Epilogue
Who possesses this landscape? –
The man who bought it or
I who am possessed by it?
False questions, for
this landscape is
masterless
and intractable in any terms
that are human.
A MAN IN ASSYNT BY NORMAN MACCAIG
I began work on this book in 2009 as an attempt to understand the circumstances of the economic crash. A tug at the broken banking thread pulled out the political failure of regulation, and that in turn led to the Austrian school of economics, and the particular meaning that Friederich Hayek and his colleagues gave to property and liberty. Thus step by step the focus of the book turned to ownership.
To 19th century Whig historians who took property to be the foundation-stone of democracy and to their Marxist successors who identified possession of the means of production as the central agent in shaping society and class consciousness, the impact of ownership across history was obvious. But that context is largely ignored by today’s historians. Even those studying wills and inventories of possessions or specialists in consumer economies and gender politics, rarely examine their topics in the context of a need to assert possession. And in the realm of anglophone studies where property does attract attention, individually owned land is assumed unquestioningly to be the mark of an advanced society, not as a bizarre mutation alien to most of humanity.
Eventually ownership of the earth in every form became the focus of the book. I was aware that this might seem old-fashioned to the point of eccentricity. Nevertheless, I justified it to myself by arguing that the urge to possess land in one way or another had been the major driving-force in human society for most of its history. Although it had been displaced from that dominant position by industrialization, in some economies for almost two centuries but for no more than a few generations across the greater part of the world, the growing pressure from up to ten billion people on the earth’s resources would, I felt, increasingly force its return to center-stage.
But the focus on land ownership yielded another advantage. It placed the emphasis on politics. Most attempts at a world view of history give the prioity to economics. To take two widely separated examples, in both Barrington Moore’s 1966 Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, and Daron Acemoǧlu’s Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty published in 2012, the productive capacity of an industrial economy is assumed to be the foundation of democracy and international status. Not only does this analysis diminish the significance of pre-industrial institutions, it inevitably makes civilized society contingent on material prosperity; in Bill Clinton’s encapsulation of political strategy, “It’s the economy, stupid.” But the success of an economy can only be measured by its growth. Since growth requires the accelerated consumption of limited natural resources, it is not a sustainable model in the long run.
If you concentrate on how a place is owned, however, the perspective changes. As this book demonstrates, matters of laws, of rights and of politics become crucial, taking precedence over economics. From that point of view, it is possible to arrive at a different distillation of what is important to humanity: “It’s the neighborhood, stupid.”
In other words, there is an alternative to the single, ultimately unviable measure of success imposed by economics. Around the world and throughout history, neighborhoods have succeeded in a million different ways. It all depends on how the earth is owned.