Privilege and Property: The Political Foundations of Failed Class Formation in Eighteenth-Century Austrian Lombardy

The distinction between state and civil society is deeply rooted in both sociology and political theory (Barkey and Parikh 1991:525; Bobbio 1999:115; Habermas 1989:19). Even thinkers who argue that civil society and the state ‘interact’ often retain the basic conceptual opposition between the terms. Barkey and Parikh go so far as to characterize recent work on the state as “the state-society literature” (1991:524). Within sociology, however, there is less theoretical discussion of what connects state and society—political society— or the way that interests in civil society are constituted as claims on the state. But as the Sardinian Marxist Antonio Gramsci pointed out in his Prison Notebooks, and the German sociologist Max Weber is his essay on class, status and parties, political society is reducible neither to interests in civil society, nor to the state (Gramsci 1971:138–40; Weber 1946:194; see also Poulantzas 1976: 95; Przeworski 1985:67; Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin 1991:1153; Wright 1978: 103, 222). Following in this Gramscian and Weberian tradition, the central theoretical point of this paper is to show how the structure of political society matters for group formation. More specifically, this paper addresses the question: what is the autonomous effect of political society on class formation, understood as the degree to which a group with a common relationship to the means of production organizes itself politically on the basis of that relationship? My main theoretical argument is that a political society, in which actors make claims on the state in terms of privileges attached to residence, rather than property ownership, inhibits class formation even when other factors, such as the relations of production, state pressure, and culture, promote it. Where such a political organization is not broken, class formation will not occur even in the presence of strong economic, state-centered, and cultural pressures.