AGAINST THE

NEO-MALTHUSIAN ORTHODOXY
PROFESSOR BRENNER'S ARTICLE1 HAS A DUAL MERIT: FIRST, IT
courageously attacks the Malthusian model; and secondly, it stresses

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the decisive role of the class struggle in long-term economic evolution,
notably in the pre-industrial phase of European history. On these two
points I would support my eminent colleague, but without agreeing
with his reasoning and while radically disagreeing with his
methodological orientation.

Let me first emphasize the points on which we agree. Like him I

deplore the fact that the Malthusian model should have become the
orthodox one.2 Served by the reputation of the historians who defend
it, it is crushing our historiography in its tentacles. The majority of
research workers in the medieval and modern periods draw their
inspiration from it, either implicitly or explicitly, and no longer even
feel it necessary to justify it. If perchance another analysis
challenging this orthodoxy is advanced, efforts are immediately made
to reintegrate the intruder into the Malthusian fold. In such a way it
has been possible to represent my own Crise du feodalisme3 as an
illustration and confirmation of the work of Postan and Le Roy
Ladurie. 4 And in this particular case, the "salvage" attempt rests
simply on the fact that I observed in Normandy secular fluctuations
in population, production, prices, wages and the like, which closely
approximated to those recorded in England, Languedoc and
Germany.
A second point of agreement between us lies in the importance
given to social relationships in the evolution of medieval and modern
Europe. It is here in fact that the shoe pinches in the Malthusian
analysis. Not that Postan and Le Roy Ladurie want to turn the social
dimension into an abstraction, as Professor Brenner implies. In actual
fact their work abounds in discussions of, among other things, the
1
Robert Brenner, "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-
Induslrial Europe", Past and Present, no. 70 (Feb. 1976), pp. 30-75.
1
By the Malthusian (or neo-Malthusian) model I mean, in general terms, any
model in which the principal determinants are in the last resort of a demographic
order. It would naturally be advisable to elaborate on this definition in such a way as
to take into account the distinctive positions of W. Abel, M. M. Postan and E. Le Roy
Ladurie, but that is not my object here.
3
Guy Bois, Crise dufiodalisme (Paris, 1976).
4
See the review by E. Le Roy Ladurie of my Crise du fiodalisme in Le Monde,
11 Mar. 1977: this book "is in the spirit of Postan and W. Abel, both of them
pioneers of our agrarian history. In the spirit of the old masters too, who formed the
thought of Postan and A b e l . . . . I am thinking of Ricardo and Malthus".
 AGRARIAN CLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT 61
patrimonies, incomes and levies of the various social groups, and
indeed they have played a pioneering role in this area of research. But
in the models that they have formulated, social and political
considerations are in the end subordinated to the demographic
element, to which they have assigned the determining role. Le Roy
Ladurie's "ecosystem"3 is based on the idea of a stable equilibrium
between population and resources, an equilibrium which is

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maintained by "homeostatic" control implying great persistence and
inertia in social relationships.6 It can, with apparent accuracy,
account for alternations of boom and slump, but is totally inadequate
when it comes to understanding the genesis of capitalism within the
old structures. There is nothing left for Le Roy Ladurie, conscious of
the difficulty, to do but to assign to his "ecosystem" a movement of
"drift" towards agrarian capitalism, without further specifying the
origins of this mysterious phenomenon. The formula is probably
felicitous but the explanation thin.
To summarize: Professor Brenner is right in thinking that
demographic determinism tends to obscure the role of class relations
and, on this specific point, I freely place myself on his side.

Things are less simple as soon as we leave the critical aspect of this
article and approach the propositions contained in it. Without
embarking here on an examination of the whole of this outline of a
theory of the transition to capitalism, we may take one of its principal
themes as an example: the comparison between the capitalist take-off
in England as opposed to the relative inertia of France. He tells us
that this is a question of the different balance of forces between
classes. In sixteenth-century France the peasantry is too solidly rooted
on the land to be expelled from it. Conversely, on the other side of the
Channel, it proves incapable of resisting seigneurial pressure. Hence
the movement of expropriation favouring the emergence of capitalist
relationships in the countryside which, in their turn, create the
conditions for a process of industrialization.
For the moment we may pass over the fact that it is not very clear
in this analysis why the same upsurge of agrarian capitalism (though
of variable intensity) appeared in all Western Europe at about the
same time.7 It remains true that the hypothesis put forward by
3
See E. Le Roy Ladurie, "L'histoire immobile", Annales. E.S.C., xxix (1974),
pp. 673-92.
6
"As for politics or the class struggle", writes Le Roy Ladurie, "their moment of
power is still to c o m e . . . . In the final perspective, the system contains its own
destiny; the effect of conflict is merely superficial": ibid., p. 689.
7
It is true that Professor Brenner tells us that the decline of serfdom and of forced
labour created a new situation, but this is unacceptable. The thesis on which this
rests, unfortunately sanctioned by the classics of Marxism, is belied by all recent
research. The economic bases of the system are in reality the various rent-paying
holdings within the framework of the seigneurie. And when this system disintegrated
(cont. on p. 62)
62 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 7 9

Professor Brenner is worthy of very serious consideration. What I was

able to observe in Normandy fully accords with his analysis: from
1520-30 one can see the beginnings of a tendency towards the
expulsion of tenant farmers (a faint echo of the British enclosure
movement), which in the end encountered fierce peasant resistance,
and the complex development of which would need to be followed
right through the Wars of Religion. This is the same class struggle as

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occurred in England, but the result is different because the peasantry
in France proved to be very strong.8 Unfortunately, from this point
on, Professor Brenner's analysis deteriorates. Having at the
beginning posed the hypothesis of an inequality in the relationship of
social forces in both France and England he must then find a
satisfactory explanation for this phenomenon. What does he suggest?
First, a social origin (the long history of struggle on the part of the
peasant communities on the Continent); secondly, a political one (the
connection between the strength of the peasant class and the
development of the absolutist state in France). Naturally here again
there can be no question of denying the reality and the importance of
these two phenomena. There is no doubt that the role of the
monarchical state in providing obstacles to the development of
French society from the end of the middle ages was in fact
considerable. But why should this factor be isolated? Why is it alone
thus privileged?9 And by virtue of what specific predisposition would
the French peasants have fought better than the English peasants?
Why did absolutism blossom in France and not in England? To be
fair, Professor Brenner does suggest an answer, but at best it can only
be regarded as a partial explanation. The precision which
characterizes the rest of his article shows strange signs of weakness
here. Having started from hyper-theoretical demands (the synthesis
of the capitalist advance on a Continental scale) he emerges with
conclusions which touch on empiricism and positivism (one isolated
political fact to account for the contrary fates of two societies).
Simply a false step? I see it rather as the inevitable result of an
erroneous or incomplete epistemological approach. Professor
Brenner's thought is, in fact, arranged around a single movement:
(note 7 com.)
in northern France in the fourteenth century, serfdom had long since ceased to play
any role whatsoever. In seeking the origin of the rupture Professor Brenner would in
my opinion be better advised to look to the drop in seigneurial income which drove
the ruling class to seek new solutions.
•All the same, I gladly subscribe (without having the space to justify it) to
Professor Brenner's thesis whereby the decisive part in the transition from feudalism
to capitalism is played out in the countryside. This is certainly one of the keys to the
"mystery" of the transition, though not readily perceived when one is obsessed by
the commercial and industrial manifestations of nascent capitalism.
9
In its extreme form, we have here the same defect of method for which the
Malthusian historians can be criticized when they surreptitiously introduce the
primacy of the demographic factor.
 AGRARIAN CLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT 63

theoretical generalization always precedes direct penetration into

historical source-material.10 The starting-point is the fundamental
principle of historical materialism: the driving role of the class
struggle. And he intends to verify it through decreasing abstraction,
by comparing it with available empirical data. This is characteristic
of a system of closed thought, where ideology triumphs over scientific
rationalism. The various mechanisms whereby the class struggle is

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dominant in the historical process are normally so complex and
unexpected that it is very rare that such a unilateral approach leads to
anything other than ideological short-cuts. In the present case, it
results in an imposing superstructure, impressive at first sight by
virtue of its very scale, even acceptable in certain of its general
characteristics (and precisely because they are general), but extremely
fragile as soon as one begins to excavate what should be its
foundations.
This is no mere matter of detail. To show the concrete
repercussions of our methodological divergence, we may go back to
the same problem (the comparative fate of French and English
societies) on the basis of an approach which is parallel to that of
Professor Brenner." This approach does not lead me to a vision as
global as his, but at least it makes it possible, it seems to me, to
establish a few foundations indispensable to the construction of any
global model. I will here summarize the principal propositions
resulting from an investigation which, starting with the example of
Normandy, bears on the very functioning of feudalism as a socio-
economic system or a mode of production.
In the first place, in the feudal system the rate of seigneurial levies
shows a tendency to fall which originates in the structural
contradiction of small-scale production and large-scale property.
When economic expansion draws to an end (about the middle of the
thirteenth century) the fall in the rate of levy is no longer offset by the
appearance of new tenures, with the result that seigneurial income in
its turn tends to decrease. The crisis of the feudal system is bound up
with this phenomenon: the dominant class does not succeed in
maintaining the economic basis of its hegemony. This takes place
against a background of social and political confrontations the result
of which is, on the one hand, the strengthening of the middling

™ A fortiori when one utilizes material collected by others.

11
In formulating this hypothesis, I have adhered to the following two precepts:
first, "pre-eminence of the historical method by as heavily researched an
investigation as possible of the economic fans, and by the continuous confrontation
of the partial theoretical hypotheses with reality; this in order to save oneself from
the risk of speculation"; secondly, "the maintenance of the direction of research
towards its ultimate objective: the global comprehension of a socio-economic system,
because as soon as one strays, however little, from this objective, the slide into
empiricism is not long delayed". Bois, Criie dufiodalisme, pp. 18-19.
64 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 7 9

peasantry and, on the other, the hypertrophy of the machinery of the

state (royal absolutism). The consequence is a profound rearrange-
ment of the production relationship, characterized by the addition to
direct seigneurial levies of a centralized levy organized by the royal
administration to the almost exclusive advantage of the seigneurial
class."
Secondly, there are secular movements, specific to the feudal

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economy, causing the alternation of economic (or demographic)
growth and stagnation or recession, and also originating from the
structure of feudalism (hegemony of small-scale production and
extensive character of growth). Constant economic and social
phenomena are linked to these movements: the upsurge of
agricultural prices and the relative fall of industrial prices, wages and
productivity during movements of growth, and vice versa. This is
indispensable to an understanding of the origins of agrarian capitalism
because every movement of growth creates economic conditions
which are ever more favourable both to the expansion of the
dimensions of the unit of production and also to a wider recourse to
the wage-earning labour force, while at the same time it increased the
pauperization of the day-labourers.
In short, there is an original dynamic of the long term, a dynamic
which carries within itself, in each of its phases of growth, a
movement of land accumulation opening the way to new production
relationships, as in the twelfth to the thirteenth, and the sixteenth to
the eighteenth centuries.
Thirdly, the first half of the sixteenth century is marked by a
sudden upsurge of agrarian capitalism in Western Europe: this is the
period when the seigneurial class, which had for centuries made great
efforts to tie the peasantry to its holdings, decided to increase the
demesne at the expense of holdings and to recruit hired labour. Why?
Because, quite simply, of the very low level of the various rents levied
on those holdings — the long-term tendency referred to above had
reached a critical point. The result was that the accumulation of
landed property (associated with the onset of the Renaissance) was
further increased.
These three propositions, which do not follow from any pre-
established scheme but from strict observation of the facts, in my
opinion constitute the bases from which can be formulated a
hypothesis — and I deliberately say a hypothesis — on the divergent
evolution of France and England. The hypothesis is as follows: it is
12
In this respect it is not possible to accept the term "independent extractor of the
surplus", which Professor Brenner uses to describe the monarchical state: Brenner,
op. cit., p. 68. The state remains, for the most part, the instrument of feudalism, even
if the use to which this instrument was actually put served in the long term to weaken
feudalism by competing with direct seigneurial extraction.
 AGRARIAN CLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT 65

inequalities in the world of feudal production (and not this or that

political or social factor!) which are at the root of the divergence.
At the end of the thirteenth century, northern France was the
region where feudalism was most advanced. By the density of its
population, the volume of its agricultural production, and its place in
international exchanges, it influenced the whole of Western Europe in
the way that any dominant economy does. But, above all, the feudal

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system can be seen there — where it had its origins — in its purest
and most advanced forms: small-scale production had irresistibly
established itself at the expense of seigneurial demesnes, and the
erosion of seigneurial levies was most marked (decline or
disappearance of forced labour, weakening of the real value of fixed
money rent, and so on). At the same period England exhibits an
evident backwardness in this respect. In England, where feudalism
had come later (and was partly imported), there are numerous
archaisms: the larger role of forced labour and the manorial
economy; the more recent and weaker assertion of the rights of
landholders; finally backwardness at the level of growth itself.
In these circumstances it can readily be appreciated that, roughly
speaking, the crisis of feudalism, although it still has a European
character, has its epicentre in the kingdom of France. It was there
that the "blockage" to growth and the decline in seigneurial revenues
took their most acute forms. Shaken to its very foundations the
system had to generate the remedies necessary to its survival, in the
forefront of which figured royal taxation and the development of
those monarchical or princely institutions which guaranteed both the
functioning of fiscal extraction and the maintenance of the tottering
social order. In England on the other hand, the effects of the crisis
were less severe, and for two reasons: first, because, as a result of its
relative backwardness, the English economy had run up against its
ceiling of growth less brutally than the French; and secondly, because
the English nobility was (at least temporarily) able to resolve some of
its own difficulties at the expense of its French counterpart 13 by
means of the convulsions attendant upon the Hundred Years' War,
which served to weaken and even exhaust the kingdom of France.
It is probably from that point that the origins of the divergence in
the development of the two societies can be discerned. France, once
the storm had passed and the restructuring of its feudalism had been
accomplished (that is, by the middle of the fifteenth century),
plunged, by means of the traditional mechanism of the feudal
economy, into a phase of new growth — or rather, recovery — which
carried within itself (as has been said earlier) an upsurge of agrarian
capitalism. Moreover, through the influence that it continued to

" Which worsened the French crisis accordingly.

66 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 7 9
14
exercise over the European economy, it stimulated in regions
beyond its own frontiers developments in the direction of capitalism.
But it had itself gone too far in the logic of feudalism for any such
expansion in new capitalist relationships to attain within its own
boundaries the critical threshold beyond which such a trend would
become irreversible: the peasants resisted expropriation here better
than elsewhere, because the tenants were already beginning to appear

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as proprietors (an effect, in the final analysis, of the long-term fall in
the rate of levy): and the lords, who had found some measure of
salvation in the service of the state, were less inclined than elsewhere
to explore new economic avenues. All in all, French society fell victim
to its own advanced level of development. By virtue of having, to a
large degree, led the way in the formation of European feudalism and
been the first to come up against a ceiling of growth, its own
restructuring was impeded. It remained ultimately the main driving
force of a capitalist evolution the effects of which, however, were
more on its margins than within itself.
England by contrast was best placed to take advantage of these
developments. Sufficiently near to the most advanced feudal societies
to have a high level of technical resource at her disposal, she was also
sufficiently undeveloped to have escaped the consequences of the
fossilization of social relations which feudal reorganization induced.
The persisting crisis in seigneurial incomes, exemplified during the
Wars of the Roses, forced the nobility to look for new economic
solutions to their difficulties, a tendency which the general European
situation encouraged. And this nobility was faced with a peasantry
whose rights had been too well established for a return to serfdom to
be possible, but not sufficiently established to enable it to maintain
control of the land when faced with seigneurial pressure. In other
words, the relative backwardness of its social evolution as compared
to that of France was to prove its trump card in the transition from
feudalism to capitalism.
As can readily be seen, the hypothesis here put forward differs from
that of Professor Brenner on two important points. First, the birth of
capitalism is considered here as a product of the functioning of the
feudal system in its general socio-economic mechanisms and must be
studied not in the framework of a specific inquiry in isolation, but
rather on the scale of the European development of feudalism as a
whole, the various elements of which are indissolubly linked."
Secondly, the idea of the inequality of development within this whole
14
Note, for example, the significant fluctuation of cereal prices in fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century Europe, which closely reflects changes in the level of population.
15
This is why Professor Brenner's comparative method does not seem very
convincing to me: it ends up by retaining only the internal elements of differentiation
within a particular society, at the expense of such external relationships as may exist
between neighbouring societies.
 AGRARIAN CLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT 67

appears to be fundamental. Variations in both the age and the degree

of maturity of the feudal system in one place as compared with
another probably play a leading and certainly a very complex role in
the rhythms which then affect the emergence and development of the
capitalist structures. 16 This is moreover a phenomenon which is
found again mutatis mutandis in the evolution of contemporary
capitalist societies.

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Finally, a few more general conclusions remain to be drawn on the
significance and importance of the divergences of analysis which
divide Professor Brenner and myself. It might be tempting to
minimize them by emphasizing the many points on which we agree,
and where our two analyses coincide, and even to defend the idea that
the two hypotheses, although proceeding by different methods,
interlock and complement one another. This would, however, be
misleading. It is of more consequence to note the differences between
our methods and to scrutinize their theoretical bases. Our different
methodologies are in effect two different applications of the theory of
historical materialism.
Professor Brenner's Marxism is "political Marxism" in reaction to
the wave of economist tendencies in contemporary historiography. As
the role of the class struggle is widely underestimated, so he injects
strong doses of it into historical explanation. I do not question the
motivation behind such a reaction, but rather the summary and
purely ideological manner in which it is implemented. It amounts to a
volontarist vision of history in which the class struggle is divorced
from all other objective contingencies and, in the first instance, from
such laws of development as may be peculiar to a specific mode of
production. Could one imagine accounting for the nature of the
development of capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
solely by reference to social factors, and without bringing into the
picture the law of capitalist accumulation and its mainspring, that is
to say the mechanism of surplus value?
In fact, the result of Professor Brenner's approach is to deprive the
basic concept of historical materialism, that is the mode of
production, of all real substance. It is significant in this respect that
the idea of feudalism is totally absent from his article. To characterize
"pre-industrial" society solely by reference to serfdom is both limited
and inaccurate. What are the modes of production characteristic of
feudalism? Is there a political economy peculiar to this system? Is it
either necessary or possible to investigate the laws of its development?
Professor Brenner's approach does not deal, even at a superficial
level, with any of these questions.
'• Naturally the same reasoning could be applied to Eastern Europe where the
much later emergence and consolidation of the feudal system explain the particular
vulnerability of the peasantry.
68 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 7 9

No less significant is the fact that Professor Brenner has kept silent
about the work of the Polish historian Witold Kula, who was the first
to cast a theoretical glance at the feudal system and who succeeded
in opening a wide breach in the positions of empiricism and
dogmatism.17 As long as such an attitude as that of Professor Brenner
persists, that is to say as long as there is a refusal to regard the feudal
mode of production as in itself a valid object of research, and to

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recognize that the way in which it functions still remains to "be fully
understood, penetration of the mystery of the origins of capitalism is
prevented and a tedious oscillation from empiricism to speculation
will result.
The error of such "political Marxism" lies not only in its neglect of
the most operative concept of historical materialism (the mode of
production). It also consists in its abandonment of the field of
economic realities — to the great advantage of the Malthusian
school. It is not enough to undertake a theoretical critique of the neo-
Malthusian position, or to blame its proponents for underestimating
one or other level of analysis. To be convincing and decisive, the
critique must attack the very kernel of Malthusian interpretation in
order to separate with absolute precision the valid from the invalid
elements. The whole strength of this model derives from the fact that
it is amply confirmed by detailed research: the importance of the
demographic factor, the succession of long-term trends, the existence
of ceilings of growth, and so on. By what strange perversion of
Marxism is it possible to refuse to take such firm data into account on
the absurd pretext that another theoretical construction rests upon it.
Let us take the example of the demographic factor. It is true that a
tendency to determinism (with clear ideological adaptations) has
characterized many historical works. It is nonetheless true that
demography is essential to an understanding of the development of
feudal society as a whole, for reasons which are implicit in the very
nature of the feudal mode of production, namely that small-scale
family production is the basic economic unit and that "reproduc-
tion"takes place on that scale according to an economic-demographic
process. Postan or Le Roy Ladurie should not be criticized for giving
too much importance to the demographic factor. They should on the
contrary be criticized for stopping their process in mid-stream and for
not integrating the demographic factor into the all-embracing whole
that is the socio-economic system.
The same point applies also where secular trends are concerned.
The Malthusian historians have cited in evidence a series of
correlations (prices, population, product and the like). Their error, it
17
Notably in his Tniorie iconomique du systeme fiodal (Paris and The Hague,
1970); Engliih trans., An Economic Theory of the Feudal System: Towards a Model
of the Polish Economy, 1500-1800 (London, 1976).
 AGRARIAN CLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT 69

seems to me, lies in not having followed this path still further in order
to comprehend the movement of another variable which, whatever
the socio-economic system, profoundly impregnates the forms of
growth, namely the productivity of labour. It would appear, here
also, that a movement specific to the productivity of labour (it
diminishes in phases of economic growth, and vice versa) necessarily
corresponds to the structural characteristics of feudalism (hegemony

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of the small family producer on a stable technical basis), and that this
movement is capable of clarifying that of other variables (prices,
wages, and so on).
Thus it is by the progressive elucidation of the mechanisms of the
feudal economy according to a process of increasing abstraction and
generalization that a global vision of the system can be achieved. And
it is by this course alone that we will finally come to understand by
what subtle mechanisms the class struggle plays a driving role in the
development of feudal societies.
In other words, to avoid undue emphasis on economic aspects, it is
necessary paradoxically to make not less of the economic factor, but
more. The flight into politics resolves nothing; on the contrary, it
enables economic or demographic determinism to occupy the field
uncontested.
One more comment: the approach I offer as an alternative to that
of Professor Brenner leads me to integrate some elements of the
Malthusian analysis, such as the concept of the population/resources
scissors.18 This can make the various demarcation lines between the
Malthusian and Marxist approaches more difficult to discern; it can
even — when the desire for polemic gains the upper hand — lay me
open to the charge of neo-Malthusianism. This is, however,
ultimately of little account because sooner or later it will be observed
that the integration of these elements into a global model, stripped of
all demographic determinism, deprives these elements of their former
ideological weight.

Such, in brief, are some observations that Professor Brenner's

article suggests to me. His great virtue is to have revived discussion
and to have challenged a large number of accepted ideas. By doing so,
he has invited a frank response. I have therefore tried to show that,
beyond the few points on which we are in agreement, there is a
methodological gulf that divides us. The problem exceeds, and
exceeds considerably, the subject dealt with in his article. It touches
on the very nature of historical materialism.
University of Besanfon Guy Bois

>• By linking it to the tendency of the productivity of labour to decline.