~ what passes for political economy
in the sixteenth century
From the earliest formulations of modern philosophy of property in the 17th and 18th centuries, two distinctions can be found. On the one hand, we can find the distinction between a state of propriety and a state of non-propriety – that is, a state in which a group has some kind of custom regarding responsibility for and discretion in the disposal of scarce goods, and a state in which there are no such customs. On the other hand, even those societies which did recognize property could be distinguished, on the basis of whether their customs of ownership were communal or private – to use modern terminology, communism and capitalism. In this respect, the early modern period had a slightly more subtle conception of social institutions of ownership than we have today; they could distinguish between a system in which discretion over scarce goods was exercised by a collective or communal social apparatus (socialism) and a system in which no discretion was recognized whatsoever (non-propriety), a distinction we take for granted or rarely consider. However, insofar as they had no principled or scientific means of choosing between institutions of private or public ownership, they did not yet have a fully developed science of political economy.
The first distinction, between the state of propriety and that of non-propriety, was discussed at great length by early modern writers, and it was always concluded that the role of the commonwealth was to secure some system of discretion and responsibility over scarce goods. The latter distinction, between institutions of communal or private property, was barely considered at all. In other words, the choices that early modern writers considered necessary and relevant were as follows:
Scarcity
/\
/ \
/ \
/ \
/ \
/Principled\
/ Choice \
/ Necessary \
No Ownership --> Ownership (civil state)
(state of /\
nature) / \
/ \
/ \
/ No \
/Principled\
/ Choice \
/ Necessary \
"Capitalism" <-?-> "Socialism"
We can find this distinction in many early modern writers, even as late as David Hume, but the ones I'd like to focus on here are Hugo Grotius (De Jure Belli ac Pacis, 1625), Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651), and John Locke (Two Treatises of Government, 1690).
~ grotius
Grotius is the earliest of these thinkers, so it is not surprising that his categorizations are still ambiguous and primitive. Nevertheless, the tendency toward the above schema is apparent.
Grotius, in the first place, distinguishes between that which is owned by all men by common right, and that which is held by private individuals. "Now some things are ours by a right we share with all other men, some by our individual right." (Grotius 78) This corresponds to a division inherent in the nature of things, that some can be "occupied" or held by a single person, and others can't be; and of those things that can be held, some will have been, and some will not. "Things corporeal are either unappropriated, or are already the property of someone. Things unappropriated may be either reducible to a state of private property or may not be." (ibid.) This is a pretty clear distinction between private ownership and the state of nature.
Before material things were specifically appropriated by any human, appropriation of anything occurred only at the very point of consumption, when privation from the common pool of resources was necessary; otherwise, everything was common. These were the terms of God's gift of the earth to man:
At the first creation of the world God gave to mankind in general dominion over all things of inferior nature, a grant renewed upon the restoration of the world after the Deluge.... Accordingly, every man could take at once for his own use whatever he wanted and consume whatever was consumable; the general exercise of this right supplied the place of private property. For to deprive anyone of what he had taken for himself became an act of injustice.... (op cit. 78)
This way of life, says Grotius, met the meagre immediate needs of those who kept it; "This condition of affairs could have lasted if men had continued living in great simplicity, and with remarkable charity towards one another." (op cit. 79) It endured, in some societies, into historic times – Grotius cites the Native Americans – and had been returned to by various peoples, including the Essenes, the early Christians, and some religious sects contemporary with Grotius. (ibid.) Nevertheless, it did not satisfy early man for long, and so societies came to be organized so as to take advantage of a division of labor.
But in this life of simplicity and innocence men did not long continue. They used their minds to invent various arts, the symbol of which was the tree of knowledge of good and evil, that is, the knowledge of things which may be either used well, or abused.... The most ancient arts, agriculture and pasturage, appeared with the first brothers, along with some interchange of products. (ibid.)
This early experiment, Grotius tells us, did not end well, for with mutual dependence came mutual resentment, "rivalry, even murder." Eventually only the Deluge was enough to sweep away the tide of violence. But even postdiluvian man was ruled by "a greed for pleasure, to which wine made its contribution;" it seemed that mankind would be doomed when that "nobler vice, namely, ambition" came to prevail among man's passions. (ibid.) The ultimate expression of this was that the land itself was divvied up: "Later on, men divided up the land and took possession of different parts." (ibid.) This division was not absolute; "Even after this there was still among neighbors a common ownership of land for pasture," though even then, pastureland was shared "not, as formerly, between tribes, but between families." (ibid.)
In spite of all this general resentment, a productive division of labor and a functioning property system was still necessary for anyone who was "no longer content to live on the spontaneous products of the earth, or to dwell in caves, or to go about naked, except when wrapped in the bark of trees or the skins of wild beasts, and wanted a pleasanter way of life." (op cit. 80) Such a system eventually developed, so that private ownership in a good could be acquired "either [by] some express agreement, as for a division, or a tacit understanding, as for simple occupation." (ibid.) Contract and convention make a stable property system possible. Whatever was owned could be divided and traded, and whatever was unowned could be occupied. (op cit. 81)
So, although Grotius makes modest reservations to the scope of property rights to account for emergencies (op cit. 82) and for "harmless use" (op cit. 84), it would seem that we generally have a fairly specific distinction between the state of nature in which everything is common to all, on the one hand, and a civil state of private property, on the other hand. However, when Grotius applies the principles he discussed to concrete cases, we see that things are not nearly as clear-cut as all that – there is a hint of this in his mention of the "property of the people, or of the governor of that people," which might be held over rivers. (op cit. 85) There is, Grotius tells us, another form of "taking possession of things that belong to no one" (op cit. 90); this other form he calls "sovereignty."
Private property as such, Grotius tells us, is not really necessary for human society to function; sovereignty is adequate, if the claim to sovereignty has precedence over a claim to ownership. "In a place over which sovereignty is already established, the right to occupy and take possession of movables may be abolished by the law of the state. For that right was a permission of the law of nature, not a command that could be perpetually enforced. It is not a requirement of human society." (op cit. 90) Sovereignty itself is "owned" either by a king, or by the republic that appoints the king (op cit. 110), and is conferred or alienated according to the will of whoever "owns" it. (op cit. 110-111) It is, in effect, a way for the public or social body to exercise discretion over goods, in lieu of private owners.
Grotius believes that sovereignty is a useful institution in many cases, and especially with regard to maritime conventions. Though he took it to be inconceivable that someone could homestead the sea,* it was relatively easy for a naval power to exert sovereignty over those who would pass through the waters it claimed as its "own." "To acquire mere sovereignty over a part of the sea, without any proprietary rights, has not been difficult, nor do I think the law of nations... forbids it." (op cit. 92) The agreements which nations make between one another regarding sea lanes is proof of this, for which the naval power claiming sovereignty over an area of sea can be held responsible. Grotius gives the example of the Athenians, whom the Argives accused of violating treaty when the Athenians permitted the Spartans, enemies of the Argives, to traverse Athenian waters; the implication is that the Athenians could exercise their sovereignty to keep out the Spartans, and were obliged to do so by their agreement with the Argives. (op cit. 92) This responsibility also entitles the sovereign maintaining and guarding the coasts and lanes to charge a toll to cover their costs, as the Romans did in the Red Sea. (op cit. 93)
So, as we can see, Grotius makes two levels of distinction. On the one hand, he distinguishes between the state in which all things are naturally held in common, by divine grace, on the one hand, and a state of law in which things fall under the claims of private owners. Nevertheless, he still sets aside a third category for things that fall under the claims of "sovereignty." Although sovereignty can be claimed over private goods or naturally common goods, Grotius recognizes sovereignty as itself something that is "owned" by the social body (the hereditary ruler or the people who elect their representative), and therefore "sovereignty" is simply another term for public ownership.
Between public ownership ("sovereignty") and private ownership ("property"), considerations of historical precedent, convenience, and morality prevail. There is no sense of making a principled decision on the basis of necessary consequences following from the nature of either option. This is therefore not political economy.
* Grotius's reasoning in this matter is inconsistent. Occupation, Grotius argues, must precede division; the whole must be owned before the parts can be distributed or traded. He suggests that, because water is liquid, it can only be occupied if it is bounded by a specific finite container, as a lake is confined by its shores, or a river by its bed. There is more ocean than land on the surface of the earth, though, and so, Grotius argues, it is unbounded; if anything, it's the ocean which bounds the land. (Grotius 81) But if this were true, it would be utterly unclear how anyone could ever acquire private ownership of any piece of land, or at least, land that wasn't a small island. Almost all land is continuous with other land, and it is absurd to suggest that any ancient party seized occupation of entire continents before apportioning it among themselves. If land can be appropriated in chunks or plots, it is conceivable that the sea could also be so claimed, even if Grotius (living in a time before a reliable means of measuring longitude was discovered) could not see a specific means according to which such plots could be defined – though, if naval powers have any way of defining in treaty or in practice the sea-lanes they control, it should have been obvious that the same means of definition could be used by private fleets to claim sea-surface. Surface, of course, is an area and does not change, regardless of the fluidity of that which is under it; the same is patently true of air, which is controlled by the person who owns the land under it, as Grotius himself points out (op cit. 82).
~ hobbes
For Hobbes, the commonwealth was constituted for the sake of having in place some method of exercising discretion over resources. In Leviathan, Hobbes maintains that:
... before the names just and unjust can have place, there must be some coercive power ... to make good that propriety which by mutual contract men acquire in recompense of the universal right they abandon.... And therefore where there is no own, that is, no propriety, there is no injustice; and where there is no coercive power erected, that is, where there is no commonwealth, there is no propriety, all men having right to all things; therefore where there is no commonwealth, there is nothing unjust. So that the nature of justice consisteth in keeping of valid covenants; but the validity of covenants begins not but with the constitution of a civil power sufficient to compel men to keep them; and then it is also that propriety begins. (Hobbes 108-109)
This is vital, Hobbes tells us, because "where there is no commonwealth there is ... a perpetual war of every man against his neighbour, and therefore everything is his that getteth it and keepeth it by force, which is neither propriety nor community, but uncertainty." (op cit. 184)
It follows, for Hobbes, that because it is the commonwealth that constitutes a system of ownership, the commonwealth has the right to dictate what that system of ownership is to be. "[I]t is annexed to the sovereignty the whole power of prescribing the rules whereby every man may know what goods he may enjoy and what actions he may do without being molested by his fellow subjects; and this is it men call propriety." (op cit. 134) In effect, it is not just that a system of property delegates discretion over scarce goods to its citizens (which could be said even of a system of absolute private property); it is that the person of the sovereign distributes goods, as well as rights of ownership, to his subjects.
Seeing therefore the introduction of propriety is an effect of commonwealth, which can do nothing but by the person that represents it, it is the act only of the sovereign and consisteth in the laws, which none can make that have not the sovereign power. And this they well knew of old, who called that nomos (that is to say, distribution) which we call law, and defined justice, by distributing to every man his own. (op cit. 185)
Thus, the right of an owner to exclude the discretion of others from the disposal of the goods he owns can never afford him similar protection from his sovereign's will. The sovereign always reserves the right to arbitrate over the distribution or exchange of goods. "[T]he propriety which a subject hath in his lands consisteth in a right to exclude all other subjects from the use of them, and not to exclude their sovereign, by it an assembly or a monarch." (op cit. 185) In effect, in order for the security of the commonwealth to be assured, the sovereign must be the de jure owner of all goods, because the sovereign acts to cement the security of his subjects:
For seeing the sovereign, that is to say, the commonwealth (whose person he representeth), is understood to do nothing but in order to the common peace and security, this distribution of land is to be understood as done in order to the same; and consequently, whatsoever distribution he shall make in prejudice thereof is contrary to the will of every subject that committed his peace and safety to his discretion and conscience, and therefore by the will of every one of them is to be reputed void. (op cit. 185-186)
This is what defines propriety, for Hobbes: the commonwealth has the power to implement the system of discretion that best secures the interests of its subjects.
In itself, this is not necessarily a controversial proposition, since any stable government must have a functioning chancery which has powers such as those Hobbes gives his commonwealth, to enforce the civil laws that define responsibility and tort. But what is the scope of the sovereign's right to allocate, distribute, and intervene in the economic sphere? How can we judge the civil laws that the sovereign implements; how can we assess their real contribution to the security of the subjects? Hobbes tells us that "The Office of the sovereign (be it a monarch or an assembly) consisteth in ... the procuration of the safety of the people.... But by safety here is not meant a bare preservation, but also all other contentments of life, which every man by lawful industry, without danger or hurt to the commonwealth, shall acquire to himself." (op cit. 249) It is the duty of the sovereign to secure a good standard of living for his subjects. In order to maintain confidence and preserve security, the sovereign must make "good laws" (op cit. 259), that is to say, laws which are "needful, for the good of the people, and withal perspicuous." (ibid.)
Of course, it is a platitude to say that a good law must be needful, beneficial, and perspicuous. The question of political economy, though, is whether we can find principles by which we can determine the beneficence of a law before we implement it. Hobbes is quiet on this point, except to maintain that a principle of private ownership so absolute as to exclude even the sovereign's direction is an evil to security. The absolute right of private ownership is one of the pernicious doctrines he identifies in chapter 29: "A fifth doctrine that tendeth to the dissolution of a commonwealth is that every private man has an absolute propriety in his goods, such as excludeth the right of the sovereign." (op cit. 242) The reason, Hobbes says, is that the sovereign must exercise his will over the subject's property in the course of defending the subject from crime and from foreign hostility:
Every man has indeed a propriety that excludes the right of every other subject; and he has it only from the sovereign power, without the protection whereof every other man should have right to the same. But the right of the sovereign also be excluded, he cannot perform the office they have put him into, which is to defend them both from foreign enemies and from the injuries of one another, and consequently there is no longer a commonwealth. (ibid.)
Of course, this idea suffers from a serious error in itself,** but what is more significant to our current discussion is that there is no sense of any positive guideline by which we could determine whether a sovereign's exercise of will would be beneficial or needful. We are told that the sovereign is an expert in matters of security, and wherein lies his credential as expert is not our concern; we need not trouble our heads over whether the sovereign understands the full economic consequences of his actions, and can blindly submit to his direction knowing that it is his duty to make only laws that are needful and beneficial – and, of course, the sovereign will fulfil his duty.
So, in Hobbes, we see, first, that there is a clear and rational basis for choosing some system of ownership over the constant war and uncertainty which characterizes a state of nature without any institution of ownership. We also see that there is something of a determination with respect to the matter of whether a society is to be organized according to the principle of private or public discretion in the disposal of scarce goods, and that, in theory at least, the public is to reserve unilaterally the right of discretion. The two articulations of early modern political economy are here. But Hobbes is unable to offer a critical evaluation of this choice according to his own standards of need, beneficence, and perspicuity. In short, in Hobbes, we have not yet reached an ordered science of political economy.
** The error I have in mind is a bit beyond the scope of what I want to talk about in this paper, but in short, it is something like this. The sovereign's job is not simply to keep his subject alive at any cost, even if it be in an altogether squalid and wretched state. On the contrary; according to Hobbes, the sovereign's job is to protect the standard of living of the subject. If, however, the sovereign reserves the right to stomp all over the subject's own wealth and means of enjoying his own life on his own terms, in the name of protecting him, he stands to become a tyrant, and it is no longer clear whether the threat from which the sovereign alleges he is protecting his subject really is more of a threat to the subject than the sovereign himself. In other words, if the sovereign doesn't need to worry about protecting his subject's property (and therefore, his subject's means to maintain and advance his life as he desires), what, exactly, is he protecting? On the other hand, if the threat from which the sovereign endeavors to protect the subject is manifestly more destructive than the steps the sovereign must take to counter it, the subject would be willing to put his goods under the care of the sovereign anyway. His absolute private discretion, in this case, would not interfere with his protector's office. Hobbes's assumption, of course, is that the sovereign always knows what is a threat, and the subject doesn't; this is all just part and parcel with Hobbes's apotheosizing of the king, attributing to him preternatural powers and making Leviathan into a new god.
~ locke
We find a similar structure in the arguments of John Locke, although he reaches somewhat different conclusions. Locke begins with the premise that God gave the Earth to all men to hold in common, as a species: "'[T]is very clear, that God ... has given the Earth to the Children of Men, given it to Mankind in common." (Locke 286) It is clear that Adam, as the first beneficiary of this gift, did not give exclusive dominion to the Earth through a chain of heredity, as was the custom of Locke's contemporary landholders: "I will not content my self to answer, That if it be difficult to make out Property, ... it is impossible that any Man, but one universal Monarch, should have any Property, upon a supposition, that God gave the world to Adam, and his Heirs in Succession, exclusive of all the rest of his Posterity." (ibid.) On the other hand, when Locke says "in common," he does not mean that God necessarily intends for man to administer land communally as a species, because the task he sets before himself is "to shew, how Men might come to have a property in several parts of that which God gave to Mankind in common, and that without any express Compact of all the Commoners" (ibid.), which compact would be necessary if there were any sense that the Earth was given to men to be administered as a socialist commonwealth. Thus, as far as Locke is concerned, the proposition that God gave the Earth to mankind to enjoy does not, in itself, imply any particular system of exercising discretion over the fruits of the Earth.
It is clear, though, that mankind must exercise discretion somehow. If there is no way people can exercise discretion over scarce goods, there is no way they can use those goods to sustain or develop their standard of living. This is the origin of human institutions of property.
And though all the Fruits [the earth] naturally produces, and the Beasts it feeds, belong to Mankind in common, as they are produced by the spontaneous hand of Nature; and no body has originally a private Dominion, exclusive of the rest of Mankind, in any of them, as they are thus in their natural state: yet being given for the use of Men, there must of necessity be a means to appropriate them some way or other before they can be of any use, or at all beneficial to any particular Man. (op cit. 286-287)
Locke's problem, then, becomes a matter of determining how property can be appropriated from the non-ownership which characterizes the state of nature, in such a way that does not defy the purpose for which God gave nature to man in the first place. In order to maintain the security of a system of ownership, Locke says, people unite in a republic: "The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealth, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property. To which in the state of Nature there are many things wanting." (op cit. 350-351)
This, however, does not necessarily lead to an absolute principle of private property, as Locke's arguments have often been characterized. In fact, Locke reserves for the state the power and right of regulating property: "Political Power then I take to be a Right of making Laws with Penalties of Death, and consequently all less Penalties, for the Regulating and Preserving of Property, and of employing the force of the Community, in the Execution of such Laws ... and all this only for the Publick Good." (op cit. 268) Note that Locke does not simply say the preservation of property – he also says the regulation of property, with the threat of harm, even death, for non-compliance. And in fact, as far as Locke is concerned, the discretion over scarce goods exercised by a public official is still a form of property, and neither defeats the purpose of ownership, nor thrusts us back into the chaos characterizing the state of nature. Social ownership is still ownership:
'Tis true, in Land that is common in England, or any other Country, where there is Plenty of People under Government, who have Money and Commerce, no one can inclose or appropriate any part, without the consent of all his Fellow-Commoners: Because this is left common by Compact, i.e. by the Law of the Land, which is not to be violated. (op cit. 292)
In other words, Locke distinguishes between that which is held in common by all mankind in principle (the state of nature before objects are appropriated of necessity), and that which is held in common by law (socialism). The latter, though communal, is still a form of ownership, because "though it be Common, in respect of some Men, it is not so to all Mankind; but is the joint property of this Country, or this Parish." (ibid.) Though it is common, it is common because it is joint property, not because it is not property at all, in the way that God's gift as a whole is not property.
If the conditions of human life require private ownership, this need does not extend to the level of land as a factor of production, and Locke offers us the fundamental socialist argument: "Besides, the remainder, after ... inclosure, would not be as good to the rest of the Commoners as the whole was, when they could make use of the whole: whereas in the beginning and first peopling of the Great Common of the World, it was quite otherwise." (ibid.) Appropriation from the state of non-ownership is permissible because the modest appropriation of which an individual is capable, Locke tells us, does not diminish the fecundity of the remainder; on the other hand, privatization of public capital does so diminish the remainder. So that, as far as Locke can tell, it does not matter whether the bounty of nature is appropriated and administered privately or communally; it only matters that it is somehow appropriated and administered.
As to the respective merits of private or communal ownership, Locke offers us no insight. That was simply not a problem he considered relevant to discuss. For him, the only relevant issue was that some system of discretion had to be implemented. In this respect, we can say that Locke, like Hobbes, simply did not yet have a fully developed sense of of the need for a science of political economy.
Grotius, Hugo. The Law of War and Peace. Louise Loomis, trans. New York: Walter J. Black, 1949.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. AP Martinich, ed. Petersborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002.
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Peter Laslett, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
|
