Politics v. Economics, ctd

nadezhda in reply to Fear and Loathing in Georgetown says:

FLG —

I hope my reply above to James Hanley (re the advantages and pitfalls of using Public Choice-style theories for political economy) is also responsive to your view of our competing analytical models. As you’ll see from my reply, I don’t think it’s quite as simple as “theoretical” versus “real world”. I also tried to address the “time horizons” question.

However, your comment on Locke got me doing some further musing. So just for fun, here are some thoughts somewhat relevant to choosing and using analytical models, taking Locke’s “Property” (which is splendid) in his Two Treatises as a text. I’m going to work from memory so it may be a bit sloppy.

Anyhow, let’s think about some of the reasons why Locke probably chose to invent a model that extracted government from his picture of society. Why did he hypothesize a state of benevolent social organization that, prior to the establishment of government, recognized the institution of property and property rights? As you’d probably expect me to say, I don’t think he was primarily concerned with segregating the domains of politics and economics, either practically or analytically. Rather, in writing the 2 Treatises, he had a complicated agenda that had both immediate and longer-term objectives.

To briefly rehearse the history. Locke wrote the 2 Treatises about a decade before he published them, in 1690 after the Glorious Revolution. The occasion of Locke’s writing the 2 Treatises was the intense conflict between the two political factions, Whigs and Tories, that were then emerging in the late 1670s. Their conflict at the time focused especially on attempts by the Whigs, led by Locke’s employer (1st Earl of Shaftesbury), to force Charles II to exclude his Catholic brother, James, Duke of York, from the succession. But the Exclusion Crisis was just one part of a wider politico-theological conflict over the nature of sovereignty that disinterred all the debates of the Civil War and Interregnum that the Restoration was supposed to have peacefully laid to rest.

So Locke’s near-term objective, to support Shaftesbury’s raw-knuckled politics, was (1) to provide grounds for the assertion by Parliament of its rights to determine who would be king (or at least to define the manner and criteria of selection) and (2) to support the broader Whig assault on what they viewed as Charles II’s moves toward “arbitrary government and Popery”, especially as Charles II employed the royal prerogative. (Shades of his father’s fatal flaw, in Whig eyes.)

Foreign policy was the most obvious arena for conflict between Charles and the House of Commons, which controlled the purse-strings. But Charles was also suspected of being a bit too fond of his cousin Louis XIV’s model, with its attempts to centralize and rationalize political and religious authority and extend the monarch’s influence into numerous areas of society and culture. It’s only in retrospect, however, that the Two Treatises seem tailor-made for justifying the more radical Glorious Revolution of a decade later which overthrew the monarch.

Locke’s primary target, and the focus of the 1st Treatise, was the theory of absolute “divine right” monarchy of Filmer’s Patriarcha, which though written earlier in the century had found new popularity in the context of the raging political battles. Filmer’s was an extreme version of the doctrine of passive obedience preached constantly by the Anglican clergy in nearly every parish of England from May 1660 onwards, especially but not exclusively on the anniversary of the exemplary martyrdom of Charles I.

Filmer grounded his assertion of the absolute sovereignty of kings on Genesis — God’s grant of the right of rulership to Adam. Not only was Adam a God-designed and mandated patriarchal model for all humankind’s future politico-social relations. Today’s kings were actual heirs of Adam’s divinely-granted rights of absolute dominion who could trace their sovereign rights (which were interests transferred by inheritance) directly back to the first man.

So according to Filmer, government, property, and the rights of absolute sovereignty of kings were coeval direct creations by God at the origin of humankind. And accordingly, God’s law, which obligated complete obedience to divinely-endowed absolute sovereigns, preceded society.

In the text of “Property” that you linked to, Locke doesn’t fight Filmer by rubbishing Genesis as a just-so story. Rather, he reads Genesis in a radically different manner. For his purposes, which require that government and sovereignty are human constructs, not divine, Locke needs for society to be prior to government. So he takes up the cudgels of theological jurisprudence — please note, this is all as much juridical as political or economic — and focuses on the part of the creation story where Adam is given dominion over the earth and its creatures. And like a good natural lawyer well-schooled in Latin, he distinguishes between the general, undifferentiated dominion of use or enjoyment shared by Adam’s successors from the process, which Locke elaborately describes, by which “property” becomes differentiated and recognized via the fruits of labor and then effectively institutionalized as part of the customs and practice that organize society. It’s only after a society with acknowledged property rights has emerged that we can reach Locke’s stage of government formation, where the (conditional) right to rule, and reciprocal obligation to obey, is established by social contract.

Accordingly, under Locke’s just-so biblical story supported by anthropological appeals to what was then known of Native Americans, Property becomes for Locke a natural right, but not a God-originated right in Filmer’s sense. Rather, it’s “endowed by the Creator” in the sense that it’s derived from how God created human nature, which is what determines how humans relate to one another as social and rational animals. Accordingly, Locke’s Property only gradually emerges in society, and it is necessarily prior to the development of contract or government. Sovereignty, human-defined “law,” and the magistracy of rulers who deliver justice arise as totally human constructs only as men agree to form a government.

So by extracting government from Filmer’s Genesis story and, while retaining the biblical narrative, placing government after the creation of society and Property, Locke’s theological jurisprudence puts paid to “divine right” nonsense. But he’s still left with an opponent he doesn’t address directly, as he did with Filmer, but who is just as dangerous.

Hobbes’ Leviathan State is also an absolutist ruler, though the State can be a monarchy or republic. Hobbes’ ideas could be used not just to support Charles I’s claims to personal rule but to justify the “Parliamentary dictatorship” of the Commonwealth or Cromwell’s increasingly absolutist rule as Protector.

The Leviathan’s absolutist logic relies, not on Genesis, but on an assessment of human nature that explains the creation of government as a response to fear of man’s short, brutish life in the state of nature. Hobbes assumes (with some justification, considering the Wars of Religion, Thirty Years War and the English Civil War) that men are subject to a compelling motivation to contract for the protection of the State by granting the State absolute sovereignty. The timing of how the social contract is made and how many steps are required to create an absolute obligation of obedience gets a bit tricky to follow, and as I understand it, Hobbes changed his mind over some details of his just-so story. But his basic scheme is that, in the state of nature, the only natural right (God-given if you believe Hobbes wasn’t an atheist) is to self-preservation. For Hobbes, all further “rights” (property, contract, etc) can only be established by a human law-giver, which is the sovereign created via the social contract. Men’s rights are, therefore, effectively conditional in that they remain subject to the absolute authority and will of the sovereign which they created by contract and which they unconditionally promised to obey. (The only right which men retain vis a vis the State is the fundamental “natural right” of self-preservation — which leads Hobbes to the rather peculiar stipulation, for one of absolutist bent, that men have the right to attempt to escape capital punishment which has been imposed by the sovereign, even when in accordance with law and due process. It also gives wiggle room for resistance theory, but that’s for another discussion.)

Locke has to demolish Hobbes’ absolutist logic. So he first and foremost must challenge the “fear factor” which is the psycho-sociological basis of Hobbes’ absolutism. Among other examples, Locke again uses his North American anthropology to explain why society, prior to the social contract that forms government, isn’t simply a state of fear and personal uncertainty and overwhelming anxiety. And crucially, Locke locates the creation of “natural” rights to Property in pre-government society. So Locke’s just-so story gives something meaningful to bargain on both “sides” of the contract — the subject promises to obey the sovereign as long as the sovereign lives up to its side of the bargain to protect life, liberty and property. The subject’s rights aren’t created by the sovereign, and the sovereign’s rights, which are created by contract, aren’t absolute but conditional.

Locke has now produced a coherent theoretical system, based on observable human behavior, which dismantles the abstract arguments for absolutism — both Filmer’s politico-theological model and Hobbes’ psycho-sociological model. And if that’s all Locke had to worry about, he could leave his tale of a benevolent pre-government social order as an abstract model that’s not historically particular but is useful analytically.

In his chapter on “Property,” he seems on the face of things to do just that. It’s clear that his model of pre-government society, if it ever existed in English history, is lost in the mist of time. In the expanding world of the 17thC, England’s economic system of property, production, trade and money depends on a complex system of government and laws. Locke isn’t claiming that his theoretical extraction of government from a well-ordered system of property is applicable to England of the 17thC or terribly useful for understanding England’s political economy. Except, that is, as his model demonstrates why both Filmer’s and Hobbes’ absolutist theories are mistaken, and that England’s monarchs are legally limited, not absolute, sovereigns whose recent flirtations with unilateral Colbertism can be legitimately challenged by their subjects as being beyond the royal prerogative.

But Locke has another longer-term, or at least a somewhat less immediate agenda. On behalf of Shaftesbury and a group of “godly” colonialists, he’s been trying to come to grips with designing a constitutional and legal system for the Carolina colonies. And central to any such system is the issue of property claims of colonists vis a vis the Native Americans. From whence do colonists’ property rights derive? From the Crown’s patents? But then where do the Crown’s rights come from — from conquest, a broadly-recognized source of legal property rights? But it’s the colonists’ inexorable expansionism that’s “conquering” the lands of North America. Not the Crown itself. And much of the conquest (though far from all) isn’t by physical conquest that destroys the Native American occupants or imposes colonial rule by force. It’s by bringing land into productive use. Property emerges by the colonists’ labor! It’s not government that has established property rights. Those rights precede government, which is appealed to merely for the purpose of securing and protecting those rights.

So Locke isn’t writing only a just-so story in which, for analytical purposes, he hypothesizes the ahistorical operation of a society with property rights but no government. He’s also got an actual, real life problem in mind. And his choice of model, though on its face merely anthropologically descriptive, has huge normative implications for how that problem is going to be resolved in favor of the colonists vis a vis both the Crown and the original occupiers of North American lands. [If you want to extend the example to global capital markets, you probably wouldn’t be gainsaid by Ireland’s taxpayers. Sorry, couldn’t resist.]

Now, does our consideration of the context for Locke’s writing in any way suggest that he wasn’t sincere and was just opportunistically churning out propaganda? Or lessen or contradict the insights we derive from reading him today? Not at all. But by teasing apart the various ways he did — and did not — himself construct and apply his model of a pre-government benevolent society with property rights, I think it suggests a bit about how we should approach using the model he designed. Beyond the political struggle over the legal norms governing sovereignty and absolutism in England with which Locke was directly engaged, his model was meant to be descriptive and suggest direct implications for action only in the settlement of the North American wilderness — a process which it was already clear to thinkers like Locke would produce inevitable conflicts over the shape of the colonial political economy.

For me, the 2 Treatises deal primarily with juridical issues within political philosophy that concern sovereignty and legitimacy, framed where necessary to address the theological premises of philosophical debates in the 17thC. In that regard, they’re exquisite and timeless. However, personally I don’t find in the Treatises an analytical model with much relevance to understanding political economy, either for Locke’s 17thC England or for today.Report