Definitions

Roman law defined property – jus utendi et abutendi re sua, quatenus juris ratio patitur – as the right to use and abuse a thing within the limits of the law. A justification of the word “abuse” has been attempted on the grounds that it signifies not senseless and immoral abuse but only absolute domain – a vain distinction invented for the sanctification of property and without effect against the delights of enjoying it, which it neither prevents nor represses. The proprietor has the power to let his crops rot underfoot, sow his field with salt, milk his cows on the sand, turn his vineyard into a desert, and use his vegetable garden as a park: are these acts “abuse” or not? In matters of property, use and abuse are necessarily indistinguishable.

According to the Declaration of Rights, published as a preface to the Constitution of '93, property is “the right to enjoy and dispose at will of one's goods, one's income, and the fruit of one's labour and industry.”

Code Napoléon, article 544: “Property is the right to enjoy and dispose of things in the most absolute manner, provided we do not act against the laws and regulations.”

First memoir

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's What is Property? (1840) appeared at a crucial point in modern French history. Just ten years before, during the “three glorious days” of revolution in July 1830, the Orleanist monarchy had been founded with a fanfare of liberal bombast and high hopes, in some quarters, of fulfilling the aims of the first French Revolution. “What is the Third Estate?” the Abbé Sieyès had asked in 1789; and his answer – “Everything” – seemed now on the point of fulfillment, with the nation finally and truly united under the general will and according to the principles of liberty and justice. For a time this political dream of bourgeois hegemony, pursued within the framework of constitutional monarchy, was shared by workers as well as members of the propertied elite, who were following François Guizot's famous advice – “Enrich yourselves!”

Before the decade was up, however, the July Monarchy seemed to many observers to have degenerated into a tyranny of wealth and status hardly better than the Old Regime. Love of liberty had turned into a “religion of property.” The ruling principle was neither equality nor fraternity but sheer “egoism”; the nation celebrated by Guizot, Michelet, and others had become a scene of class struggle between owners and workers – the haves and the have-nots or, in the parlance of the day, the prolétaries versus the propriétaries.

The modern State is the distinctive product of a unique civilization. But it is a product which is still in the making, and a part of the process is a struggle between new and old principles of social order. To understand the new, which is our main purpose, we must first cast a glance at the old. We must understand what the social structure was, which – mainly, as I shall show, under the inspiration of Liberal ideas – is slowly but surely giving place to the new fabric of the civic State. The older structure itself was by no means primitive. What is truly primitive is very hard to say. But one thing is pretty clear. At all times men have lived in societies, and ties of kinship and of simple neighbourhood underlie every form of social organization. In the simplest societies it seems probable that these ties – reinforced and extended, perhaps, by religious or other beliefs – are the only ones that seriously count. It is certain that of the warp of descent and the woof of intermarriage there is woven a tissue out of which small and rude but close and compact communities are formed. But the ties of kinship and neighbourhood are effective only within narrow limits. While the local group, the clan, or the village community are often the centres of vigorous life, the larger aggregate of the Tribe seldom attains true social and political unity unless it rests upon a military organization.

The teaching of Mill brings us close to the heart of Liberalism. We learn from him, in the first place, that liberty is no mere formula of law, or of the restriction of law. There may be a tyranny of custom, a tyranny of opinion, even a tyranny of circumstance, as real as any tyranny of government and more pervasive. Nor does liberty rest on the self-assertion of the individual. There is scope abundant for Liberalism and illiberalism in personal conduct. Nor is liberty opposed to discipline, to organization, to strenuous conviction as to what is true and just. Nor is it to be identified with tolerance of opposed opinions. The Liberal does not meet opinions which he conceives to be false with toleration, as though they did not matter. He meets them with justice, and exacts for them a fair hearing as though they mattered just as much as his own. He is always ready to put his own convictions to the proof, not because he doubts them, but because he believes in them. For, both as to that which he holds for true and as to that which he holds for false, he believes that one final test applies. Let error have free play, and one of two things will happen. Either as it develops, as its implications and consequences become clear, some elements of truth will appear within it.

Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse was the most sophisticated intellectual exponent of the ‘New Liberalism’ which emerged in Britain in the closing years of the nineteenth century. A determined advocate of political and social reform, who worked for years as a journalist on the progressive liberal press, Hobhouse also had a distinguished academic career, occupying the first professorial chair in sociology to be established at a British university. As a political theorist, Hobhouse is most significant for his attempt to reformulate liberalism to recognize more adequately the claims of community, establish the centrality of basic welfare rights, and legitimate an activist democratic state.

Leonard Hobhouse was born in the Cornish village of St Ive in 1864. The son of Caroline Trelawny and an Anglican clergyman, Reginald Hobhouse, he was brought up in comfortable circumstances. Schooled at Marlborough, he went on to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, earning a first-class degree in Greats in 1887. After graduation, Hobhouse stayed on in Oxford, first as a Prize Fellow at Merton College, and later as a full Fellow of Corpus Christi. By the mid-1890s Hobhouse began to feel cramped by the confines of academia; and, eager to play some more definite part in the crusade for social reform, he abandoned his Oxford career to take up a position with the liberal Manchester Guardian in 1897. He remained with the paper as a full-time leader writer until 1902. Between 1903 and 1905 he worked as Secretary to the anti-protectionist Free Trade Union.

Summary

A satisfactory account of the development of property in general has not yet been written, and perhaps in the present state of our knowledge cannot be written. In no department of the study of comparative institutions are the data more elusive and unsatisfactory. The divergence between legal theory and economic fact, between written law and popular custom, between implied rights and actual enjoyment, enables one and the same institution to be painted and, within limits, quite honestly and faithfully painted in very different colours. The legally minded historian will lay stress on forms or principles which have very little bearing on the actual life of the people. The economic historian, impatient of these subtleties, will ask us to look at the actual working of the institution, only to find that by some turn of events the dormant legal principle is awakened, and becomes a potent and perhaps deadly force in the working of a system. The theorist with a generalization to defend can always, by judicious selection and omission, quote travellers, ethnologists, early codes, or points of contemporary custom on his side; for he is singularly unfortunate if he cannot find something either in the every day working of the institution or in its theoretical implications, which, by ignoring other aspects, may be made to tell on his side.

The school of Cobden is affiliated in general outlook both to the doctrine of natural liberty and to the discipline of Bentham. It shared with the Benthamites the thoroughly practical attitude dear to the English mind. It has much less to say of natural rights than the French theorists. On the other hand, it is saturated with the conviction that the unfettered action of the individual is the mainspring of all progress. Its starting-point is economic. Trade is still in fetters. The worst of the archaic internal restrictions have, indeed, been thrown off. But even here Cobden is active in the work of finally emancipating Manchester from manorial rights that have no place in the nineteenth century. The main work, however, is the liberation of foreign trade. The Corn Laws, as even the tariff reformers of our own day admit, were conceived in the interest of the governing classes. They frankly imposed a tax on the food of the masses for the benefit of the landlords, and as the result of the agricultural and industrial revolutions which had been in progress since 1760, the masses had been brought to the lowest point of economic misery. Give to every man the right to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market, urged the Cobdenite, and trade would automatically expand.

The growth of representative institutions is one of the outstanding features of modern history. The movement, like all others, has its ebb and flow, but on a wide view the set of the current is unmistakable. Throughout the civilized world, including now not merely the peoples of Europe and of European descent, but the leading examples of Eastern civilization, we find the principle of self-government germinating where it had hitherto been unknown, and ripening where it had only been immature. In our own country, where alone among great nations Parliamentary institutions had enjoyed continuous vitality from a remote past, the advance took the form, first of consolidating the primacy of the popular House, and secondly of broadening the basis of representation. Of these two processes the first has, it is true, received a check. The vast and growing power of organized wealth has found in an irresponsible Chamber a handy instrument of obstruction. But in so doing it has only raised a constitutional issue of which the final settlement can neither be distant nor doubtful. The second process has been advanced by three great measures of reform, and has now to be completed by a fourth, which will extend the area of representation to the entire adult population.

The movement towards self-government is not to be understood if studied in isolation.

The nineteenth century might be called the age of Liberalism, yet its close saw the fortunes of that great movement brought to their lowest ebb. Whether at home or abroad those who represented Liberal ideas had suffered crushing defeats. But this was the least considerable of the causes for anxiety. If Liberals had been defeated, something much worse seemed about to befall Liberalism. Its faith in itself was waxing cold. It seemed to have done its work. It had the air of a creed that is becoming fossilized as an extinct form, a fossil that occupied, moreover, an awkward position between two very active and energetically moving grindstones – the upper grindstone of plutocratic imperialism, and the nether grindstone of social democracy. ‘We know all about you’, these parties seemed to say to Liberalism; ‘we have been right through you and come out on the other side. Respectable platitudes, you go maundering on about Cobden and Gladstone, and the liberty of the individual, and the rights of nationality, and government by the people. What you say is not precisely untrue, but it is unreal and uninteresting’ So far in chorus. ‘It is not up to date’, finished the Imperialist, and the Socialist bureaucrat. ‘It is not bread and butter’, finished the Social democrat. Opposed in everything else, these two parties agreed in one thing. They were to divide the future between them. Unfortunately, however, for their agreement, the division was soon seen to be no equal one.