Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and Representative Government: 1450-1789.

This is a volume in the series "The Making of Modern Freedom." It consists of seven essays by six authors, on the connections between taxation and constitutional development in early modern Europe. The six authors discuss England (but not Scotland or Ireland), Castile (but not Aragon), France, and the United Provinces. It is a pity that some other countries were not also considered - for instance, Germany and Poland which prevents the book from providing a fully rounded picture of what was happening in Europe as a whole. But all of the essays are highly competent pieces of work, combining new research with able synthesis.

The two opening contributions are on England. David Harris Sacks offers an illuminating and wide-ranging survey of taxation and constitutional developments from the mid-fifteenth century to the eve of the Civil War. He asserts that "a new kind of argument" about such matters emerged in the early seventeenth century with the advent of "a new conception of property" as "an abstract right that inhered to the individual as part of his life." From the 1620s, he says, there also emerged "a new kind of politics - constitutional politics" (55). These important claims are illustrated with much valuable material. J.R. Jones's chapter on the reigns of the last Stuarts argues that constitutional consensus after 1688 was crucial in making possible the very high level of taxation achieved during England's wars with France for the next century and more. His discussion of James II interestingly stresses the influence of political arithmetic on that king. Augustus J. Veenendaal, Jr. talks about fiscal crises and constitutional freedom in the Netherlands. The Dutch Republic, he says, never really had a fiscal crisis though it taxed much more highly than both France and England. One important reason for this was that there was no conflict between ruler and representative body in the Netherlands, "because the representative bodies had taken the place of the ruler" (134).

Two chapters by I.A.A. Thompson survey Castile. Thompson asserts that medieval Castile was arguably "the freest society in Europe" (142). He notes but rejects the Whig thesis that parliaments are crucial in safeguarding liberty, and that Castile was unfree since its Cortes was (allegedly) subservient (181). The Cortes, he points out, flourished from the 1590s to 1620s. Later, the crown made a determined effort to recover its freedom of action, and from 1667 to 1700 the Cortes was not summoned at all. This did not mean that absolutism had triumphed or that liberty had been extinguished, for the power of local aristocrats revived to such an extent in the later seventeenth century that Castile might better be described as a republic than a monarchy. The Cortes had in any case been an unrepresentative institution which served as a defender of narrow entrenched privileges, not general liberties.

Philip T. Hoffman's discussion of early modern France stresses the limitations on the absolute power of the king and shows how fiscal crises contributed to important political and constitutional changes. Though royal power was restricted, however, liberty meant not universal rights but sectional privileges. Kathryn Norberg's chapter shows how intellectual change helped to disillusion the French with the idea of fiscal reform either through a strong monarchy or through aristocrats and representative institutions; in consequence, the financial crisis of 1788 led to the Revolution.

The editors' conclusion valiantly attempts to draw general points from the essays. It shows that the links between taxation and representative institutions were complex, and demonstrates that there was no single road to modern liberty (a term which crops up quite often in this volume, though its precise meaning is not always clear). The notion that strong representative institutions mean low taxes is, as the conclusion points out, particularly dubious, since England and the Netherlands in the eighteenth century were far more highly taxed than France or Spain; which is why the "absolutist" French crown tried to revive representative institutions.

JOHANN SOMMERVILLE University of Wisconsin, Madison