Accident as well as geography probably ensured that the idea didn’t find the ground as fertile on the British side of the English Channel, where the common law continued to evolve incrementally, even haphazardly, obedient to custom rather than a grand design. It’s a simplification, though not a gross one, to say that the common law is more messily pragmatic, the civil law more theoretical and pure; these are also designations that might apply, respectively, to Edward Coke and Francis Bacon.
So while Coke would use the civil law, or even sketchier precedents, when needed—he even went so far as to cite it in Darcy v. Allein13—he remained the era’s most eloquent champion of the common law, its great adversary. As Coke put it, under the common law, every man’s house is his castle, not because it is defended by moats or walls, but because while the rain can enter, the king may not; under the civil law, the king is bound by nothing at all. Which was, as we shall see, a clue to the puzzle of Britain’s head start in industrialization, as well as one of the sources of friction between Coke and Bacon.
It wasn’t the only one. By the 1590s, and despite Bacon’s connections through family and friends—he had entered into the circle surrounding the charismatic Robert Devereaux, second Earl of Essex, and another of Elizabeth’s favorites—his legal career was not what one would call brilliant. In 1594, he was rejected in his bid for the position of Attorney General when the Queen selected Coke, and then, insult to injury, for Coke’s former job as Solicitor General* in favor of Thomas Fleming—Coke’s choice. Four years later, the always-short-of-funds Bacon tried to mend his finances matrimonially, and he set his eye on one of the wealthiest, and certainly the most fascinating, women in England. Lady Elizabeth Hatton was beautiful, witty, rich, and, with the death of her first husband in 1597, eligible. To the brilliant, handsome, but impecunious Bacon, who had known her since they were children, she was perfect. He even enlisted Essex in the service of his courtship, and the Earl obliged with a letter to Lady Hatton’s father that read in part, “I had rather match [Elizabeth] with Mr. Bacon than with men of far greater titles.”14 Unfortunately for Bacon, the lady had other ideas.
The clever reader will see this one coming. Coke’s first wife, Bridget, with whom he was apparently deeply in love, died in June 1598. In what seemed even at the time to be the sort of haste that in later eras would have involved a shotgun, Coke and Elizabeth Hatton were married that September. Though Lady Hatton’s beauty and wealth were almost certainly decisive, it is tempting to think that one of the reasons Coke pursued her so avidly was to frustrate his rival. If so, he paid for his momentary triumph with more than thirty years of grief, which included notoriously brutal domestic quarrels, vitriolic public fights, and property disputes so intractable, containing accusations of physical abuse and theft so scandalous, that they occupied England’s Privy Council for three months. To call Coke’s second marriage the worst decision he ever made is to understate the case; upon his death, Lady Hatton wrote “we shall never see his like again,15 praises be to God.” She was not alone in her distaste for her husband. In a famous argument in the chambers of the exchequer in 1601, shortly after Coke had led the brutal prosecution of his onetime mentor, Essex, Bacon told his rival, “Mr. Attorney: I respect you;16 I fear you not, and the less you speak of your own greatness, the more I will think of it.”
Coke and Bacon were so hostile to each other that they would have reflexively taken opposite sides on a debate over the best way to prepare roast beef, but for the history of the Industrial Revolution, the most significant point of divergence between the two was the way they approached the idea of innovation. One of the most consistent themes in the life of Coke, the pragmatic champion of institutions designed to protect and promote the English artisan, was his belief that the state enjoyed the most prosperity when it encouraged those artisans to perfect their craft (or at least did nothing to discourage them). Bacon, on the other hand, had an equally powerful belief in the practice of empirical science, and he advocated for a state-supported foundation that would nurture it.
That advocacy began early in Bacon’s life with a powerful attack on the medieval philosophy that had dominated scholarship for eleven centuries, subordinating Greek philosophy—particularly Aristotle—to the revealed wisdom of the Bible and the Church fathers. And not just philosophy: When natural phenomena conflicted with supernatural explanation, Christian faith demanded choosing the latter, which was clearly no way to advance an understanding of the natural world. However, since people in tenth-century Europe were just as smart as they had been a thousand years before (and would be a thousand years later), their brains had to exercise themselves on something, and the result, from the fifth century through the fourteenth, was a network of Christian schools, and later universities, that established a classical curriculum emphasizing dialectic rather than experiment. Their leaders, known as scholastici, or Scholastics, filtered their Aristotle through a thoroughly Christianized screen that discarded the Greek philosopher’s empirical bent and kept only his appeal to formal logic.
This was the edifice that Bacon set out to undermine when he published The Advancement of Learning in 1605, setting out his ambitious ideas for the reformation of education and philosophy. So ambitious were they that even listing Bacon’s ideas tends to scant the depth of the footprint he left on the modern world. In fact, attempting to encapsulate his thought in a few lines or sentences is not only daunting, but insulting. Suffice it to say that before Bacon, the gold standard in inquiry was essentially contemplative and syllogistic; truth could be discovered by comparing opposing ideas. Afterward—particularly after he wrote Novum Organum, in 1622, in which he famously stated his belief that the compass, the printing press, and gunpowder had changed history more than any empire or religion—truth was something extracted from nature using the tools of observation and experiment. He didn’t, as is sometimes suggested, invent the scientific method; he had too feeble a handle on hypotheses, and especially mathematics, to do so. But what he did understand about the scientific enterprise was profoundly important for the wave of inventions that would inundate the world a century after his death. He knew that to be self-sustaining, both science and invention needed to be social enterprises, depending utterly on the free flow of information among investigators. And since the state is the beneficiary of such a self-sustaining cycle of inventions, it was therefore incumbent on the state to make the information—about discoveries, techniques, and inventions—flow.
By 1608, he was making notes for the idea of a “college for Inventors17 [with] a Library, Vaults, fornaces [sic], Tarraces for Isolation, woork houses of all sorts” that could institutionalize the idea of invention in service of the state. Those notes would eventually find their way into the the posthumous publication of The New Atlantis in 1626, one of the achievements that appears in even the briefest biographies of the man. Bacon’s fictional Atlantis was the utopian kingdom of Bensalem, located somewhere in the South Seas and distinguished by (among other things) what can only be described as a government-funded Research & Development facility. The “College of Six Days Works,” or Salomon’s House, was home to hundreds of investigators into the mysteries of nature; the thirty-six most senior researchers were organized by the nature of their work. Those who performed new experiments, for example, Bacon called Pioneers, or Miners, while the ones who attempted to find applications for new discoveries he called Dowry-men or Benefactors. Tellingly, though Bacon had respect18 for artisans and craftsmen, they were prohibited from full participation in Salomon’s House. Instead, the highest honors were reserved for those “Dowry-men” who produced innovations that were of the highest value to the sovereign. In Bensalem, statues were automatically erected to honor inventors, with one of the highest to “the inventor of ordnance and of gunpowder.”19 Salomon’s House was the explicit inspiration for the Royal Society, which was founded twenty-four years after Bacon’s death in large part to honor his notion of science as a collaborative venture whose proper goal is t
he material improvement of mankind.
The material improvement of mankind, not of inventors. In Bensalem, inventors were not granted any property rights in their inventions: no patents. In the conflict over the Statute on Monopolies, as with much else, Bacon stood on the opposite side from Coke, and his ideal society, not at all surprisingly, reflected his belief that the surest route to innovation was by relying on men who wanted only fame as a reward. Bacon’s faith in progress20 through collective action by public servants obliged him to reward innovators; his snobbery made it impossible to make those rewards commercially valuable, particularly to anyone who might need the income, and especially in the form of ownership of inventions.
Coke’s pragmatic support for the artisan class and Bacon’s vision of invention as a collective endeavor were both, for their day, progressive—both were willing to grant the highest honors to any accomplished man of low birth—but nonetheless a bit nearsighted: Both could see the value of the innovator to society, but misunderstood how to align social benefits with individual rewards; and Bacon, in particular, was unwilling to grant inventors even a temporary property right in their ideas.
That sort of ownership required a revolution in the idea of property itself.
ON TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1689, the royal yacht Isabella docked at Gravesend carrying Mary Stuart, the daughter of King James II, on her last day as the Princess of Orange. A day later, in London, she would be acclaimed Mary II, Queen of England, thus putting an end to the most tempestuous four decades in English history. Any fifty-year-old Englishman at Gravesend that day had lived through two or three civil wars; the execution of one Charles and the exile of another; the autocratic rule of Oliver Cromwell; the restoration of Charles II; the 1665 recrudescence of the bubonic plague; and the Great Fire of London the following year. The fifty-year-old would be able to recall more recent events as well, including the rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth and any number of near rebellions beginning with the 1685 death of Charles and the accession of his younger brother, James, whose conversion to Catholicism failed to reignite civil war only because his Protestant daughter, the wife of the Dutch stadtholder William of Orange, was the heiress presumptive.
So when the Isabella arrived with that same daughter, a few months after her husband had successfully asserted her rights at the head of an invading army, she was conveying a much-longed-for respite from what, in the apocryphal curse, are known as “interesting times.” And that wasn’t all. The royal yacht led a flotilla that carried, as a passenger, a sometime poet, essayist, and physician, a fifty-six-year-old man who had been living as an exile in the Dutch cities of Amsterdam, Leiden, and Utrecht for the preceding four and a half years, using the nom de refuge of “Dr. Van der Linden.” His real name was John Locke, and he was, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, one of the three greatest men who ever lived (the other two were Isaac Newton—and Francis Bacon).
Son of a lawyer, grandson of a clothier, Locke had successively been a brilliant but bored student at Westminster School and at Christ Church College, Oxford, where his fellow students included John Dryden, Robert Hooke, and Christopher Wren. It is tempting to think that he cultivated the company of men who formed the kernel of the future Royal Society when they were all at Oxford, but if so, it has escaped the attention of hundreds of biographers.
Locke’s Oxford career gave only hints of his future prominence. Despite his steady climb up the academic ladder, starting as a “student”—at the time, a formal title more like “fellow”—by 1660 becoming a lecturer and reader in rhetoric, and by 1664 the “censor of moral philosophy,” he wasn’t what one might call an academic star. In the words of Lady Damaris Masham,* he “had so small satisfaction from his studies”21 that he failed to work very hard at them. Whether out of boredom or out of resistance to the pressures to take instruction as an Anglican clergyman, he subsequently dabbled in law, medicine, diplomacy, and natural philosophy. In the last capacity, he collaborated with Robert Boyle, who sponsored him for a fellowship in the Royal Society, though Locke’s involvement was scarcely life-changing; in his four decades as a member of the RS,22 his only publication was a letter regarding a poisonous fish sent to him by a friend in the Caribbean.
What did change Locke’s life in matters large and small was his relationship with Anthony Ashley-Cooper—Lord Ashley when Locke first met him, and later the first Earl of Shaftesbury, the Lord High Chancellor of England, President of the Privy Council, and ultimately the great political adversary of Charles II. It was in service to Shaftesbury, originally as a physician, that Locke developed temperaments heretofore absent, including a toleration of nonconformist ideas and, more relevant, an interest in the economic relations between men. In 1668 he even wrote a treatise with the wonkish title Some of the Consequences that are Like to Follow upon Lessening of Interest to 4 per cent. And it was in service to Shaftesbury that Locke was forced to leave England not once, but twice. The first time he exiled himself as a precaution, after Shaftesbury’s circle published a series of arguably seditious pamphlets; when the furor had died down, in 1679, he returned. Four years later, however, after the group planned, though never carried out, an assassination attempt on King Charles, Locke, now an accused traitor and fugitive, was forced to escape again, this time to Rotterdam, where he arrived on November 1, 1683, there to stay until he could return more than five years later. With him when he arrived on the Isabella that February day in 1689 was the draft manuscript for a work that would be published later that year under the title Two Treatises on Government.*
As with Bacon, there is no way that Locke’s thoughts on the nature of knowledge, religious freedom, political organization, or a dozen other subjects can be contained within a single book, much less a portion of a single chapter. Those wondering what on earth Locke’s writings have to do with the world’s first steam locomotive, however, will find that the relevant passages from the Treatises concern Locke’s views on the rather slippery idea of property: or, rather, the idea that ideas are property.
Despite much evidence to the contrary, the first word most children learn (after the local equivalent of “mama” and “papa”) is not “mine.” Nonetheless, the concept of ownership in some form is pretty universal, even in eras and cultures that deny it. This is because the idea of property is essential for a culture to be able to speak of the relationship between people and things. And some sort of property law is utterly necessary if a society is to resolve disputes between people over things. The difference between the way property is understood on Wall Street and in an Egyptian souk clearly shows that the concept is absolutely contingent upon culture, but in the societies that trace their legal and philosophical systems back to Greece and Rome, property traditionally has three characteristics, none of them absolute:
Exclusive possession (which also obliges everyone else to keep away);
Exclusive use; and
Some right of conveyance, the ability to transfer the property right.
The Western idea of property is distinctive not because of these three characteristics, but because of its tendency to generalize them; in many non-Western societies, the rules for land may have little or nothing to do with the rules for animals, which in turn may be unrelated to the rules for objects. In the Western tradition, the default position is that individual possession/use/conveyance is the zero point from which exceptions may deviate. This perspective may have begun as nothing more than a convenience—it is easier to adjudicate disputes if all the rights in question are decided together—but like a ratchet that turns in only one direction, it has tended, over the centuries, to promote the accumulation of more and more individual rights over things, such as land, and even water, that were once held in common.
That “accumulation,” of course, was generally done at the point of a sword, which seemed to Locke to be a historical fact, but not a historical right. And rights were what interested Locke. His development of a new definition of property rights evolved over decades, and it owed a
s much to the recent history of Britain as it did to the Roman idea of usufructus (the right to profit from a thing without owning it) or the medieval notion of seisin (possession of land without title to it). The Civil War, in particular, had turned the world upside down in more ways than one; there was something dangerously explosive about gathering a large number of people by persuading them that God wants them to be free of both political and religious tyranny, and then giving them weapons. Four years after the start of hostilities, a mass movement within Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army (the first in history to give its soldiers a say in their own governance, an idea that seems as radical today as it did to Cromwell) demanded the right to vote in their “Agreement of the People” of 1647. The conflict prompted a public debate, at Putney in southwest London, between the self-named “Levellers,” the element among the Parliamentarians most in favor of democratic reforms as part of the battle against the royalists, and the Army’s more conservative leadership, and the discussion moved inevitably from voting rights to property rights, since the former depended on the latter.
Common law tradition granted the franchise only to owners of either a specified amount of land or of a license to trade, under the logic that since laws are made to safeguard property, legislators should be elected only by those with an interest in those laws, or, as the conservative faction had it, “disposing of the affairs of the kingdom23 [requires] a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom.” The Leveller response was that every man—almost every man; they excluded servants and beggars,24 for example—has property in his own person and has therefore an interest in parliamentary action.
The Most Powerful Idea in the World Page 8