their path-breaking analysis, criti-
cal historians of modern Germany concurred that the underlying reason for
the advent of National Socialism in Germany was the absence of a bourgeois

8  Davidson 2012, p. 367.

9   Davidson 2012, p. 369.
10  Ibid.
11  Davidson 2012, p. 477. And almost by Barrington Moore (Moore 1973) – in Davidson’s
opinion, Moore ruined his concept of consequentialism by introducing the criterion ‘de-
mocracy’ into the concept ‘bourgeois revolution’ (Davidson 2012, p. 274).

Historical Materialism 27.3 (2019) 191–209

Downloaded from Brill.com03/04/2020 09:45:24PM by juan@grigera.com.ar
via Juan Grigera
Remarks on Neil Davidson ’ s Book 195

revolution in this country.12 Eley and Blackbourn opposed this interpretation

by, first of all and very correctly, stressing that in order to explain the advent of
the National Socialist regime one should not look further back than the crisis
of the Weimar Republic. They also pointed to the fact that the critical historiog-
raphy on Germany tended to idealise the French and the English Revolutions
by assuming that these had been fundamentally liberal. Lastly, they explained
that the German bourgeoisie, though very divided and therefore not having
been able to achieve a liberal revolution in 1848, was very successful in making
use of existing political institutions for capitalist practices of appropriation.
In other words – and it is this argument which Davidson has adopted – the
victory of capitalism does not depend on a liberal revolution.13 Of course not.
Is there still anybody alive in the twenty-first century who thinks differently?
But if the whole book is about political upheavals the outcomes of which
furthered capitalism, why do we then have to label the advent of capitalism
‘bourgeois’? Is the terminology which Marx has made use of more than a hun-
dred years ago sufficient reason to do so? And can this transformation of the
term ‘bourgeois’ into an empty cliché14 really save the theoretical concept
‘bourgeois revolution’? I will try to discern Neil Davidson’s conviction for the
necessity of trying to do so as well as the means by which he hopes to achieve
his reconstruction of the theoretical concept ‘bourgeois revolution’.
That Davidson steels himself against critique by pointing to the termino-
logical practices of Marx and Engels has already been mentioned. More impor-
tant, however, is his reference to the reasoning in the ‘Preface’ to A Contribution
to the Critique of Political Economy which Marx wrote in 1859. According to
this Preface and to Davidson, revolution became possible when – at a certain
stage of the development of productive forces – the correspondence between
‘structure’ and ‘superstructure’ broke down, transforming the elements of the
superstructure from ‘forms of development into their fetters’.15 If this Preface
is far from summing up the theoretical foundations of historical material-
ism, it is nonetheless a flawless example of Marxist historical philosophy. Just
like the conviction of bourgeois philosophers that rationalisation (or mod-
ernisation) is inherent in the course of human history, versions of Marxist

12  Accordingly, the subtitle of the German edition was ‘Die gescheiterte bürgerliche
Revolution von 1848 [The Failed Bourgeois Revolution of 1848]’, while in the English edi-
tion it is ‘Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany’.
13  He omits to mention that Eley and Blackbourn pointed out that – in spite of the serious
repression which was present after 1871 – the growing power of the bourgeoisie not only
found expression in the furthering of capitalism but also in the furthering of civil rights.
14  Benno Teschke labelled it a ‘semantic shell’ (Teschke 2005, p. 6).
15  Davidson 2012, p. 153.

Historical Materialism 27.3 (2019) Downloaded

191–209 from Brill.com03/04/2020 09:45:24PM by juan@grigera.com.ar
via Juan Grigera
196 Gerstenberger

historical philosophy proclaim certain fundamental dynamics of history, fore-

most amongst them the development of productive forces. It is their dynam-
ics which, according to Davidson, produce the historical possibility for social
revolution. One might point out that, throughout the book, Davidson repeat-
edly defends himself against the reproach of negating historical agency. And
indeed, there are many instances where he describes historical events. But in
Davidson’s analysis the concept of agency always remains subordinate to that
of pre-ordained forces of history.
In other words: the overthrow of pre-capitalist political forms of domina-
tion is not explained by reference to the crisis of these forms and by the prac-
tices which achieved their abolition, but by their inadequacy to furthering the
growth of capitalism. This substitution of historical analysis with historical
philosophy makes it possible to not only analytically lump together very dif-
ferent forms of pre-capitalist forms of political domination but also to term
‘bourgeois’ the overthrow of any of these forms of domination.
There is, however, a further theoretical precondition for Neil Davidson’s
reconstruction of the concept ‘bourgeois revolution’. This is his reduction of
the theoretical concept ‘capitalist state power’ to an institution which delivers
certain functions.

There are certain activities that capitalist states must perform, of which
three are particularly important. The first is the imposition of a dual so-
cial order: horizontally over competing capitals … and vertically over the
conflict between capital and labour…. The second is the establishment
of ‘general conditions of production’…. the third is the way in which
each capitalist state has to represent the collective interests of the ‘in-
ternal’ capitalist class ‘externally’ in relation to other capitalist states and
classes.16

One could point out that many a capitalist state of our times is far from repre-
senting the collective interests of the internal capitalist class, because those in
power are making use of political and judicial competences for private appro-
priation, and therefore are often in direct alliance with foreign capital.17 But
I will leave that aside.

16  Davidson 2012, p. 578.

17  It has been very convincingly argued that many present-day states, especially, but not
only, in Africa, do not conform to this model. They are, nevertheless, states in capital-
ist societies and considered sovereign ‘national states’ in the realm of international law.

Historical Materialism 27.3 (2019) 191–209

Downloaded from Brill.com03/04/2020 09:45:24PM by juan@grigera.com.ar
via Juan Grigera
Remarks on Neil Davidson ’ s Book 197

The persistence of the states-system is explained by

the need for capitals to be territorially aggregated for competitive pur-

poses [and … by the need] for that territory to have an ideological basis –
nationalism – which can be used to bind the working class to the state
and hence to capital.18

This explanation of the ongoing existence of an international order which is

structured by national sovereignty is not convincing. It is especially unconvinc-
ing when it comes to those post-colonial states which were ‘granted’ national
sovereignty by the General Assembly of the United Nations from 1960 onward.19
Since sovereignty is granted to nations, any claim to endow parts of these judi-
cially established entities with separate competences and a separate territory
was henceforth to be considered unlawful and rebellious. Competitive pur-
poses of national capitals were not decisive for these territorial aggregations.
Instead, the integration of post-colonial political unities into the international
order as sovereign nation states was the result of international politics. It was
made use of for constructing alliances in the conflict which has become known
as the Cold War, and it has since been made use of for strategies of exploita-
tion by contract. China Miéville has forcefully argued that just as the formal
neutrality of the state legitimates exploitation of labour in the national sphere,
the formal equality of states in international law makes it possible to use con-
tracts between formally equal partners for the exploitation of resources in the
international sphere.20
Neil Davidson is wary of declaring every overthrow of colonial domination a
bourgeois revolution. In India, for example, post-colonial successor regimes in-
herited the state apparatus of the colonial power. In such cases, independence
did not change the class basis of the state. On the other hand, the proclama-
tion of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the overthrow of the feudal-
Absolutist regime of Haile Selassie in 1974 as well as the end of colonial power
in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique are interpreted as having been
bourgeois revolutions. The announcement of the ‘Four Modernisations’ to the
Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee Congress of the Chinese

Bayart 2004; Bayart, Ellis and Hibou 1999; Chemillier-Gendreau 1995, especially Chapter 8;
Jackson 1990; Kößler 1994; Gerstenberger 2009.
18  Davidson 2012, p. 578.
19  Declaration Number 1514, decided upon in 1960, declares ‘the granting of independence
to colonial countries and peoples’.
20  Miéville 2005, passim.

Historical Materialism 27.3 (2019) Downloaded

191–209 from Brill.com03/04/2020 09:45:24PM by juan@grigera.com.ar
via Juan Grigera
198 Gerstenberger

Communist Party in December 1978 is interpreted as the ‘consolidation of the

bourgeois revolution’ in China.21

Defending the Theoretical Concept ‘Bourgeois Revolution’ against

Neil Davidson’s Reconstruction

To reiterate: for Neil Davidson the theory of bourgeois revolution is not

about the origins and development of capitalism as a socioeconomic

system but the removal of backward-looking threats to its continued ex-
istence and the overthrow of restrictions to its further expansion. The
source of these threats and restrictions has, historically, been the pre-
capitalist state …22

Davidson insists that there is no law

which states that bourgeois revolutions can only be conducted against

states associated with the feudal and tributary modes of production out
of which capitalism emerged; in a context where a capitalist world econ-
omy was consolidating they could also be conducted against tribal societ-
ies still in the ‘Asiatic’ stage transitional to full class society.23

If revolution in a tribal society may have resulted in a political apparatus fur-

thering capitalism, this did not make it a ‘bourgeois revolution’, because bour-
geois revolutions were not about the institution of capitalist state functions
but about the abolition of specific forms of political domination, more pre-
cisely about the abolition of the fundamental legal inequality inherent in the
system of estates, of state-guaranteed privileges (monopolies) for production
and trade as well as privately owned competences of the judiciary, and hence
the possibility to privately enforce labour services as well as to privately safe-
guard property. Differences of concrete judicial and institutional forms apart,
these elements of domination were present in many European societies from
the seventeenth century onwards. Though feudal forms of exploitation and
appropriation were still to be found, strategies of appropriation had been de-
cisively altered by processes of commercialisation and by the legalisation of

21  Davidson 2012, p. 621.

22  Davidson 2012, p. 420.
23  Davidson 2012, pp. 607–8.

Historical Materialism 27.3 (2019) 191–209

Downloaded from Brill.com03/04/2020 09:45:24PM by juan@grigera.com.ar
via Juan Grigera
Remarks on Neil Davidson ’ s Book 199

the practices of domination. At the same time, the Reformation had not only
changed practices of religious belief but had also contributed to the critique of
the personal ownership of competences of domination. I have suggested sum-
marising these elements under the term ancien régime,24 thereby stating that
the possibility of bourgeois revolutions did not arise in just any pre-capitalist
society but only in those European societies which were no longer feudal and
not-yet-fully capitalist.25 If opposition to the forms of domination in societies
of the European ancien régime can be explained by material interests and by
the endeavour of many a family to rise into the higher echelons of the existing
social order, this neither explains how revolutions came about nor why the
resulting state has taken on the form of a public power.
It was the Russian legal scholar Evgeny Pashukanis who suggested that any
endeavour to develop a Marxist theory of the capitalist state has to focus on
the radical historical change of class domination. He suggested we enquire
why the apparatus of political compulsion is no longer the private property
of the dominant class but constituted as a public, impersonal power which is
separated from society.26 And, indeed, most participants in the debate about
a Marxist theory of the capitalist state, which started in the 1970s, have taken
these questions as their starting point. From their analysis of the ‘logic of capi-
tal’ they derived27 the necessity of a formally-neutral public power. Since capi-
talist forms of production were neither instituted nor upheld by the practice or
the threat of force, they had to be legitimated. They conceived of the capital-
ist state as the institutionalisation of this legitimation, by decreeing citizens
to be equal before the law.28 If the empirical description of the neutrality of
state power was much more inspired by the political realities of the 1970s (in
Germany) than by actual historical instances of impersonal bourgeois state-
power, the fundamental flaw of this reasoning was not its empirical weakness
but the derivation of the public character of state power from the ‘logics’ of
capitalist social relations. It is, therefore, not surprising that this thoroughly a-
historical theory was silently discarded as soon as Marxists started to actually
analyse concrete forms of capitalist state-power.

24  Compare Gerstenberger 2007, pp. 645–62 and passim. When French revolutionaries
coined the term, they wanted it to encompass everything they wanted to abolish.
25  Some of these preconditions have been exported to European-settler colonies. They were
especially present in the English colonies in North America. In part, the American War of
Independence was also a bourgeois revolution.
26  Paschukanis 1966, pp. 119–20.
27  This is why their theories have been labelled ‘derivation theory’.
28  For an overview of the debate, see Holloway and Picciotto (eds.); Gerstenberger 2011.

Historical Materialism 27.3 (2019) Downloaded

191–209 from Brill.com03/04/2020 09:45:24PM by juan@grigera.com.ar
via Juan Grigera
200 Gerstenberger

Any explanation which endeavours to explain bourgeois revolutions as up-

heavals which were necessary for the development and the defence of capital-
ism must resort either to historical philosophy like that of Neil Davidson or to
the equally a-historic reasoning which was present in the derivation debate.
Not only the theoretical concept ‘bourgeois revolution’ but also the concept
‘bourgeois state’ only make sense if they are constructed as strictly historical
concepts.
In order to bring history back into the debate about bourgeois revolutions,
we have to once again consider the revolutionary developments in those so-
cieties which were to become the first capitalist societies. Since the French
Revolution constitutes the most important riddle in the context of debates on
bourgeois revolutions, it is on this revolution that I will focus my discussion.
According to his general theoretical concept, Davidson maintains that
every bourgeois revolution resulted in the establishment of a capitalist state
and that it occurred when the correspondence between the productive forces
and politics as well as laws was no longer in accord. It then follows that the
development of capitalism in France had to be already well underway be-
fore the Revolution. Those historians who have become known as ‘political
Marxists’, on the other hand, uphold Robert Brenner’s thesis that outside of
England there was no autonomous development of capitalism. They maintain
that capitalist property relations expanded to France only decades after the
Revolution and that, in any case, the state which was established through the
French Revolution was not a capitalist state. Indeed, for Ellen Meiksins Wood,
just as for Brenner, the whole concept of bourgeois revolution is futile, because
we may be convinced that

the French Revolution was thoroughly bourgeois … without coming a

flea-hop closer to determining whether it was also capitalist.29

Fundamentally opposed as they may appear to be, the two positions rely on
an identical theory of the capitalist state. Since it is strictly functional, it has
to focus on the economic base of the class which was to become able to influ-
ence the policies of the post-Revolutionary state. Wood stresses that the main
actors in the French Revolution were ‘professionals, officeholders, and intel-
lectuals’.30 Though that leaves out artisans, poor people, peasants, and – just
to mention in passing – women, her insistence on the absence of capitalists is,
nevertheless, correct. Davidson accepts that the non-capitalist bourgeoisie was

29  Wood 1999, p. 63.

30  Wood 1999, p. 184.

Historical Materialism 27.3 (2019) 191–209

Downloaded from Brill.com03/04/2020 09:45:24PM by juan@grigera.com.ar
via Juan Grigera
Remarks on Neil Davidson ’ s Book 201

decisive, assuming that this enabled revolutionaries to adopt more extreme

positions.31 He nevertheless maintains that at the time of the Revolution, capi-
talism in France was already decisively present. In order to substantiate this
statement he refers to a speech which Abbé Sieyès delivered in 178932 and to
Henry Heller’s analysis of the French Revolution.33 But Heller’s reassessment
of the ‘classic Marxist view of the Dutch, English and French revolutions as
capitalist and bourgeois revolutions’34 is insufficiently based on empirical re-
search to be accepted as confirmation for the claim that capitalism was already
well under way in France at the time of the French Revolution. Wanting to
uphold this supposition, Davidson must overlook the bulk of research on the
development of capitalist labour relations in France in the course of the nine-
teenth century.35
To repeat: while Wood and other ‘political Marxists’ maintain that the state
which was established through the French Revolution cannot have been a
capitalist state because there was no capitalist base, Davidson maintains that
the base must have been capitalist, because the post-Revolutionary state was
established through a bourgeois revolution. According to him, bourgeois revo-
lutions have always been capitalist revolutions. The riddle is solved as soon as
analysis is emancipated from the theoretical limits of functionalism. It then
becomes possible to actually analyse the French Revolution as a revolution
which resulted in a bourgeois state, the political essence of which is not suf-
ficiently captured by describing state functions.
The possibility of revolution inherent in the crisis of the French ancien ré-
gime was transformed into its reality by the creation of a pre-revolutionary
public through the crown itself.36 While English kings, even before the revo-
lution of the mid-seventeenth century, reigned ‘in parliament’, French kings
had not convened the Estates-General of their kingdom since 1614. When an
assembly of notables refused to consent to new taxes in 1787 and demanded a
convening of the Estates-General, the collection of the doléances (burdens) of
the people to be presented to the king at the outset of the Estates-General cre-
ated a public in which the campaign for the better representation of the third
estate could quickly gain notoriety.

31  Davidson 2012, p. 592.

32  Davidson 2012, p. 63.
33  Davidson 2012, p. 588.
34  Heller 2011, p. 133 and passim; Davidson has not cited Heller 2011, but rather Heller 2006
(Davidson 2012, p. 588).
35  Compare Bron 1968; Duveau 1946; Haupt 1989; Moss 1976.
36  A more extensive explanation is in Gerstenberger 2007, pp. 522–35.

Historical Materialism 27.3 (2019) Downloaded

191–209 from Brill.com03/04/2020 09:45:24PM by juan@grigera.com.ar
via Juan Grigera
202 Gerstenberger

The revolution, when it came about in 1789, was acted out in fierce struggles
on streets and in squares, in heated political debates, and on the battlefield, in
the jubilant enthusiasm of the journées, in bloody terror and, finally, in those
military conquests for which Napoléon transformed the nationalism which
had been present in the defence of the revolution at Valmy into the ideologi-
cal strategy of an already-established bourgeois state. In the course of these
struggles, the legal constitution of the state was changed several times. And in
spite of the fact that Napoléon declared his accession to power to have defini-
tively ended the Revolution, the nineteenth century was to see several political
upheavals and hence more changes of the political constitution.
But through all of these changes the essence of the bourgeois state-form
remained unchanged. Napoléon created his own nobility, but the dissolution
of estates was not rescinded. Financiers could make money by investing in the
state, but state offices were no longer transformed into private property. The
Revolution had definitively established that the use of state competences for
private gain was to be considered corruption. None of the privileges which had
been abolished in the frenzy of the night of 8 August 1789 were ever to be re-
established. The Revolution disembedded37 economic competition from the
realm of the state. It thereby established a bourgeois state, the form of which
legitimated not only the labour relations which were present at the time of
the Revolution, but also the capitalist labour relations which were to become
dominant in the future.
The structures of the bourgeois state having been established by the
French Revolution institutionalised the critique of the ancien régime’s forms
of domination. Elements of the French opposition were present in all the
societies of the European ancien régime: the critique of legal inequality,
the critique of economic privileges, the critique of private competences of the
judiciary. And it was not only in the kingdom of France that competences of
domination were commercialised during the last phases of the ancien régime.
The Reformation, in spite of its having been politically resolved by establishing
the competence of princes to decide the religious confession in their realm,
had furthered private religious practice, thereby strengthening the concept of
individuality. But in France, critique of the ancien régime was also provoked by
the fact that – more so than in other kingdoms of the time – state offices were
not only a means for private appropriation but also for social advancement.
If the purchase of an office did not directly result in the nobility of one’s fam-
ily, it held out a promise for the generations to come. We have to remember
that individuals usually want to advance socially in the society in which they

37  The expression was coined by Polanyi (Polanyi 1977).

Historical Materialism 27.3 (2019) 191–209

Downloaded from Brill.com03/04/2020 09:45:24PM by juan@grigera.com.ar
via Juan Grigera
Remarks on Neil Davidson ’ s Book 203

live. There may have been the lone merchant or manufacturer dreaming of
an economy in which it would no longer be necessary to pay dearly for the
privilege of dealing in trade or manufacture, but he would probably still have
preferred to gain or to safeguard the privilege which authorised these eco-
nomic activities. But just as for the offices, there was a limit to the extension
of the number of privileges, because these tended to contradict each other,
producing all manner of ill-feeling. By the middle of the eighteenth century
the traditional pattern of social advancement in France was severely endan-
gered, thereby also endangering the possibility for the crown to successfully
manage the competition between clientele groups. The means for private ap-
propriation which constituted the huge state apparatus was financed through
taxes, the bulk of these being extracted from ‘the people’, most of them peas-
ants and most of them poor. Starvation was endemic. The dependence of the
centralised apparatus of appropriation on the taxes of peasants explains why
the crown endeavoured to prevent peasant families from being evicted from
their land. During the revolution peasants fiercely – and finally successfully –
defended those property-rights to their land which formerly had been guaran-
teed by the laws of the kingdom. In the decades to come, this was to prevent
the rapid expansion of agrarian capitalism.
The essence of any bourgeois revolution was not the furthering of capitalism
but the establishment of a bourgeois state. Its apparatus belongs to nobody –
and hence to ‘the nation’. The bourgeois state is separated from society in that
it transforms the inequality of social positions into the equality of the subjects
of law, while at the same time sanctioning the existence (and further develop-
ment) of fundamental inequality in the material living conditions of citizens
by sanctioning any sort of private property.
The formal equality of citizens before the law was the result of actual strug-
gles, but it was also the result of the necessity to legitimate the New Order in
the eyes of the world. Religion and tradition having lost their legitimating com-
petence, the proclamation of the natural equality of man was a prerequisite
for the attack on the foundations of the Old Order. And it was only in this
context that contracts between free and formally equal subjects of law could
become the dominant form of legitimating social relations, amongst them
capitalist labour relations. In this sense the Code Napoléon was, indeed, the
conclusion (or, in the terminology of Davidson, the consummation) of the
Revolution. The main function of the bourgeois state for capitalism is not con-
tained in any policy but in its form, because this negates the inequality of so-
cial conditions.
The essence of this negation is the legal and forceful sanction of private
property. Once the capacity to labour is transformed into a commodity, it is

Historical Materialism 27.3 (2019) Downloaded

191–209 from Brill.com03/04/2020 09:45:24PM by juan@grigera.com.ar
via Juan Grigera
204 Gerstenberger

thereby also transformed into private property. By negating the fundamental

difference between the private property in means of production and the private
property in the capacity to labour, the bourgeois state sanctions the existing
order of exploitation. In France, this state-form resulted out of the critique of
the ancien régime before capitalist labour relations had become dominant. It
was only later that the bourgeois French state was to become the public insti-
tution of a capitalist society.
If the state which was established in the course of the French Revolution was
not yet the state of a capitalist society, as Davidson assumed, the Revolution
was, nevertheless, not as futile as Wood maintains. In order to better explain
this double critique, I suggest a somewhat closer look at the development of
capitalist labour relations in England and France in the course of the nine-
teenth century.
While it has long been assumed that the meaning of ‘free wage labour’ is
more-or-less evident, and that capitalist production necessitates free wage la-
bour, this assumption has lately come under attack. Labour historians have
come to maintain that not only coerced contractional labour but even outright
slavery were – and sometimes still are – integral elements of labour regimes in
capitalist societies.38 This, however, has not yet overcome the assumption that
the development of the labour regime corresponds functionally to the stage of
industrial production. As far as France and England are concerned one would,
therefore, expect that free wage labour, in the full sense of the present-day con-
cept, would have been established early on in the most advanced capitalist so-
ciety of the time. That this was not the case may shed light upon those aspects
of bourgeois revolutions which are absent from Neil Davidson’s reconstruction
of the theoretical concept.
In France, one of the fiercely-raised revolutionary demands concerned the
abolition of the livret. Before the Revolution, men and women, who were le-
gally free to offer their capacity to labour on the market, were obliged to ascer-
tain their right to actually do so by showing their livret (booklet) to the police,
thereby accepting that their participation in the labour market was condi-
tional upon being under the supervision of the authorities. The police were to
make sure that any worker had left his or her former occupation with the con-
sent of their employer. This consent was documented in the livret. Of course,
in times of labour scarcity, employers as well as workers endeavoured to make
use of the labour market without interference from the police. This did not
change the fact that neglecting to present the livret was considered a penal
offence. The Revolution abolished the livret. It was reintroduced in the era of

38  Davidson has taken note of the results of this research (Davidson 2012, pp. 415–16).

Historical Materialism 27.3 (2019) 191–209

Downloaded from Brill.com03/04/2020 09:45:24PM by juan@grigera.com.ar
via Juan Grigera
Remarks on Neil Davidson ’ s Book 205

the Napoleonic regime and, once again, in 1854, but it never again had to be
presented to the police, and never again were workers forced to return to their
former occupation if the consent of their employer had not been inscribed in
their booklet. Livrets, therefore, no longer contradicted the private nature of
labour relations. Instead, the booklet was now used to document any advances
on the wage by the employer. Workers unable to present a booklet to their new
employer would then have had difficulties in being granted such an advance.
For many decades after the Revolution, French workers were denied the col-
lective rights to associate and to strike, but the individual right of concluding
and ending a labour contract was not rescinded once the bourgeois state had
been established. In France, therefore, free wage labour, in the sense we have
come to understand it, was established long before industrial capitalism had
become predominant.
Not so in England. While the freedom to conclude a labour contract had
been acquired in England much earlier than in France, the freedom to leave
an occupation was only definitely gained with the passing of the Employer and
Workmen Act in 1875. It was only with this Act that labour contracts were de-
finitively set free from state control, thereby disembedding capitalist labour
relations from the state. While the sanction of labour contracts had been part
and parcel of the traditional Master and Servant Act, its regulations as well as
its practice in the nineteenth century were not shaped by traditions. Instead,
they were severed in the course of industrialisation. And in the first half of
the 1870s, just before the Act was repealed, more workers were condemned
because of breach of contract and insubordination to their employer than ever
before.39 Historians having researched the very slow advent of ‘free wage la-
bour’, in the form which used to be thought a prerequisite for capitalist forms
of production, have not been able to detect any economic causes for the end
of the application of criminal law against labourers. Instead, they advance the
hypothesis that the extension of the right to vote has precipitated the institu-
tion of formal equality for the contracting partners in capitalist labour rela-
tions.40 This would confirm the assumption that the disembedding of labour
relations from the realm of the criminal law was not so much an economic
requirement as a requirement which arose when workers’ organisations had
become strong enough to effectively question the legitimacy of the existing
constitution, thereby pushing the process of reforming capitalist state-power
one step further towards its bourgeois legal constitution. The bourgeois form

39  Hay 2000, p. 109.

40  Steinfeld 2001, pp. 85–6 and passim.

Historical Materialism 27.3 (2019) Downloaded

191–209 from Brill.com03/04/2020 09:45:24PM by juan@grigera.com.ar
via Juan Grigera
206 Gerstenberger

of state power proclaims that exploitation which is based on a contract be-

tween legally free partners is to be considered legal and hence legitimate.

On Non-Bourgeois Capitalist States

According to Davidson, the era of bourgeois revolutions from below ended in

1859, to be succeeded by several bourgeois revolutions from above, amongst
them the American Civil War and the political unification of Germany. He
takes these to have been prompted by the spread of capitalism, dominated by
Britain.41 In spite of the fact that, according to Davidson, after the first social-
ist revolution bourgeois revolutions were no longer historically necessary, they
not only continued to occur but even became more frequent. The conclusion is
consistent with Davidson’s theoretical concept. It forces very different histori-
cal events and processes into the theoretical mould of a deterministic concept
of historical materialism, thereby denying the theoretical concept ‘bourgeois
revolution’ any political content.
I oppose this reduction of the content of bourgeois revolutions to the estab-
lishment of a state which delivers functions for the development of capitalism.
Instead, I maintain that bourgeois revolutions occurred in very specific his-
torical conditions having been brought about by the theoretical and practical
critique of the domination-forms in ancien régime Europe. In other words: the
theoretical concept ‘bourgeois revolution’ is only appropriate for those events
and processes which Neil Davidson has termed ‘revolutions from below’. But
the historical relevance of these revolutions is not limited to the actual events
and processes, because the critique of domination-forms of the European an-
cien régime has since also been present in struggles against inequality, injustice
and exploitation all over the world.
Many of those who fought against colonial domination were inspired by
the hopes of freedom and equality present in bourgeois revolutions. And if
many post-colonial societies transformed the apparatus of the colonial state
after the pattern of bourgeois states, this was not only prompted by the re-
quirements of international law42 – to be strengthened during the era of the
Cold War by requirements for the reception of international aid from Western
powers – it was also inspired by the hopes which had been raised and legiti-
mated in the course of bourgeois revolutions.

41  Davidson 2012, p. 599.

42  Mbembe 2001; Miéville 2005.

Historical Materialism 27.3 (2019) 191–209

Downloaded from Brill.com03/04/2020 09:45:24PM by juan@grigera.com.ar
via Juan Grigera
Remarks on Neil Davidson ’ s Book 207

The principle of the equality of citizens which has been put on the historical
agenda by bourgeois revolutions has correctly been analysed as legitimating
capitalist social relations by negating their relevance in the political sphere.
This negation is the essence of the bourgeois form of capitalist state-power.
If the historical reality of capitalism has abundantly demonstrated that ex-
ploitation and accumulation can function without this political legitima-
tion, this has not – at the same time – put an end to the historical relevance
of bourgeois revolutions, because this derives from the fact that the critique
of capitalist social and political relations was already present in the very act of
their historical establishment.

The ‘Epilogue’

The final pages of Neil Davidson’s book are – to say the least – astonishing. In
his praise of the Declaration of Independence, very aptly taken from a speech
by the former slave Frederick Douglass, the American Constitution ‘interpret-
ed as it ought to be interpreted’ is praised as a ‘glorious liberty document’.43
Davidson now lauds bourgeois revolutions for having brought ‘the universal
principles of freedom and justice … onto the historical agenda’.44 Alas, after
bourgeois revolutions have been deprived of their political content over hun-
dreds of pages, this cannot be smuggled back in through an ‘epilogue’.

References

Bayart, Jean-François 2004, ‘Le Crime transnational et la formation de l’État’, Politique

Africaine, 93: 93–104.
Bayart, Jean-François, Stephen Ellis and Béatrice Hibou 1999 [1997], The Criminalization
of the State in Africa, Oxford: African Issues.
Blackbourn, David and Geoff Eley 1980, Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung. Die
gescheiterte bürgerliche Revolution von 1848, Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein.
Blackbourn, David and Geoff Eley 1984, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois
Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany, New York: Oxford University
Press.
Bron, Jean 1968, Histoire du mouvement ouvrier français, Volume I: Le droit à l’existence.
Du début du XIXe siècle à 1884, Paris: Les Éditions Ouvrières.

43  Davidson 2012, p. 656.

44  Ibid.

Historical Materialism 27.3 (2019) Downloaded

191–209 from Brill.com03/04/2020 09:45:24PM by juan@grigera.com.ar
via Juan Grigera
208 Gerstenberger

Callinicos, Alex 2013, ‘The Dynamics of Revolution’, International Socialism, 9 January,

available at: <http://isj.org.uk/the-dynamics-of-revolution/>.
Chemilier-Gendreau, Monique 1995, Humanité et souverainetés. Essai sur la fonction du
droit international, Paris: Éditions La Découverte.
Cottereau, Alain 2000, ‘Industrial Tribunals and the Establishment of a Kind of
Common Law in Nineteenth-Century France’, in Private Law and Social Inequality in
the Industrial Age, edited by Willibald Steinmetz, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davidson, Neil 2003, Discovering the Scottish Revolution 1692–1746, London: Pluto Press.
Davidson, Neil 2012, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?, Chicago:
Haymarket Books.
Duveau, Georges 1946, La Vie Ouvrière en France sous le Second Empire, Sixth Edition,
Paris: Éditions Gallimard.
Gerstenberger, Heide 2007 [1990], Impersonal Power: History and Theory of the
Bourgeois State, Historical Materialism Book Series, translated by David Fernbach,
Leiden: Brill.
Gerstenberger, Heide 2009, ‘Über Staatsgewalt in der Sub-Sahara und das Elend der
Kategorien’, in Nord-Süd-Beziehungen im Umbruch. Neue Perspektiven auf Staat und
Demokratie in der Weltpolitik, edited by Hans-Jürgen Burchardt, Frankfurt am Main:
Campus.
Gerstenberger, Heide 2011, ‘The Historical Constitution of the Political Forms of
Capitalism’, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 43, 1: 60–86.
Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard 1989, Sozialgeschichte Frankreichs seit 1789, Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp.
Hay, Douglas 2000, ‘Master and Servant in England: Using the Law in the Eighteenth
and Nineteenth Centuries’, in Private Law and Social Inequality in the Industrial Age,
edited by Willibald Steinmetz, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heller, Henry 2006, The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789–1815, New York: Berghahn
Books.
Heller, Henry 2011, The Birth of Capitalism: A 21st Century Perspective, London: Pluto
Press.
Holloway, John and Sol Picciotto (eds.) 1978, State and Capital: A Marxist Debate,
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Jackson, Robert H. 1990, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third
World, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.
Kößler, Reinhart 1994, Postkoloniale Staaten. Elemente eines Bezugsrahmens, Hamburg:
Deutsches Übersee-Institut.
Mbembe, Achille 2001, On the Postcolony, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Miéville, China 2005, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law,
Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

Historical Materialism 27.3 (2019) 191–209

Downloaded from Brill.com03/04/2020 09:45:24PM by juan@grigera.com.ar
via Juan Grigera
Remarks on Neil Davidson ’ s Book 209

Moore, Barrington 1973 [1966], Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and
Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Moss, Bernard H. 1976, The Origins of the French Labor Movement 1830–1914: The
Socialism of Skilled Workers, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Paschukanis, Eugen 1966 [1929], Allgemeine Rechtslehre und Marxismus. Versuch einer
Kritik der juristischen Grundbegriffe, Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Neue Kritik.
Polanyi, Karl 1977 [1944], The Great Transformation. Politische und ökonomische
Ursprünge von Gesellschaften und Wirtschaftssystemen, Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp.
Robin, Régine 1977 [1971], ‘ “Fief” und “Seigneurie” im Recht und in der juristischen
Ideologie am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Feudalismus. Materialen zur Theorie und
Geschichte, edited by Ludolf Kuchenbuch and Bernd Michael, Frankfurt am Main:
Ullstein.
Steinfeld, Robert J. 2001, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labour in the Nineteenth Century,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Teschke, Benno 2005, ‘Bourgeois Revolution, State Formation and the Absence of the
International’, Historical Materialism, 13, 2: 3–26.
Wood, Ellen Meiksins 1999, The Origin of Capitalism, New York: Monthly Review Press.

Historical Materialism 27.3 (2019) Downloaded

191–209 from Brill.com03/04/2020 09:45:24PM by juan@grigera.com.ar
via Juan Grigera