Andro Linklater’s latest and, sadly, last book (he died as
it was being published) started as his attempt to make sense of the global
economic crash and mutated into a paean to the potential and problems inherent
in private property.
He knew this was an extraordinarily old-fashioned approach to
modern fiscal analysis. But, as he writes toward the outset of Owning the Earth, “The idea of
individual, exclusive ownership, not just of what can be carried and occupied,
but of the immovable, near-eternal earth, has proved to be the most destructive
and creative cultural force in written history. It has eliminated ancient
civilizations wherever it has encountered them, and displaced entire peoples
from their homelands, but it has also spread an undreamed-of degree of
personal freedom and protected it with democratic institutions wherever it has
taken hold.”
This shouldn’t give you the idea that Owning the Earth is a heartless, self-congratulatory free-market
screed. Rather, Linklater’s villains are the Austrian School (those two
patricians, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, in particular) and all those
who confuse the production of individual wealth with democracy and the
promotion of purely private interests with the public good. “The iron law of
private property,” he concludes, “turns out to be a paradox. Although it
promotes individuality, it only works by giving equal weight to the public
interest.” His heroes, then, include Adam Smith (not for the “invisible hand”
but for its corollary: the idea that the market is designed and tempered to the
public interest), James Madison (for having “embraced the diversity of opinion
as evidence of free society”) and Wolf Ladejinsky (who pioneered land
redistribution while working for Douglas MacArthur in the 40s and early 50s.)
Linklater romps through history with the insouciance of
Minnesota Fats attempting a five-ball bank-shot combination to either beat or
sucker a pool hall opponent. The book hopscotches centuries and continents and moves
from the Levelers to Lehman Brothers, with Locke, Lenin, Lincoln, Ladejinsky, Linux, and
the Louisiana Purchase in between. He concludes that private property promotes democracy – but only when it’s an expanding resource, available to all,
cheaply and efficiently. Once the frontier closes or is disposed of (or, in global intellectual property agreements, if patents held privately are given the force of law while varieties of communal ownership are not) the egalitarian and equitable teamwork between property and democracy breaks down.
His assertion that the massive government-led rescue plans developed after the recent financial meltdown proved that "the Austrian experiment had failed" may be an overstatement--after all, free market absolutists are still vocal, almost everywhere. But Linklater is more interested in small futures than big ones. As he notes, rivalries over land and resources may create vicious conflicts, but don’t always cause the many types of legal
and quasi-legal sharing arrangements to rupture. “Even three wars between India
and Pakistan have not caused either of them to break the Indus Water Treaty
they signed in 1960. Underpinning these formal regulations for sharing water,
as well as thousands of other informal arrangements, has been the understanding
that it is worth limiting individual needs so that everyone benefits from a
limited resource. However bitter the disputes, it is overshadowed [grammatical oddity in the original] by the
realization that taking whatever one wants risks destroying the entire system
and ruining everyone.”
Owning the Earth flips traditional
pieties about property on their head. Linklater doesn’t cite Peter Kropotkin or Karl Polanyi or E.F.Schumacher or Elinor Ostrom – but his work is imbued with their spirit.
“There is an alternative to the single, ultimately unviable measure
of success imposed by economics,” Linklater concludes. “Around the world and
throughout history, neighborhoods have succeeded in a million different ways.”
Yes!
***
one querulous cavil: Oddly, Owning the Earth contains some grammatically questionable constructions and lots of oddball spellings (among them: Hayek is "Friederich" instead of Friedrich, the Chinese city Shenzhen is "Zhenzhen," Mao Zedong is spelled "Zhedong" on first reference, and George H.W. Bush is referred to as "George H. Bush.") Misspellings can creep into any volume, but these seem egregious.
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