Proletarii

Here Toynbee explains what he means by the term “proletariat” in A Study of History. In a word, non-stakeholders. Christians began as an “internal proletariat” in the Roman Empire. Barbarians were an “external proletariat”. The term, as he uses it, has a strong resonance for a European in 2006.

The word “proletariat” is used here and hereafter in this Study to mean any social element or group which in some way is “in” but not “of” any given society at any given stage of such society’s history. That is, it is used in the sense of the Latin word proletarius from which it is derived. In Roman legal terminology, proletarii were citizens who had no entry against their names in the census except their progeny (proles). The following definition is given in the Compendiosa Doctrina per Litteras of Nonius Marcellinus: “Proletarii dicti sunt plebeii qui nihil rei publicae exhibeant sed tantum prolem sufficiant.” (Quoted by Bruns, C.C., in Fontes Iuris Romani Antiqui, ed. 7 (Tübingen 1909, Mohr), Pars Posterior, p. 65.)

He is usually called Nonius Marcellus. “Marcellinus” may be an error. He was a late third- or early fourth-century lexicographer and grammarian, and is sometimes called the “Peripatetic of Thubursicum” (a town in Numidia, now Khamissa in Algeria, and probably his birthplace).

In any case, the word proletarii goes back at least to Servius Tullius, one of the Etruscan kings.

To say that “proletarians” contribute nothing to the community but their progeny is a euphemism for saying that the community gives them no remuneration for any other contributions that they may make (whether voluntarily or under compulsion) to the common weal. In other words, a “proletariat” is an element or group in a community which has no “stake” in that community beyond the fact of its physical existence.

Proletarii referred to an economic class, but Toynbee gives “proletariat” a wider application: “stake” includes spiritual and emotional stakes. Christians were a proletariat.

It is in this broad sense [of non-stakeholder] that the word “proletariat” is used throughout this Study, and not in the specialized sense of an urban labouring population which employs the modern Western economic technique called “Industrialism” and is employed under the modern Western economic régime called “Capitalism”. This restricted usage of the word, which is current to-day, was given this currency by Karl Marx, as one of the technical terms which he coined in order to convey the results of his study of history. More than one of these Marxian coinages have become current even among people who reject the Marxian dogmas.

A Study of History, Vol I, OUP, 1934 (footnote)