Ownership in Early Christianity and the Natural Law Tradition

A talk given at Henry George Foundation, London 2018

Joseph Milne

Charles Avila’s book, Ownership: Early Christian Teaching, shows us that the Church Fathers addressed the question of land ownership and its exploitation very strongly. For example, Avila quotes from Saint Ambrose, Bishop of Milan in the fourth century, who wrote:

The elements have been granted to all for their use. Rich and poor alike enjoy the splendid ornaments of the universe. . . The house of God is common to all. (p. 72)

In another passage Ambrose says:

Thus God has created everything in such a way that all things be possessed in common. Nature therefore is the mother of common right, usurpation of private right. (p. 74)

Ambrose’s assertion that the earth and all the elements belong to all in common is to be found in the other Church Fathers. It was an essential part of early Christian thought. From the Christian perspective all nature belongs to the Creator who has given it, simply as a gift, to all the creatures to share in common. Just as God has created each being, so likewise he has created their dwelling place, where all may flourish with each other. With the human race this is even more so, since through intelligent cooperation the community may enhance the gifts of nature in mutual benefit, so there is no need for want or poverty. This is the true ‘state of nature’ contrary to the atomistic doctrine of Hobbes.

According to Ambrose, the cause of poverty is avarice. Very simply, it is the desire to possess for oneself what by nature is to be shared amongst all. Here he accuses the wealthy landlords as avaricious who exploit their tenant farmers who barely survive while they themselves live in luxurious palaces, gathering riches for their own sake. Their defence, according to Avila, is the Roman law of property.

But to Ambrose, and from a Christian perspective, gathering wealth as an end in itself is to live for the wrong reason, out of accord with nature, and to wilfully inflict harm on others. Like the other Church Fathers, Ambrose pleads with the landed rich to give their excess to the poor. This would be no more than to return what they have stolen from them. On being elected Bishop of Milan by popular demand, Ambrose gave most of his property to the poor.

Needless to say, beyond a few rich Christians who heeded these pleas from the Fathers, the exploitation of the land remained. And since the wealth of the Roman Empire derived primarily from agriculture, the direct abuse of land monopoly was a plainly evident wrong. Now it is worth asking why this teaching of the early Church went largely unheeded. Christianity, we should remember, became the official religion of Rome, and these teachings widely known, especially the idea of the community holding all in common and giving any excess wealth to the poor.

We are faced with the same question today. Why, after such great popularity, have the insights of Henry George into the proper use of land also gone unheeded? After all, as Charles Avila points out, George was only saying in economic terms what the early church was saying in ethical terms. The Fathers called upon the justice of divine providence, George upon empirical economic justice. Both arrive at the same evident truth: that if the gifts of nature are misappropriated, then exploitation will arise between citizens, poverty will increase while wealth increases and, if this is not remedied, a society will eventually destroy itself – as did the Roman Empire.

Now Avila wonders why the slaves or tenants did not rise up against the powerful landowners. It seems there were small rebellions, but these were easily put down with force. If we look around the world today, it is clear that the oppressed have no chance of remedying their condition themselves. It is precisely because they are at a disadvantage that they are oppressed. But if we turn to what we may call the modern free democracies, it is equally clear that the disadvantaged or exploited there are also the least likely to rise up and bring about justice. A more likely result of any rebellion is that the oppressed will become the oppressors – just as those fleeing to America from the Irish potato famine have done through taking land-ownership with them. Avarice and injustice seem to take root even from the best intentions.

Why is it, then, that the more educated and influential cannot bring about a remedy to this most basic injustice of misappropriating the earth? Even those politicians who understand the land question cannot bring about any change. All they can do is try to mitigate the consequences of injustice.

Here is where I believe the Church Fathers and the classical philosophers had an insight which our own age lacks. They understood the human situation at a far deeper level than either the poor or the rich and powerful of their day. They could see that neither the rich nor the poor understood human nature or the laws of nature – what we may call, along with Henry George, the ‘social laws’ of nature.

From the Christian perspective, the question is: why does avarice arise? Indeed, why does ‘possessiveness’ arise? Why do human beings desire to take things as their own property, even when it obviously harms others? Is humanity selfish and brutal by nature as Thomas Hobbes proposed in his Leviathan? Or, further, is there no such thing as ‘justice’ in the order of nature, but merely brute force, survival of the fittest, and the ‘war of all against all’? Is divine justice no more than a fiction invented by the powerful in order to impose their rule on the weak, as the Sophists argued in Plato’s time?

The early Christians, like the classical philosophers before them, asked these questions, and they rejected the idea that human nature is essentially selfish. Christianity sees human nature as fallen from its original natural or ‘innocent’ state. It has always been concerned with restoring human nature to its natural condition – its condition before the Fall. This meant that the political or social teaching of the early Church, and in the Middle Ages, recognised that there cannot be a truly just society in the fallen human condition. What is required is a transformation of the soul, so that the providential order of nature can again be perceived.

The earliest Christian communities did attempt to live in common and share all property. And this became the basis of monastic life – to live without any possessions. Yet even the monasteries tended to accumulate wealth and every now and then needed great reform, as with the birth of the Cistercians, Franciscans and Dominicans. But it was recognised that the majority cannot live this way. We will come back to how this was answered in a moment.

The philosophers had a different explanation. They saw the problem lay in errors of judgement, of mistaking for true what was not true. This is how Plato and Aristotle saw the human situation. According to them we do not know how to judge correctly between the true and the false, or between the just and the unjust. They understand that the faculties of the mind are naturally directed towards truth, just as the eye is directed towards light, or the ear towards sound, but that this capacity needs to be developed through careful education. This meant strengthening the rational faculties, but also the body, and the cultivation of the virtues – primarily justice, courage, prudence, and temperance. For Plato and Aristotle, the understanding of the truth of things is directly connected with understanding justice. For them enquiry into the true and the good cannot be separated.

Book I of Plato’s Republic is all about misconceptions of justice. These take several forms. First, that justice is only an external convention in a society. Second, that justice is the rule of the strong over the weak. Third, that it is doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies. Fourth, that it is giving to each what they are owed. Each of these positions are shown by Socrates to be flawed in one way or another. They belong to the realm of uninformed opinion. The remaining books of the Republic seek to overcome these false conceptions of justice and to find its true nature.

This is not the time to explore that in detail. But one thing ought to be noted. Plato’s dialogue arrives at an understanding that, through erroneous thinking, Nature and Law have become separated. The Greek words are physis and nomos. For Plato the law of anything is its nature, or its nature is its law. This law belonging to each thing is also its natural connection with all other things. The whole cosmos is a harmony between all its parts, and this harmony is the coincidence of physis and nomos, Nature and Law.

The Greek word kosmos means ‘order’. Everything has a part to play within the great whole, and through performing that part each fulfils its own being. It becomes harmonious with itself and with the whole cosmos. This harmonious order of things is true justice. Justice is not imposed upon things from outside but belongs to their essence and their proper mode of being. It means each thing acts according to its own true nature when it acts according to the order of the whole. It also means that each human being who lives justly has a harmonious order in their own being or soul, so that thought, action and virtue all work together. Most important of all, living justly becomes the primary aim of human life, both within and without. Next after that is the health of the body, and lastly the right use of wealth.

For Plato and for Aristotle, a life devoted to gathering money or wealth is quite simply an ignoble life. This is especially clear in Aristotle. In his Politics he argues that nature is ordered in such a way that the needs of all creatures are fully met. The land naturally supplies enough for a human community, and there is a natural limit in what it provides. Seeking in excess of this natural limit is harmful. True economics is an economics of sufficiency, in accord with what nature provides in due measure.

This means that trading solely for monetary profit is not only an ignoble way of life, it also goes beyond the natural limits of nature’s provisions. To seek to acquire unlimited wealth distorts the harmony of nature. It is unjust. The fact that such acquisition has no natural limit indicates it is unjust, since justice is always proportionate. But also, for both Plato and Aristotle, trading merely for the sake of money corrodes the civil order of the community. Markets in this sense are a threat to the social stability of the polis. They corrupt natural human relationships. For Aristotle economics is the study of a society becoming self-sufficient in necessities, within the limits of nature. It is more a study of ‘good management’ rather than of ‘commerce’. The aim is health and peace rather than wealth.

These two perspectives – the Christian and the philosophic – are quite different to each other, yet together they embody the highest aims of a just society in Western civilisation, which has absorbed aspects of each. One seeks a way of life based on goodness and mercy, on the love of God and neighbour. The parable of the Good Samaritan still strikes a note. The other seeks a way of life through reason and discriminating between reality and appearance. It seeks an understanding of the unity of physis and nomos, Nature and Law, or the real and the good, the truthful and the ethical. Yet both see the quest for the just life as an ongoing journey. For the Christian tradition it lies in overcoming the avaricious desires that come with the Fall, while for the philosophic tradition it is a way of bringing human nature and society into harmony with the cosmic order.

These are the leading responses in our Western civilisation to the injustices that afflict human society. Yet they both aim at a condition of justice that seems beyond the capacity of the majority of people. The Church Fathers and the philosophers were perfectly aware of this. Those who are wealthy through misappropriating the labour of others are not that keen on having a just society. They can console themselves with the belief that justice is an impossible utopian dream. Those who protest on behalf of the poor are too often driven by envy of the rich, and so they bring no remedy. Complacency and anger are two common responses to the question of justice.

Given the fact that few are likely to become saints or philosophers, is there a kind of justice that can be established which removes the worst ills that arise from the misappropriation of the land, and which opens a way towards the possibility of a truly just society? Well, obviously at least to us, Henry George opens the door to such a possibility, by removing the means of misappropriating the land and stealing the value created by the community and the wages of those who produce wealth. There are elements of the generous Christian ethic in George’s work as well as elements from the noble philosophic tradition, especially that of the Natural Law and the understanding of justice as a universal principle. There is a tendency nowadays, unfortunately, to reduce the scope of George’s insights merely to his fiscal proposals, and to seeking ways of implementing a land tax, forgetting that it is the love of justice that informs all his social and economic analysis.

We are confronted with the simple fact that modern society is as far from achieving this today as George was a hundred years ago – or the Church Fathers were in persuading the people that the land belongs to all in common sixteen hundred years ago, or Plato 2,500 years ago. For as far back as we can go in recorded history it has always been proclaimed by the poets, the prophets and the philosophers that the earth belongs to all in common. Virgil, for example, writes of a Golden Age when:

No tenants mastered holdings,
Even to mark the land with private bounds
Was wrong: men worked for the common store, and earth
herself, unbidden, yielded more fully. (Georgics I/126-29)

And the great Roman poet Ovid writes:

The earth itself, which before had been, like air and sunshine,
A treasure for all to share, was now crisscrossed with lines
Men measured and marked with boundary posts and fences. (Metamorphosis I/134-36)

The Stoic philosopher Seneca also writes of the Golden Age:

The social virtues had remained pure and inviolate before covetousness distracted society and introduced poverty, for men ceased to possess all things when they began to call anything their own. . . . How happy was the primitive age when the bounties of nature lay in common and were used freely; nor had avarice and luxury disunited mortals and made them prey upon one another. They enjoyed all nature in common, which thus gave them secure possession of public wealth. Why should I not think them the richest of all people, among whom was not to be found one poor man? (The Epistles)

Not only are we far from such visions, we have an added difficulty in our time, the implications of which were only hinted at in George’s time: the separation of the economic realm from the social realm. This is something Karl Polanyi has observed very clearly in his The Great Transformation. With the growth of a market economy, aimed at exchange for profit, the creation of wealth has gradually divorced itself from the social realm, and come to exist independently of society. Not only is land monopoly misappropriating the natural community revenue and diminishing the wages of labour, the economy as a whole is becoming parasitic upon society, making human life serve the economy, rather than the economy serve human life. This separation, now so plainly evident, especially in the great cities where land monopoly is rife, is precisely what Aristotle warned against, and what the Church Fathers struggled against.

This separation of the economic from the social is reinforced by the modern reduction of economic analysis to mathematical models. The tendency to reduce economics to mathematical calculation was already present in the early economic thinking of the seventeenth century. And this in turn came from a previous shift in the conception of the ‘laws of nature’. The new conception of the laws of nature was based upon a purely mechanistic observation of the laws of motion, to which all phenomena could be reduced. This new view was hailed as superseding the religious and philosophical approaches to nature. These, it was argued, belonged to a more primitive stage of society, preparing the way for the empirical method of mechanical science. This idea is expressed in Turgot, for example, one of the pioneers of economics in the eighteenth century. The Physiocrats were not immune to the mechanistic thinking of their age through which they sought to express their insights.

The expression ‘laws of nature’ was directly opposed to the tradition of ‘natural law’ which extended back to Plato, the Stoics and early Christians such as St Augustine, and was greatly refined through the Middle Ages, producing in the twelfth century the Decretum Gratiani, and culminating in the thirteenth century in Aquinas’s great treatise on law in the Summa Theologica.

Natural law refers to what we spoke of earlier, the harmonious order of the cosmos in which everything plays its part for the sake of the whole. It is the cosmic justice which brings community into being. It is essentially ‘cooperative’ as opposed to ‘competitive’, communitarian as opposed to individualistic. Natural law expresses the common good. According to natural law the land belongs to all in common, or simply to the Creator as St Ambrose and St Augustine argued. The new mechanical conception of the ‘laws of nature’ cannot account for just possession or ownership. It cannot encompass commutative or distributive justice. There is no ethical dimension to the mechanistic conception of nature.

The new mechanistic conception of nature gets transferred to jurisprudence with the rise of ‘positive law’, which is no longer rooted in the natural law or a conception of universal justice, but rather in the will of the legislator. Law became divorced from ethics in the same way as economics became divorced from community.

It is therefore no surprise that the expansion of positive law since the seventeenth century has been primarily in property law. Legally speaking, ‘ownership’ becomes the new way of conceiving human nature and society. Locke’s famous theory that the ownership of land springs from extending self-ownership through labour to land is the obvious development of this new kind of ‘law of nature’ absorbed into positive law. The ‘self-owning person’ has no precedent in history. It is rooted in a new conception of human nature and our relation to the world and society. Out of it springs a new branch of law called ‘human rights’, which are claims made upon the state, more or less replacing earlier ‘natural rights’, which are natural liberties, as formulated in the American constitution, which in turn replaced the natural law tradition extending back into the Middle Ages. This is a mode of law for the self-owning person, whose claims stand in opposition to the state.

The modern conception of the state has arisen through the loss of the communal understanding of society, in which each citizen, through their specific talents or vocations, serves the good whole. Once society is conceived in terms of proprietorial individuals, each seeking their own private ends, then ‘the state’ in some form or other has to be imposed to regulate the conflicting desires and actions of individuals. And this includes the market.

These are problems that George does not tackle. In his time for most ordinary people the vision of freedom was still framed within the context and language of the common good and natural justice, and had not yet declined into the notion private freedom and individual rights in opposition to the state or community. It was only the ‘intellectuals’ who propagated these ideas, while the majority of people still lived in the shadow of Christian morality.

George’s eye is on the just society and on how to remedy the injustices that arose with the market society based on land monopoly. It may well be, with the full implementation of the land tax world-wide, that the separation of the economic realm from the social realm would be repaired. It may well be that then the pursuit of wealth for its own sake would be replaced by higher cultural aims, as George envisioned, including due care for the environment.

All that may well be so. But the implementation of the land tax will not come about without first overcoming the prevailing mechanistic interpretation of economics, which reinforces its separation from the social realm, and which suits land monopoly by abstracting the earth into capital or reduces it to mere ‘resources’. Nor can the ‘social’ good be restored without a return to understanding the communal nature of the human person. This communal nature is something that the Church Fathers could call upon when prompting the rich to share their wealth with the poor. And it was something that was gradually developed throughout the Middle Ages through the formulations of civil and canon law, including English common law.

There is a growing body of scholarly study of the communal nature of society, and it is from this perspective that the limited nature of the sphere of economic theory is clearly brought to light. The study of economics in relation to other disciplines would be of enormous value. For example, the very good work being done in environmental studies and ecology would be greatly enhanced by a good knowledge of economic and social laws. Environmental destruction and economic injustice have a common cause. They occur through misconceptions of the nature of society rooted in the proprietorial conception of our human relation to the land or nature.

From the perspective of the Church Fathers and the Greek philosophers, these are manifestations of the separation of physis from nomos, of Nature from Law. Where George and the Church Fathers meet is in their common call for justice in conformity with the order of nature, and in their recognition of the essential goodness of human nature.

Given the Christian interpretation of the fallen human condition, or the classical philosophical interpretation of our misperception or ignorance of the true nature of things, how does each tradition conceive a remedy to the injustice that arises through the proprietorial relation with the land or nature?

Here the early philosophers and theologians gave a common answer: that, allowing for possession by convention, all property ought to be put to right use. It is not the claim to ownership as such that matters since, as Avila demonstrates, ownership can only ever be a legal claim on property. It is how property is used that ultimately matters. As John Chrysostom says ‘For it is not wealth that is evil, but the evil use of wealth’ (p.87).

Locke’s famous argument that we come to own things by extension of our self-ownership through labour is clearly flawed since we obviously derive our existence from nature or from the Creator. And why should Locke’s principle apply only to human beings? What of the bird who builds its nest or the squirrel that buries its nuts? From the perspective of nature there is nothing unowned remaining for Lockean man to extend ownership to. St Augustine likewise discounts Locke’s argument: ‘Whence does anyone possess what he or she has? Is it not from human law? For by divine law, the earth and its fullness are the Lord’s (Psalm 23:1)’. (p. 111)

If, then, it is only flawed thinking or a legal fiction that makes ownership seem to be so, and yet through weakness or through ignorance our society cannot give up the notion of ownership, is there then a compromise that remedies the injustices that spring from it?

There is indeed. The compromise proposed by the philosophers and theologians is to permit ownership but demand right or beneficial use. Whatever a person possesses ought to be used in such ways as serve the common good. That was the ethical solution proposed by St Thomas Aquinas, and he draws it from Aristotle. Nothing in nature comes into being to be ill-used. Legal possession does not override that natural law. Good laws, then, are framed to ensure the beneficial use of things. This is not so strange, as is clear in the modern regulation of drugs and medicines, or food safety standards. And if this is right for the use of manufactured things, then how much more so for the right use of the land itself, the home of all living beings?

When Henry George suddenly saw how wealth and poverty arose together through the private monopoly of land he also saw how it could be remedied through a simple fiscal measure which struck a compromise between allowing the ownership of land to continue and ensuring its future beneficial use. This is precisely what a land tax ensures. Its implementation requires a general grasp of natural justice, but not that all citizens should become saints or philosophers. While it would not make citizens virtuous, it would remove practices which invited vice. It would change the ethos of society from that of citizens grasping whatever they can through fear of want, to a general contentment in a visibly just distribution of wealth. The ‘proprietorial-self’ would vanish from the conception of human nature.

The Land Question and Community

Joseph Milne

A talk exploring how the privatisation of land, the rise of modern industry, and the evolutionary ideologies of progress in the nineteenth century, destroyed the self-sufficiency of communities and turned free people into a wage labourers. Given at the Henry George Foundation in 2021

One of the effects of the privatisation of land is the erosion of community. The history of land enclosure in England and Scotland shows this to be the primary effect. Communities that were originally more or less self-sufficient were broken up and families were driven from the land to the towns or cities to seek work. In this way the natural relations between people and the land were permanently broken, and gradually the poorest were driven into the slums. We hardly need to repeat this history as it is well known. The village dweller ceased to be his own master, owner of his own capital and the works of his hands, and was compelled to become a wage labourer. We have long forgotten that in the high Middle Ages a wage labourer was considered equal to a pauper and in need of charity. He was unable to support himself. The Church and the ordinary people would seek to support him.

But perhaps what has not been so well known is the long-term effects of this on community generally. There is something of a forgotten history here. With the land enclosures and the rise of modern industry, creating the wage labourer, the conception of society completely changed. This became very evident to me in my researches into the background of Henry George’s A perplexed Philosopher in preparation for Volume VI of the Annotated Works. My usual areas of study are ancient Greece and the Middle Ages. The conception of society in those times was radically different than our modern conception. For example, in the Greek city state, or polis, every citizen was understood to be responsible for the good of the whole. Or in medieval times a town was likened to a living organism, just like the universe itself, with each member enjoying a specific station according to their abilities to contribute to the well-being of all. The various trades, institutions and customs were all understood as serving the common good. Nobody was excluded, and those unable to support themselves were simply looked after by the whole community.

So it came as a shock to me to read the social theories of the nineteenth century – the theories of Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin, for example. While these three differed in certain respects about evolution, they held two basic ideas in common: the idea of biological progress and radial Individualism. That is to say, they each saw the present rise of industry as an advance on all previous history, and they each saw the ‘individual’ as the centre of society, in particular those individuals who commanded the great expansion of industry and of the British Empire. They saw this progress not only as material progress, but also as moral progress. In fact, for Herbert Spencer in particular, material progress and moral progress were one and the same thing. They were expressions of the synthesis arising from the original factors of matter and motion – his materialist theory of evolution. Matter and motion had culminated in the English captains of industry, the envy of the French.

If one reads the opponents of Henry George in his own time, their cry is ‘liberty’ and ‘individual freedom’. Their enemy was not merely Henry George and the various socialist reformers, it was ‘the state’ or government itself. Their conception of individualism held that, as higher individuals evolved, the need for the state would eventually wither away. Government and the state belonged to an earlier and lower stage of evolution, such as in classical Greece. Likewise, the poor – which is to say the ‘morally inferior’ – would wither away too if left to their proper evolutionary fate under the law of survival of the fittest. Incidentally, it was Spencer who coined the expression ‘survival of the fittest’, not Darwin, although Darwin happily adopted it. It corresponded with the theory that the great law of nature was competition within and between species, an idea now projected onto society and the market economy.

It is not difficult to see how these ideas were amenable to extreme reformers on either side – to the Marxists and to the Libertarians. On the one side, all property and all means of production should be owned by the State. On the other side, all property and all means of production should be owned by private individuals. Yet both sides had the conception of the state eventually disappearing through evolution. In one the individual would be subsumed into an amorphous community. In the other, solitary evolved individuals would be practically self-sufficient in mastery of the world’s resources. On one side the ‘proletariat’ was supreme. On the other the ‘individual industrialist’ was supreme. Yet both positions were equally materialist, determinist, and atheist. And both were equally opposed by George.

These are the kind ideas that were at war with each other in George’s time, and which he was in part dealing with in his critique of the social theory of Spencer in his A Perplexed Philosopher. My point, however, is that these ideas, at both extremes, were consequent on the privatisation of the land. The conception of human community was radically changed, or rather, radically distorted and deformed. Given that only a few individuals have possession of the land, and that they determine its uses, whatever may be ‘natural’ in the human community is necessarily distorted. Traditions and customs, institutions, functions and specific gifts, which arise only through continuous community, are all gradually lost or degraded. Society loses any distinct form and the people no longer experience themselves as members of specific communities or as fellow dwellers on Mother Earth. There is a law of consequences at work here. If the natural human relation with the land is broken, then natural human relations are broken or lost. As Tolstoy put it in his book on art: ‘If farming is wrong, then everything is wrong’.

These ideas of the nineteenth century remain powerful influences in our time, even though Herbert Spencer is all but forgotten. Yet he remains, along with Auguste Comte, a founder of the new science of sociology. His influence extends to Karl Marx and Max Weber. Marx saw Spencer’s theory of ‘survival of the fittest’ as confirming his theory of ‘class struggle’. And I think it is true to say that our understanding of society has been in continual crisis since that time. In particular, the civil realm has been in conflict with the economic realm. For while civil rights have grown, economic rights have diminished. And this disconnection between the civil and the economic has itself contributed to a profound distortion in the very idea of ‘natural rights’. For example, the freedoms that properly belong to the economic realm are now sought in the civil realm – such as the minimum wage. And in the civil realm itself, the quest for equality has turned into demands for recognition of difference and so-called ‘identity politics’. Paradoxically, the rise of modern individualism, and the quest for equal rights, has turned into a loss of a sense of personal identity, especially among younger people. There is no longer any sense of belonging in community where rights may be exercised.

All these distortions lie at the door of the general failure to understand that the land cannot be made private property. They are all consequent upon the misappropriation of the land. George himself listed a host of social ills that arise through this failure. For example, criminality and alcoholism. I think we can now count drug addiction as a necessary consequence too. We can also count the erosion of the family and responsible parenthood as a consequence. Natural social relations are destroyed as a consequence of a wrong relation with the land. These in turn place huge costs upon the welfare state, which itself is a necessary and inevitable consequence of the misappropriation of land.

And here is where one of the most monstrous ideas of Herbert Spencer is still at work. We condemn the criminal, the broken family and the drug addict in the same way that Spencer condemned the Victorian slums. It was from this condemnation of the poor, regarded as responsible for their own fate, that eugenics became widely discussed in England and other parts of Europe. The disintegration of the family, criminality, and drug-trafficking and addiction are all ‘unnatural’ social phenomena, but they are not due to the degeneracy of the individuals, and therefore to be remedied by any form of eugenics or ‘social cleansing’ through natural selection. Such solutions were seriously proposed in the nineteenth century. Such ideas have the devastating effect of concealing the real causes of deprivation, the breaking of the natural connection with the land.

Herbert Spencer had once seen the injustices that arose through the privatisation of the land. As I am sure you know, Spencer wrote a magnificent chapter arguing that land cannot be private property in his first book, Social Statics, published in 1850. George had made Spencer well known through quoting from that chapter in Progress and Poverty. Until then Social Statics had remained relatively unknown. But George quoting it extensively put Spencer in an awkward position in relation to the ruling class in England – the landed class. To protect his name and to remain in the right circles he needed to extricate himself from what he knew to be true and just. In modern terms, his opposition to private property in land had become for him ‘politically incorrect’ and would lead to social exclusion.

So he joined with the Radical Individualism of his time in opposing any kind of amelioration of poverty, whether from charity or from Gladstone’s reforms. His idea of justice was now ‘each gets the consequences of their own actions’. The rich entrepreneur deserves his wealth, the poor chimney sweep deserves his poverty. The destitute deserve their destitution. It is a law of social evolution. The fact that it was through the labour of the poor that the rich became wealthy was quietly overlooked. According to evolutionary theory, the strong survive and the weak are eliminated. That is the new justice. And one can see its roots going back to Thomas Hobbes’ notion of nature as a state of ‘war of all against all’. While for Hobbes it was a static condition of things, for Spencer and his wide following it had become an evolutionary principle. In fairness to Hobbes, he saw government as necessary to curb the natural brutality of individuals.

It may not be very comfortable to admit it, but these ideas are still at play in our time. But for us they have become normalised. For example, business is regarded as necessarily driven by competition for the highest profit. And under the notion of the ‘freedom of the individual’, and a host of arbitrary claims that spring from it, the underlying economic injustices remain invisible, or are taken to be inevitable. Yet they corrode the life and culture of community.

Perhaps the tragedy in all this is that it was foreseeable. Not only had George pointed to the consequences of privatisation of land, but many others in his time and slightly earlier had also pointed it out. For example Robert Owen, who in founded the cooperative movement in 1826, along with several communities and schools for children, here in the UK and the USA. Also Patrick Dove, who George praises in The Science of Political Economy, had proposed a land tax in1851 as the way to justice in a truly Christian society.

But even acquaintances of Darwin, Huxley and Spencer proposed the introduction of a land tax. The most significant of these was the evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had first formulated the theory of natural selection, usually attributed to Darwin. He was the first president of the Land Nationalisation Society formed in 1881, where he arranged for Henry George to speak when in England. In 1882 Wallace published a remarkable book entitled Land Nationalisation: Its Necessity and its Aims in which he notes that he had come across Progress and Poverty when he had almost finished his book. He fully endorses George’s analysis of the land question.

As a widely travelled naturalist, Wallace had seen how well so-called ‘primitive’ societies live, remarking that they had far higher moral standards than Victorian England, where poverty and inequality were tolerated. This observation was contrary to the claims of Spencer, who describes primitive societies as cannibals. But one observation of Wallace that I find especially striking is that our large cities are unnatural. He observes that this is indicated in the necessity of sewer systems. Where people live without privatisation of land, they are naturally dispersed into small communities, and in these communities all wastage is returned to cultivate the land. There is no wastage, no need for refuse collection. Wallace’s observations of evolution are now gaining regard among scientists, for example in An Elusive Victorian by Martin Fichman, and he is regarded as the earliest environmentalist. He saw the obvious link between the privatisation of the land and the destruction of the environment, including all the ailments and diseases that come with large cities.

Thus a link is made between the natural social proportion of communities, morality, environment, and the land question. The privatisation of land creates a rift between the civic and economic realms as an inevitable consequence of an unnatural relation with the earth. And to some extent modern Georgists inadvertently contribute to this wrong relation, if I might say so, by abstracting land into ‘location’. Location and locomotion are the words Herbert Spencer used in his abdication from his earlier philosophy. He speaks a great deal of nonsense about our rights to ‘natural media’, such as air, water and light, and where ‘land’ now becomes just another ‘natural media’ where we have ‘locomotion’. In neoclassical economics ‘land’ has been abstracted out of existence through intensifying it as either capital or location. This follows from Herbert Spencer and is contrary to Henry George. Consider what happens if we turn the primary elements of production – land, labour and capital – into location, energy and assets. Economics is then no longer part of nature or society. It is no longer human. Orwell observed that, if you wish to deceive and confuse the public, use Latin abstracts and avoid concrete Anglo-Saxon words. As an example he gave ‘extending borders’ as a substitute for ‘war’. This tendency to abstraction now deceives and confuses modern students of economics, removing it from ethics and an activity of community. There is a belief that if you translate concrete observed reality into abstract formulas you get nearer to the truth of things and make them ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’.

Wallace, himself a natural scientist, also gave a warning about this, noting that William Jevons and Alfred Marshal were turning economics into an abstract mathematical science and breaking the link between the natural activities of labour on land as understood by Adam Smith, Robert Owen and Henry George. This move has, so to speak, ‘privatised’ the academic study of economics. Marshal’s famous attack on George when he had given a lecture at Oxford was to accuse him of having no academic expertise and therefore no knowledge of economics or any right to speak on the subject. The move to appropriate economics for academic experts alone was one of the tactics used to undermine George. My point is that abstract words such as ‘location’ instead of ‘land’ dislocate the study of economics from the natural world as experienced in actual life. We must be careful not to speak the language of pseudo-science, especially when speaking of society and its relation to the natural world. As Edmund Burke pointed out to Thomas Paine, the knowledge of society is not derived from abstract metaphysics, but from the study of history and taking prudent action according to given circumstances.

Just as we have become accustomed to the privatisation of land, so likewise we have become accustomed to the privatisation of the individual. It is no accident that Georg’s opponents hit upon the ‘individual liberty’ as a defence of private property in land. Surely every individual should be free to make up his own mind on the question of property!

This argument conceals the obvious truth that all people have an equal right to dwell upon the land – to a ‘location’ if you insist! It is a self-evident truth utterly obvious to the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, the North American Indians, and the Australian Aborigines. They do not speak of ‘location’, but rather they acknowledge the land as the sacred Mother of all living beings. It is obvious that nature intends her gifts to be shared by all creatures, and she grants no contracts, deeds, titles or charters of private possession to any being. Sharing is the natural and equitable relation to the land. This ‘sharing’, which is still practiced in some parts of the world, even in farming communities in modern Europe, is the natural basis of society and community. It is at once economic and civic. Everyone is a participant rather than a private autonomous individual. All genuine human rights spring from sharing the land and participating in communal life together. They are simply given in the natural order of things and do not require proclamations or bills to exist. To turn natural rights into legal claims, although necessary in the present state of things, actually turns the human person into a private commodity, or into a ‘legal entity’ as Simone Veil argued. This is what the Radical Individualism and Libertarianism of the nineteenth century has given us under the invisible hand of Herbert Spencer’s social evolution.

I am not attacking our modern civil liberties. These are a great achievement of judicial development in the face of great odds. Human community strives to continue to exist even when uprooted from the land. I only wish to bring attention to the fact that these are in large part delusory if not founded in economic justice. The acceptance of privatisation of land has accustomed us to a perpetual conflict between civic and economic justice. And the more we attempt to resolve this conflict through civil freedoms alone, the more deeply we become enmeshed in economic injustices, not only of land speculation but also of the vast commercial monopolies and widespread destructive banking practices. By an extraordinary turning of things backwards, land speculation, the vast commercial monopolies and modern banking, are all defended under the rubric of ‘civil liberties’.

One final thought. I have argued that we need to see the social and civic consequences of the privatisation of the land and the artificial economy of land speculation. It is not enough to study this issue within the economic sphere alone, since the historical separation of the economic and civic spheres are a direct consequence of private land ownership. In George’s time the connection between the civil and economic was still obvious and seen by all. Social reformers, such as Robert Owen and the Quakers, were economic reformers at the same time as social reformers. It is the modern disconnection of the two spheres that leads some reformers to seek means of taking from the rich to give to the poor. But no amount of economic redistribution remedies the social consequences of land speculation. Likewise with those who demand ‘changing the system’. These kinds of mechanical changes really change nothing. They are ideologies rather than practical policies.

What is really needed is an understanding among a sufficient majority of the population of the real causes of poverty, crime, broken families and drug addiction – not to mention climate change and destructive modern farming methods. And in this regard, it is of little use merely campaigning for the implementation of a land tax. The Georgist movement needs to widen its range and study the nature of society and its institutions. That wider approach was present to some degree in the early movement but has now faded away. To a very large extent, the materialist, individualist, atheist, and deterministic social theories of the nineteenth century are still with us and shape how we regard the world. They have created a cloud obscuring the natural relations between the land and human citizenship.

Economics and the Land Ethic

Joseph Milne

Talk given at the Henry George Foundation 2019

Let me begin with a quotation from Aldo Leopold:

There is as yet no ethic dealing with man’s relation to the land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land…is still property. The land relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations. (A Sand County Almanac, OUP: 1949, p. 203)

Aldo Leopold was an early pioneer of environmental ethics, advisor to the UN before his death in 1948. He saw ethics had evolved in society first for the individual, then for the community, and now it must embrace the land. As he puts it: ‘The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land’. (p. 204)

It follows from this that, so long as we have no land ethic, the land is still property, just as slaves were once property, a mere economic resource towards which we owe nothing. At best we have laws to protect property, because it is someone’s property, not because of its natural worth. It is assumed that because something is property, an owner can dispose of it however they wish. It is quite clear, however, that our laws of property are founded on claims of privilege and not on natural justice. It is also clear that land ownership is only a legal concept, not a natural one. This was recognised by the prophets of the Old Testament and by the medieval natural law tradition. But in the Middle Ages a legal claim on land came with duties to the community. These duties were eroded in England by the Magna Carta, which established civil rights on the one hand, and private property rights on the other.

Little has changed since Aldo Leopold’s time 70 years ago. In fact, very little has been done to explore the true relation of economics and the environment. It is commonly assumed that economic interests are in conflict with care for the environment. There are indeed those who suggest that Henry George’s tax reforms, and the introduction of a land tax, would increase production and lead to further harm to the environment. This is because the ‘land question’ is seen only superficially, both on the economic side and the environmental side.

The land question is the question of the place of the human species in the biosphere. Land is the biosphere. It is not a mere economic ‘resource’. That word ‘resource’ is a distortion of what land is and of our true economic relation with it. Are one’s parents or children a ‘resource’? The word ‘location’, which often replaces the word ‘land’, also distorts our true economic relation with the land. The language we use about the world reveals how it is seen or misconceived. We may observe, for example, how economic language has moved over the last 200 years from concrete social language to abstract concepts, and eventually to mathematical and statistical language, gradually divorcing economics from the social and ethical realms, and from the natural world. In fact, economists such as Mariana Mazzucato and Michael Hudson have shown that modern ‘textbook economics’ has practically nothing to do with actual economics. It has become a fictional language. Yet the word ‘economics’ means the ‘household’ or ‘household management’. It implies wise management for mutual benefit. It directly concerns how we live, use and dwell on the land. The true laws of economics and the laws of nature cannot be in conflict with each other. If they appear to be, then economic understanding must be in error.

It is therefore of great importance to see how the present economic injustices and the destruction of the environment are linked together. Human poverty and environmental harm have the same common cause. They both spring from a wrong relationship with the land. As Aldo Leopold suggested, the social ethic and the land ethic cannot be divorced from each other, since one is an extension of the other. It is perfectly plain that if there is poverty amid abundance, as there is here in the UK, then the social ethic must be amiss. That is to say, we live in a wrong relationship with one another. If we live and a wrong relationship with one another, how can we live rightly with the land, with the earth, the biosphere? If we live out of accord with where we live, how can we live rightly as a community? And if we live out of accord with nature, how can we live in accord with human nature? Yet modern economic theory assumes that land is merely a resource, a passive store for consumption, and that economic exchange is essentially mutual exploitation. By abusing the land we degrade our own humanity.

According to Henry George, people are not naturally exploitative or competitive. On the contrary they are naturally generous and cooperative. This is the natural basis of any division of labour, whether in the family, the workplace, the nation, or humanity as a whole. The prevailing idea of ‘competitive individualism’, an offshoot of Hobbes and Social Darwinism, distorts our understanding of the natural order of society. Nature works by association and integration, not by competition. If one watches people working we see that, in practice, they cooperate, regardless of prevailing economic theories. They act for mutual advantage. But if in politics and in economics we fail to see how cooperation is natural, then we will make bad laws for governing society. We will legalise things that are unnatural and anti-social – such as usury and gambling.

Land monopoly is clearly socially divisive. I need hardly argue this point here. Yet it is also, and more fundamentally, an unnatural relation with the land. It causes slums and pollution. We have all seen pictures of the unhealthy and degrading Victorian slums. They personify land abuse, and the social abuse that follows as a consequence. But even now in the UK substandard houses are being built for land and social exploitation. Such social exploitation is environmentally harmful. It neither serves the homemaker well, nor respects the best or appropriate use of land. It is humanly and environmentally unnatural. It is driven by the desire to exploit the homemaker and the land. The desire to exploit does not use things in the manner they are best suited to. It lowers the standard of life and erodes community. It also degrades the exploiter.

But of course, if land is taken to be private property, rather than the natural dwelling place of all living beings, then that initial false relation opens the door to a host of others. Land monopoly invites land abuse and social injustice. The economic realm cannot be separated from the environmental realm, and neither realm can be separated from ethics.

So the question becomes: what is the right use of land? This is at once an economic, social and ecological question. It is almost to ask the Socratic question: How ought we to live?

To begin to answer this question we need to step outside the mechanistic framework of current thinking about the world, and even about the universe. If we consider for a moment the ancient understanding of the land we find it expressed in the symbol of Mother Earth, or as the Great Nurse of all living beings. Plato, in the Laws, says that we should honour the earth as our mother. And further he lays down a law that no household may sell their land. And in Aristotle’s Politics we read that the land provides precisely sufficient for all our needs, and that to take more than this, or to trade things solely for profit, will corrupt the society. And earlier we read in Hesiod of the Golden Age where all lived in peace and:

all good things
Were theirs; ungrudgingly, the fertile land
Gave up her fruits unasked.

And Virgil, also writing of the Golden Age, says:

No tenants mastered holdings,
Even to mark the land with private bounds
Was wrong: men worked for the common store, and earth
herself, unbidden, yielded more fully. (Georgics I/126-29)

The Roman poet Ovid writes of how this was lost:

The earth itself, which before had been, like air and sunshine,
A treasure for all to share, was now crisscrossed with lines
Men measured and marked with boundary posts and fences. (Metamorphosis I/134-36)

The Stoic philosopher Seneca also wrote of the Golden Age:

The social virtues had remained pure and inviolate before covetousness distracted society and introduced poverty, for men ceased to possess all things when they began to call anything their own. . . . How happy was the primitive age when the bounties of nature lay in common and were used freely; nor had avarice and luxury disunited mortals and made them prey upon one another. They enjoyed all nature in common, which thus gave them secure possession of public wealth. Why should I not think them the richest of all people, among whom was not to be found one poor man? (The Epistles)

The ancient poets and philosophers spoke in a symbolic language which perceived, so to speak, an eternal reality behind the disorders humanity had brought upon itself and upon the earth. That symbolic eternal reality pointed the human imagination to how we ought to live, and how we might live, if we adopted the pure social virtues and live without avarice. The ‘vices’ cause us to misperceive the world and our place in Nature: ‘for men ceased to possess all things when they began to call anything their own’.

This ancient view of things reflected a natural harmony between society and Nature. And when the philosophers of Classical Greece and China considered what was expressed in poetic symbols and myths, they discerned a lawful order than ran through all things. We might say that Nature was itself Law. It manifested itself as Law – not as laws governing Nature, but as its very essence or being. And human nature likewise was seen to be lawful, having its own essence. And this essence of human nature corresponded with the great laws of Nature. The human person was like a small cosmos reflecting and reflecting upon the greater cosmos. For the ancient poets and philosophers, it is this correspondence with the greater cosmos that aligns the human senses and faculties with Nature and enables perception and thought. The word ‘consider’ means to observe the stars and the order of Nature. Yet our modern sciences take no note of the fact that Nature gives us our senses and faculties, and even less that these are given for a purpose within the great order of things.

From this holistic understanding of Nature arose the tradition of Natural Law. This is too vast a subject to go into here, so I will simply show how it appears on different levels. At the highest level it is simply the Good, or what later was called the Eternal Law. Out of the Good springs Justice. Out of Justice springs the regulation of Nature and society. Out of regulation springs jurisprudence or ‘legal’ law. From legal law springs custom. The descent from the Good to custom is like a ray of light shining from the Good and informing each level with its own luminosity. This means that the ‘rightness’ or ‘fitness’ of each level may be measured by reference to the next level above it. And so the Stoic and medieval philosophers say that any ‘legal’ or ‘positive’ law enacted which contradicts the Eternal Law cannot be called a law. An example of the kind of law which fails to meet this criterion is a law which is advantageous to one party at the expense of another. A law is truly a law only when it serves the universal good. It follows from this that any ‘legal’ law that advantages the ‘economy’ over Nature or the environment cannot be called a law.

This larger picture of law and ‘lawfulness’ helps us to discern things we would otherwise miss. For example, Aristotle and Plato both note that the person who keeps the legal law because it is legal is ‘just’ only in a limited way. A person is just in the full sense only when they keep the legal law because it is rooted in justice itself, and through love of justice itself. Then keeping the law is virtuous. This is a central theme of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.

Now we might well examine which laws in our time measure up to this criteria. Earlier I gave the examples of legalised usury and gambling. These things are clearly advantageous to one party but harmful to another, and harmful to society as a whole. They are unjust laws and, very strictly speaking, not laws at all – one might want to say ‘fake laws’. A real law aligns Nature and justice.

This principle can easily be applied to economic activity. We can ask if any particular activity is true to the economic law of just exchange, and we can ask if it is beneficial to one party while harmful to another, and we can ask if it is universally beneficial to all creatures and to the biosphere. Is it just and good in all these respects? It is perfectly clear that many present economic enterprises fail on each of these criteria. They contravene the Law of Nature, the cosmic law of the ancient poets and philosophers. And we can see that they contravene both the social ethic and the land ethic.

It seems quite clear that we need to replace bad laws with good laws. We are perfectly aware that there are vested interests in bad laws, laws which allow harm to society or to the land upon which all life depends. It may well be that the crisis of global warming is awakening a deeper sense of natural justice then the last several hundred years of industrialisation have done. It may well be that our age will be compelled through fear to adjust our relationship with nature as well as our understanding of society.

But I believe there can be a more noble response than that. Fear provokes irrational response. What is really needed is a reconsideration, in the light of Natural Justice and the Good, of the very nature of human work. It has long been taken for granted that the aim of the economy is to keep increasing wealth, while it is that notion that has driven us to neglect the laws of Nature and treat the land as a mere resource, rather than as the living biosphere and our home. The drive to create ever more wealth has led to social exploitation, massive consumer debt, while only very few get richer. For many people work is a drudge they are compelled to do just to keep the wolf from the door. Much of this work is unnatural and does not fulfil human potential.

A fortunate few perform work that is meaningful and fulfilling, but most do not. George observed that the working people of the Middle Ages could provide sufficient for their needs with three days’ work a week. This would be perfectly feasible now if we were not held in debt bondage through land speculation. If that were so, George suggests that the free time would naturally be given to social and cultural pursuits. Even in George’s younger days masters and apprentices would often gather to talk and drink together in working hours. It is clear that work was as much a social activity as an economic one – before the big corporations and monopolies with their absentee shareholders came along. But even now there are craftsmen and women, artists, musicians, scholars, doctors, farmers and many others who work out of love for their work and service to the community. We regard them as very fortunate, and indeed they are, but this is because they have found their vocations. They have found the work through which they may fulfil their talents and make a substantial contribution to society. And these callings may best be performed in accord with Nature, neither exploiting anyone nor harming anything.

Surely true work, work in accord with human nature, would make a net contribution to society, and diminish nothing which the land freely provides. There is an ancient principle that if one does something solely for private gain, one is alienated from oneself and from nature. The talents of each individual fit them for association and cooperation. Each human beings’ natural capacities are essentially social and life-enhancing. In that most fundamental sense they are ‘ecological’ and part of Nature as a whole.

Our problem is that, through land monopoly and the ever-expanding abuse of credit, human capacity has been limited, and social life has been diminished. And so what was once ‘natural’ now strikes us as utopian. Land abuse has blinded us to the natural order of things and diminished our vision of human nature and society. The ancient philosophers traced all political ills to one common cause: the wrong use of things. This is what practical reason is meant to discern, the right use of things. And this principle goes deeper than the question of property or ownership. Property, according the Thomas Aquinas, is justified only so long as it is used for the common good. This was the real basis of the Medieval ‘just price’ theory and the prohibition against usury. All things and all human activities have right uses, and private gain was not considered one of them. Acquisition is not an end in itself. Money-making is not the proper end of the economy. On the contrary, it deforms it. But fear of want drives people to seek acquisitions as a form of security, and so distorts the real meaning of work. As Plato observes in the Republic (Book VIII), the quest for money-making ultimately leads to oligarchy, where the city become two cities, one for the rich and one for the poor. The economist Joseph Stiglitz argues that we are heading in that direction.

There is no economic reason for intelligence and virtue to be opposed to one another. In meaningful work they are not, while in exploitation they are. Yet neo-classical economics divorces ethics from economics, and imagines the economy as a kind of autonomous, self-regulating machine, as though society itself were a machine. It is this, amoral, mechanistic notion of economics that divorces wealth creating, or meaningful work, from the environment. It sanctions the wrong use of things, and the wrong use of human labour.

It is clear, however, that an adequate response to the present crisis of global warming demands a marriage of intelligence and virtue. Great ingenuity is needed to reform farming methods and non-toxic production of energy. These need to be brought into harmony with the natural order, and intelligence guided by that aim can be enormously creative. We need pioneers as capable as the great inventors of the Victorian era, a new industrial revolution, but no longer based on the exploitation of nature or labour, with injustice hidden under the cloak of social Darwinism.

We should note, however, that ‘investors’, hedge funds, creditors, insurance brokers and banks, and the whole money-market, cannot bring about such a change. They only take from wealth-creation and contribute nothing towards it. In this regard, as currently constituted, they are no different to land speculation. They merely extract from the economy, from the actual production of wealth. They have no engineers, inventors or discoverers. And like land speculators, they inhibit economic diversity and small-scale enterprise. They inhibit addressing environmental abuse and climate change.

It is here that we also need to consider the proper role of government. It is obvious that global warming and environmental destruction require global cooperation, and this can only be secured through governments working with a common aim. In a sense, this great challenge creates an opportunity for peaceful international cooperation. There is no need in the nature of things for nations to be opponents of each other. But we need to confront the myth that the economy works independently of the state and is self-regulating. That is a misrepresentation of Adam Smith and leads to oligarchy, not liberty. It is only at the level of government and national institutions that the safety and good of the whole can be secured. And it is only vested interests that demand deregulation of finance and exchange of goods. But also – and some Georgists need to learn this – it is the idea that the economy operates independently or autonomously that divorces it from distributive justice. That is what Herbert Spencer and his followers wished to secure and which Henry George so vigorously opposed. Their slogan was ‘freedom of contract’, meaning that neither law nor government should interfere in whatever contacts were made between employers and employees, or between landlords or tenants. Such contracts involved no societal obligations. They fiercely resisted all the social reforms of Gladstone, arguing that indolence was the cause of poverty.

Here is where the different orders of law I mentioned earlier come in. There is the Eternal Law or the Good, from which springs Justice, and from Justice springs the common regulation of Nature and society. Out of regulation springs jurisprudence, the realm of positive or written law, and from this legal realm springs custom. In this ancient conception of law, found in one form or another in any great civilisation, law descends from the universal to the particular. The good of society as a whole, where it is in harmony with itself and with Nature, belongs to universal Justice. A perfectly good people could live by that law alone, without any need for positive or written law. But that is like saying every human being can be perfectly healthy. That is the most desirable thing, and what the art of medicine aims at, yet is never fully attainable. And so Justice needs to be reflected upon and articulated according to circumstance, and this is jurisprudence, the realm of ‘legal’ law, of legislation. Law at this level, if it accords with Justice, ‘guards’ all citizens from social and economic abuses. It ought to guard against land monopoly and usury which destroy society. Scholars trace that function back to ancient Babylonia, Syria, Egypt, Israel, Greece and Rome. (Michael Hudson, And Forgive Them Their Debts, p. 44) With the decline of Rome it was gradually lost until revived again in the Middle Ages. Its last great English expression, preserving the medieval legacy, is in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity in the sixteenth century.

Good regulation of the economy comes under jurisprudence, ensuring that self-interests do not override the common good. Good laws here would not need to be plentiful, and where they were abided by government would operate with a light touch. It would not need to redistribute wealth. Such intervention is necessary only where injustice prevails, or where bad laws are made. And where laws protect the interests of the few, then poverty arises and eventually environmental harm inevitably occurs. Only a virtuous society can be truly prosperous and live in harmony with the land and with Nature as a whole. Good laws encourage virtue. And where people are generally virtuous they have good conventions. Good conventions hold community together in everyday affairs. These are conditions conducive of advantageous cooperation. Such cooperation leads to liberty.

My point in all this is that if there is social injustice, there will be economic injustice, and if there is economic injustice there will be violation of nature and abuse of the land. Society is part of the biosphere. The Land Ethic of Aldo Leopold shows us that we cannot divorce society from nature, and that if we do – and as we currently do – our society itself will be unjust, and the economy will be reduced to mutual exploitation rather than mutual cooperation. Let me draw to a close with another quotation from Aldo Leopold:

It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than the mere economic value: I mean value in the philosophical sense.
Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. Your true modern man is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it: to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. (p. 223-4)