Chapter Three
On April Fools’ Day 1649, Gerrard Winstanley, a bankrupted cloth merchant, led a score of likeminded souls out on to the wooded slopes of Saint George’s Hill in Surrey, about twenty miles west of London, and began to clear the ground. Their action in digging up the earth gained them their nickname, the Diggers, but their purpose had a wider significance than merely preparing the earth for cultivation. The soil on the hill was acidic and incapable of supporting much other than thin grass, heather, and fir trees, and today the slopes are home to one of the most expensive and exclusive golf-centered building developments in England. Such a fate could not have been further from the Diggers’ intentions. They planted subsistence food, beans, barley, and roots, but what they really intended to grow was a new, egalitarian society.
“[T]he earth was not made purposely for you, to be Lords of it, and we to be your Slaves, Servants, and Beggers,” Winstanley wrote in a pamphlet addressed to the property-owning gentry, “but it was made to be a common Livelihood to all, without respect of persons: And that your buying and selling of Land, and the Fruits of it, one to another, is the cursed thing.” In place of that unequal society, the Diggers wanted to re-create the communal living of the early Christians when, as the Acts of the Apostles recorded, “All who believed were together and had all things in common.” The basis of this new society was communal ownership of the land: “For the Earth, with all her Fruits of Corn, Cattle, and such like,” wrote Winstanley, “was made to be a common Store-house of Livelihood to all Mankinde.” They were not concerned with politics, because they believed “we shall need neither [magistrates] nor [laws] in that nature of Government; for as our Land is common, so our Cattell is to be common, and are not to be bought and sold among us . . . and we shall not arrest one another.”
There was nothing new about trying to alter a society’s values by changing the way that its land was owned. In Europe, similar attempts went back at least to 133 BC when the populist tribune, Tiberius Gracchus, set out to restore the Roman republic to its original egalitarian state by appropriating land from the wealthy and redistributing it to poorer citizens. Seen through the angry eyes of the Diggers, the feudal system of government had been another such experiment, because William the Conqueror’s seizure of once freely occupied English land in 1066 created a society in which everyone from duke to peasant became dependent on the king as owner of the earth. “Surely he took freedom from every one,” Winstanley declared, “and became the disposer both of inclosures and commons.”
The scattering of hastily erected Digger cabins on Saint George’s Hill stands out from earlier experiments, however, for being the first attempt in a long line that stretches into the twenty-first century to try to find an alternative to, in Winstanley’s phrase, “that disturbing devil, called Particular propriety [private property].” None of the various Digger encampments lasted more than a year. They suffered physical intimidation by neighboring landowners, and as a group they clearly failed to deal with the tensions of communal ownership. Nevertheless, their experiment has had a long line of successors, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau by way of Vladimir Lenin to the Prachandra Path adopted by contemporary Nepal’s Maoist Communists. Nearly all have followed Winstanley’s line of argument: that private property is fundamentally unjust, being based on violence and inequality, and that an egalitarian society can be created by redistributing land as communal property. Making such a society work, however, has always proved exceptionally difficult.
At one period of my life, I believed passionately in Winstanley’s egalitarian ideals, and lived for longer than was sensible on communes in the United States and Europe, farming unproductive, steeply sloping fields locked away in the mountains, unwanted by their original owner. The experience offered a salutary lesson in understanding how ownership of the earth shapes the way society is organized.
The most attractive qualities of a primitive commune, sharing the labor and the rewards, turned out to be its most destructive. It was not the group but an individual who actually plowed the field, dug the ditch, milked the goats, and made the granola. Over time, it became obvious that some performed these tasks better, or more slowly, or more lazily, than others, and so the tasks either had to be organized with rigid efficiency to spread the burden fairly, or the sort of dissensions that plagued the Plymouth colony boiled up and tore the community apart. On that very basic level, it was clear that Winstanley was wrong. Far from being able to dispense with government, equal ownership entailed a surprising intensity of organization and policing of personal foibles.
However, communal ownership was not the only way to deal with the inequalities of property. Winstanley’s experiment took place during a brief break in the ruinous civil war that wracked England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1642 to 1651 and took the lives of as many as one million of their eight million inhabitants. In the horror of those events, whole countrysides were emptied, and more than one million English acres and most of Ireland’s farmland changed hands.
When parliamentarian forces routed the royalist army in the summer of 1647 and King Charles I was deposed, all three kingdoms were left without a legitimate government. In their crude attempt to create a new, more equal kind of society, the Diggers attempted to extinguish the monster of private property, but in the last months of 1647 a more sophisticated plan for a fairer society was discussed by the most powerful people in the country. In their debates, which took place in the village of Putney, just outside London, the monster was not only assigned a central role in constitutional government, but even talked of as the starting point of genuine democracy.
Many antagonisms, religious, economic, and social, contributed to the conflict that broke out between crown and Parliament in 1642. But all of them led back to a fundamental dispute about sovereignty. Did it ultimately lie with the monarch, who, as Charles’s father, King James I, had claimed was “the supremest thing on earth, for kings are not only God’s lieutenants on earth, but even by God himself they are called gods,” or should it somehow be exercised by the representatives of the freeholders and merchants whose wealth paid for the government of the country?
Taxation was the trigger that turned argument to fighting. Using their political stronghold in the House of Commons in the 1540s, the landowning gentry had claimed new privileges for property owners, encapsulated in the 1628 Petition of Right that stated as a principle that there should be no taxation without representation and no imprisonment except by process of law. To avoid giving his consent, King Charles I had attempted to rule without Parliament, raising money by various methods that included imposing a massive total of £50,000 in fines for illegal enclosure, the last attempt to turn back the irresistible tide. When debt finally drove Charles to recall Parliament, he was confronted by a House of Commons intent on punishing his advisors before voting on taxes, and when royal troops tried to force them to vote, violence ensued.
For the royalists, a monarchy provided the only form of legitimate government, but in October 1647 the parliamentarians were confronted by the urgent need to find an alternative when the first phase of hostilities ended with victory and the capture of the king. Their most powerful leader, a plainspoken, middle-aged landowner with a prominent wart on his square chin, epitomized their indecision about what form the government should take. “I can tell you, Sirs, what I would not have,” Oliver Cromwell confessed, “though I cannot what I would.”
Cromwell’s dominance rested mostly on his command of the Ironsides, Parliament’s fiercely disciplined cavalry, but partly on his own unshakeable personality. He was a reborn Puritan, once “the chief of sinners” who had seen the light and now consulted his conscience to discover what course Providence required him to follow. “If here I may serve my God,” he wrote on the eve of a battle in 1645, “either by my doing or by my suffering, I shall be most glad.” But, coming from a family that was related to Thomas Cromwell and had grown rich on monastic land, he was also the quintessential property owner, committed to the preservation of its rights against royal depredation. “I was by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable heights, nor yet in any obscurity,” he admitted. But the family fortunes had declined despite his efforts, and his slightly shabby appearance was caught in the description of him in Parliament wearing a plain woollen suit and linen shirt, its collar “spotted with blood.”
Cromwell’s inclination was to support the Presbyterian “grandees” on Parliament’s side, made up of lawyers, merchants, and senior military officers who believed that the monarchy had to remain, but in future should be controlled by the legislature. During the war, however, the parliamentary cause had sprouted another, radical wing, the Puritan-influenced Independents who wished the monarch to be stripped of all power. Among them a group of pamphleteers and junior officers calling themselves Levellers had started to ask a question that could not have been put into words before: if kings were not divinely appointed, if they could be defied, fought against, and chased all over the country, where did sovereignty actually come from?
To resolve their differences, Cromwell summoned the Levellers’ representatives in November 1647 to an army council meeting in Putney. Five cavalry regiments elected representatives, known as “the agitators,” to make their case, while Cromwell and his advocate and son-in-law, General Henry Ireton, appeared in person. On the face of it, there was not much to choose between the Cromwellian agenda, “The Heads of Proposals,” and the Levellers’ “Agreement of the People”—parliaments elected every two years, religious toleration for everyone and the king’s executive power either minimized or shared with a council of state answerable to Parliament—but they disagreed fundamentally about who could vote in these elections. Take away some of the king’s sovereign power, and it must evidently come to rest with the people who elected the new powerful legislature.
To Ireton, speaking for Cromwell, it was obvious therefore that voting could only be exercised by those with “a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom,” meaning landowners or tenants paying at least two pounds a year in rent, and wealthy merchants. Without property, there could be no rights. That was what most respectable people in England had believed before the war. “He that hath no property in his goods” a member of Parliament had said bluntly in 1624, “is not free.” The liberties enshrined in the common law and in statutes from Magna Carta onwards—freedom from taxation without representation, recourse to the supreme authority of the legal system, the necessity of trial by jury, the existence of habeas corpus—had all emerged from the landowners’ basic need for security of tenure. Freedom was a privilege and, as the moderate and thoughtful Presbyterian Richard Baxter put it, lack of property was bound to “keep men out of freedom in the commonwealth.”
Once blood had been shed, however, it brought in a wider issue than property rights. In forthright language, Colonel William Rainborough, the Levellers’ chief speaker at Putney, pointed out that the rank and file in the army were not fighting for property rights but “for the liberties of the people of England.” Thus when it came to voting, “I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest . . . and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.” In short, anyone could vote. “I do verily believe,” he declared, “that there is no man but will say that the foundation of all law lies in the people.”
The Levellers’ proposal brought into the political arena an idea that until then had been confined to religon, that of human equality. Such a concept came more easily to Puritans, who believed that all souls were equal in the sight of God, than to Presbyterians, who held that only a minority of souls belonged to the elect destined for paradise. “Error No. 52,” the Presbyterian preacher Thomas Edwards wrote in a long list of the Levellers’ mistaken beliefs, “By natural birth all men are equally and alike born to like property, liberty and freedom.”
For property owners, there could be no question of giving the king’s sovereign power to landless voters who, in Cromwell’s dismissive words, “have no interest but the interest of breathing.” Representatives of the unpropertied might legislate against property, the very bulwark of individual freedom, and Ireton’s outrage at Rainborough’s proposal is apparent even through the muffled, occasionally confusing transcript of the debate. “Give me leave to tell you, that if you make this the rule,” he exclaimed, “I think you must fly for refuge to an absolute natural right, and you must deny all civil rights.” If people could lay claim to “natural rights” of freedom and voting, Ireton spluttered, they would go on to make other unreasonable claims, saying “this is so just, this is so due, this is so right to them.”
In fact the Levellers did not believe that every male could vote—they would have excluded beggars and servants who might too easily be bribed—and their purpose in arguing for a near-universal male franchise was actually to strengthen the authority of government. To Ireton’s persistent assertion that the Levellers’ program would destroy the constitution, Rainborough replied in irritation, “I wish you would not make the world believe that we are for anarchy.” Rainborough was dogged and courageous, unintimidated by the senior rank of his opponents, and his arguments contain the central belief of modern democracy, that the authority of government, its sovereign power, is derived from the assent of all the people, regardless of the property they possess. But the Levellers made a still more audacious claim.
One year earlier, in 1646, the savage satirist and pamphleteer Richard Overton had carved out of the concept of property-based individual freedom a principle that had never before been voiced. From confinement in the fortress-like prison of Newgate, opposite the royal courts of justice in London, he fired off what he called “An arrow against all tyrants and tyranny, shot from the prison of Newgate into the prerogative bowels of the arbitrary House of Lords, and all other usurpers and tyrants whatsoever.”
The arrow’s message was that everyone was born with equal rights, and it began with a declaration startlingly modern in its egotism: “To every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any. For every one, as he is himself, so he has a self-propriety [property in himself], else could he not be himself; and of this no second [person] may presume to deprive any of, without manifest violation and affront to the very principles of nature and of the rules of equity and justice between man and man.”
What is remarkable about Overton’s arrow is that it uses the central concept of the land revolution to claim universal rights that until then had been thought of as privileges restricted to property. “No man has power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man’s . . . For by natural birth all men are equally and alike born to like propriety [property], liberty and freedom; and as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature into this world, every one with a natural, innate freedom and propriety—as it were writ in the table of every man’s heart, never to be obliterated.”
Although little is known of Overton’s early life, several of his pamphlets are written in the form of plays, and good evidence suggests that he was a onetime actor in the company attached to London’s Fortune Theater. That background would have immersed him in Shakespeare’s plays, and the individualized struggle of his characters to assert what was authentically theirs against the grip of the past. It would also explain the punchy style of his writing. But Overton’s fearlessness was his own. Better than most, he understood the cold, murderous insistence on having his way that underlay Cromwell’s religiosity, and he did not hesitate to depict the general as the sort of treacherous assassin popular in Jacobean drama and familiar to play-goers of the period. “You shall scarce speak to Cromwell about anything,” Overton wrote, “but he will lay his hand on his breast, elevate his eyes, and call God to record, he will weep, howl and repent, even while he doth smite you under the first rib.” The accuracy of that murderous characterization would soon be revealed.
Cromwell’s supporters had Overton condemned for treason after he had issued yet more pamphlets calling for greater democracy and wider freedom. Although he escaped execution, other Levellers who adopted his views were less lucky. The Putney debates broke up with no agreement. Two years later, however, a troop of Ironsides wearing the Levellers’ green ribbons were imprisoned by Cromwell’s troops in the church at Burford, a market town near Oxford, and accused of mutiny.
A relic of their captivity can still be seen in the unsteady letters carved into the church’s lead font, “Antony Sedley prisner 1649.” One by one, their ringleaders were led out and shot, among them Corporal Perkins, and this account of his courage might serve as an epitaph for the first doomed attempt to establish the foundation of modern democracy: “The place of death and sight of his Executioners was so far from altering his countenance or danting his spirit that he seemed to smile upon both, and accompt it a great mercy that he was to die for this ‘quarrel’; and casting his eyes up to his Father and afterwards to his fellow-prisoners (who stood upon the [church roof] to see the execution) set his back against the wall, and bad [told] the Executioners shoot; and so died gallantly, as he had lived religiously.”
Four years later, having established complete control of the army, Cromwell had himself sworn in as Lord Protector, and ruled until his death as a deeply religious, unmistakably military, and instinctively property-supporting dictator.
The Lord Protector’s rule was just what the most influential political commentator of the day felt the nation required. Thomas Hobbes believed the concept of natural rights to be wrong and pernicious. He had spent much of his exceptionally long life considering the state of nature, and had come to share Winstanley’s belief that property was an artificial concept kept in place by the violence of government and the fear of the governed. Unlike the Diggers, however, Hobbes believed that guaranteeing the security of private property was the only way of leading mankind out of the dark shadows of its depraved nature into the sunlit uplands of civilized society.
Two qualities were at war in Hobbes’s character, timidity and aggression. Born in 1588, the year a Spanish armada sailed to conquer England, he himself attributed his phobic fear of physical violence to his mother’s “Dread of the Spanish invasion” at the time of his birth. His rages were equally marked. “If any one objected to his Dictates,” a contemporary remarked of Thomas Hobbes, “he would leave the Company in a passion, saying, his business was to Teach, not Dispute.” Both traits marked his philosophy.
At the age of fourteen the boy was a good enough scholar to be admitted to Oxford University, and his exceptional learning led to his appointment soon after graduation to be tutor to the future Earl of Devonshire, and later to his son. These positions he held almost continuously until his death in 1679 at the age of ninety-one.
What is striking about Leviathan, Hobbes’s magnum opus, published in 1651, was that he only came to the political discussion after a prolonged dissection of human nature. Having laid bare what he called “the characters of man’s heart, blotted and confounded as they are with dissembling, lying, counterfeiting,” he concluded that people were driven by passions, “appetite, desire, love, aversion, hate, joy, and grief,” and these in turn were manifestations of two fundamentally selfish impulses, greed and fear, that could never be satisfied or dispelled. “I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death . . . because he cannot assure the power and means to live well which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.” In a state of nature, therefore, the passions remained uncontrolled, leading inevitably to tensions, aggravation, and violence. In the book’s best-known sentence, he bleakly described the consequence. There would be “no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
As though General Ireton were dictating at his elbow, Hobbes poured scorn on the idea that property, or any form of ordered society, could exist without government: “Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice . . . no propriety, no dominion, no mine and thine distinct; but only that to be every man’s that he can get, and for so long as he can keep it . . . in such a condition every man has a right to every thing.” The theory proposed by Cotton and Overton shrivelled in the face of Hobbes’s logic.
Significantly, this unflattering portrait of humanity was taken from an earlier book, De Corpore, written in the 1630s, long before civil war broke out, when the royal government was making its final, doomed attempt to limit the power of the property-making gentry. Hobbes was already middle-aged by then, having grown up in the generation of Shakespeare’s children, and it was evident that something had changed in people’s outlook. The unease about separating the self from the past that shadowed Shakespeare’s drama had gone. The unease that Hobbes expressed, and was evidently shared by his wide public, concerned the children and grandchildren of those who had done well out of the Tudor land grab and knew no restraints on their behavior.
Hobbes believed in science, not democracy. On his tours of Europe as tutor to the Earl of Devonshire, he had met Galileo and become a friend and later close enemy of the French mathematician René Descartes. In England, he acted as note-taker to Francis Bacon, pioneer of experimental science, and was friendly with many of the early scientists who later formed the Royal Society, including William Harvey, discoverer of the circulation of the blood. Next to politics, most of his time was spent trying to solve the impossible mathematical problem of squaring the circle. And Leviathan is in large part a scientific attempt to describe a system of government that would make sense of the balkiness of human nature. In Hobbesian philosophy, people behaved like the elements in a chemical experiment, reacting to the introduction of outside agents like danger and opportunity according to patterns determined by their innate passions, appetites, and trepidations.
According to Hobbes, however, government of some kind could be expected to emerge spontaneously from this chemical soup. The one force greater than the individual’s greed to acquire more of everything was the individual’s fear of being destroyed by the violence of everyone else’s greed. Love of life, one of the driving passions, impelled people to use their reason and see that some sacrifices were worth making for greater security. This gave rise to what Hobbes called “the first and fundamental law of nature, which is: to seek peace and follow it.” The same law of nature also drove people to desire other qualities impossible in the violent brutish world, such as justice and mercy, “and in sum, doing to others as we would be done to.”
So, despite themselves, people would prefer to exchange their natural right to everything for the civil rights that a state guaranteed, and especially for those laws “by which [a person] acquireth and holdeth a propriety in land or goods, and a right or liberty of action.” But because these goals were “contrary to our natural passions, that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge, and the like,” it was necessary to have “the terror of some power to cause them to be observed.” Step by step, each individual would be driven to the point where he turned to his neighbor and said, “I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man [Leviathan], or to this assembly of men, on this condition: that thou give up thy right to him, and authorise all his actions in like manner.” Thus, self-interest would end in stable, albeit dictatorial, government.
Hobbes’s argument extended over several hundred pages, but its conclusion was conveyed by the magnificent engraving on the book’s cover. In the foreground stood a prosperous walled city with fine houses and a sumptuous cathedral, while behind it villages nestled in a peaceful countryside crossed by neat hedgerows, and sailing barges waited on the river to take produce down to a thriving port. Towering over this scene of peace and prosperity was the crowned figure of Leviathan, a sword in one hand, a bishop’s crozier in the other. Leviathan represented the commonwealth or state that would cause the law of nature to be observed, and his torso and limbs were composed of hundreds of tiny men and women gazing up at his face in devotion. On each side of the book’s title a column of panels illustrated the powers that the state had tamed: to the left, castles, cannons, clashing armies, and warfare, to the right, cathedrals, argument, and disputatious prelates.
During the last years of the twentieth century, a long swath of Arab states from Algeria to Yemen experienced something close to the desperation that Hobbes imagined occurring in a state of nature. More than 150,000 people lost their lives in Algeria, tens of thousands of them murdered by having their throats slashed, and the frenzy only ceased with the installation of Abdelaziz Bouteflika as its “strong man” ruler. For the inhabitants of Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, security without political freedom was preferable to such chaos. In 1991, Somalia lost its Leviathan, the longtime dictator Siad Barre, and fell into a cycle of civil war, foreign invasion, and famine that indeed rendered most people’s existence solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
However, the behavior of these autocratic rulers illustrated the drawback to the Hobbesian solution to civil chaos. If property only survives thanks to Leviathan’s protection, it will always be in danger of being appropriated and redistributed to the advantage of Leviathan’s family and cronies. Until the “Arab Spring” of 2011, the mass of people living under this sort of rule had to purchase protection for their lands, shops, and businesses by paying bribes and other favors to the rulers’ families and associates who became bloated with wealth. The death of a Tunisian fruitseller, Muhammad Bouazizi, who set himself on fire rather than endure more of the regime’s harassment and humiliation, encapsulated the despair that a Leviathan government engenders.
Even to Hobbes’s contemporaries, the danger of a corrupt and bullying ruler was obvious. Despite the risk of offending Cromwell, criticism of Leviathan centered on this outcome. Yet it was not clear whether a more attractive form of non-monarchical government existed. To a country still recovering from civil war, peace and security were too valuable to be lightly discarded. One way through this apparently insoluble dilemma was suggested by the most eccentric of Hobbes’s critics.
In 1656, James Harrington published a highly individual history of English politics entitled Oceana. His purpose was twofold: partly to correct Hobbes but mostly to explain how the cataclysm of the civil war could have occurred. Looking back at the history of the previous two centuries, he became convinced that property explained it all. He took for granted that its owners would be selfish in pursuit of their own interests. What intrigued him was the way that this shaped a country’s government.
A polyglot intellectual, and the spoiled darling of his family, Harrington supported Parliament in theory, but the execution of Charles I in 1649, which he personally witnessed, so shocked him that it caused what appears to have been a nervous breakdown. Oceana was begun a few years later, and, although written as a kind of fairy tale, remains remarkable as the first attempt to analyze political events in terms of economic forces.
Harrington’s theory depended on a simple observation: the shape of government was bound to reflect the way the earth was owned because in the last resort, those who controlled most property could sustain the largest number of soldiers. “An army is a beast that hath a great belly and must be fed,” he pointed out, followed by the observation that “he that has the land can feed the soldiers.” Harrington’s conclusion was contained in a single sentence: “Such . . . as is the proportion or balance of . . . property in land, such is the nature of empire [government].” Where one man was “sole landlord” of an entire country, “his empire is absolute monarchy”; where the ground was in the hands of only a few, the government was an aristocracy; and where many owned it, as in England, “the empire is a commonwealth.” A century later, the founders of the American republic read Harrington with particular attention, and John Adams summed up his philosophy in a pithy phrase, “Power follows property.”
Where a government did not reflect this underlying reality, there was bound to be conflict ending in an explosion. Absolute monarchs, such as the Bourbons in France and the Hapsburgs in Spain, who owned their nation’s territory, had to prevent any attempt by the people to widen their share of the land. Conversely, where people won land for themselves—here Harrington pointed to the Dutch winning independence from the Spaniards, and the Swiss from the Austrian Hapsburgs—the explosion went off under the foreign monarchs. “Where are the estates, or the power of the people in France?—blown up,” Harrington wrote gleefully. “Where is that of the people in Arragon, and the rest of the Spanish kingdoms?—blown up. On the other side, where is the King of Spain’s power in Holland?—blown up. Where is that of the Austrian princes in Switzerland?—blown up.”
The cause of the civil war in England, according to Oceana, could be traced directly back to Henry VIII’s disposal of monastic estates in the 1540s. It put land in the hands of so many people, “that the balance of the commonwealth was too apparently in the popular party.” The explosive pressure of that imbalance had to be relieved. If “their kings did not first blow up them,” meaning the landowners, the owners would have no choice but to destroy royal government. “Rights” played no part in Harrington’s thesis. The drive toward democracy was not about personal freedom, it was about the distribution of power based on property.
In effect, Oceana vindicated the belief held by Winstanley and the Diggers that the way the land was owned did shape society and government. However crude, Harrington’s economic model suggested a mechanism to explain why property should have such far-reaching effects. And so long as land remained the prime source of wealth and income, its assumption that landowners were bound to want political power offered a surprisingly far-reaching approach to the analysis of a country’s social and governing structure. Late into the twentieth century, United States foreign policy continued to provide practical vindication of Harrington’s thesis. “When you answer the question, ‘Who really owns the soil?’,” wrote George McBride, a pioneer of the Green Revolution in Mexico, “you lay bare the very foundations upon which its society is based, and reveal the fundamental character of many of its institutions.”
The answer led the Soviet Union to break up privately owned farms and establish collectives on state-owned land in the 1930s, and drove the United States in the 1940s to promote democracy in Japan by forcibly destroying “the undemocratic land tenure system” and redistributing it to owner-occupiers. “We believe in the family-size farm,” President Harry S. Truman declared in 1950. “That is the basis of our agriculture and has strongly influenced our form of government.” Throughout the Cold War, the struggle between capitalism and Communism in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East was shaped by the Harringtonian belief that once land was either privately owned or state-owned, the politics would follow suit.
Harrington, however, took his pioneering analysis no further. Instead, with obsessive, almost autistic attention to detail, he devoted himself to creating a blueprint for his ideal commonwealth, with every inch of land surveyed, mapped, and measured to become property, and elaborate rules set in place to keep its government honest.
To prevent any one individual acquiring too much power, he proposed limiting the amount of landed property each person could acquire, and to avoid corruption in government, members of both the legislature and the executive were to be “rotated,” that is elected by ballot for a set term, usually of three years. Ideas such as these appealed strongly to the scientific, rationalist people who dissected dead bodies and examined the shadows on the moon through a telescope. When Harrington founded the “Rota club” in the late 1650s to promote his ideas, its membership included people such as William Harvey and the architect Christopher Wren.
In his remarkable, though almost unreadable, study of how a democracy could come into being, Harrington offered a corrective to Hobbes’s fearful view of the greediness of the land revolution’s beneficiaries. Although his model of government formation was drawn from the same period of English history, Oceana showed in effect what might happen after Leviathan. With security, Leviathan’s subjects would grow wealthier, and sooner or later seek power to protect their property against the depredations of the ruler. One side or the other would then be blown up. Missing from Harrington’s truncated analysis, however, was the volatile substance that led to the explosion.
The catalyst was to be found in the claim of the English Levellers to a universal right to freedom and property. Because it sprang, as Overton put it, from “the rules of equity and justice between man and man,” this right existed in nature, before monarchs and laws existed. A “civil” right, created by the law, could be legally removed by the law. But a “natural” right, while it might be temporarily obliterated, could never be destroyed. In other words, the protection the common law gave to individual ownership merely enshrined a preexisting right. As one of the Leveller agitators at Putney put it, “Really properties are the foundations of constitutions, and not constitutions of property. For if so be there were no constitutions, yet the law of nature does give a principle for every man to have a property.” Thus King Charles’s attempt at autocratic rule was not only illegal, it ran counter to natural justice, and justified his overthrow and execution.
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Had these arguments about “natural rights” to freedom and voting been confined to a powerful elite, their significance would have been diminished. But amongst the Puritan-influenced, private-propertied English, the capacity to read their Bible and their title deeds gave their own language both spiritual and political authority. As a result, Leveller pamphlets, like those of their mainstream critics, together with Leviathan, Oceana, and other books in the same vein, were not only written in the vernacular, but widely read by landowners and by those accustomed to seeking biblical texts to buttress the dictates of conscience.
Elsewhere in the world, the language of power divided government from the governed. In China, Mandarin was spoken and written only by the ruling elite who made up the imperial bureaucracy, and on the continent of Europe the majority of people communicated in local dialects—as late as 1794, according to Abbé Grégoire, barely a quarter of France’s inhabitants understood French—while law courts and universities used Latin. Consequently the flood of treatises on natural law published in seventeenth-century Europe, such as Francisco Suárez’s De Legibus, Hugo Grotius’s De Jure Belli ac Pacis, and Samuel Pufendorf’s De jure naturae et gentium, were composed for a privileged class of lawyers, academics, and administrators.
This restricted audience dictated the nature of their discussion of natural rights. Framed in relation to abstract principles derived from familiar church authorities and Latin and Greek texts, personal freedom was defined in the familiar negative sense of not having the status of a slave, while the political freedom to resist a lawful ruler was equally constrained. However unjust a sovereign’s actions, rebellion was akin to children killing their father, an unnatural crime wrong in itself and liable to produce, as Grotius put it, “a turbulent state of affairs, which no sober minded people ever wished to experience.” Protestant and Catholic alike shared the belief of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the medieval church’s great lawyer, that only a direct threat to personal safety justified resistance to a king.
By contrast, the Putney debates and scores of Leveller-inspired pamphlets not only imagined the possibility of the king being subject to the will of the people, but made the breathtaking claim that every free person was entitled to the unique array of privileges won by property owners—freedom from arbitrary arrest, protection of the law’s due process, the right to trial by jury, and other defenses against the king’s power—and a right to vote and thus participate in government.
So long as Puritanism, and with it the primacy given to individual conscience, carried political influence, the possibility that these individual rights might be universal remained in existence. But, as the landowners monopolized power and entrenched their privileges after 1653, the balance of opinion would tip away from the Levellers and toward Cromwell, so that by the end of the century English freedom was once more seen to be a privilege of property. But the revolutionary thought that Overton had put into print and the green-ribboned Levellers had fought for, that by natural justice such rights belonged to all, was not extinguished. On the other side of the Atlantic, it would not only burst into life but shape the constitution of a new nation.