Who Owns Ownership?

When Henry Knox reported the news of Shays' rebellion to George Washington in late 1786, he wrote with trepidation that the rebels even intended to abolish private property. In the same year, Washington was vacillating over a gift of shares in the Potomac Canal Company, granted to him by the Virginia legislature: could a statesman accept such gifts and remain virtuously disinterested? Some men made large fortunes while working for the patriot war effort. Others like Alexander Hamilton were "public fools" who separated his work done for money from work done for his country. America's founding generation had no answer to the question of how property related to government and to society. But they were deeply interested in the question.

Exegetes of liberal philosophers like John Locke and Adam Smith have for some time been correcting the nineteenth-century understandings of their thought. They are no longer always seen as theorists of the private, "economic" man, who should be governed as little as possible, and whose own "life, liberty, and property" must be the state's chief - it's only - objective. Rather, property and its accumulation are good only inasmuch as they are good for society. The right of property is natural, but it is also instrumental: it is part of the function of society and government for alleviating poverty, and creating "the wealth of nations." Wealth and the ways of making it are as much public as private.

It was on these foundations that James Madison could argue that protecting the "different faculties" of men for acquiring property was the first principle of government; and that Hamilton could argue that the welfare of the richest men in the country - the creditors of the national bank - was the best support to the welfare of the state itself. On the other hand, to say only that would be to obscure the division between Madison and Hamilton at every phase of their relationship, and between many other Americans with different ideas.

The twin birth of capitalism and the modern state was messy and drawn out. It occurred in the midst of almost continual war, and the necessities and opportunities of warfare on a larger and larger scale were among the most pressing reasons for asking questions about property and society. These questions became still more important, in America, after the end of monarchy, around which an entire conception of property - and its relation to society - had once been constructed. Elements of such patriarchal thought of course remained, and played a role in the ongoing conversation; they were even bolstered by what many Americans saw as the excesses of the French revolution.

By examining the relationship between property and society in early liberal theory, historians of American political thought can further dissolve the conceptual boundary between liberal and republican schools - they can, in other words, think more like late-eighteenth-century Americans. And by focusing on the relationship between property and society, a relationship that is considerably more complex than laissez-faire neoclassicism implies, we can also see further into the development of categories that inform modernity: public and private, individual and community, and (in a different sense) positive and negative liberty.