Rafe Blaufarb. The Great Demarcation

When France’s revolutionary National Assembly announced in August 1789 that it had abolished the “feudal regime,” it actually took a huge step toward a much larger project, according to Rafe Blaufarb’s deeply original analysis in The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property. The revolutionary legislators were engaged in separating a realm of public political power from individually owned private property. On the one hand, ownership by individual persons was to be disentangled from the great variety of “feudal” rights that came along with property; and on the other hand, public functions were no longer to be understood as something that could be purchased or inherited. The termination of venal office-holding, the seizure of Church property, and the ending of lords’ claims to operate courts or demand displays of deference were all aspects of the “great demarcation” of the title (1–3). A generation ago, historians of the French Revolution were debating whether to characterize it as primarily a “political” or a “social” revolution, but Blaufarb argues that more deeply it was a “constitutional” revolution, one that created our modern categories of the political and the social (48). The book’s elegant argument proposes a simultaneous birth of a modern state and a modern property regime.

Argument (complex analysis) · Deference · Early Modern Europe · Feudalism · Law and economics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Private property · Property (philosophy) · Property law · Property rights · Realm · Sociology · State (computer science) · Classics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies