The Medieval View of Property
Property meant something very different in the medieval era than it does now in the modern world. In the feudal world, the holding of property was always considered conditional in nature, whereas in industrial society, the holding of property is regarded as an absolute right that resides exclusively with the owners, subject to certain limitations imposed by the state. This is a critical distinction that separates the feudal way of conceptualizing property from the way we think about it today.
The feudal society was conceived as being part of a “Great Chain of Being,” a hierarchically structured natural and social world that stretched from the lowliest creatures in nature to the princes of the Church. The entire chain was God’s creation and was organized in such a way as to ensure that each creature performed his or her role as God had prescribed it, which included serving those above and below according to his or her station.
The social structure of feudal society operated in a manner similar to nature’s grand hierarchy. Every rung of the social ladder is populated by a unique category of individuals who perform a specific role or function in the grand scheme of things, and each is bound to those above and below him in the chain by a complex set of mutual obligations and reciprocal relationships. From serf to knight, from knight to lord, and from lord to Pope, all are unequal in degree and kind, and yet each is obligated to the other by the medieval bonds of homage, and all together make up a perfect mirror of God’s total creation.
The notion of property has to be viewed within the broader context of the Church’s worldview. While Church leaders came increasingly to acknowledge a legitimate role for private property in the social schemata, it was always understood that property itself was held in the form of a trust all along the social hierarchy. Since God is the owner of his creation, all things in the earthly world ultimately belong to him. God grants human beings the right to use his property so long as they are righteous and fulfill their obligation of homage and fealty both to him and to every other person on the social ladder in the way he has preordained.
Property, then, was a rather complex phenomenon in feudal society and was tightly bound to the idea of proprietary relationships. Things were not owned outright or exclusively by anyone, but rather shared in various ways under the conditions and terms established by a rigid code of proprietary obligations. For example, when the king granted land to a lord or vessel, “his rights over the land still remained, except for the particular interest he had parted with.” The result, says historian Richard Schlatter, is that “no one could be said to own the land; everyone from the king down through the tenants and sub-tenants to the peasants who tilled it had a certain dominion over it, but no one had an absolute lordship over it.”
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“The essence of the theory” of property in the medieval world, writes historian Charles H. McIlwain, “is a hierarchy of rights and powers all existing in or exercisable over the same objects or persons, and the fundamental relationship of one power to another in this hierarchy is the superiority of the higher to the lower, rather than a complete supremacy in any one over all the others.”
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By the late eighteenth century, the feudal concept of the conditional right to use private property had given way to the modern notion of absolute ownership. While there were many factors that led to this radical change in the notion of property, none proved more important than the breakup of the feudal estates and the enclosure of the land commons into private real estate that could be bought and sold in the marketplace.
The land was transformed, first in England, and later on the Continent. After more than a millennium of history, when people had belonged to the land, new legislative initiatives, in the form of the great Enclosure Acts, reversed the spatial and temporal playing field. Henceforth, the land belonged to people and could be exchanged in the form of private property in the marketplace. Real estate could also be transformed into capital and used as a tool of credit to leverage economic activity.
It’s difficult to imagine the change in consciousness brought on by the English Enclosure Acts. For centuries, people’s security was bound up in attachment to their ancestral land and their duties and obligations in a Christian hierarchy that stretched from the common fields they tended to Christ’s throne above. Now the land, which heretofore had been considered God’s creation and administered by a complex set of rules and obligations that connected the lowliest serf to the Angels of Paradise, was severed. The land was divided up in the form of privately owned plots. Those who could not afford to purchase a lot of their own were forced off the land. Some became paid laborers working for the new owners, while others were forced to migrate to the nearest towns to find “work” in the new industrial factories.
In this detached world, one’s labor became a form of property, and people sold their time in the marketplace. Daily rounds gave way to jobs, status in the community gave way to contractual agreements, and everyone, whether they wanted to or not, became responsible for making his or her own destiny.
It should be emphasized that a private property regime makes modern markets possible and not the other way around. In the medieval era, exchange was generally by way of barter between relatives, extended kin, and neighbors. Without a common law and legal code, the only way to trust the authenticity and to ensure a peaceful transfer of ownership of property was for the seller and buyer to know each other and to be a part of a tightly bound social community. For this reason, markets were always local and limited in their reach and importance. A mature private property regime, by contrast, substitutes subjective criteria like trust, with objective criteria like ownership titles, and provides enforcement mechanisms—the police and the courts—to make sure that sellers and buyers abide by their contractual agreements. Only when such a legal regime is in place and backed by the full coercive authority of the state can markets be extended in space and time to include large numbers of players—most of whom are strangers to one another—in the exchange of property.
The Protestant Reformation of Property
The Protestant Reformation figured significantly in the reformulation of private property relations. Martin Luther and his followers launched an all-out attack on the authority of the Pope and the feudal social order over which the Vatican presided. Luther argued against the idea of the Church as God’s sole emissary on Earth and said that the priests were sinners like everyone else and therefore incapable of acting as intermediaries between the faithful and the Lord Almighty. He counseled that the only infallible authority on matters of faith was the Bible and that God’s will was knowable to every Christian by reading the scriptures. Each man and woman, said Luther, stands alone before God. Luther’s doctrine challenged the very basis of papal authority—its claim to be God’s appointed representative on Earth. By doing so, Luther and his followers cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Holy Roman Empire and feudal social arrangements.
Luther was particularly harsh in his attacks on Church property, arguing that the Vatican had amassed untold wealth over the centuries at the expense of the people and had violated Christian faith, which preached abstinence and eschewed worldly luxuries.
The Reformation fervor ended up replacing one propertied class for another. Church lands were confiscated in Western and Northern Europe—even in Catholic Spain and Austria—and the lands of feudal lords were either seized or sold. The routing of the old feudal order made room for the establishment of a new bourgeois monied class of merchants, traders, and shopkeepers.
Luther’s notion of “a calling” helped lay the groundwork for the natural-law theory of property and provided the all-important spiritual underpinning for the amassing of capital and wealth—which made the industrial age possible. Luther argued that all callings, even the most humble in nature, are equally sacred in the eyes of the Lord. He wrote that “what you do in your house is worth as much as if you did it up in heaven for our Lord God.”
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Luther railed against what he regarded as the elitism of priestly asceticism and argued that by faithfully discharging one’s earthly duties—regardless of the calling—the believers are serving as God’s stewards and the caretakers of his creation.
John Calvin, recall, went even further than Luther, calling on the faithful to continually improve their lot in life. While Calvin’s doctrine was never intended to advance the notion of commerce, it had the unintentional effect of bolstering the very interests of the new capitalist class. His emphasis on unceasing work, productivity, and improving one’s station proved compatible with a new class whose interest lay in hard work, expanded production, frugality, and a rational ordering of human activity in the marketplace.
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His doctrine helped justify, though inadvertently, the idea of accumulation of wealth and the amassing of capital, the key ingredients of a modern property regime and capitalist way of life. Economic historian Richard Henry Tawney and sociologist Max Weber wrote extensively on the deep philosophical connection between the rise of the Protestant work ethos and the emergence of modern capitalism. By freeing up individuals from dependency on the Church hierarchy and arming each person with a new psychology of material self-advancement, the Reformers left behind far more than a religious legacy. Long after the religious fires had died down, European men and women retained a new sense of self-worth that was compatible with modern notions of property accumulation.
The old idea of the individual as a small part of a complex social organism made up of proprietary relations and obligations gave way to the modern notion of the individual as an autonomous being in the world, alone before his God and his fellow human beings, and exercising, by strength of personal will, his or her unique stamp on the world. The metamorphosis of the individual from a loyal servant enveloped in the bowels of a Great Chain of Being to an autonomous agent with one’s own individual calling, and always improving one’s material lot to the greater glory of God, went hand in hand with a change in the notion of property from proprietary rights to exclusive ownership. Property, once bound up in complex social arrangements and the conditional rights of usage, came to be seen much like the new individual, as autonomous things, each unique, and indivisible. Tawney writes that what remained after the fall of the feudal social order “was private rights and private interests, the material of a society rather than a society itself.”
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In this new world, property rights would be the social glue that bound people together. Private property and unfettered economic freedom, said Tawney, “were taken for granted as the fundamentals upon which organization was to be based, and upon which no further argument was admissible.”
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While the Protestant ethic was born in Europe, many of its most fanatic disciples migrated to America, where they hitched Calvin’s religious vision to Enlightenment notions of science, private property rights, and capitalist market relations, creating the uniquely American Dream.
The Metaphysics of Private Property
With private property ensconced as the organizing principle of society, it was left to modern scholars to create the appropriate philosophical rationale to accompany it. They found their answer in the natural-law theory of property—a concept that had developed slowly in the late medieval period and advanced more quickly during the Reformation and its aftermath.
The French political philosopher Jean Bodin began by arguing that common ownership is unnatural and a violation of divine law. Plato’s commonwealth, with its adoration of communal ownership, wrote Bodin, is “against the law of God and nature, which detests not only incests, adulteries and inevitable murders, if all women should be common; but also expressly forbids us to steale, or so much as desire anything that another man’s is.”
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Bodin reminded his readers that theft is forbidden by God. Why would God include the commandment “Thou shalt not steal” if he didn’t mean to embrace the concept of private ownership of property? asked Bodin.
Bodin goes on to make the point that the family—a natural institution—is built on private property, and the state, in turn, is built on the family.
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That being the case, argued Bodin, the chief responsibility of the state is to protect each person’s—and family’s—“natural” God-given right to own property.
The belief that the primary role of the government is to protect each person’s inalienable right to own property was a radical idea that, in time, became the rallying cry for republican reformers and others in their struggle to replace monarchic rule with democratic forms of government. Bodin was insistent on this score. If the state were to abrogate its main reason for being—the protection of private property—it would have no legitimate claim to exist. He wrote, “But the greatest inconvenience is, that in taking away these words of Mine and Thine, they ruin the foundation of all Commonweales, the which were chiefly established to yield unto every man that which is his owne, and to forbid theft.”
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Bodin’s writing pierced the church/state veil that had enveloped Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire. At a time when the prevailing orthodoxy still viewed the state as the upholder of the faith, Bodin dared to argue that the state’s primary charge was far more secular in nature—to protect the natural right of private property. Individual rights—embedded first and foremost in private property—took precedence over both aristocratic privileges and deference to Church authority. In the new scheme of things, rulers exist to protect the individual rights of property holders rather than individuals existing to serve the interests of princes and kings. Tawney described the new way of thinking about the relationship of the individual and the state this way:
What it implies is, that the foundation of society is found, not in functions, but in rights: that rights are not deducible from the discharge of functions, so that the acquisition of wealth and the enjoyment of property are contingent upon the performances of services, but that the individual enters the world equipped with rights to the free disposal of his property and the pursuit of his economic self-interest, and that these rights are anterior to and independent of, any service which he may render.
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