The Land Question and Community

A talk exploring how the privatisation of land, the rise of modern industry, and the evolutionary ideologies of progress in the nineteenth century, destroyed the self-sufficiency of communities and turned free people into a wage labourers. Given at the Henry George Foundation in 2021

Joseph Milne

One of the effects of the privatisation of land is the erosion of community. The history of land enclosure in England and Scotland shows this to be the primary effect. Communities that were originally more or less self-sufficient were broken up and families were driven from the land to the towns or cities to seek work. In this way the natural relations between people and the land were permanently broken, and gradually the poorest were driven into the slums. We hardly need to repeat this history as it is well known. The village dweller ceased to be his own master, owner of his own capital and the works of his hands, and was compelled to become a wage labourer. We have long forgotten that in the high Middle Ages a wage labourer was considered equal to a pauper and in need of charity. He was unable to support himself. The Church and the ordinary people would seek to support him.

But perhaps what has not been so well known is the long-term effects of this on community generally. There is something of a forgotten history here. With the land enclosures and the rise of modern industry, creating the wage labourer, the conception of society completely changed. This became very evident to me in my researches into the background of Henry George's A Perplexed Philosopher in preparation for Volume VI of the Annotated Works. My usual areas of study are ancient Greece and the Middle Ages. The conception of society in those times was radically different than our modern conception. For example, in the Greek city state, or polis, every citizen was understood to be responsible for the good of the whole. Or in medieval times a town was likened to a living organism, just like the universe itself, with each member enjoying a specific station according to their abilities to contribute to the well-being of all. The various trades, institutions and customs were all understood as serving the common good. Nobody was excluded, and those unable to support themselves were simply looked after by the whole community.

So it came as a shock to me to read the social theories of the nineteenth century - the theories of Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin, for example. While these three differed in certain respects about evolution, they held two basic ideas in common: the idea of biological progress and radial Individualism. That is to say, they each saw the present rise of industry as an advance on all previous history, and they each saw the 'individual' as the centre of society, in particular those individuals who commanded the great expansion of industry and of the British Empire. They saw this progress not only as material progress, but also as moral progress. In fact, for Herbert Spencer in particular, material progress and moral progress were one and the same thing. They were expressions of the synthesis arising from the original factors of matter and motion - his materialist theory of evolution. Matter and motion had culminated in the English captains of industry, the envy of the French.

If one reads the opponents of Henry George in his own time, their cry is 'liberty' and 'individual freedom'. Their enemy was not merely Henry George and the various socialist reformers, it was 'the state' or government itself. Their conception of individualism held that, as higher individuals evolved, the need for the state would eventually wither away. Government and the state belonged to an earlier and lower stage of evolution, such as in classical Greece. Likewise, the poor - which is to say the 'morally inferior' - would wither away too if left to their proper evolutionary fate under the law of survival of the fittest. Incidentally, it was Spencer who coined the expression 'survival of the fittest', not Darwin, although Darwin happily adopted it. It corresponded with the theory that the great law of nature was competition within and between species, an idea now projected onto society and the market economy.

It is not difficult to see how these ideas were amenable to extreme reformers on either side - to the Marxists and to the Libertarians. On the one side, all property and all means of production should be owned by the State. On the other side, all property and all means of production should be owned by private individuals. Yet both sides had the conception of the state eventually disappearing through evolution. In one the individual would be subsumed into an amorphous community. In the other, solitary evolved individuals would be practically self-sufficient in mastery of the world's resources. On one side the 'proletariat' was supreme. On the other the 'individual industrialist' was supreme. Yet both positions were equally materialist, determinist, and atheist. And both were equally opposed by George.

These are the kind ideas that were at war with each other in George's time, and which he was in part dealing with in his critique of the social theory of Spencer in his A Perplexed Philosopher. My point, however, is that these ideas, at both extremes, were consequent on the privatisation of the land. The conception of human community was radically changed, or rather, radically distorted and deformed. Given that only a few individuals have possession of the land, and that they determine its uses, whatever may be 'natural' in the human community is necessarily distorted. Traditions and customs, institutions, functions and specific gifts, which arise only through continuous community, are all gradually lost or degraded. Society loses any distinct form and the people no longer experience themselves as members of specific communities or as fellow dwellers on Mother Earth. There is a law of consequences at work here. If the natural human relation with the land is broken, then natural human relations are broken or lost. As Tolstoy put it in his book on art: 'If farming is wrong, then everything is wrong'.

These ideas of the nineteenth century remain powerful influences in our time, even though Herbert Spencer is all but forgotten. Yet he remains, along with Auguste Comte, a founder of the new science of sociology. His influence extends to Karl Marx and Max Weber. Marx saw Spencer's theory of 'survival of the fittest' as confirming his theory of 'class struggle'. And I think it is true to say that our understanding of society has been in continual crisis since that time. In particular, the civil realm has been in conflict with the economic realm. For while civil rights have grown, economic rights have diminished. And this disconnection between the civil and the economic has itself contributed to a profound distortion in the very idea of 'natural rights'. For example, the freedoms that properly belong to the economic realm are now sought in the civil realm - such as the minimum wage. And in the civil realm itself, the quest for equality has turned into demands for recognition of difference and so-called 'identity politics'. Paradoxically, the rise of modern individualism, and the quest for equal rights, has turned into a loss of a sense of personal identity, especially among younger people. There is no longer any sense of belonging in community where rights may be exercised.

All these distortions lie at the door of the general failure to understand that the land cannot be made private property. They are all consequent upon the misappropriation of the land. George himself listed a host of social ills that arise through this failure. For example, criminality and alcoholism. I think we can now count drug addiction as a necessary consequence too. We can also count the erosion of the family and responsible parenthood as a consequence. Natural social relations are destroyed as a consequence of a wrong relation with the land. These in turn place huge costs upon the welfare state, which itself is a necessary and inevitable consequence of the misappropriation of land.

And here is where one of the most monstrous ideas of Herbert Spencer is still at work. We condemn the criminal, the broken family and the drug addict in the same way that Spencer condemned the Victorian slums. It was from this condemnation of the poor, regarded as responsible for their own fate, that eugenics became widely discussed in England and other parts of Europe. The disintegration of the family, criminality, and drug-trafficking and addiction are all 'unnatural' social phenomena, but they are not due to the degeneracy of the individuals, and therefore to be remedied by any form of eugenics or 'social cleansing' through natural selection. Such solutions were seriously proposed in the nineteenth century. Such ideas have the devastating effect of concealing the real causes of deprivation, the breaking of the natural connection with the land.

Herbert Spencer had once seen the injustices that arose through the privatisation of the land. As I am sure you know, Spencer wrote a magnificent chapter arguing that land cannot be private property in his first book, Social Statics, published in 1850. George had made Spencer well known through quoting from that chapter in Progress and Poverty. Until then Social Statics had remained relatively unknown. But George quoting it extensively put Spencer in an awkward position in relation to the ruling class in England - the landed class. To protect his name and to remain in the right circles he needed to extricate himself from what he knew to be true and just. In modern terms, his opposition to private property in land had become for him 'politically incorrect' and would lead to social exclusion.

So he joined with the Radical Individualism of his time in opposing any kind of amelioration of poverty, whether from charity or from Gladstone's reforms. His idea of justice was now 'each gets the consequences of their own actions'. The rich entrepreneur deserves his wealth, the poor chimney sweep deserves his poverty. The destitute deserve their destitution. It is a law of social evolution. The fact that it was through the labour of the poor that the rich became wealthy was quietly overlooked. According to evolutionary theory, the strong survive and the weak are eliminated. That is the new justice. And one can see its roots going back to Thomas Hobbes' notion of nature as a state of 'war of all against all'. While for Hobbes it was a static condition of things, for Spencer and his wide following it had become an evolutionary principle. In fairness to Hobbes, he saw government as necessary to curb the natural brutality of individuals.

It may not be very comfortable to admit it, but these ideas are still at play in our time. But for us they have become normalised. For example, business is regarded as necessarily driven by competition for the highest profit. And under the notion of the 'freedom of the individual', and a host of arbitrary claims that spring from it, the underlying economic injustices remain invisible, or are taken to be inevitable. Yet they corrode the life and culture of community.

Perhaps the tragedy in all this is that it was foreseeable. Not only had George pointed to the consequences of privatisation of land, but many others in his time and slightly earlier had also pointed it out. For example Robert Owen, who in founded the cooperative movement in 1826, along with several communities and schools for children, here in the UK and the USA. Also Patrick Dove, who George praises in The Science of Political Economy, had proposed a land tax in1851 as the way to justice in a truly Christian society.

But even acquaintances of Darwin, Huxley and Spencer proposed the introduction of a land tax. The most significant of these was the evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had first formulated the theory of natural selection, usually attributed to Darwin. He was the first president of the Land Nationalisation Society formed in 1881, where he arranged for Henry George to speak when in England. In 1882 Wallace published a remarkable book entitled Land Nationalisation: Its Necessity and its Aims in which he notes that he had come across Progress and Poverty when he had almost finished his book. He fully endorses George's analysis of the land question.

As a widely travelled naturalist, Wallace had seen how well so-called 'primitive' societies live, remarking that they had far higher moral standards than Victorian England, where poverty and inequality were tolerated. This observation was contrary to the claims of Spencer, who describes primitive societies as cannibals. But one observation of Wallace that I find especially striking is that our large cities are unnatural. He observes that this is indicated in the necessity of sewer systems. Where people live without privatisation of land, they are naturally dispersed into small communities, and in these communities all wastage is returned to cultivate the land. There is no wastage, no need for refuse collection. Wallace's observations of evolution are now gaining regard among scientists, for example in An Elusive Victorian by Martin Fichman, and he is regarded as the earliest environmentalist. He saw the obvious link between the privatisation of the land and the destruction of the environment, including all the ailments and diseases that come with large cities.

Thus a link is made between the natural social proportion of communities, morality, environment, and the land question. The privatisation of land creates a rift between the civic and economic realms as an inevitable consequence of an unnatural relation with the earth. And to some extent modern Georgists inadvertently contribute to this wrong relation, if I might say so, by abstracting land into 'location'. Location and locomotion are the words Herbert Spencer used in his abdication from his earlier philosophy. He speaks a great deal of nonsense about our rights to 'natural media', such as air, water and light, and where 'land' now becomes just another 'natural media' where we have 'locomotion'. In neoclassical economics 'land' has been abstracted out of existence through intensifying it as either capital or location. This follows from Herbert Spencer and is contrary to Henry George. Consider what happens if we turn the primary elements of production - land, labour and capital - into location, energy and assets. Economics is then no longer part of nature or society. It is no longer human. Orwell observed that, if you wish to deceive and confuse the public, use Latin abstracts and avoid concrete Anglo-Saxon words. As an example he gave 'extending borders' as a substitute for 'war'. This tendency to abstraction now deceives and confuses modern students of economics, removing it from ethics and an activity of community. There is a belief that if you translate concrete observed reality into abstract formulas you get nearer to the truth of things and make them 'rational' and 'scientific'.

Wallace, himself a natural scientist, also gave a warning about this, noting that William Jevons and Alfred Marshal were turning economics into an abstract mathematical science and breaking the link between the natural activities of labour on land as understood by Adam Smith, Robert Owen and Henry George. This move has, so to speak, 'privatised' the academic study of economics. Marshal's famous attack on George when he had given a lecture at Oxford was to accuse him of having no academic expertise and therefore no knowledge of economics or any right to speak on the subject. The move to appropriate economics for academic experts alone was one of the tactics used to undermine George. My point is that abstract words such as 'location' instead of 'land' dislocate the study of economics from the natural world as experienced in actual life. We must be careful not to speak the language of pseudo-science, especially when speaking of society and its relation to the natural world. As Edmund Burke pointed out to Thomas Paine, the knowledge of society is not derived from abstract metaphysics, but from the study of history and taking prudent action according to given circumstances.

Just as we have become accustomed to the privatisation of land, so likewise we have become accustomed to the privatisation of the individual. It is no accident that Georg's opponents hit upon the 'individual liberty' as a defence of private property in land. Surely every individual should be free to make up his own mind on the question of property!

This argument conceals the obvious truth that all people have an equal right to dwell upon the land - to a 'location' if you insist! It is a self-evident truth utterly obvious to the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, the North American Indians, and the Australian Aborigines. They do not speak of 'location', but rather they acknowledge the land as the sacred Mother of all living beings. It is obvious that nature intends her gifts to be shared by all creatures, and she grants no contracts, deeds, titles or charters of private possession to any being. Sharing is the natural and equitable relation to the land. This 'sharing', which is still practiced in some parts of the world, even in farming communities in modern Europe, is the natural basis of society and community. It is at once economic and civic. Everyone is a participant rather than a private autonomous individual. All genuine human rights spring from sharing the land and participating in communal life together. They are simply given in the natural order of things and do not require proclamations or bills to exist. To turn natural rights into legal claims, although necessary in the present state of things, actually turns the human person into a private commodity, or into a 'legal entity' as Simone Veil argued. This is what the Radical Individualism and Libertarianism of the nineteenth century has given us under the invisible hand of Herbert Spencer's social evolution.

I am not attacking our modern civil liberties. These are a great achievement of judicial development in the face of great odds. Human community strives to continue to exist even when uprooted from the land. I only wish to bring attention to the fact that these are in large part delusory if not founded in economic justice. The acceptance of privatisation of land has accustomed us to a perpetual conflict between civic and economic justice. And the more we attempt to resolve this conflict through civil freedoms alone, the more deeply we become enmeshed in economic injustices, not only of land speculation but also of the vast commercial monopolies and widespread destructive banking practices. By an extraordinary turning of things backwards, land speculation, the vast commercial monopolies and modern banking, are all defended under the rubric of 'civil liberties'.

One final thought. I have argued that we need to see the social and civic consequences of the privatisation of the land and the artificial economy of land speculation. It is not enough to study this issue within the economic sphere alone, since the historical separation of the economic and civic spheres are a direct consequence of private land ownership. In George's time the connection between the civil and economic was still obvious and seen by all. Social reformers, such as Robert Owen and the Quakers, were economic reformers at the same time as social reformers. It is the modern disconnection of the two spheres that leads some reformers to seek means of taking from the rich to give to the poor. But no amount of economic redistribution remedies the social consequences of land speculation. Likewise with those who demand 'changing the system'. These kinds of mechanical changes really change nothing. They are ideologies rather than practical policies.

What is really needed is an understanding among a sufficient majority of the population of the real causes of poverty, crime, broken families and drug addiction - not to mention climate change and destructive modern farming methods. And in this regard, it is of little use merely campaigning for the implementation of a land tax. The Georgist movement needs to widen its range and study the nature of society and its institutions. That wider approach was present to some degree in the early movement but has now faded away. To a very large extent, the materialist, individualist, atheist, and deterministic social theories of the nineteenth century are still with us and shape how we regard the world. They have created a cloud obscuring the natural relations between the land and human citizenship.