A Compact to Protect Property, or a Conspiracy to Create Meaning? Rethinking Liberal Theory Part 3

8/3/2019 A Compact to Protect Property, or a Conspiracy to Create Meaning? Rethinking Liberal Theory Part 3

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A compact to protect

property, or a conspiracyto create meaning?Rethinking liberal theory 3

by John MacBeath Watkins

Thanks to John Locke and Karl Marx, we've spent hundreds of years arguing about how

we can achieve freedom and justice through perfecting our relationship with property.

Locke was actually following Hobbs, who realized that if kings ruled by divine

right, Europe's religious divisions would tear it apart: People would not accept the divine

right of a king not of their faith. He looked to the value system associated with property

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/83/Zebra_Botswana_edit02.jpg/633px-Zebra_Botswana_edit02.jpg



to shift the legitimacy of the state away from religious authority. When he said, "The

‘value,’ or ‘worth,’ of a man is, as of all other things, his price; that is to say, so much as

would be given for the use of his power; and therefore is not absolute, but a thing

dependent on the need and judgment of another," he was not just applying this system of

value to tradesmen, where it had been applied as long as money or barter had existed. He

was saying that sovereigns were to be valued because we needed their services to prevent

people from killing each other. It is significant that he said this after the Thirty Years

War, at the end of which Germany had about two-thirds the population it had when the

war started, and the German states were still divided into Catholic and Protestant sects.

It's easy to see why Locke continued Hobbes' concern with property. You had to

have property to be a full citizen in Locke's England, so to argue for wider voting rights,

he had to argue that we all possess property in our persons. Even long after his death, it

was still quite normal for nations to restrict the voting franchise to those with sufficient

property. Hobbes used the value system of property to give us a secular way of

legitimizing government. Locke adopted the system of rights associated with property to

argue that we all have rights, and no one can buy them off you; that is, your property

right to yourself is inalienable.

Locke was radical enough to put his freedom and possibly his life in peril had he

stayed in England, but his philosophy was based on the ideas already existing in his

homeland's political culture. Even marriage and family could be viewed through the lens

of property, with women as chattel and children as part of their parents' property until

they came of age. Thus, Abraham Lincoln's father could rent him out for labor, the

money going to his father as if Abraham Lincoln were a slave, leading to his statement, "I



have been a slave." It was the simple truth, and likely had a strong effect on how Lincoln

viewed slavery.

Locke was eager to expand our understanding of what qualified as property, but

he never really defined property. If you've ever tried to take a chew toy from a dog,

you've seen the instinct to possession that makes the institution of property necessary.

But that emotional need is not itself property, any more than love is marriage.

Property is the institution that regulates our emotional attachment to objects, and

defines the rights, privileges and obligations people have to things they possess or use.

And when I say defines, I'm using the term more literally than you might think.

Locke maintained that society was formed to protect property, but a moment's

reflection will reveal that such a system of rights can only exist once symbolic thought

exists. Language gives us the categories we use to think in the symbolic manner that

allows us to have such an abstract thing as a system of rights. And language, as Swiss

linguist Ferdinand de Saussure pointed out in The Course in General Linguistics about a

century ago, is a social enterprise.

The categories of thought that I referred to earlier are what we wish to

communicate. They are, in Saussure's terms, the signified. We use words to signify them,

and the sounds we choose to represent the signified are arbitrary. Call it water if you are

English, call it eau if you are French, as long as your society agrees that the sound you

use signs the meaning you intend, it doesn't matter what sound your society has chosen.

The fact that the signs are arbitrary, and must be agreed upon within a society, is

why we have different languages for different groups of people. In fact, changing the

signs so that only the "in" group understands them, as with slang, is a way of defining a



group. Should a language lose a word, if for example we were to lose the world "vast,"

the meaning that word signifies collapses into other, existing words and the meanings

they covey (so "vast" must be conveyed with terms such as "big" and "huge"), and our

thought would become a little more vague. Should a new meaning come into the world, it

must either have a new sign or adopt a sign already in use, as when computer

programmers adopted the word "cookie" for a type of code given to a visitor to a web

site, while bakers continued to use the word for something yummy, handy, and fattening.

The dog's chew toy is a concrete object (well, rubber), its willingness to defend its

toy is the desire for possession, and the owner's desire to stop the damned thing from

squeaking so he can get a little rest, for God's sake, gives you the conflict that needs to be

regulated. In the animal world, a conflict over possession of a carcase, for example, can

produce a conflict red in tooth and claw. When the pack of hyenas take the lion's game,

this has occurred because of the lack of such an institution. If the lion could communicate

to a higher authority that it had applied its labor to nature (the zebra, late of the Serengeti)

to make the zebra its property, it could have the sheriff come and evict the hyenas from

the kill.

Then, the zebra's family could sue.

In Locke's view, that's what the state was there for; to protect our property,

including our lives.

But remember, prior to Hobbes, the state did not rely on such secular concepts of

its purpose. Faith and force ruled mankind from time immemorial. And faith, and the

ecclesiastical authority derived from it, needed symbolic thought as much or more than

property did. So did kinship, another source of legitimacy for hereditary kings.



These competing systems of rights, privileges and obligations were part of the

network of meaning that enabled us to have the concepts of property and the system of

authority needed to enforce it. I cannot tell you which of these came first, or even

whether that matters, but all are part of the structure of symbolic thought that Saussure

described in the posthumously published Course in General Linguistics.

Language had to come first, and it defined the group that spoke each version of it.

Language allows cultures to contain more knowledge than any one mind can contain.

Language, and the world of symbolic thought it makes possible, is the most distinct

attribute of human society. Language makes it possible to cooperate with members of our

species not closely related to us by blood, which is very different from the world of other

mammals.

So perhaps human society is not a compact to protect property, but a conspiracy

to create meaning, a thing of whispers, sighs, and cries instead of inventories and bank

accounts.

A Compact to Protect Property, or a Conspiracy to Create Meaning? Rethinking Liberal Theory Part 3

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