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.

Causation and Affinity

The "antislavery debate", as embodied in Thomas Bender's volume of that name, is similar to the debate over the US constitution from the early and mid-twentieth century. Here I'm going to discuss these debates a little bit in order to suggest a way they might supply a helpful way of thinking about early Federalists.

Both debates revolve around the question, what is the role of capitalism? But actually framing the question in that way seems to have damaged and distracted historians' arguments. In the antislavery debate it's particularly pronounced, because the central problem can be rendered (as Bender renders it): "is there anything to be made of the near simulateity of the rise of capitalism and the emergence of organized antislavery?" This for me is not an inherently interesting question. What is interesting is, rather, what caused the emergence of antislavery, and (a different question) what was the nature of capitalism and its rise?

The question "what is the role of capitalism" combines those in a somewhat awkward way, which in an important sense creates the argument around which the volume pivots. Thomas Haskell writes, "What, then, did capitalism contribute to the freeing of the slaves? Only a precondition..." So, although his argument is relevant to the specific question he asks, it is not very illuminating at all about the two questions I find interesting: what is (and why) antislavery, what is (and why) capitalism?

The reason the debate can move in this direction in the first place is that it begins from the work of David Brion Davis, who does find a strong link between the two (not "only a precondition"). For Davis, "free" but disciplined wage labour is essential to capitalism, and slavery is antithetical; antislave and humanitarian movements thus had an important role in creating the conditions necessary for capitalism to flourish. They represent the expansion of capitalist moral economy, from cores in e.g. the Quaker religion/network, towards (by the nineteenth-century) total ideological hegemony.

I find Davis' model highly plausible; Haskell does not. He is concerned with the moral qualities of antislavery and capitalism, and therefore with the problem of causation. Did capitalism cause antislavery? Were antislavery activists motivated by capitalism? Haskell thinks that the answer to both questions is no; but he imputes to Davis the position that the answer is yes, but unconsciously, through self-deception (i.e. activists really cared about capitalism, not slavery, but they deceived themselves into thinking otherwise). This is the model of "class interest" that Haskell constructs. It is in my view a straw man.

John Ashworth points towards (without elaborating on) a more robust conception, when he writes that "one can say a person is moved by certain ideals that have grown out of class interest... the individual may or may not be aware of the relationship between ideals and self-interest." Haskell rightly identifies the rhetorical slipperiness of the metaphor "grown out of," but I think Ashworth's point is still useful. Class interests privilege certain values and ideas, certain cultural structures, within which people then act, from their own limited knowledge and perspective.

It's not that values like "promise-keeping" (which Haskell himself emphasises), or to use Federalist parlance, "justice", are not good values. You don't have to be a hypocrite to privilege them. But prioritising certain values - say, "justice" over "equality" - does obviously serve class interests. People don't choose what values to privilege by consciously consulting their class interests. Or even unconsciously. They don't really "choose" at all: to a great extent, culture chooses for them. To explain how that works, we need to go back to Skinner and discourse theory; but it's easy to see, at least, how discourse limits and directs our choices about values.

The same problems are at play in the debate over the constitution. What we should call the "vulgar Beardian" (i.e. not what Beard actually wrote, but how he was read) approach imputes to the founders the motive of active class interest. This argument is frequently said to have been "demolished", and so it has; it was never Beard's argument to start with. But what Beard did show was that the values the constitution privileges (justice, contract, property, minority rights) are those that favour capitalism.

There is a complication here, over the constitution's defence of slavery - which is a defence of elite interests contrary to capitalism. It is the slavery provisions that display so-called "naked self-interest." But the (capitalist) values encoded in the document itself are the values of a discourse that achieved a certain intellectual, ideological hegemony in post-revolutionary America - in a way that slavery did not. This is, in fact, what necessitated the more "naked" promotion of self-interest (through bargaining at the convention) on the part of the defenders of slavery.

So far I have described capitalism as a system that privileges certain values, and  constitutionalism (and antislavery) as movements that are animated by those values. It's important to add, here, that these movements themselves serve to further entrench the values they embody. That is, in part, how discourse is shaped. Activists can trace their belief in "justice" or "humanitarianism" to the founding fathers of constitutionalism or antislavery - rather than to capitalism or class interest.

It is this final point, the question of "elective affinity" (to invoke Weber, as the antislavery debaters do), that may be useful to help understand the early Federalists. Those who affiliated with the Federalist vision or persuasion, and later the Federalist party, did not need to fundamentally share the same class interests, or the same complete sets of values. Rather, they might be Federalists if some of the values that they privilege are also privileged by Federalism.

Antislavery activists like John Jay could also be ardent constitutionalists, in spite of the pro-slavery provisions of the constitution. And proslavery advocates like Charles Pinckney could be constitutionalists too. They were both Federalists. These men hold, and represent, different class interests. Beard was wrong to try to find a core interest - personalty as opposed to realty - that united them; it's that part of his argument that failed. But they do share an elective affinity with certain values that animate the Federalist persuasion.

Federalism should be seen as a movement, not a party in the Marxist sense, where it would represent a single class interest. Its members, or affiliates, might quite often disagree with each other, even in fundamental ways; they share no single causal class interest. But, in the battle over the constitution, they did not need to trace their ideas back to these disagreeing interests. Instead, they worked together to achieve a victory on behalf of the values that they all shared.

Capitalism and/or Freedom

History isn't just history. When we try to understand the relationship between the past and now, a lot depends on what we think the 'now' is like, and what we'd like it to be like. The example I'm thinking of is the emergence of capitalism in America, and the role of the revolution and the founders. Part of that is also the idea of modernity: in what sense is modernity defined by capitalism, and vice versa? And so in what ways did the revolution and founders help create the modern world?

Last year the newest volume of the Oxford History of the United States came out: Gordon Wood's Empire of Liberty: a history of the early republic, 1789-1815. So it's not unreasonable to say that Wood's position (still) represents the historiographical orthodoxy. What is that position? For him, the early republic is all about the triumph of Jeffersonianism, and moreover, Jeffersonianism means capitalism. He deals with the state-interventionist Jefferson, the Jefferson of the Louisiana Purchase and the Embargo Act, as a paradoxical contradiction to the true Jefferson, who represents the individual pursuit of happiness, through competitive commerce, without government interference. My review of the book is here.

The Federalists, in this picture, are aristocratic stick-in-the-muds dedicated to clawing back a hierarchical and deferential society from the teeth of revolution. This is a bit different from the story in Wood's earlier book, The Creation of the American Republic, when he gave the (Madisonian) Federalists the triumph: their constitution was 'the end of classical politics' and the beginning of modernity. In the 1980s, Wood's tune shifted subtly away from this constitutionalism towards a celebration of the market. I would suggest that he had two major influences in that shift: Joyce Appleby and Ronald Reagan.

Wood and many others see a pretty straightforward link: freedom, to laissez-faire, to market capitalism. It works forwards and backwards, each element standing in for the others. Since we have market capitalism, it seems to follow, then we have freedom; and since we have those things, the Jeffersonians won, and the Federalists lost.

But it doesn't work if we don't see capitalism in the same rosy way. What if we see it as, instead, a system of rules that protect and entrench certain priorities? Capitalism isn't a question of non-interference with the individual, it's not a question of autonomy. It is, just as much as any system of power, a continual series of interferences: it creates and enforces ownership, labour, and finance contracts, which ultimately rely on the power of law and the state. It has to be continually propped up, stimulated, and bailed out. They were doing those things in the 1790s just as much as they are now.

Historians like Wood and Janet Riesman, following E. James Ferguson, point out that while the Federalist opposed paper money emissions in the 1780s, now we take paper currency manipulation as the sine qua non of financial capitalism. But they miss the point that the Federalists themselves made: the market can't work when currencies are controlled democratically. Capitalism is fundamentally at odds with democracy. It runs on rules that can't be broken by popular majorities, because the majority are always losers under capitalism: they get left in the dust by the concentration of wealth.

If we see capitalism this way, it's the rule-making Federalists who matter more in the making of modernity. They were the real founding fathers of American capitalism - and, in that sense, of the modern world.