The European Dream
Page 18
John Calvin, recall, went even further than Luther, calling on the faithful to continually improve their lot in life. While Calvin’s doctrine was never intended to advance the notion of commerce, it had the unintentional effect of bolstering the very interests of the new capitalist class. His emphasis on unceasing work, productivity, and improving one’s station proved compatible with a new class whose interest lay in hard work, expanded production, frugality, and a rational ordering of human activity in the marketplace.5 His doctrine helped justify, though inadvertently, the idea of accumulation of wealth and the amassing of capital, the key ingredients of a modern property regime and capitalist way of life. Economic historian Richard Henry Tawney and sociologist Max Weber wrote extensively on the deep philosophical connection between the rise of the Protestant work ethos and the emergence of modern capitalism. By freeing up individuals from dependency on the Church hierarchy and arming each person with a new psychology of material self-advancement, the Reformers left behind far more than a religious legacy. Long after the religious fires had died down, European men and women retained a new sense of self-worth that was compatible with modern notions of property accumulation.
The old idea of the individual as a small part of a complex social organism made up of proprietary relations and obligations gave way to the modern notion of the individual as an autonomous being in the world, alone before his God and his fellow human beings, and exercising, by strength of personal will, his or her unique stamp on the world. The metamorphosis of the individual from a loyal servant enveloped in the bowels of a Great Chain of Being to an autonomous agent with one’s own individual calling, and always improving one’s material lot to the greater glory of God, went hand in hand with a change in the notion of property from proprietary rights to exclusive ownership. Property, once bound up in complex social arrangements and the conditional rights of usage, came to be seen much like the new individual, as autonomous things, each unique, and indivisible. Tawney writes that what remained after the fall of the feudal social order “was private rights and private interests, the material of a society rather than a society itself.”6 In this new world, property rights would be the social glue that bound people together. Private property and unfettered economic freedom, said Tawney, “were taken for granted as the fundamentals upon which organization was to be based, and upon which no further argument was admissible.”7
While the Protestant ethic was born in Europe, many of its most fanatic disciples migrated to America, where they hitched Calvin’s religious vision to Enlightenment notions of science, private property rights, and capitalist market relations, creating the uniquely American Dream.
The Metaphysics of Private Property
With private property ensconced as the organizing principle of society, it was left to modern scholars to create the appropriate philosophical rationale to accompany it. They found their answer in the natural-law theory of property—a concept that had developed slowly in the late medieval period and advanced more quickly during the Reformation and its aftermath.
The French political philosopher Jean Bodin began by arguing that common ownership is unnatural and a violation of divine law. Plato’s commonwealth, with its adoration of communal ownership, wrote Bodin, is “against the law of God and nature, which detests not only incests, adulteries and inevitable murders, if all women should be common; but also expressly forbids us to steale, or so much as desire anything that another man’s is.”8 Bodin reminded his readers that theft is forbidden by God. Why would God include the commandment “Thou shalt not steal” if he didn’t mean to embrace the concept of private ownership of property? asked Bodin.
Bodin goes on to make the point that the family—a natural institution—is built on private property, and the state, in turn, is built on the family.9
That being the case, argued Bodin, the chief responsibility of the state is to protect each person’s—and family’s—“natural” God-given right to own property.
The belief that the primary role of the government is to protect each person’s inalienable right to own property was a radical idea that, in time, became the rallying cry for republican reformers and others in their struggle to replace monarchic rule with democratic forms of government. Bodin was insistent on this score. If the state were to abrogate its main reason for being—the protection of private property—it would have no legitimate claim to exist. He wrote, “But the greatest inconvenience is, that in taking away these words of Mine and Thine, they ruin the foundation of all Commonweales, the which were chiefly established to yield unto every man that which is his owne, and to forbid theft.”10
Bodin’s writing pierced the church/state veil that had enveloped Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire. At a time when the prevailing orthodoxy still viewed the state as the upholder of the faith, Bodin dared to argue that the state’s primary charge was far more secular in nature—to protect the natural right of private property. Individual rights—embedded first and foremost in private property—took precedence over both aristocratic privileges and deference to Church authority. In the new scheme of things, rulers exist to protect the individual rights of property holders rather than individuals existing to serve the interests of princes and kings. Tawney described the new way of thinking about the relationship of the individual and the state this way:
What it implies is, that the foundation of society is found, not in functions, but in rights: that rights are not deducible from the discharge of functions, so that the acquisition of wealth and the enjoyment of property are contingent upon the performances of services, but that the individual enters the world equipped with rights to the free disposal of his property and the pursuit of his economic self-interest, and that these rights are anterior to and independent of, any service which he may render.11
Having laid out the broad intellectual groundwork for a bold new conception of private property in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the unfinished business of filling in both the substance and details of the modern notion of ownership was taken up in the seventeenth century by the political philosopher John Locke and later by a succession of theorists including Adam Smith, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.12
Locke’s theory of property was published in 1690 in Two Treatises on Civil Government. His treatises quickly became the secular bible for a middle class that was beginning to climb onto the political stage in England. His writings served as a rationale for parliamentary reforms in England and, later, provided the philosophical foundation for the French and American revolutions.
Like many of his predecessors, Locke argued that private property is a natural right and unalterable. Locke’s reasoning, however, is what distinguishes his theory from those who came before him. He argued that each man creates his own property by adding his labor to the raw stuff of nature, transforming it into things of value. While Locke acknowledged that the Earth and all of its creatures were common to all men in the state of nature, he was quick to add that each man, in turn, “has a property in his own person . . . and this no one has any right to but himself.” Locke goes on to assert that “the labor of his body and work of his hands . . . are properly his.” That being so, Locke concluded that
whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it in, it hath by this labor something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this “labor” being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.13
As to the question of how much property a person might legitimately claim for himself, Locke said, “as much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates and can use the product of, so much is his property.”14
Locke�
�s natural-right theory of property was wildly popular with the new generation of independent farmers, merchants, shopkeepers, and small capitalists who were transforming English life and ridding the country of the last vestiges of feudal privilege. His treatises offered more than a mere explanation of the natural right of property. He elevated human labor and glorified acquisition as the crowning achievement of human existence. Unlike medieval churchmen, who thought of human labor as a set of necessary obligations to fulfill, Locke saw in it opportunities for which every man ought to strive.
David Hume (and, later, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) added the notion of utility value to the ownership of property. Hume argued that the justification for private ownership lies in the idea of utility: “Examine the writers of the laws of nature,” writes Hume,
and you will always find that whatever principle they set out with, they are sure to terminate here at last, and to assign, as the ultimate reason for every rule which they establish, the convenience and the necessities of mankind. What other reason, indeed, would writers ever give, why this must be mine and that yours.15
The utility theory of property provided yet another rationale that could be used by the new class of merchants and traders to advance their personal and political agenda. The utility theory softened the edges of Locke’s labor theory, making property not just an end in itself but rather an instrument for advancing human happiness. Philosophers of the period were in agreement that “the greatest possible happiness of society is attained by ensuring to every man the greatest possible quantity of the produce of his labor.”16
The utilitarians were among the first of the modern theorists to make the clear distinction between ownership as a thing in and of itself, that one possessed, and ownership as an instrument to advance human happiness. Georg Friedrich Hegel, the German philosopher, picked up this distinction in a slightly different way. His theory of property—which some call the personality theory—has become as important as Locke’s labor theory of ownership in establishing the notion of private property in the modern world.
Hegel argued that property plays a far more important role than most philosophers had heretofore been willing to acknowledge. Beyond its material and utilitarian value, said Hegel, property has a deeper function. According to Hegel, “property enables an individual to put his will into a ‘thing.’”17 One expresses his or her sense of personality by imprinting it into possessions. It is by way of fixing one’s will onto objects in the external world that each person projects his being and creates a presence among men. Work, in Hegel’s cosmology, is a creative expression rather than just an exercise of labor, and the product of that work represents an expropriation of the world and its incorporation into the projected personality of the owner. He writes:
Personality is that which struggles to . . . give itself reality, or in other words to claim that external world as its own. To claim that external world as its own personality requires the institution of property.18
As one’s personality is always present in the owned object, property becomes an extension of one’s personality. Others, in turn, come to know and recognize one’s personality through the objects one owns. Hegel, then, viewed property as more than just a way to satisfy needs. On a more profound level, property is an expression of personal freedom. By surrounding oneself with property, a person inflates his or her personality in space and time, creating a sphere of personal influence. In short, he or she creates an expanded presence in the world.19
Property and personhood become nearly synonymous in Hegel’s mind. Each becomes an expression of the other. Nearly a century after Hegel first advanced his personality theory of property, William James lent his support to the theory in terms readily recognizable to a generation becoming comfortable with psychological notions of projection. James writes:
It is clear that between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine, the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves. Our fame, our children, the work of our hands may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked. . . . In its oldest possible sense, however, a man’s self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body, and his psychic powers, but his clothes and house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and work, his land and houses and yacht and bank account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax or prosper, he feels triumphant, if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down . . . a great part of our feelings about what is ours is due to the fact that we live closer to our own things and so feel them more thoroughly and deeply.20
James goes on to observe that when something that belongs to us is stolen or destroyed or simply lost, we feel “a sense of the shrinkage of our personality” because the things we come to possess are an extension of who we are.21
If Hegel’s theory of property seems more contemporary than Locke’s, perhaps it is because the emphasis of the capitalist system has shifted substantially over the years, from a production to a consumption orientation. The labor theory of property provided an ideal philosophical backdrop for an era where the attention was focused narrowly on hard work, industrious behavior, savings, and capital accumulation. Merchants, shopkeepers, and an emerging bourgeois class looked to the labor theory of property as a justification for their own behavior. Locke’s ideas became values to live by as much as explanatory theories of the nature of property relations. Today, consumption and the commodification of personal experience are far more important factors in the commercial equation. It’s no wonder, then, that the notion of property as an extension of one’s personality and a mark of selfhood has greater social currency. Marketing professionals have long understood the close connection between personhood and property, and have habituated several generations of consumers to the idea that who we are is a direct reflection of what we have.
Mine vs. Thine
The metamorphosis in thinking about the nature of property paralleled the many other changes that were transforming a continent from a feudal economy to a market economy and from dynastic rule to nation-state governance. The new concept of property was a way for Europeans to reorder their relationship to space and time. The new technologies opened the door to vast new spaces and dramatically quickened the human tempo. Space that had for so long been conceived of as cloistered and vertical was suddenly horizontal and wide open to the vanishing point of the horizon. Time, which for aeons had been experienced as cyclical and relatively closed, was suddenly experienced as linear and expansive. The old feudal institutions, with their spatial walls and temporal boundaries, simply collapsed in the wake of what appeared to be an endless frontier running alongside an infinite future. The development of a private property perspective was the critical mental tool for domesticating the new spatial and temporal frontier.
The whole of earthly reality was reconfigured into a single formula—“mine vs. thine.” And with this formulation, Europeans set out to enclose the whole of space and time. In the new future being born, every person would become his or her own private god whose divinity lay in amassing property, inflating his or her being, and casting an ever larger shadow over existence and duration. More mine, less thine. Those who could, by talent and cunning, acquire the most property could transform it into capital and use that capital to control not only nature but the lives of other people as well. They were called “capitalists.”
The modern market economy and the nation-state, in turn, became the institutional mechanisms to speed along this new reorganization of the world. The market would serve as the impartial arena where each capitalist would lock in battle against his fellow warriors in the struggle to capture space and sequester time in the form of private property. The infant nation-state, in turn, was to be the protector of every person’s property by establishing legal codes and enforcement mechanisms—and, by so doing, guarantee his or her freedom.
For the Enlightenment philosophers and the jurists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, freedom was defined in negative terms as the right to exclude others. The early modern era was a time of differentiation—the separation of the individual from the cloak of the Church, the yoke of the feudal estate, the constraints of the craft guilds, and the many other obligations and indentures that were an integral part of a dynastic order based on status and rank.
Private property was viewed as a ticket of sorts to personal liberation. To be free, in the sense that it was used at the time, was to be autonomous and mobile—to not be dependent on or beholden to others or held hostage to circumstances. The more propertied one was, the more autonomous and mobile one could be. Greater autonomy and mobility meant greater freedom. Property, then, was a border between the self and the other. Property means “mine not thine.” The greater the accumulation of property and wealth, the larger the extension of one’s domain and sphere of influence in the world. If one were secure in one’s property, then all of the other rights would be guaranteed—the right to privacy, the right to be free of coercion, and so forth. Property rights, protected by law, ensured that no man could be bullied, oppressed, or made subject to another man’s will.