Property and Freedom: Why Language is the Proper Basis for the Social Contract

7/31/2019 Property and Freedom: Why Language is the Proper Basis for the Social Contract

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Property and

freedom: Whylanguage is the

proper basis for the

social contract

-- Rethinking liberal theory 8

by John MacBeath Watkins

The relationship between property and freedom is an argument that echoes down the years

from the Civil War to the current day, between those who say the first freedom resides in

our ability to use and dispose of our property as we see fit, and those who argue that the

rights of people matter more than the rights of property.

It's a conflict that was present at the creation of liberalism. John Locke famously

founded the social contract on property, and said that we are all born with property,

because we own ourselves. As we've discussed before, in Locke's day you had to have

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2011/12/rethinking-liberal-theory-2-outlaw-john.html





property in order to vote. In saying we are born owning ourselves, he was taking a radical

position that everyone should have full citizenship.

Objectively, many people did not own themselves in his day. One of my own

ancestors was kidnapped from the streets of Glasgow and taken to the new world, were she

was sold to an old man as an indentured servant, to care for him in his declining years. This

was in a Quaker community, and after the old man's death she married a Quaker preacher.

Not all forms of slavery are equally pernicious.

One of the most pernicious was race slavery as practiced in the Old South. Slavery

is the ultimate extractive institution; all the fruits of the slave's labor belong to the slave's

owner. White indentured servants like my ancestor were cheaper than African slaves, but

they were genetically inferior as slaves in Dixie. They lacked the resistance to malaria, a

disease which devastated whites nearly as badly as Native Americans. Black slaves cost

more because they were worth more.

But Locke's notion that all people hold property in their own person was a ticking

time bomb under the institution of slavery. That institution had probably been with

mankind as long as war and property, and yet, if the ownership of ourselves is, as Locke

suggested, an inalienable right -- one we cannot sell or transfer to another -- slavery is an

unthinkable evil.

The Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus was born a slave; the name his parents gave

him is unknown, and Epictetus means "acquired." He was not so different from his master,

a freedman who was a secretary to Nero. Consider how different this is from the situation



of the slave in the antebellum South. The racial divide helped make it possible to

dehumanize slaves, and the rules provided few legal protections to them from the whims of

their masters. As recently as 1968, the striking Selma, Alabama, sanitation workers carried

signs saying "I am a man." History can change quickly, but culture changes slowly.

There was a contradiction in Locke's philosophy and his own life. He taught that we

are born owning ourselves, but he was a shareholder in the Royal African Company, which

bought slaves in Africa and sold them in the new world, and wrote a constitution for

Carolina that gave slaveholders complete power over their slaves.

That conflict still reverberates in our society. The Republican Party, which started

out as the Northern, abolitionist party, but because it was the Northern party, also became

the party of industrialists and financiers, has now dropped its northern liberal wing and

joined the business interests to the people who used to be represented by Dixicrats. And the

argument that freedom to dispose of your property however you will is the most basic

freedom still rings true to the conservatives of the South. It's an argument the leading men

of the secessionists states made forcefully in the various declarations of secession issued as

the left the union.

Consider these words from the Georgia Declaration of the Causes of Secession:

The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the

Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates

and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten

years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our

http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html




non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of

African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb

our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with

their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property,

and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to

deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the

Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with

every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and

excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union

for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war.

From the South Carolina Declaration of the Causes of Secession:

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing,

until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government.

Observing the *forms* [emphasis in the original] of the Constitution, a

sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive

Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical

line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line

have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the

United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to

be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because

he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half






slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery

is in the course of ultimate extinction.

This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution,

has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons

who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens;

and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the

South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the

Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the

common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and

that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the

United States.

The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the

equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer

have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal

Government will have become their enemy.

The cries of "constitution" and "property" were central to the grievances of the

slave states. Even the claim that the North has tried to "arouse the passions and excite the

hatred of our people" seems familiar to the modern ear, because these arguments are the

language of the Tea Party.



Property is woven into our system of thought, our social order, and our language. It

is not objects, or the desire for objects; those are conditions that call out for the institution

of property.

Property is the system of rights, obligations and rules regarding the human use of

things. One might say that it is the meaning and the grammar of desired objects. It

encompasses a universe of categories of thought that make it possible for us to peaceably

make and use things.

And, of course, meanings, and the rules governing how we use meanings together

in discourse, originate in language. Language does not just express our thoughts, it makes

symbolic thought possible. One might even say, as Ferdinand de Saussure did, that

language gives us the categories we use to think. The notion of property, and the rules of

property, are not just expressed in language, they are based on language. Property is just

one galaxy in the universe of meaning.

It is language that gives us the structure of though that makes the strange, symbolic

world of humanity possible, and property is only one part of that world. Property cannot,

therefore, be the basis for the social contract.

Language is a social enterprise. As de Saussure noted, we have signs -- the words

we use to express meaning -- and the signed -- the meaning we express with the word. The

signs are arbitrary. It does not matter whether a culture refers to a substance as eau or

water, as long as all agree that the word used refers to the meaning of that wet stuff we like

so well we have it piped right into the house.

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2011/06/to-read-is-to-become-stolen-child.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2012/03/on-disenchantment-of-world.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure


http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2011/06/to-read-is-to-become-stolen-child.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2012/03/on-disenchantment-of-world.html




Before symbolic thought can give us the concept and vocabulary of property,

symbolic thought must exists, so language must come first. The most distinctive feature of

human society, this weird web of meanings in which we live our lives, so unlike the world

of other animals, is the thing which makes a society human. We do not form a human

society to protect our lives (even wolves do that) or to protect our property. We form a

society to imbue the world with meaning.

The freedom to participate in that conversation, to have a say in what the world

means, is the most basic freedom, and it belongs to anyone who possesses language. Locke

persuaded us that we were born owning ourselves, even though it was not objectively true

in his day, and in so doing, he changed the meaning of the lives of slaves and slave owners.

We had presidents who owned slaves, that's how respectable the institution once was, but

now consider slavery unspeakably evil.

That Locke could change the nature of property with language is a dead giveaway

to the fact that property is a product of the system of meaning language gives us. It is a

secret that has been laying in the laps of mankind for a century and a half, at least, invisible

the way air is, because language is symbolic world we live in.

The Selma strikers carried signs saying "I am a man" because they wanted to write

the meaning of their own lives, rather than be told their lives were meaningless or have the

meaning of their lives dictated to them. They were reaching for the most basic human

freedom, to have a say in who we are.

Property and Freedom: Why Language is the Proper Basis for the Social Contract

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