by Benjamin M. Studebaker
In the conclusion of The Heart of Isonomia, I suggested that improving the political capabilities of citizens requires—among other things—an expansion of economic rights. In last quarter’s issue, Laurent Dobuzinskis wrote a piece weighing in on the form these economic rights might take, arguing that predistribution of assets is preferable to redistribution and to the traditional welfare state. In this piece, I’ll offer reflections on several economic schemes that come up frequently in public discussion. While these schemes sound plausible enough to temporarily generate legitimacy for a system that fails to deliver on the promise of equality of political capabilities, they would not produce a system that would in fact deliver on that promise.
In particular, I want to focus on the idea that owning property inculcates political capabilities, and therefore the way to achieve an equality of political capabilities is to create an economic system in which everyone is a property owner. It’s an idea that is often attributed to Aristotle. In the Politics, Aristotle invokes an old proverb, ascribed to Pythagoras, along the lines of “make friends’ goods common goods.” He elaborates on how this is to be done:
…individuals while owning their property privately put their own possessions at the service of their friends and make use of their friends’ possessions as common property; for instance, in Sparta people use one another’s slaves as virtually their own, as well as horses and hounds, and also use the produce in the fields throughout the country if they need provisions on a journey. It is clear therefore that it is better for possessions to be privately owned, but to make them common property in use; and to train the citizens to this is the special task of the legislator.
The key here is that for Aristotle property itself does not inculcate the relevant attitude—the legislator must train the citizens. Indeed, this is the “special task” of the legislator. It is one of the most important functions of the law. It is often argued these days that people are in fact very other-regarding, that in various experimental settings there’s all sorts of evidence that people can be very empathetic and nice. But for this to happen reliably at scale, liberal institutionalists usually argue we need appropriate institutions that create the kinds of relationships that allow for those traits to come to the fore—e.g., the rule of law, an open-access order, inclusive institutions, or what have you. And whatever institutional scheme we need, for Aristotle we can only interact with that scheme in the right way if we have property.
Now, when we discuss property in an Athenian context, we are usually talking about farmland. Farmland is a special kind of property in two key senses. First, farmland produces an income that can sustain the owner’s household. It is not simply a lump sum of cash, to be depleted, nor is it a set of assets that produce a return but must be complemented by some other source of income. It is property in the complete sense—it straightforwardly secures the means of subsistence for the household, without any need for further sources of income. If an ancient Greek person doesn’t own enough land for the land to perform this function, that person would often be regarded as not having enough property to meet the citizenship requirements.
Second, farmland does not necessarily require the owner actively manage the property. For Aristotle, this is key.1 Because the property-owner doesn’t have to spend time managing the property, there is time available to receive the training and to participate in public life. The farmland is to be managed by an “epitropos,” a slave or hired hand who is nonetheless entrusted with managing the land. This epitropos—or, later on, in Latin, “vilicus”—could be otherwise highly educated, and might very well be more skilled at managing the farm than the owner. But for Aristotle, no matter how skilled the epitropos is in efficiently managing the land, the epitropos still lacks the fundamental ability that is a prerequisite for citizenship—the ability to directly evaluate ends. Citizens who understand the value of ends will appropriately sacrifice their own means in the service of valuable ends, putting their private property to common use. An epitropos has simply been ordered to manage the owner’s means so as to maximize the resources upon which the owner can draw, for purposes that may remain fundamentally opaque to the epitropos.
In this respect, the epitropos is very much like a consultant, who is hired to efficiently achieve some end the consultant had no role in selecting. No matter how skilled consultants are in efficiently achieving the ends that are given to them, they did not choose those ends for themselves. When they confuse their skill in managing means with a skill in choosing ends, this appears as hubris. They’ve spent all their time focusing on efficiently achieving the ends given to them by others, so why would we think they have any skill in thinking about ends?2
So, for Aristotle it is not just that the property-owning citizen should have enough property to secure the means of subsistence for the household. The citizen-owner should also have enough property to own or employ an epitropos. Only when this economic state of affairs obtains does it become possible for the owner to follow that Theban law Aristotle loves so much, the one that bars anyone who has been to the market in the last ten years from holding public office.
And even when the citizens have enough property to own or employ an epitropos and stay away from the market for entire decades, this still will not be enough to give them the relevant political capabilities. Even when the citizens have all of this, they will still need to be trained, and it’s on the “legislator” to provide this training. In this context, the legislator is the one who gives the law—like Solon, or Lycurgus. It is the person—or symbolic figure—who designs the political system at its inception. The legislator is not simply a citizen who participates in the political system, it is the one who creates that system in the first place. When the legislator is dead and buried, it is the system the legislator created that provides the training. A citizen with adequate property will only acquire the political capabilities if that citizen also has the good fortune to have been born in a city that is well-ordered. If the citizen is instead born in a city that is poorly ordered, the property-owners will not reliably receive the training, and unless there are some among them with the necessary skills to re-found the city, to take on the role of the legislator and make the system anew, conditions will further deteriorate. Aristotle gives the cities where the training is not reliably relayed the names “tyranny,” “oligarchy,” and “democracy,” depending on whether these cities are misruled by one person, a small number of wealthy people, or a large number of poor people.
The standard liberal response to Aristotle is to insist that the citizen doesn’t need all of this, that something less will do. In The Heart of Isonomia, I discussed the way in which liberal theorists water down the set of political capabilities the citizens needs to participate. But here I want to focus on the ways liberals water down the property requirements. Here are four distinct levels of watering down:
- Citizens need very nearly as much property as Aristotle says, but they don’t need the political system to provide training. They can instead receive this training from private, civil society organizations. The political system must have the necessary features to maintain space for civil society, but it can then get out of the way.
- Citizens need to own property, but they don’t need any training specifically directed at developing political capabilities. By nature, they have the potential to develop political capabilities if they have sufficient access to some set of primary goods. The political system doesn’t need to worry about civil society because individuals are able to manage on their own.
- Citizens need to own property, but they need to manage the property themselves to be appropriately inculcated with political capabilities. They don’t need to own or employ an epitropos—in fact, those who own or employ an epitropos may be out of touch. Work itself provides the training.
- Citizens need to own property, but they only need to own enough property to have a fair opportunity in a market system. Those who fail in the market should be protected from outright destitution, but there is no need to make additional provisions for the development of political capabilities, either because all people have political capabilities by nature or because the political system ought to be designed in a manner that makes very limited demands on the ordinary citizen.
At one end of the scale, we would have Max Weber. For Weber, even in instances where the bourgeois citizens own more than enough property to hire financial advisors, consultants, and business executives, they lack political maturity. This means that civil society is not adequately providing the training. Since for Weber untrained wealthy citizens necessarily endanger the survival of the state, this necessitates state intervention to provide the missing training. Weber made this argument in Germany at a time when Germany had a relatively modern system of public education, especially in comparison with Britain.3 The German state was already more involved than most, but for Weber this was not good enough, because the wealthy were very clearly making deeply foolish, irresponsible decisions. In this respect Weber is the major liberal figure who is closest to the ancient position—he simply did not trust civil society to provide the training, even to wealthy Germans who ticked all the property boxes.
At the other end of the scale, we would have someone like Friedrich Hayek. For Hayek, the state ought to insure citizens against catastrophic outcomes. But providing political training while maintaining the market system in a sufficiently pure form was too challenging for him, and therefore Hayek proposes to reduce the citizens’ roles in political decision-making considerably. His “law of liberty” is not a law that gives the citizens the training, it is a law that insulates itself from the consequences of its having failed to give the citizens the training.
Generally, liberals are uncomfortable with taking either the Weber pill or the Hayek pill. That is to say, they are uncomfortable either with giving the state a very large role in providing the training whenever civil society fails or in straightforwardly giving up on the project of having capable citizens. There’s something of a “horseshoe” effect here, insofar as both Weber and Hayek agree that ordinary liberal approaches have failed to produce a sufficiently capable of citizen population, and therefore drastic measures must be taken to protect the system from the wayward citizens.4
The liberal who wishes to avoid swallowing these pills must embrace schemes to create property-owning democracies on the basis of something resembling theory #2 or theory #3. Theory #2 is the Rawlsian position. In that schema, “wealth and income” is one of the primary goods that is a prerequisite for developing what Rawls calls the “two moral powers.” But the amount of wealth and income that is necessary for the two moral powers to develop is never spelled out. Theory #3 is a workerist position, focused mainly around that idea that work itself is spiritually generative. We might associate it with the mid-20th century Keynesian emphasis on full employment.
Recently, Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas have written a really wonderful book exploring the tensions between these two positions and the history of the struggle between them. Ostensibly, the book is about universal basic income, but it is really about how, in the second half of the 20th century, theory #2 emerged to challenge theory #3. Titled Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income, it highlights how many liberals and market socialists both came to prefer #2 to #3 during the same time period.
The economic implications of theory #3 are relatively straightforward. If work is what develops our political capabilities, then the state can straightforwardly secure its citizens political capabilities by providing full employment. Most obviously, this can take the form of a right to a job. If the market cannot provide a job, the state steps in and gives the citizen a job. The aim here is not primarily the production that the citizen will generate, but the moral and spiritual benefits that employment confers on the citizen. The state gives the citizen a job not simply to give the citizen the means of subsistence but to give the citizen a meaningful role, a purpose, something that makes the citizen feel part of society. When citizens feel part of the society, they will view their fellow citizens as relevantly like themselves and they will put their property at the service of their fellows.
But what about the people who cannot work? It’s not clear what theory #3 can do with them—if they can’t work, then they can’t develop the political capabilities, and this means in an important sense they don’t make trustworthy citizens. The welfare state was created to ensure the non-working population still receives the means of subsistence. But by accepting a non-working population, there is an implicit acceptance that some people will not have the positive qualities that, on this theory, only work instills. In the United States, the non-working population was non-trivial and it disproportionately represented many demographic groups, creating an implicit justification for marginalizing those groups. It became very common to allege that the groups that disproportionately received welfare benefits suffered from cultural problems of one kind or another, that increasing the labor force participation rate for different demographics was the best way to improve those groups, culturally. All of this was entailed by the premise that it’s work that provides the training.
Ultimately, this implication eroded support for welfare programs over time, slowing their growth and eventually creating a justification for adding work requirements and cutting benefits. By the 1980s, there remained strong support for maintaining welfare programs for those who are retired, i.e., for those who used to work, but outside of that there was a new consensus that access to benefits ought to depend on proving to the state that you really can’t work. Even then, theory #3 still implies that those who can’t work cannot receive the benefits that only work provides, and in this respect theory #3 implies that these people are a continuing source of subversive activity.
Against this, there’s theory #2, and the idea that over time, automation will create a condition in which it is impossible for theory #3 to work. Proponents of theory #2 argue that theory #3 is doomed both because the economy will cease to provide enough jobs for work to plausibly be the basis of the training and because the jobs the economy does continue to provide will be of poor spiritual quality, i.e., they will be too alienating or atomizing to perform the function which, at some prior point in time, work may have performed. Beyond this, some proponents of theory #2 never bought the idea that work was an effective way of delivering the training in the first instance, that work was always already too alienating, too atomizing, or too intellectually deadening.
But proponents of theory #2 still avoid swallowing unpleasant pills by postulating that citizens can develop the necessary capabilities on their own if they have enough property. Because theory #2 is not focused on providing jobs but on simply providing all-purpose means, it becomes possible to propose cash transfers. That’s where the basic income theories come into play. But it also leads to a tendency to frame all new government programs as cash transfer programs. In a crisis, the government simply sends cash, forgives debt, issues cheap debt, or prints money. Whenever the government needs to incentivize any form of behavior, it simply issues a tax credit. Where, under theory #3, the government focused on creating roles that fostered a sense of rootedness in the society, it now simply plays with spreadsheets.
And, because theory #2 has never gotten very specific about how much property is really necessary, there are a lot of people who say they are trying to offer an economic scheme appropriate for theory #2 that is not plausibly capable of performing the social and political functions that a theory #2 scheme needs to perform. For instance, it’s hard to argue that Andrew Yang’s basic income scheme—$1,000 per month, or $12,000 per year—was anything like sufficient to plausibly replace work. To be sure, he argued that it would increase over time and eventually develop into an appropriate theory #2 scheme, but his critics suspected that this was really an attempt to produce a Hayekian social minimum more appropriate to theory #4.
Part of the trouble is that the cost of actually building out a scheme that makes work genuinely optional remains enormous. As much as it is impossible at this stage for everyone to work, it is also impossible at this stage for no one to work. Contemporary theory #2 schemes therefore frame themselves as supplements for a system that is still largely based on theory #3, even if the version of theory #3 we’re working with is increasingly visibly derelict, with the state unable to raise the funds necessary to fully fund the welfare state and increasingly at the mercy of global financial forces when it comes to job creation. They therefore position themselves as ways of replacing the welfare state that might themselves one day develop into alternative models for providing the training. But, in their incipient forms, they often help the state cut welfare benefits in the near-term without either providing jobs or providing comprehensive alternatives to employment. And because there are liberals who have swallowed the pills, liberals who pledge to make things right later on do not have much good will with which to operate.
All that said, it is very clear that, for nearly a century now, theory #3 and, increasingly, theory #2 have managed to perform legitimating roles. They have made it possible for theorists who cannot swallow the pills or embrace a non-liberal theory to persuade themselves that it is still possible for liberal political theory to deliver the training. But it must be acknowledged that, even on their own terms, at our current level of economic development, theory #2 and theory #3 don’t really work. Even if work performs the training function, it is not possible for everyone to work, and even if everyone has something resembling Rawls’ two moral powers, it will take a lot more than the extant available cash transfer schemes to develop those powers. And of course, there are many, many political theorists throughout the history of thought who would think you a fool were you to believe that property alone is enough to get this job done.
What about predistribution schemes? Cooperative workplaces are premised on theory #3—they are simply an effort to improve the capacity of work to provide the training, by blurring the distinction between the epitropos and the ordinary workers the epitropos oversees. They are only convincing if we think the epitropos’ managerial skills imply an ability to choose ends. Otherwise, giving every ordinary worker the role of epitropos is unlikely to give the worker the relevant training, and it may burden the worker with a managerial role any given worker may not want and at which any given worker might not be good.
Other, lesser schemes that offer citizens small amounts of property when they reach the age of maturity or that make it marginally easier to acquire certain types of property (e.g., residential homes) do not generate a sufficient income to take the place of a good job, much less the place of good farmland. Schemes of this kind can make the government marginally more popular and be used in sustaining its legitimacy for a while, but they do not deal with the fundamental problem—they fit firmly within the bounds of theory #2.
Land reform made a lot of sense in antiquity, but as both populations and food yields increase, it is hard to envision a society with a very large number of small farmers who can earn enough from farming to sustain themselves. Even in antiquity, land reform was always difficult to execute in part because either the new citizen-farmers needed to acquire farm management skills or they needed to acquire skilled epitropoi on short notice. There is also usually considerable political opposition to land reform, in large part because extant landowners usually consider it a form of redistribution rather than predistribution. Those land owners usually have an unequal share of political power. Land reform is most often pursued in states that, for Aristotle, have gone off the rails need to be re-founded. It’s a Catch-22—land reform only happens in states that still work well enough to do land reform. It is needed most in the places where the law is too dysfunctional, where the citizen population lacks the training necessary to recognize the need for reform.
Re-founding is only possible in contexts where there is some other institutional scheme that can be legitimated. The would-be legislator—or organization of legislators—would need some positive story to tell about some other way of structuring the law. Such stories are in short supply these days. The absence of a new legislator allows liberalism to tread water, untroubled by sharks. But swimming? Well, that would require training.
NOTES
- I discuss Aristotle’s position in depth here, but it bears mentioning that there was significant disagreement in Greece and Rome about the degree to which the owner should be involved in directly managing the property. For a rich discussion of the range of attitudes, see Peter Hunt, Ancient Greek and Roman Slavery (Malden: Wiley, 2018). ↩︎
- This may or may not be a good reason to refuse to vote for Pete Buttigieg—an experienced McKinsey consultant—depending on the degree to which you agree with Aristotle that managing means and choosing ends are separate and distinct skills. ↩︎
- For more detailed examination of the history of public education in Europe, check out the journal Paedagogica Historica. For a look at the universities, see the four volumes edited by Walter Rüegg between 1992 and 2010, entitled A History of the University in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ↩︎
- At this juncture, both the Aristotelian and the Marxist would ask why the law should be preserved if it is so bad at performing one of its central functions. It’s an interesting question, but one I’m not answering in this piece. ↩︎
Benjamin M. Studebaker received his PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge. Send him mail.
Isonomia Quarterly 