Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood
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and techniques of land use; but it also meant, and more fundamentally, new forms and conceptions of property. Agricultural improvement and the enhancement of profit for capitalist agriculture ideally called for a concentration of property; but above all, they required the elimination of various customary rights and practices that interfered with capital accumulation. Improving landlords and capitalist tenants needed to be free of obstructions to the productive and profitable use of property.
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, there was growing pressure to extinguish customary rights – for instance, disputing communal rights to common land by claiming exclusive private ownership; challenging customary tenures which granted smallholders rights of possession without outright legal title; eliminating various use rights on private land; and so on. This meant the establishment of property that was literally exclusive – excluding other individuals and the community, eliminating various kinds of restrictions on land use imposed by custom or communal regulation.
The detachment of economic from ‘extra-economic’ powers meant that the processes of state-centralization and capitalist development, although sometimes in tension, were closely intertwined. There were obviously conflicts between the landed class and the monarchy, which would come to a head in the Civil War. But those conflicts had a particular character and intensity precisely because of the underlying partnership between dominant class and monarchical state. The interests of the English ruling classes were, from very early on, deeply invested in a unitary Parliament, with legislative powers, which was very much a part of the centralized state. The aristocracy was also committed to a national system of law, and jurisdictional conflicts between king and the nobility ended quite early. Even in the early thirteenth century, at a time of violent tension between monarchy and barons, when Magna Carta claimed the rights of the barons to be tried by their peers, it did not assert their rights of jurisdiction over other free men. The common law – which was, in the first instance, the king’s law – became the favoured legal system for the aristocracy as well as for free peasants who could seek protection from the Crown, while the rule of law was understood to mean that the monarchy itself was subject to the law.
This uniquely unified system of law, in an unusually centralized state, produced a distinctive type of ‘free’ man, subject only to the king and to no other, lesser lord. Landlords enjoyed great local powers, but outside the manor they acted as delegates of the Crown in relation to free men. There remained land subject to manorial lordship; but the ‘free’ Englishman, with an individual ‘interest’ in freehold property recognized in common law and free of lordly claims or obligations, was a unique formation. In France, for example, even charters of freedom did not dissolve seigneurial obligation; and even free peasants with access to royal protection could still be subject to seigneurial jurisdiction.12
The English common law did eventually come to represent parliamentary power against the Crown, with Parliament asserting its supremacy as the interpreter of common law. In the Civil War in the seventeenth century, the conflict between monarch and Parliament, common lawyers tended to side with Parliament, against the prerogative courts allied with the king. But this was not a case of parcellized jurisdictions asserting themselves against the central state. On the contrary, it was an assertion of the aristocracy’s essential role in the partnership that constituted the central state, at a time when that partnership was being challenged by the monarchy. At the same time, while the ruling class was claiming its share in the public sphere of the central state, it was also asserting its power in the private sphere of property, as landowners rather than as officers of state. From this point of view, the issue was less an assertion of public jurisdiction than of private rights, intended to protect the ruling class against the Crown’s violation of its partnership and the division of labour between property and state.
The English Revolution – the whole period from the Civil War in the 1640s to the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 – saw major upheavals, and, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, it produced uniquely radical ideas. But it did not fundamentally transform social property relations in England, which were hardly less capitalist before the Revolution than after. Nor, for that matter, did it fundamentally transform – bar the ‘interregnum’ – the relation between Parliament and monarchy. Even if we attach great importance to the settlement of 1688 in establishing parliamentary supremacy, it did little more than consolidate what was already on the table before the Revolution, before the Stuart monarchy attempted, unsuccessfully, to establish a Continental-style absolutism in a society where there was little political support and even less social foundation for any such project. If the old cooperative enterprise between monarchy and Parliament was increasingly giving way to parliamentary supremacy (and we should not exaggerate the extent to which this was true even in the eighteenth century), what remained was the characteristic division of labour between state and property, the separation of economic and extra-economic powers, which had marked out Britain from its neighbours.
The long history of partnership between aristocracy and central state, and the role of Parliament as the public face of private property, has meant that the ruling class in Britain has, on the whole, been consistently committed to parliamentarism. But the other side of the coin is that the dominant historical narrative and mainstream political culture have marginalized the truly revolutionary and democratic traditions that emerged during the English Revolution, the tradition of the Levellers, Diggers and other radical movements. Democratic popular forces were defeated by the parliamentary oligarchy; and, though their legacy has never completely disappeared from the British labour movement, the dominant parliamentary tradition owes more to the victorious propertied classes.
The process of state-formation in France was quite different. If in England there was a transition from feudalism to capitalism, in France it was rather a transition from feudalism to absolutism – absolutism not simply as a political form but the absolutist state as a form of politically constituted property, a means of enriching office-holders by exploiting the peasantry. The monarchy emerged out of feudal rivalry, as one aristocratic dynasty established itself over others in a context of parcellized sovereignty. The monarchical state continued to confront the challenge of feudal parcellization, not only opposition from dynastic rivals but claims to independent powers and privileges by the aristocracy and various corporate entities, guilds, estates, provinces and towns.
The monarchy certainly did pursue a centralizing strategy with some success; and royal courts did emerge, which, among other things, could be used to protect peasants from lords (not least, in order to preserve the peasantry as a source of state taxes). But the dominant class continued to depend to a great extent on politically constituted property – that is, on means of appropriation deriving from political, military and judicial powers, or ‘extra-economic’ status and privilege, in contrast to the English landed classes and their dependence on competitive production. In France, in contrast to England, even in the eighteenth century peasants still dominated agricultural production, and relations between landlords and tenants had very different effects. There was, for instance, nothing like the culture of ‘improvement’ nor the improvement literature that had been so important in seventeenth-century England. Village regulation of production and restrictions on land use continued to be important in agriculture even beyond the Revolution. For French landlords, extra-economic strategies – political and legal – for enhancing their power to squeeze more surplus out of peasants were still more important than agricultural improvement. This meant, among other things, that peasants were more plagued by taxes than by attacks on their property rights.
The state developed as a competing form of politically constituted property, a primary resource, a mode of direct appropriation for state office-holders by means of taxation, which some historians have called a kind of centralized rent. If the absolutist state was able to undermine the independent powers of the aristocracy, it did so in large part by replacing those powers with the lucrative resource of state office for a segment of the aristocracy. An elaborate bureaucracy developed not just for political and administrative purposes but as an economic resource for office-holders, proliferating state offices as a form of private property.
Nor was there anything in France like England’s long parliamentary tradition. No such tradition existed before the Revolution. There was, to begin with, a stark historical contrast between the unitary national Parliament in England, with its early legislative role, and the fragmented