As a political ideal, private property often feels like oxygen (at least for those who own it); we all know it’s there, we all know it’s doing important work and yet we often don’t really notice it as it swirls around, shaping our politics. Yet for all that invisibility, it is probably the most central concern of modern political thought and action.
Modern liberalism, emerging with thinkers such as John Locke, has always been concerned with the survival of private property. Locke’s Second Treatise of Government published in 1690 is a landmark text for this line of thinking. According to Locke, the only way for humans to thrive and prosper was via private property ownership.
Private property, he said, was what separated civilised men from their primitive ancestors still living in a state of nature. Governments emerged as a way to protect property and to prevent a return to that violent state of nature. The role of governments was of necessity limited and shallow; the government should protect property (and property owners’ interests) and little else.
At the time Locke was writing, England was gripped by a slow-burning fear of “masterless men”, wandering vagrants displaced by the Enclosures, the privatisation of commonage land from the late medieval period onwards. These lumpen mobs supposedly roamed rural England, terrifying the elite.
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Whether or not they actually existed is highly debatable. But the fear of them was certainly real. And an important safety valve was invented to deal with this perceived threat to the property order; they could be exported to colonies in the New World, where they would both convert the ostensibly empty territories of the Virginia Territory into private property and be converted into safe and sensibly property-owning persons themselves.
Private property was the basis of a harmonious social order, but that order could easily slip away. Propertied Englishmen could be reduced to violent, Oriental terrors
A century and a half after Locke, Edmund Burke, another politically engaged thinker, would speak with horror that these colonists’ descendants might now slip out of this sensible property-ownership, and back into a brute (and racially inferior) state of nature. Burke feared that any parliamentary crackdown on the American Revolution would expose the fragility of private property and white British civilisation. American colonists, he stated, had moved so far into the continental interior as to be almost out of reach of British law. A coercive response would only push them further away.
Where the Britons of North America had thus far respected the laws of private property, if they crossed to the far side of Appalachia they would be lost: “Already they have topped the Apalachian [sic] mountains. From thence they behold before them an immense plain, one vast, rich, level meadow; a square of five hundred miles. Over this they would wander, without a possibility of restraint; they would change their manners with the habits of their life; would soon forget a government, by which they were disowned.” They would become, Burke said, “hordes of English Tartars”.
Private property was the basis of a harmonious social order, but that order could easily slip away. Propertied Englishmen could be reduced to violent, Oriental terrors.
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Burke would famously continue this line of thinking when he looked at the French Revolution, regarding which he had far fewer sympathies than the revolution of 1776. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France as well as his other writings from the 1790s are filled with monstrous images of “Maroons” (escaped slaves), and with “obscene harpies”, dehumanised women, who “flutter over our heads, and souse down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, or unpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal”. This was his vocabulary for understanding Jacobinism.
What we today call conservatism is often traced back to Burke’s Reflections; that racist anxieties about threats to the propertied order are at the heart of conservatism is less commonly recognised.
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One of Edmund Burke’s harshest critics once said that he was nothing but a “celebrated sophist and sycophant”. When that same critic, Karl Marx, wrote in 1848 that a “spectre was haunting Europe, the spectre of communism”, he was naming a truth that Burke (and Locke) also tacitly recognised, that the elite are always animated by a fear that private property might soon disappear, undone by the actions of one or another of a series of dangerous mobs.
Margaret Thatcher’s vision of a ‘property-owners’ democracy’ always required the rhetorical use of a whole host of ‘enemies within’
As Marx himself noted, “all fractions of the ruling-classes” in England, “landlords and capitalists, stock-exchange wolves and shopkeepers, Protectionists and Free-traders, government and opposition, priests and freethinkers, young whores and old nuns”, were all united by “the common cry for the salvation of Property, Religion, the Family and Society”.
And this desire to defend private property from various mobs has defined Anglophone political culture since then. Defenders of slavery argued that the abolition of this one, peculiar form of property would lead to the abolition of all forms of property. Property-ownership in America has long existed in an intimate relationship with the desire to prevent the “danger” of black home-owners moving into the neighbourhood, most explicitly in the immediate postwar period when segregation was official Federal policy.
As one scholar has noted, history in the United States unfolds “at the juncture of racism and real estate”. The very make-up of American cities is a product not just of segregation, but also of the racist fears that exist behind it.
On this side of the Atlantic, Margaret Thatcher’s vision of a “property-owners’ democracy” always required the rhetorical use of a whole host of “enemies within” – miners, feminists, immigrants, welfare state bureaucrats, gay rights activists, and the loony left.
And indeed, here in Ireland, what is the current anxiety about the rise of Sinn Féin but the playing out of all these old tropes; the anxiety of property-owners that the propertyless are finally coming for you?
Aidan Beatty is a historian from Galway now teaching at the Frederick Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh