Parecia-me então, como agora, que A Revolução dos Bichos faz uma advertência a respeito dos problemas da desigualdade, o resultado da concessão de direitos e privilégios a uma classe política dominante. Orwell habilidosamente ilustra o problema fundamental da autoridade política, seus conflitos inerentes e seus incentivos que favorecem o abuso do poder e que rapidamente enterram grandes ideais filosóficos. O ponto principal de Orwell era que os porcos nunca levam a sério sua retórica de igualdade e de restabelecimento da fazenda em termos mais igualitários — que quase imediatamente passam a tomar vantagem de sua posição desigual na fazenda para explorar o resto dos animais e concentrar os luxos para seu usufruto particular. A Revolução dos Bichos, assim, sucintamente demonstra a conexão entre o poder político e o poder econômico. Quando a desigualdade naquele é instituída como fato legal, a desigualdade neste se segue inexoravelmente. Os libertários de livre mercado normalmente ficam desconfortáveis com as condenações de esquerda à desigualdade econômica, alegando que, em princípio, o libertarianismo não tem qualquer problema com a desigualdade.

Afinal, se favorecemos os direitos individuais, a competição aberta e a propriedade privada, devemos aceitar quaisquer resultados que se seguirem dessas premissas. Estritamente, tudo isso é verdade. Parece-me, porém, que uma crítica social libertária precisa incluir uma crítica à desigualdade econômica como sintoma da falta de liberdade econômica e das persistentes interferências do poder político em favor das elites ricas. Em seu estudo biográfico de Thomas Hodgskin, o historiador David Stack descreve a crença de Hodgskin de que “o trabalhador poderia ser liberado através da aplicação consistente da moralidade burguesa”. Para Hodgskin, Stack afirma, “a desigualdade e a miséria, a ordem social e a antipaz” eram todas funções da legislação, impostas artificialmente e não resultantes de “quaisquer desigualdades inerentes no sistema de produção”. Se as injustiças econômicas existentes resultam da lei positiva, então “restrições socialistas ao laissez faire estavam enganadas”. Hodgskin viveu e escreveu seus trabalhos numa época em que era mais fácil articular uma visão que fosse tanto liberal quanto socialista. O legado pouco apreciado de pensadores como Hodgskin avança o argumento (frequente aqui no Centro por uma Sociedade Sem Estado) de que os libertários devem desconfiar do termo “capitalismo” em vez de trombeteá-lo como algo que favorecemos.

Como Hodgskin, os anarquistas de mercado atuais não se opõem ao fato de que o capital é compensado como parte do processo de produção. A preocupação — que só pode ser aplacada pela adoção de um ora hipotético livre mercado — é que o capital seja supercompensado devido à posição de privilégio que o estado confere a ele. Escreveu Hodgskin: “Ficamos tentados a pensar que capital é como uma palavra cabalística, tal qual Igreja ou Estado, ou quaisquer outros termos gerais que são inventados por aqueles que tosam a humanidade para esconder as mãos com a tesoura. É um tipo de ídolo perante os quais os homens devem se prostrar (…).” Entre os insights principais de Hodgskin, normalmente ignorados pela maioria dos defensores do livre mercado, está a ideia de que o comércio em si não prova a ausência de exploração. As trocas desiguais são exploratórias no momento em que uma das partes têm vantagens injustas ganhas através de intervenções coercitivas ou restrições à competição. No nível micro, as trocas desiguais se manifestam, por exemplo, em relações de emprego ou em acordos de bens ou serviços de consumo. Em uma escala maior, análises sobre trocas desiguais podem auxiliar nosso entendimento sobre a forma pela qual os países pobres e em desenvolvimento interagem economicamente com o Ocidente desenvolvido.

No mundo de A Revolução dos Bichos, os porcos empregavam a violência como maneira de preservar sua posição de poder; os outros animais trabalhavam cada vez mais em troca de menores pagamentos, enquanto os porcos eram os senhores da Granja dos Bichos — nome que foi eventualmente revertido ao original Granja do Solar. O mantra original “Todos os animais são iguais” foi gradualmente, quase imperceptivelmente, suplantado pela ideia de que “alguns animais são mais iguais que outros”. A interpretação de Machan de A Revolução dos Bichos esquece que Orwell era um socialista e, como o estudioso de Orwell Craig L. Carr observa, o livro é um alerta bastante direto a respeito da “traição do ideal igualitário”. Após a revolução dos porcos, com a queda do sr. Jones, permaneceu “[um] sistema econômico que legitimava a desigualdade material”. Orwell tinha bastante interesse no uso da língua. Em toda a sua obra, inclusive em A Revolução dos Bichos, gestos políticos são os mecanismos através dos quais os objetivos nobres da revolução se tornam “coerentes com o privilégio e a posição de superioridade da classe dominante”. Os termos usados pelo libertarianismo e pelo livre mercado similarmente são importantes aos beneficiários dos privilégios econômicos. Sem eles, as pessoas reconheceriam o que de fato é o poder corporativo: algo criado pela violência e coerção políticas, um sistema de classes tão real, observável e quantificável quanto qualquer outro anterior. Criticar a desigualdade deve ser importante para o libertarianismo porque devemos levar a sério nossas ideias em favor do livre mercado e devemos considerar a economia política atual como muito distante de nosso modelo. Os libertários, da mesma maneira, devem estar abertos ao socialismo e à análise de classes presente no trabalho de esquerdistas como Hodgskin e Orwell. É hora de começarmos a enfatizar tanto a liberdade quanto a igualdade, não somente uma ou outra.

Traduzido por Erick Vasconcelos.

In addressing this issue, we who believe in freeing the market from privilege as well as from regulation and taxes should be careful not to imply that we have free markets today. When we declare our opposition to minimum-wage or equal-pay-for-equal-work legislation, we must at the same time emphasize that the reigning corporate state compromises the market process in fundamental ways, usually to the detriment of workers. Therefore, not only should no new interference with the market be approved, but all existing interference should be repealed forthwith. If you omit that second part, you’ll sound like an apologist for the corporatist status quo. Why would you want to do that?

The fact is that no politician, bureaucrat, economist, or pundit can say what anyone’s labor is worth. That can only be fairly determined through the unadulterated competitive market process. Perhaps ironically (considering libertarians’ individualism), it’s a determination we make collectively and continuously as we enter the market and demonstrate our preferences for various kinds of services through our buying and abstaining.

If the market is free of competition-inhibiting government privileges and restrictions, we may assume that wages will roughly approximate worth according to the market participants’ subjective valuations. This process isn’t perfect; for one thing, preferences change and wage and price adjustments take time. Moreover, racial, ethnic, and sexual prejudice could result, for a time, in wage discrimination. (See Roderick Long’s excellent discussion of the wage gap, “Platonic Productivity.”)

The surest way to eliminate wage discrimination is to keep government from impeding the competitive process with such devices as occupational licensing, permits, minimum product standards, so-called intellectual property, zoning, and other land-use restrictions. All government barriers to self-employment — and these can take implicit forms, such as patents and raising the cost of living through inflation, or burdening entrepreneurs with protectionist regulation — make workers vulnerable to exploitation. Being able to tell a boss, “Take this job and shove it,” because alternatives, including self-employment, are available, is an effective way to establish the true market value of one’s labor in the marketplace. With the collapsing price of what Kevin Carson calls the “technologies of abundance” (think of information technology and digital machine tools), sophisticated small-scale enterprise — and the independence it represents — is more feasible than ever.

One thinker who understood how the worth of labor is determined in the market was the radical libertarian English writer Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869). Hodgskin is often misunderstood. Wikipedia calls him a “socialist writer on political economy, critic of capitalism and defender of free trade and early trade unions.” To the modern ear that will sound odd: a socialist critic of capitalism who defended free trade and unions.

Hodgskin is usually labeled a Ricardian socialist, but Hodgskin criticized David Ricardo while lauding Adam Smith. Moreover, socialism didn’t always mean what it means today. In earlier times, socialist was an umbrella term identifying those who thought workers were denied their full just reward under the prevailing political economy. The remedy for this injustice varied with particular socialists. Some advocated state control of the means of production; others wanted collective control without the state; and still others — Benjamin R. Tucker most prominently — favored private ownership and free competition under laissez-faire.

What these self-styled socialists had in common was their conviction that capitalism, which was understood as a political economy of privilege for employers, cheated workers of their proper reward. By this definition, even an adherent of subjectivist and marginalist Austrian economics could have qualified as a socialist. (See my article “Austrian Exploitation Theory.”)

By the way, Hodgskin used the word capitalist disparagingly before Karl Marx ever wrote about capitalism. As George H. Smith notes, Marx called the laissez-faireist Hodgskin “one of the most important modern English economists.” It was not the first time the author of Capital complimented radical pro-market liberals. He credited class theory to French liberal historians. (Marx then proceeded to mangle their libertarian theory.)

As a libertarian champion of labor against state-privileged capital, Hodgskin had much to say about how just wages should be determined. In his 1825 book, Labor Defended Against the Claims of Capital, he first noted that many goods are the product of joint efforts, which would seem to make it difficult to reward individual workers properly. He wrote,

Though the defective nature of the claims of capital may now be satisfactorily proved, the question as to the wages of labour is by no means decided. Political economists, indeed, who have insisted very strongly on the necessity of giving security to property, and have ably demonstrated how much that security promotes general happiness, will not hesitate to agree with me when I say that whatever labour produces ought to belong to it. They have always embraced the maxim of permitting those to “reap who sow,” and they have maintained that the labour of a man’s body and the work of his hands are to be considered as exclusively his own. I take it for granted, therefore, that they will henceforth maintain that the whole produce of labour ought to belong to the labourer. But though this, as a general proposition, is quite evident, and quite true, there is a difficulty, in its practical application, which no individual can surmount. There is no principle or rule, as far as I know, for dividing the produce of joint labour among the different individuals who concur in production, but the judgment of the individuals themselves; that judgment depending on the value men may set on different species of labour can never be known, nor can any rule be given for its application by any single person. As well might a man say what others shall hate or what they shall like.

Whatever division of labour exists, and the further it is carried the more evident does this truth become, scarcely any individual completes of himself any species of produce. Almost any product of art and skill is the result of joint and combined labour. So dependent is man on man, and so much does this dependence increase as society advances, that hardly any labour of any single individual, however much it may contribute to the whole produce of society, is of the least value but as forming a part of the great social task. In the manufacture of a piece of cloth, the spinner, the weaver, the bleacher and the dyer are all different persons. All of them except the first is dependent for his supply of materials on him, and of what use would his thread be unless the others took it from him, and each performed that part of the task which is necessary to complete the cloth? Wherever the spinner purchases the cotton or wool, the price which he can obtain for his thread, over and above what he paid for the raw material, is the reward of his labour. But it is quite plain that the sum the weaver will be disposed to give for the thread will depend on his view of its utility. Wherever the division of labour is introduced, therefore, the judgment of other men intervenes before the labourer can realise his earnings, and there is no longer any thing which we can call the natural reward of individual labour. Each labourer produces only some part of a whole, and each part having no value or utility of itself, there is nothing on which the labourer can seize, and say: “This is my product, this will I keep to myself.” Between the commencement of any joint operation, such as that of making cloth, and the division of its product among the different persons whose combined exertions have produced it, the judgment of men must intervene several times, and the question is, how much of this joint product should go to each of the individuals whose united labourers produce it?

Observe Hodgskin’s Austrian-style subjectivism: How much someone is willing to pay for a product “will depend on his view of its utility.” (The way this fits with his labor theory of value is an interesting matter that we cannot take up today.)

How then does he propose that the wage problem be solved? Here’s how:

I know no way of deciding this but by leaving it to be settled by the unfettered judgments of the labourers themselves. If all kinds of labour were perfectly free, if no unfounded prejudice invested some parts, and perhaps the least useful, of the social task with great honour, while other parts are very improperly branded with disgrace, there would be no difficulty on this point, and the wages of individual labour would be justly settled by what Dr Smith calls the “higgling of the market.”

Thus free competition among industrious individuals, who ultimately are trying to serve consumers, is the only way to reveal the worth of labor services and products. This is both just and efficient. There is no way for a legislator or bureaucrat to divine the correct minimum wage or to decide if “equal work” is being paid equally. Only the free market process can discover this information.

“Unfortunately,” Hodgskin added, “labour is not, in general, free.” What keeps it from being free? The state, which serves special interests.

Hodgskin emphasized that labor includes “mental exertion”:

Far be it, therefore, from the manual labourer, while he claims the reward due to his own productive powers, to deny its appropriate reward to any other species of labour, whether it be of the head or the hands. The labour and skill of the contriver, or of the man who arranges and adapts a whole, are as necessary as the labour and skill of him who executes only a part, and they must be paid accordingly.

Perhaps Marx should have read his Hodgskin more closely, and those who would legislate the level of wages today should read him for the first time. (I’ve also written about Hodgskin here and here.) So-called progressives who look to the state to set wages do a disservice to those who fare worst in the corporate state, because while progressives work on behalf of measures that must price marginal workers out of the market, truly radical reforms are overlooked.

Rather than empowering our rulers further, let’s empower individuals by freeing the market.

“The connection will be only be fully appreciated,” Gordon writes, “by those who have learned that the geometry of politics is non-Euclidean; straight lines, when extended, form complete circles, and parallels may meet and even cross.” (The quotes are from Gordon’s “The London Economist and the High Tide of Laissez Faire,” Journal of Political Economy, December 1955.)

The radical edge that Hodgskin gave his laissez-faire advocacy confuses people whose thoughts come in prefabricated boxes. Today if someone sympathizes with labor’s plight, he’s bound to be labeled a collectivist, although earlier radical individualists located the source of that plight not in the market but in the halls of government. This was better understood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the likes of Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, and Herbert Spencer held the libertarian vanguard.

Hodgskin, very simply, was a natural-law individualist who thought government should grant no privileges to anyone, particularly capitalists, landowners, and clergy, who in his time were the chief beneficiaries of state appropriation and other interference with peaceful market activity. He embraced the “natural right of property” and opposed the “artificial right of property,” which he attributed to the utilitarians’ belief that legislation, not natural law, was the source rights. In other words, land and other objects acquired through original appropriation and honest, voluntary means were legitimate property. All forced and fraudulent means of acquisition yielded illegitimate, artificial property that could only be sustained by government power. He called for the abolition of all forms of the artificial right of property and full flowering of the natural right.

Hodgskin was a passionately consistent adherent of the philosophy of John Locke and the laissez-faire, free-trade Manchester school of Cobden and Bright. His dubious ideas on the labor theory of value (held also by Adam Smith and David Ricardo) and the nature of capital would not withstand the later Austrian school of economics, and he criticized capitalists. But this was always in the context of systematic government intervention, most egregiously the prohibition of unions, or combinations. Laissez faire would eliminate “most of the misery which exists in the world,” he said. He fully appreciated that capitalists were laborers too — possessing the right to their full product like any other laborer. Unlike Marx, he did not believe that the exploitation of labor was inherent in market relations, but rather was the result of departures from the free market. (For an Austrian critique of the labor theory of value, see Robert Murphy’s excellent paper here. [PDF])

As for his alleged Ricardian socialism, Murray Rothbard writes in his history of economic thought, “There is no question that Hodgskin’s ultra labourism influenced Karl Marx, but his extreme labour theory of value does not make him a Ricardian, much less a socialist. In fact, Hodgskin was highly critical of Ricardo and the Ricardian system, denounced Ricardo’s abstract methodology and his theory of rent, and considered himself a Smithian rather than a Ricardian. Smith’s natural law and harmony-of-interest free market doctrine was also more congenial to Hodgskin. …Furthermore, even at his most labourist in the 1820s, Thomas Hodgskin … widened rather than narrowed the definition of ‘labour’. Mental activity is as much ‘labour,’ he pointed out, as muscular exertion…. Not only that: Hodgskin also pointed out cogently that the capitalist is also very often a manager, and therefore also a labourer.’”

This gives context to such Hodgskin statements as: “There is then, I conclude, a natural right of property, founded on the fact that labour is necessary to produce whatever bears the name of wealth.” If socialism means abolition or crippling of the market, Hodgskin was no socialist.

Hodgskin’s intellectual career was something remarkable. He wrote for a general public and even helped run an institute designed to teach free-market economics. His idea of natural economic harmony — absent government intervention — reminds one of his contemporary Frederic Bastiat, who called The Economist “a precious collection of facts, doctrine and experience mutually supporting each other.” Hodgskin’s “philosophical basis was natural law…,” Gordon writes. “He may appear to be an anachronism in the mid-nineteenth century until one reflects upon the fact that this is precisely what laissez faire and the economic harmony doctrine were. They were a reaction against utilitarianism and a return to natural law.”

Observe his independence of thought. When many thinkers of his day were under the sway of Thomas Malthus’s pessimism about the ability of a growing population to feed itself, Hodgskin was sounding like Adam Smith, Julian Simon, Peter Bauer, and Jane Jacobs rolled into one — although he had trouble finding a publisher for his views. “Hodgskin argued that an increase in population provides a larger market which permits a more extensive division of labor to be carried out. Also, large centers of population are a stimulus to the inventive and creative powers of men” (Gordon).

Natural and Artificial

Again in Bastiat-like fashion, Hodgskin finds the right of property in the very nature of man and the world. In his book The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832), he states:

… I look on a right of property — on the right of individuals, to have and to own, for their own separate and selfish use and enjoyment, the produce of their own industry, with power freely to dispose of the whole of that in the manner most agreeable to themselves, as essential to the welfare and even to the continued existence of society. If, therefore, I did not suppose, with Mr. Locke, that nature establishes such a right — if I were not prepared to shew that she not merely establishes, but also protects and preserves it, so far as never to suffer it to be violated with impunity — I should at once take refuge in Mr. Bentham’s impious theory, and admit that the legislator who established and preserved a right of property, deserved little less adoration than the Divinity himself. Believing, however, that nature establishes such a right, I can neither join those who vituperate it as the source of all our social misery, nor those who claim for the legislator the high honour of being “the author of the finest triumph of humanity over itself.”

In Hodgskin’s view, this natural right is self-sufficient, needing no help from the legislator.

A savage, stronger than the labourer or more cunning, may undoubtedly take the fruit of his industry from him by force or fraud; but antecedently to the use of force or fraud, and antecedently to all legislation, nature bestows on every individual what his labour produces, just as she gives him his own body. She bestows the wish and the power to produce, she couples them with the expectation of enjoying that which is produced, and she confirms in the labourer’s possession, if no wrong be practised, as long as he wishes to possess, whatever he makes or produces. All these are natural circumstances — the existence of any other person than the labourer not being necessary to the full accomplishment of them. The enjoyment is secured by the individual’s own means. No contract, no legislation, is required. Whatever is made by human industry, is naturally appropriated as made, and belongs to the maker. In substance, I would feign hope, there is no difference between this statement and that of Mr. Locke; but I wish to mark, stronger than I think he has done, the fact, that, antecedently to all legislation, and to any possible interference by the legislator, nature establishes a law of appropriation by bestowing, as she creates individuality, the produce of labour on the labourer.

He goes so far to say that the right of property is embedded in the very idea of individuality. The latter would be meaningless without the former.

Mr. Locke says, that every man has a property in his own person; in fact, individuality — which is signified by the word own — cannot be disjoined from the person. Each individual learns his own shape and form, and even the existence of his limbs and body, from seeing and feeling them. These constitute his notion of personal identity, both for himself and others; and it is impossible to conceive — it is in fact a contradiction to say — that a man’s limbs and body do not belong to himself: for the words him, self, and his body, signify the same material thing.

As we learn the existence of our own bodies from seeing and feeling them, and as we see and feel the bodies of others, we have precisely similar grounds for believing in the individuality or identity of other persons, as for believing in our own identity. The ideas expressed by the words mine and thine, as applied to the produce of labour, are simply then an extended form of the ideas of personal identity and individuality.

The idea of property occurs to us naturally and early on as we act in the world. We don’t need the legislator to instruct us in its nature or its intricacies. The individual’s reason is capable of grasping the concept.

As nature gives to labour whatever it produces — as we extend the idea of personal individuality to what is produced by every individual — not merely is a right of property established by nature, we see also that she takes means to make known the existence of that right. It is as impossible for men not to have a notion of a right of property, as it is for them to want [lack] the idea of personal identity…. Ideas of property are truly instinctive, and are acquired by children long before they ever hear of law. If they do not belong to the mind, as the legs and the tongue belong to the body, like the habit of walking or speaking, they are so early acquired, and so continually present to us that they appear innate.

Through production and commerce people would increasingly improve their material condition and the condition of those around them. The hitch is that some wish to prosper not through productive effort but through appropriation of the fruits of other people’s labor. The most efficient way is through the power of government, which has nothing it hasn’t first taken from some producer.

The first and chief violation of the right of property, which pervades and disturbs all the natural relations of ownership, confusing, and perplexing the ideas of all men as to the source of the right of property, and what is their own, of which so many actions stigmatized by the law as crimes, are the necessary consequences, and the natural corrections, — the parent theft from which flow all other thefts, is that of the legislator, who, not being a labourer, can make no disposition of any property whatever, without appropriating what does not naturally belong to him.

That is the source of the artificial right of property.

One of the first objects then of the law, subordinate to the great principle of preserving its unconstrained dominion over our minds and bodies, is to bestow a sufficient revenue on the government. Who can enumerate the statutes imposing and exacting taxes? Who can describe the disgusting servility with which all classes submit to be fleeced by the demands of the tax-gatherer, on all sorts of false pretences, when his demands cannot be fraudulently evaded? Who is acquainted with all the restrictions placed on honest and praiseworthy enterprise; the penalties inflicted on upright and honourable exertions; — what pen is equal to the task of accurately describing all the vexations, and the continual misery, heaped on all the industrious classes of the community, under the pretext that it is necessary to raise a revenue for the government?

This was written in 1832. Hodgskin never experienced the Congress, the Internal Revenue Service, or the U.S. income tax. Would he be surprised if he visited us today?

Nature may annihilate, but she never tortures…. Not so the legislator. He has inflicted on mankind for ages the miseries of revenue laws, — greater than those of pestilence and famine, and sometimes producing both these calamities, without our learning the lesson which nature seems to have intended to teach, viz. the means of avoiding this perpetual calamity. Revenue laws meet us at every turn. They embitter our meals, and disturb our sleep. They excite dishonesty, and check enterprise. They impede division of labour, and create division of interest. They sow strife and enmity amongst townsmen and brethren….

Locke’s commonwealth, says Hodgskin, has not lived up to its theory.

The natural right of property far from being protected, is systematically violated, and both government and law seem to exist chiefly or solely, in order to protect and organize the most efficacious means of protecting the violation….

The important and yet perhaps trite fact to which I wish by these remarks to direct your attention is, that law and governments are intended, and always have been intended, to establish and protect a right of property, different from that which, in common with Mr. Locke, I say is ordained by nature. The right of property created and protected by the law, is the artificial or legal right of property, as contra-distinguished from the natural right of property. It may be the theory that government ought to protect the natural right; in practice, government seems to exist only to violate it.

The more things change…

Is government the source of our rights? I fear that today many people would say yes. Not infrequently it is said that the government or the Constitution grants us freedom of speech or press or the right to own property. This offends the natural-law tradition that was essential to the genesis of classical liberalism (“liberalism”) and the vital institutions it spawned. While some prominent early liberals sought to overthrow natural law in favor of the seemingly more-scientific utilitarianism, the heart and soul of liberalism is — and remains — the natural law. The philosophy would be impoverished without it.

Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869) well understood this. He deserves to be better known than he is. Hodgskin was an early editor of The Economist and an important influence on Herbert Spencer, who also worked at that publication. Hodgskin is something of a puzzle for many people. He is often described as a Ricardian socialist, but in his case the label is misleading. Having lived before the marginal revolution, in which Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian school, and other economists provided an alternative to the Adam Smith/David Ricardo labor theory of value, Hodgskin did regard labor, rather than utility, as the source of economic value. [UPDATE: There are indications in Hodgskin’s writings that he regarded utility as a fundamental economic phenomenon. He writes in Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital: “But it is quite plain that the sum the weaver will be disposed to give for the thread will depend on his view of its utility.” Nevertheless, he thought that what people found useful had to be created by labor.]

But calling him a socialist is bound to confuse. He was indeed a critic of “capitalism,” by which he and others back then meant government intervention on behalf of capital to the prejudice of labor. But he was no advocate of state control of the means of production. On the contrary, he was a influenced by the radical market economist J. B. Say and believed violations of laissez faire, such as tariffs, are what exploited workers by depriving them of their full, market-derived product. Only in a fully free and openly competitive environment void of privilege (“Middle English, from Old French, from Latin, a law affecting one person“) could laborers achieve justice. (Hodgskin developed his sympathy for labor while in the navy, where he observed the cruelty toward sailors. He himself was disciplined and eventually court-martialed and discharged.) As David Hart and Walter Grinder write, “The radical individualist Thomas Hodgskin … gives a clear example of the application of the libertarian nonaggression principle to the acquisition and exchange of property. He also implies that those who benefit from ‘artificial’ property rights, that is, by force and state privilege, comprise a class antagonistic to the producing class.”

How unfortunate that siding with workers against government intervention on behalf of business has come to considered anti-libertarian! There was a time when one could write a book, as Hodgskin did, titled Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital without being thought a communist. (A modern example is here.)

The work of Hodgskin that Hart and Grinder were referring to is The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832), which he signed “A Labourer.” The book is a series of letters to Lord Brougham on the moral and legal status of property. This book will be worth revisiting in the future, so I will confine today’s report to the introductory letter. It is a good indication of Hodgskin’s natural-law approach to liberty and government, an approach that ought to be emphasized in the liberal expression. (This is not to slight the concern with consequences. But it is to reject the notion that only consequences in the narrow sense matter. For some pregnant thoughts on this subject, see Roderick Long’s blog post here.)

Natural Phenomenon

Hodgskin was alarmed that few among the general public or in Parliament understood that society is a natural phenomenon, rather than an artificial product of government. It was too commonly thought that without a constant stream of new legislation, society would run down and turn chaotic. (Have we heard anything like this lately?) He wanted to set Lord Brougham straight on this point.

With one or two exceptions, they [members of Parliament] are so ignorant that they have yet to learn the existence of any natural laws regulating society. They believe that it is held together by the statutes at large; and they know no other laws which influence its destiny than those decreed by themselves and interpreted by the judges.

But if no one understands the true nature of society, i.e., that it is essentially self-regulating, then how can a legislator know that he must keep from interfering with it? It’s a question we could put to almost any member of Congress.

Rapidly therefore as the gentlemen at Westminster work, making three or four hundred laws per year, repeating their tasks session after session–actively as they multiply restraints, or add patch after patch, they invariably find that the call for their labours is continually renewed. The more they botch and mend, the more numerous are the holes. Knowing nothing of natural principles, they seem to fancy that society–the most glorious part of creation, if individual man be the noblest of animals–derives its life and strength only from them. They regard it as a baby, whom they must dandle and foster into healthy existence; but while they are scheming how to breed and clothe their pretty foundling–lo! it has become a giant, whom they can only control as far as he consents to wear their fetters. [Emphasis added.]

How little basic attitudes have changed in 175 years.

Because we have continually altered our laws piecemeal, paying no regard to principles, or setting out from an erroneous one, that has never since been revised, we are now lost in a vast wilderness of fictions and absurdities. The law, instead of being [quoting Brougham himself] “the staff of honesty and the shield of innocence, is a two-edged sword of craft and oppression,” which, but for the large shield of the public press which the law has in vain endeavoured to break, would hack society asunder.

Then Hodgskin approaches the heart of the issue.

To remedy these monstrous evils, vitiating the whole social compact we must begin at first principles. To stop the flowing of the volcanic and sulphureous stream, which, though shining and sparkling with promise, like the fertilizing waters of the earth, withers the heart of the land, we must go to the fountain head. Convinced, by the every day practices of our legislators, that they never study first principles, though they continually and vainly try to modify results, and convinced by the present state of the law that they cannot begin the study too soon, I propose to call your attent on to one of those principles, THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY — some of the consequences of which are now undergoing investigation by two sets of commissioners.

He doesn’t show much confidence in members of Parliament. I note that Congress’s rating in public-opinion polls is at historically low levels, although I suspect that unlike Hodgskin, Americans probably think Congress is not doing enough. Hodgskin, on the other hand, operates from something like a Public Choice, as opposed to the textbook public-interest, perspective.

I am aware, indeed, that nothing is more irksome to legislators than to stop them short in their career, by any demands for previous investigation. — It is so much easier and shorter to decree than inquire, and so much more flattering to self-love to dictate than examine, that both indolence and vanity combine to make the law-giver act before he understands. He takes no comprehensive view of society; he grubs forward under the influence of his passions and animal instincts, like the mole, and is quite as blind. If any of those instincts had for their object the welfare of society, I should join the crowd and huzza him on. Unfortunately for his pretentions, his instincts, his passions, his desires — like those of all animals — have no other object than the preservation and welfare of the individual. Till, therefore, some incarnation of social instincts be made manifest, I, for one, must insist that the legislator is bound to inquire into the natural laws which regulate society, before he tries to bind society down to his own short-sighted views. Self-interest, too, should now dictate inquiry: for mankind are every where becoming the critics of his actions; and he will command their respect and obedience, no longer than he guides his conduct by the natural principles to which society owes its rise, progress, and continued existence.

The Knowledge Problem

Our author had a sense of the “knowledge problem” that F. A. Hayek did so much to call attention to. Unfortunately, our legislators haven’t yet caught up with either thinker. They still believe, for example, that they can construct a proper immigration policy that will let in only the right kind of people, i.e., those who fit the future needs of the economy — as though politicians could predict the future needs of an economy.

The progress of the past may cast its shadow before, so that you may have a rough notion that society is to go on increasing in people, in wealth, and in knowledge, as it has increased in past time; but what shape that increase is to take, how rapid is to be the progress, and what are to be the new relations, both among individuals and among nations, it will call into existence — what new trades, what new arts, may arise — what new habits, manners, customs, and opinions, will be formed — what is the precise outline society will assume, with all the fillings-in of the picture to the most minute touches; — all these things, to which laws ought to be adapted, cannot possibly be known: and inquiry into them, with a view of making laws to accord with them, must necessarily make the whole business of legislation appear in its true character to mankind — a mockery of their interests, and a fraud on their understandings. [Emphasis added.]

Hodgskin cuts to the chase now, raising the issue at the center of his attention: property rights. See if he sounds like a socialist, as we commonly apply that label.

Political organization depends very much on the mode in which property is distributed. Wherever the right of property is placed on a proper foundation, slavery, with all its hateful consequences, is unknown: — wherever this foundation is rotten, freedom cannot exist, nor justice be administered….

But though the Westminster philosophers, and you also, agree with Mr. Locke, in attributing to the right of property the utmost importance, making it the basis of the political edifice, they differ from him, fundamentally and totally, as to the origin of this right. Mr. Locke lays it down, that the preservation of property is the object for which men unite into a commonwealth. For this purpose, they put themselves under government. Property therefore, according to Mr. Locke, existed antecedently to government, and government was established for the protection of an antecedently existing right of property. [Emphasis added.]

But this conception of property as a natural right is not what holds sway, Hodgskin goes on:

On the contrary, both Mr. [John Stuart] Mill and M. [Etienne] Dumont, describe the right of property to be the offspring of law. Mr. Mill says, “the end of government is to make a distribution of wealth,” or create such a right. M. Dumont expressly says, that the right of property is altogether the work or creation of the legislator, or the law. This difference of opinion is pregnant with momentous consequences. If a right of property be a natural right, not created by legislation, if it be a principle of society, derived immediately and directly from the laws of the universe, all its results will be determined, at all times, by those laws; and the legislator ought to ascertain these results, before he dreams of making decrees, to enforce them. Before he takes any steps to protect the right of property, he must, on Mr. Locke’s principles, find out in what it consists.

That would seem to be mere common sense. Since natural law operates whether we acknowledge it or not, social engineering that contravenes natural law must come to grief.

If, on the other hand, a right of property be altogether the creature and work of laws, as the legislator seems to suppose, he may at all times determine all its consequences. He will have no occasion to inquire into any circumstances foreign to his own enactments; he will only have to frame his decrees with logical accuracy from the principles he lays down.

The two approaches are mutually exclusive and mutually exhaustive. There’s no middle way.

One system looks on the legislator as an ally, in enforcing the laws of nature, to do which he must know them; the other denies that there are any such laws, which in fact its authors do in express terms, and they look on enactments as determining the welfare and destiny of mankind. A more important difference of opinion cannot exist. Either principle lies at the very foundation of the whole political edifice. Mr. Locke’s view is, in my opinion, more correct than Mr. [Jeremy] Bentham’s, though at present among legislators, and those who aspire to be legislators, the latter is by far the most prevalent. Practical men universally adopt it; for they always decree, and never inquire into the laws of nature. The prevalence of Mr. Bentham’s opinion, makes it necessary to illustrate and enforce that of Mr. Locke, in so far as it is limited to asserting that a right of property is not the offspring of legislation.

Natural-law liberals, such as Thomas Paine, saw government, at best, as a necessary evil. Not so the utilitarians, Hodgskin says.

…Messrs. Bentham and Mill, both being eager to exercise the power of legislation, represent it as a beneficent deity which curbs our naturally evil passions and desires (they adopting the doctrine of the priests, that the desires and passions of man are naturally evil) — which checks ambition, sees justice done, and encourages virtue. Delightful characteristics! which have the single fault of being contradicted by every page of history. Hitherto, it has been generally supposed that the whole world was given to the human race, with dominion over all other created things, for them to use and enjoy in every way, abstaining from nothing — restricted in nothing consistent with their own happiness — bound mutually to share the blessings provided for them, because mutual assistance begets mutual love — supplies physical wants easier and better, and promotes moral and intellectual improvement; — that the rights and duties of men grow out of the great scheme of creation, which is sometimes misinterpreted, and rarely understood, by human sagacity, — sometimes marred, and never mended, by human wisdom. But, now, in compliment to political power, and to Mr. Bentham’s theory, that we may find an apology for our own infirm and base submission, we must believe that men had naturally no right to pick up cockles on the beach or gather berries from the hedge — no right to cultivate the earth, to invent and make comfortable clothing, to use instruments to provide more easily for their enjoyments — no right to improve and adorn their habitations — nay, no right to have habitations — no right to buy or sell, or move from place to place — till the benevolent and wise law-giver conferred all these rights on them.

If this be the basis of the political system, Hodgkin wanted no part of it.

To me, this system appears as mischievous as it is absurd. The doctrines accord too well with the practice of law-givers, they cut too securely all the Gordian knots of legislation, not to be readily adopted by all those who, however discontented they may be with a distribution of power, in which no share falls to them, are anxious to become the tutelary guardians of the happiness of mankind. They lift legislation beyond our reach, and secure it from censure. Man, having naturally no rights, may be experimented on, imprisoned, expatriated or even exterminated, as the legislator pleases. Life and property being his gift, he may resume them at pleasure; and hence he never classes the executions and wholesale slaughters, he continually commands, with murder — nor the forcible appropriation of property he sanctions, under the name of taxes, tithes, amp;c., with larceny or high-way robbery. [Sir Robert] Filmer’s doctrine of the divine right of kings was rational benevolence, compared to the monstrous assertion that [quoting Mill] all right is factitious, and only exists by the will of the law-maker. But though this may be comfortable doctrine for legislators, it will not satisfy the people; and in spite of false theories and unreasonable practices, events are now teaching mankind to place a just value on law-making. Day does not follow day, without increasing our knowledge of the consequences of actions; and it is fast becoming apparent, that the wise men, such as Cicero and Seneca, as Bacon and Locke, and as Burke and Smith, who have advocated a totally different system from that of Messrs. Bentham and Mill and their arrogant disciples, have not cast the seeds of their faith in nature, on a barren and ungrateful soil.

Where are those such as Thomas Hodgskin when we really need them?