请将“Sanctioning of conditions of appropriation by ruling power
Scholarly discussion of the forms of appropriation of the developed ancien régime, and the structural context of its material reproduction, has been domi-nated in the last few decades by two sets of questions: the question of the modernisation potential of absolutist state power, and the debate on the causes of the French Revolution. As far as the first of these goes, it is now in a state of unravelling. When the concept of absolutism was still unchallenged, the task of research was only to explain the details of government develop- mental policy in each national state, but as the concept of absolutism has been challenged, the idea of systematic mercantilist economic promotion has also been somewhat shaken. Little is now heard of the celebrated French heroes of mercantilism, Sully and Colbert, and Colbertism, which had previously been seen as a particularly systematic case of development ‘from above', is nowa-days described as a mere illusion, or even a fiscal and bureaucratic obstacle to development. Of all the results of this historical revision, what especially stands out at this time is the demonstration that there was scarcely anything at the time that could be described as a national market, that peasant production - especially that of poorer peasants in the more remote districts - was involved in market relations to a far lesser extent than was previously thought, and above all, that legal texts say little or nothing about actual economic relations, or even actual government policies in the provinces. As to a new assessment of the importance that the specifically French form of generalised rule and concrete political strategies had for material relations, there have been general proposals - above all Robert Brenner's thesis of the structural importance of the French state as an independent institution of exploitation135 and George C. Comninel's analytical concept of an economy of owners of land and office - but no analysis of the overall connection that systematises the results of recent decades.
The situation is very similar in respect to the second of the debates men-tioned above. The explanatory concept of the French Revolution that was previously dominant has been dismantled, but no new one established in its place. Whilst criticism of the concept of absolutism proceeded more or less unchallenged, criticism of the so-called ‘social interpretation of the French Revolution' has been the object of bitter struggle between opposing schools. For the question of the social-structural causes of the Revolution involves a debate not only between scholarly and political positions, but between entire world-views. The ‘social interpretation' applies to the French Revolution a Marxian concept of the ‘bourgeois revolution' as a social transformation and consequently also a political one. In the view of its champions and its opponents alike, this interpretation needed to prove that both material reproduction and forms of rule before the Revolution were still dominated by feudal forms. ‘Feudalism', in this context, was broadly interpreted (extending for example 
to the purchase of landed property by bourgeois and newly ennobled). At all events, according to this interpretation, the Revolution was a confrontation between a feudal-aristocratic class and an alliance of oppressed classes that was dominated by the bourgeoisie. The opponents of this Marxist interpreta-tion (most clearly formulated by Albert Soboul), grouped under the rubric of 'revisionists', maintained that feudalism had disappeared long before the Revolution, and that the Revolution, far from accelerating capitalist develop-ment, actually interrupted it. There was no social need for the Revolution, which rather arose accidentally from a situation of political crisis.
The bitter dispute between these two orientations covers a surprising agreement in certain theoretical assumptions. In both interpretations, the Revolution is assessed in respect to its social-structural preconditions, and in both cases, focus is on the relationship between social-structural (especially economic) basis and form of rule, implying a separation between economic and political spheres; finally, they also share the common assumption that the structures of material reproduction must be described either as capitalist, as feudal, or as a transitional form understood as a mixture of the two.
Successful revisionist criticism of the thesis of a persistence of feudalism through to the Revolution, and the analytically unsatisfactory notion of a 'transition', were the points of departure for structuralist improvements of the social interpretation, developed especially by Régine Robin. This author based herself on the concept of 'diachrony' developed by Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar. In this conception, a transitional social formation involves non-correspondences [décalages] between the various instances of a society. This is explained by a double reference to the structure of two modes of production, or to put it another way, by the articulation of two modes of production. The advantage of this concept lay in the possibility it offered to integrate all those research results that contradicted the traditional Marxist interpretation of the society of the ancien régime. The impression could thus be given that the new orientation in a certain sense combined the advantages of both revisionist and Marxist schools, for, whilst it remained undoubtedly superior to the revisionist historians in its structural-analytic systematisation, it accepted, on the other hand, the criticism of the view that the nobility were the bearer of a feudal mode of production, and the bourgeoisie the bearer of a still oppressed capitalist mode of production. On closer examination, however, the theoretical gain is somewhat limited. The concept of social formation as an articulation of one or more modes of production does indeed permit a classification of research results, but, since this conceptual apparatus is purely descriptive, it does not itself contain any theory of the developmental dynamic of a specific social formation that goes beyond the traditional teleology in which capitalism follows from feudalism. This criticism is confirmed by the fact that no explanation is even given of how and why capitalist relations of exploitation should arise in a non-capitalist world - at first in isolation, but eventually coming to prevail over feudal relations. Instead of this, the articulation of a capitalist mode of production - i.e. of an established structural context - is projected back into a precapitalist society.
To sum up, in the scholarly discussion of the last few decades, the ‘social interpretation' of the French Revolution as a watershed between two modes of production, and as a class struggle in which ‘bourgeoisie' and ‘nobles' faced each other in opposing class camps, was criticised, but no new explanation of the Revolution developed. The revisionist school was not just concerned to rebut the necessity of the Revolution, it refused even to analyse the structural preconditions for its possibility. In this connection, the question of the structural context of material reproduction under the ancien régime has once more come onto the agenda. This analysis however lies outside the scope of the work presented here.
In the following section, we shall only be able to explain some particular structural features. These will serve to make clear that the developmental dynamic of the ‘economy' of the French ancien régime can only be grasped theoretically if it is borne in mind that the organisation of appropriation was an element of the generalised rule, in other words, that the traditionally separation of research areas into economic and political history necessarily overlooks the structural dynamic of material reproduction under the ancien régime.
The social form of appropriation under the ancien régime was distinguished from both feudalism and capitalism by the structural feature of privilege. Privileges were opportunities for provision and enrichment that were sanc-tioned by power, rights that represented a particular kind of private property. The structure of privileges arose from the generalisation of personal rule. Since generalised rule enabled customary rights to be validated at law, and sanctioned within definite limits the power of the lords, especially in the forms of seigneurial rule and church rule, it transformed the varied results of long 
social conflicts - such as the right to glean on the lords' harvested land, the right to a milling monopoly or the favourable position of guild members - into privileges that could potentially be protected by the same legal and ‘police' measures as could the privileges of merchant companies or officeholders that were directly institutionalised by the generalised rule. Since relevant elements of appropriation were integrated in this way into the structures of generalised rule (what we would today call ‘public' power), conflicts over the extent and forms of appropriation took the form of conflicts over the scope and modality of rule.
It is in this sense that I differ from the view of George C. Comninel, though I would agree with him that the structures of material reproduction before the French Revolution were neither feudal nor capitalist, nor a mixture of the two. Comninel sees the prevailing situation as an economy of owners of land and office, but, while this rightly indicates the importance of private participation in the results of centralised appropriation, it means that he sees the connection between ‘economy' and ‘state' as simply a material one. This overlooks the fact that the conditions for the constitution of interests were different so long as appropriation strategies appeared above all as struggles over rights. If the number of legal disputes concerning labour relations and conditions of peas-ant production fell dramatically after the Revolution, this not only signalled a change in the form conflicts took, but also a change in the conditions for the formulation and pursuit of demands. Conflicts that were waged over the extent and form of rule, and, in doubtful cases, were legitimised by the king through courts that he appointed, were not simply class struggles in a different guise. In this legalised structure of appropriation, it was not possessors of means of production and possessors of the commodity labour-power who confronted each other, but rather contending parties who disposed of differing rights. Michael Sonenscher has made this distinction especially clear.136 In his thesis, labour relations were structured by the rights of those involved in them, and not simply by the materially determined subjection of the economically dependent. When journeymen carpenters claimed the right to keep for themselves off-cuts of wood that were left by the production process, when a master insisted on the customary right that an apprentice living in his house-hold had to open the door in the morning for the journeymen living outside, when the peasants of a village claimed they had always had the right to graze their livestock on a meadow after the first cropping of hay, when journeymen demanded to be addressed in the polite form, and sailors refused to remain on board ship for a longer voyage than had initially been agreed, they insisted in all these cases on a 'public' regulation of their conditions of work and life that was either laid down in writing or founded in custom. The power of sanction-ing this regulation lay in the last instance with the crown. Arrangements were made even for exceptional cases, for instance when it was established that harvest workers were to be proceeded against summarily if they ganged up to demand higher wages.137”翻译为中文