The real brilliance of the new bourgeois class was the way it balanced the potential anarchy of individualism with a new, sophisticated understanding of one’s social obligations. The great twentieth-century sociologist Max Weber glimpsed the significance of the new mental acrobatics in his examination of the role that Protestant Reformation theology played in creating the internal controls that allowed unbridled capitalism to flourish without sacrificing the social order.
Recall how the Protestant theologian John Calvin replaced the external order imposed by the Church on each individual with an internally imposed order that was far more strict. Every action at every moment of a believer’s life had to conform to God’s glory. All personal conduct must, therefore, be perfectly controlled and ordered. Lapses, respites, and doubts were all signs of nonelection and therefore to be avoided. Calvin’s doctrine transformed the unsystematic and somewhat casual way of life of medieval Europe into the methodically planned life characteristic of the new bourgeois class. Self-control replaced church control in daily affairs.
The bourgeois man and woman created their own private despotism over personal behavior. They learned to be self-controlled, self-sacrificing, and self-possessed, to be diligent and industrious. At first, these values were a way of living out their faith. Eventually, the religious intent fell by the wayside in Europe, but the values remained and became a critical element in fostering the capitalist ethos. Never before in history had people willingly imposed on themselves such utter restraints. In the past, control over people’s behavior was more often enforced externally by extended family, or by governments and elites, and backed up by coercion and violence. In an era given over to the creation of the autonomous individual, each person now became his or her own ruler, governing his or her own behavior with the kind of fervor that, if imposed by an external political force, would have been considered harsh and heavy-handed. The bourgeois ethos proved effective. Everyone learned to balance his or her newly won autonomy and independence with self-imposed responsibilities to society.
In America, unlike Europe, the integration process continued to remain attached to its religious roots. Convinced that they were indeed the “chosen people,” Americans were far more disposed to balancing their newly won autonomy with a shared obedience to a higher authority rather than a personal responsibility to their fellow human beings. For Americans, self-control, self-sacrifice, and industrious behavior were more likely to be exercised to please God—and self—than to fulfill one’s social obligations. In this sense, many Americans remained true to the Protestant ethic, long after Europeans had passed it by. It was this divergence that set off the American Dream from its European antecedents.
Americans found no contradiction in living in two seemingly contradictory realms at the same time: one characterized by religious zeal and faith in eternal salvation, the other by Enlightenment secularism, rational behavior, and the belief in material progress—the contrary worlds of John Winthrop and Benjamin Franklin. What united both Reformation theology and Enlightenment philosophy was the premium each placed on the autonomy of the individual. Reformation theologians railed against the papal authority of the Church and admonished their fellow Christians that priests were imperfect like all other human beings and therefore could not serve as divine intermediaries. Martin Luther, John Calvin, and their successors argued that the Church’s interpretation of biblical doctrine was no more authoritative than that of every other Christian and that each individual’s relationship to God is ultimately a personal experience. The Protestant Reformation sought to dethrone the Church hierarchy and elevate each believer, making every human being equal in the eyes of the Lord. The Enlightenment philosophers elevated the individual as well, but their reasons for doing so were more bound up in ideas about rational human behavior. The status of the autonomous individual, however, remains to this day the common link between these two great historic streams.
Americans are arguably the most individualistic people on Earth, both because of our deep religious convictions and our materialistic ambitions. That’s why Americans continue to be so anti-authoritarian in nature. We don’t like bosses of any kind and refuse to humble ourselves at the feet of politicians, business potentates, or, for that matter, any higher authority, with the exception of God on high. In America, every person thinks of her- or himself as the equal of every other person.
Although the idea of the autonomous individual allows Americans to be both religious and secular, faith oriented and rationally driven, living in both the Reformation and Enlightenment worlds can play havoc with one’s sense of teleology. While the Reformation side of the American character calls on each individual to experience the suffering of Christ in this world in return for salvation in the next, the Enlightenment side beckons every American to pursue happiness in the here and now in the name of human progress.
Europeans were less schizophrenic in this regard and eventually abandoned their religious zeal, leaving them only their Enlightenment ideology. And even that, in turn, was subsequently compromised by their deep misgivings about man’s perfectibility and the inevitability that unfettered market forces would automatically lead to unlimited material progress for all.
It was Americans, then, who not only became the most enthusiastic disciples of the Protestant Reformation theology and the most ardent supporters of Enlightenment ideology but also the keenest champions of individual autonomy. Europeans, because of their long history of more dense spatial arrangements and paternalistic and communal ways of living, never fully embraced the idea of the lone self to the extent Americans would on the sparsely settled frontiers of a vast new continent. Americans, on the other hand, have, throughout our history, paid homage to the individual in popular myth, literature, and in virtually every human endeavor. The American Dream was never meant to be a shared experience but, rather, was meant to be an individual journey. In a peculiar sense, the American way of life became an extreme caricature of European ideas that sprang forth and enjoyed a period of influence in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, only to be tempered by new countervailing forces in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that reflected Europe’s earlier paternalistic and collectivist roots.
The “New World,” then, is a bit of a misnomer. We Americans continue to live out a dream whose roots lie deep in Europe’s past, many of whose central tenets and assumptions no longer hold much sway in a world far removed in space and time from the historical conditions that gave rise to them.
6
Inventing the Ideology of Property
THE VAST CHANGES in spatial and temporal consciousness and the birth of the rational, autonomous individual transformed European life over a period of several hundred years. There is, however, one other institutional development that emerged alongside all of the other conceptual changes—an institution that gave concrete shape and meaning to the rest and provided the indispensable linchpin for the birth of the capitalist economy and the rise of the nation-state.
The invention and codification of a private property regime in the late medieval to early modern era became the foundation for the pursuit of the Enlightenment utopian vision of unlimited material progress. Private property rights became the essential legal tool for separating the individual from the human collective as well as from the rest of nature. A private property regime institutionalized the new spatial and temporal consciousness and made possible the modern notions of autonomy and mobility as well as the negative idea of freedom as personal independence and self-reliance. Its stormy development, and the equally fierce resistance to it, has continued, until very recently, to be the defining dynamic of European politics and the politics of much of the rest of the world.
The institutionalization of private property certainly would have to be considered one of Europe’s most important contributions. Without a mature, regulated private property regime in place, market capitalism could not exist and the nation-state would never have survived. This last point ne
eds to be emphasized. The very concepts of a modern market and nation-state are inseparably linked to a private property regime. The purpose of markets is to allow for the free exchange of property. The primary function of the state, in turn, is to protect the private property rights of its citizens.
Europe created the idea of the states’ new role, only to have second thoughts about the matter when so many of its destitute population were systematically left out of the new economic arrangement. Americans, however, bought the idea of the states’ new mission from the get-go and never wavered from the view that the primary function of government is to safeguard the private property holdings of the people. Tocqueville took note of Americans’ fierce attachment to private property rights on his short visit to the new country. He asked, rhetorically,
Why is it that in America, the land par excellence of democracy, no one makes that outcry against property in general that often echoes through Europe? Is there any need to explain? It is because there are no proletarians in America. Everyone, having some possession to defend, recognizes the right to property in principle.1
Once again, Americans became the purest advocates of a European idea, later partially abandoned by Europeans themselves, as they begin to rein in private property rights with a commitment to socialist reforms. Knowing, then, how the private property regime emerged and understanding its critical role in the birth of modern capitalist markets and nation-state governance, as well as the different ways it was embraced in the Old World and in America, are essential to coming to grips with the full meaning of the changes now taking place in Europe as it prepares to move beyond both these pillars of the modern age to become the first post-territorial governing region in a network-linked global economy.
The Medieval View of Property
Property meant something very different in the medieval era than it does now in the modern world. In the feudal world, the holding of property was always considered conditional in nature, whereas in industrial society, the holding of property is regarded as an absolute right that resides exclusively with the owners, subject to certain limitations imposed by the state. This is a critical distinction that separates the feudal way of conceptualizing property from the way we think about it today.
The feudal society was conceived as being part of a “Great Chain of Being,” a hierarchically structured natural and social world that stretched from the lowliest creatures in nature to the princes of the Church. The entire chain was God’s creation and was organized in such a way as to ensure that each creature performed his or her role as God had prescribed it, which included serving those above and below according to his or her station.
The social structure of feudal society operated in a manner similar to nature’s grand hierarchy. Every rung of the social ladder is populated by a unique category of individuals who perform a specific role or function in the grand scheme of things, and each is bound to those above and below him in the chain by a complex set of mutual obligations and reciprocal relationships. From serf to knight, from knight to lord, and from lord to Pope, all are unequal in degree and kind, and yet each is obligated to the other by the medieval bonds of homage, and all together make up a perfect mirror of God’s total creation.
The notion of property has to be viewed within the broader context of the Church’s worldview. While Church leaders came increasingly to acknowledge a legitimate role for private property in the social schemata, it was always understood that property itself was held in the form of a trust all along the social hierarchy. Since God is the owner of his creation, all things in the earthly world ultimately belong to him. God grants human beings the right to use his property so long as they are righteous and fulfill their obligation of homage and fealty both to him and to every other person on the social ladder in the way he has preordained.
Property, then, was a rather complex phenomenon in feudal society and was tightly bound to the idea of proprietary relationships. Things were not owned outright or exclusively by anyone, but rather shared in various ways under the conditions and terms established by a rigid code of proprietary obligations. For example, when the king granted land to a lord or vessel, “his rights over the land still remained, except for the particular interest he had parted with.” The result, says historian Richard Schlatter, is that “no one could be said to own the land; everyone from the king down through the tenants and sub-tenants to the peasants who tilled it had a certain dominion over it, but no one had an absolute lordship over it.”2 “The essence of the theory” of property in the medieval world, writes historian Charles H. McIlwain, “is a hierarchy of rights and powers all existing in or exercisable over the same objects or persons, and the fundamental relationship of one power to another in this hierarchy is the superiority of the higher to the lower, rather than a complete supremacy in any one over all the others.”3
By the late eighteenth century, the feudal concept of the conditional right to use private property had given way to the modern notion of absolute ownership. While there were many factors that led to this radical change in the notion of property, none proved more important than the breakup of the feudal estates and the enclosure of the land commons into private real estate that could be bought and sold in the marketplace.
The land was transformed, first in England, and later on the Continent. After more than a millennium of history, when people had belonged to the land, new legislative initiatives, in the form of the great Enclosure Acts, reversed the spatial and temporal playing field. Henceforth, the land belonged to people and could be exchanged in the form of private property in the marketplace. Real estate could also be transformed into capital and used as a tool of credit to leverage economic activity.
It’s difficult to imagine the change in consciousness brought on by the English Enclosure Acts. For centuries, people’s security was bound up in attachment to their ancestral land and their duties and obligations in a Christian hierarchy that stretched from the common fields they tended to Christ’s throne above. Now the land, which heretofore had been considered God’s creation and administered by a complex set of rules and obligations that connected the lowliest serf to the Angels of Paradise, was severed. The land was divided up in the form of privately owned plots. Those who could not afford to purchase a lot of their own were forced off the land. Some became paid laborers working for the new owners, while others were forced to migrate to the nearest towns to find “work” in the new industrial factories.
In this detached world, one’s labor became a form of property, and people sold their time in the marketplace. Daily rounds gave way to jobs, status in the community gave way to contractual agreements, and everyone, whether they wanted to or not, became responsible for making his or her own destiny.
It should be emphasized that a private property regime makes modern markets possible and not the other way around. In the medieval era, exchange was generally by way of barter between relatives, extended kin, and neighbors. Without a common law and legal code, the only way to trust the authenticity and to ensure a peaceful transfer of ownership of property was for the seller and buyer to know each other and to be a part of a tightly bound social community. For this reason, markets were always local and limited in their reach and importance. A mature private property regime, by contrast, substitutes subjective criteria like trust, with objective criteria like ownership titles, and provides enforcement mechanisms—the police and the courts—to make sure that sellers and buyers abide by their contractual agreements. Only when such a legal regime is in place and backed by the full coercive authority of the state can markets be extended in space and time to include large numbers of players—most of whom are strangers to one another—in the exchange of property.
The Protestant Reformation of Property
The Protestant Reformation figured significantly in the reformulation of private property relations. Martin Luther and his followers launched an all-out attack on the authority of the Pope and the feudal social order over which the Vatican presided.
Luther argued against the idea of the Church as God’s sole emissary on Earth and said that the priests were sinners like everyone else and therefore incapable of acting as intermediaries between the faithful and the Lord Almighty. He counseled that the only infallible authority on matters of faith was the Bible and that God’s will was knowable to every Christian by reading the scriptures. Each man and woman, said Luther, stands alone before God. Luther’s doctrine challenged the very basis of papal authority—its claim to be God’s appointed representative on Earth. By doing so, Luther and his followers cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Holy Roman Empire and feudal social arrangements.
Luther was particularly harsh in his attacks on Church property, arguing that the Vatican had amassed untold wealth over the centuries at the expense of the people and had violated Christian faith, which preached abstinence and eschewed worldly luxuries.
The Reformation fervor ended up replacing one propertied class for another. Church lands were confiscated in Western and Northern Europe—even in Catholic Spain and Austria—and the lands of feudal lords were either seized or sold. The routing of the old feudal order made room for the establishment of a new bourgeois monied class of merchants, traders, and shopkeepers.
Luther’s notion of “a calling” helped lay the groundwork for the natural-law theory of property and provided the all-important spiritual underpinning for the amassing of capital and wealth—which made the industrial age possible. Luther argued that all callings, even the most humble in nature, are equally sacred in the eyes of the Lord. He wrote that “what you do in your house is worth as much as if you did it up in heaven for our Lord God.”4 Luther railed against what he regarded as the elitism of priestly asceticism and argued that by faithfully discharging one’s earthly duties—regardless of the calling—the believers are serving as God’s stewards and the caretakers of his creation.
The European Dream Page 17