S0190-128120140000034001

Production, Consumption, Business and the Economy:Structural Ideals and Moral RealitiesThe English Enlightenment and “The Economy”: How Some Men with a Vision Createdthe Modern World and Its ProblemsSidney M. Greenfield

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/S0190-128120140000034001

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THE ENGLISH ENLIGHTENMENT

AND “THE ECONOMY”: HOW

SOME MEN WITH A VISION

CREATED THE MODERN WORLD

AND ITS PROBLEMS

Sidney M. Greenfield

ABSTRACT

Purpose � This conceptual paper examines the claim of ahistorical,transcultural universality in aspects of Enlightenment thinking as it hasbeen embedded in the assumptions of classical economic theory.Specifically, with respect we query to presupposing rationality and maxi-mization, that all nations are on an evolutionary course to bettermentconceptualized as development and progress.

Design/methodology/approach � Using historical data, examinedfrom a cross-cultural perspective, the arguments put forth in Englandin the late seventeenth century to justify the enclosures and privateproperty, that led to revolution, are shown to have introduced new insti-tutions, including private property, entrepreneurship and self-regulatingmarkets.

Production, Consumption, Business and the Economy: Structural Ideals and Moral Realities

Research in Economic Anthropology, Volume 34, 1�28

Copyright r 2014 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 0190-1281/doi:10.1108/S0190-128120140000034001

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/S0190-128120140000034001

Findings � Maximizing behavior is shown to be the result of successivegenerations being socialized under the new institutional arrangementsthat, conflated with modernity, were then taken to the Americas andSouth Asia as part of British colonial/imperial expansion.

Theoretical implications � When economic theory is examined in itscultural and historical context it is just one of a large number of possiblecultural patterns.

Practical implications � If contemporary economic and social institu-tions, and the behaviors they produce, are but one of a number of alter-native possibilities, many of the problems facing so many can berethought and perhaps ameliorated with new institutional arrangements.

Keywords: Private property; markets; enclosures; entrepreneurship;economic development/progress

“The global economic system is quite evidently non-sustainable and inequitable.”

� Shiva (1988, p. 222)

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

[The definition of] “Insanity: is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting

different results.”

� Albert Einstein

THE PROBLEM

This paper is written against the background of the most recent worldwideeconomic crash, the jobless recovery, the recession and fear of a possibledepression, and the increasing recognition that an already large and grow-ing segment of humanity finds itself unable to obtain adequate materialsustenance under current world economic arrangements. It is offered as acontribution to the debate over how our hegemonic capitalist system maybe altered to better serve the needs of humankind. I begin by examining thebasic premises of the present system as they are found in the writings ofAdam Smith. Specifically, my focus will be on what Smith says abouthuman nature, its betterment, progress, and their implications for behaviorand contemporary social institutions. Smith’s beliefs have been elaborated

2 SIDNEY M. GREENFIELD

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and they have become the foundation for the academic discipline ofeconomics whose practitioners use them to formulate policies that havebeen adopted and implemented by governments and international agenciesacross the globe. I argue that the economic hardships being endured by somany people today are, in large part, the consequences of institutionalarrangements based on, and perpetuated by, the acceptance of theseassumptions. If we wish to improve these material conditions, I contend,we must begin by making explicit the premises of the current system, andreexamine, reevaluate, and possibly replace some of them. In this way wemay be able to avoid the all-too-common trap of expecting different resultsfrom a repetition of the thinking and policies that led to where we are.

INTRODUCTION

If we take the year 1775 to mark the beginnings of the IndustrialRevolution and the transition from traditional agrarian based societies tothe modern industrial (and some would add post industrial) one, for eco-nomic matters Smith’s, The Wealth of Nations (1937 [1775]), may be readretrospectively as a guide, or perhaps planning document for what has hap-pened in the roughly two and a quarter centuries to follow its publication.Smith presents an evolutionary vision of universal progress, conceptualizedas material growth and development, that he makes applicable to not justhis own English society and those of neighboring Western Europe, butalso for the rest of humanity in its varied and diverse cultural forms. Smithconceives of the economy as an aspect of nature perhaps comparable togravity. It may be studied and understood, but with the implication that itcannot be changed, as gravity can be understood, but not changed. If wecomprehend the economy we can accommodate to it just as we buildbridges to enable us to traverse places where we might fall to our death ifwe disregarded gravitational forces.

Smith begins employing a fantasized imagery of human behavior derivedfrom a priori assumptions about a universal “human nature.” Building onearlier writers such as Hobbes (1588�1679), Locke (1632�1704), andRousseau (1712�1778), Smith starts with their vision of “man in a state ofnature.” He attributes to this isolated individual being a set of motives,aspirations, goals, and objectives. Smith then creates what has come to beknown as “homo economicus” (economic man), someone who is constantlystriving to maximize his personal interests.1 This is the rational choice

3The English Enlightenment and “The Economy”

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model to which economists subscribe. The myth of the invisible hand isadded by the Scottish intellectual (Smith, 1976, p. 184) to maintain that theenvisaged outcome of the decision-making process that he attributes toindividuals, as selfish and inconsiderate of others as it may be, actually willwork to the benefit of all. Rival models of political economies practicedpreviously in England and elsewhere in Europe, particularly mercantilism,are criticized and he concludes with a set of policy prescriptions that ifimplemented by government will make the evolutionary advances proposedin the envisioned model � and its promised material benefits � a reality.

Smith uses universalistic terms and images but the data he provides istaken primarily from the England of his day. The largest social unit, thenation whose wealth he proposes to increase, is still a kingdom that is inthe process of being transformed into a modern nation-state with a repre-sentative government.2 By adopting and following his instructions, andthose of his fellow thinkers, that nation, Smith contends, will develop andprogress along the evolutionary ladder to the benefit of everyone.

Smith begins, as had Hobbes (1909 [1651]) previously, assuming a worldcomposed of isolated individuals � male heads of actual or potential inde-pendent nuclear family households � making decisions and choices forthemselves (and their social units) in terms of the goals and values he pro-poses. Concern with self and a desire to acquire and accumulate more andmore (maximization) are foremost. Economists, and others who accept thisvision, refer to these assumptions, contextualized in this decision-makingframework, as rational. Based upon them, Smith’s followers, in the imageryof nineteenth century science, have claimed economic behavior can bestudied deductively, with predictability, using mathematical (primarilystatistical) models and formulas.3 Economic models, therefore, can be usedto deduce how people, at times independent of what they claim to be theirwishes, should behave in order that they may achieve the benefits that, withprogress, will accrue both to them and to all others.

Smith was an astute observer, but he offers little evidence to support theclaim that Englishmen of other periods, or people elsewhere, actually think,desire, and behave the way he postulates that they do. Had he examinedhis own country a century or two earlier, he would have encountered acitizenry behaving very differently from those in his time. But the socialpolicies Smith proposes in order to improve the material well-being of theresidents of the nation requires inhabitants who think and behave likethose only beginning to appear and gain importance in his own era.4

Moreover, he concludes his lengthy text by imploring political authoritynot to direct or constrain the actions of its citizens. Left alone by


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government (laissez faire), he contends, individuals will be free to pursuethe goals they are hypothesized to strive for with their individual successes(and failures) resulting, by means of the invisible hand, in the betterment ofall. Society will move forward in an upwardly sloping direction steadilyimproving. How is this to happen when all of the empirical evidence, asGeertz (1973, p. 35) phrased it, “is firm in the conviction that men unmodi-fied by the customs of particular places [i.e., in a state of nature] do not infact exist, have never existed, and most important, could not in the verynature of the case exist?” But Smith and his followers, including thoseeconomists who formulate policies that are being implemented by govern-ments and international agencies, have and continue to propose plans foraction as if they do.

Smith was one of a number of seventeenth and eighteenth centuryEuropean writers who challenged and eventually transformed the thendominant thinking and institutional arrangements of the world in whichthey lived. The premise they shared and the new view of the world theyespoused, as Berlin (1997, p. 243) summarized it, were base on the beliefthat “human nature was fundamentally the same at all times and places;that local variations were unimportant compared with the constant centralcore …; that there were universal human goals; …. [and] that there wasa logically connected structure of laws and generalizations susceptible ofdemonstration and verification ….” Moreover, these laws would enablehumans to “replace the chaotic amalgam of ignorance … superstition, …antasy, and, above all, the ‘interested error’ maintained by the rulers ofmankind and largely responsible for the blunders, vices and misfortunesof humanity.” Proclaiming the ability to derive new social arrangementsbased on the methods of the natural sciences, the goal of these thinkers andactivists was to “sweep away irrational and oppressive legal systemsand economic policies the replacement of which would rescue men frompolitical and moral injustice and misery …” (ibid., p. 244).5

Berlin reminds us that although this Enlightenment vision was incorpo-rated into Western thought as the intellectual foundation of modernity,there was another tradition with an opposing vision that went back to theGreek Sophists.6 Followers of this (alternative) framework, to quote Berlin(1997, pp. 244�245), contended that:

beliefs involving value-judgments, and the institutions founded upon them, rested not

on the discoveries of objective and unalterable natural facts, but on human opinion,

which was variable and differed between societies and at different times; that moral and

political values, and in particular justice and social arrangements in general, rested on


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fluctuating human convention. These writers emphasized the variety of human customs,

and especially the influence of dissimilar natural factors … upon the development of

different human societies, leading to differences in institutions and outlook, which in

turn generated wide differences of belief and behavior.

The formalist-substantivist debate that developed in economic anthro-pology in the second half of the twentieth century exemplifies thesecontrasting philosophical visions. Formalists accept Smith’s (and theEnlightenment’s) micro-level premise of a world of independent individualsstriving to maximize their own interests as they interact with others. Theyalso postulate that each person, no matter where or when he or she isfound, is making decisions and choices in terms of a set of rational assump-tions � assumptions attributed to them by the authors � that are believedto be inherent and therefore universal across time and place. By means oftheir decisions, individuals then create the social world around them.Substantivists, in contrast, in the counter-Enlightenment tradition, assumethat the social, historical, or cultural context in which people find them-selves shape their decisions and choices and hence they behave in diverseways depending on their circumstances.7

In the following pages I take the substantivist, counter-Enlightenment,and relativist perspective and argue that the core of the assumptions Smithand those to follow in his path make, that are presented as being universal,were in fact based on specific historical circumstances that included a seriesof revolutionary transformations in social and economic life in the centu-ries before Smith wrote. Those socialized under these (new) institutions,and the legal machinery enforcing them, I suggest, did behave in ways thatapproximated how Smith and his followers proposed all humans would.

Earlier Enlightenment thinkers and activists such as John Locke(1632�1704), whose writings Smith cites and upon which he builds, pro-vided the foundations for much of what the Scottish author wrote. Lockespecifically contributed to creating the social conditions whose universaliza-tion they all advocated for in print. Prior to and independent of the formu-lation of the rationalist decision-making framework, cultural patterns andinstitutional arrangements, with specific rules and sanctions to enforcethem, were put in place in England that constrained people to behave inways consistent with the assumptions Smith adopted. Encoded in laws, thenew cultural rules were enforced by a criminal justice system and its policeforce. These new institutions and the legal machinery supporting them,I suggest, served to mold the individual members of society to behave inways that approximated how Smith and his fellow theorists proposed allhumans would. To explain what the Enlightenment theorists assumed as


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applicable to all humanity and how The Wealth of Nations came to serve asa model for a proposed reality that would become a model of an extant one(in Geertz’, 1973, p. 93 sense), not just in England, but throughout most ofthe world today, I begin looking at two economic institutions that cameinto being during the period of revolutionary ferment in English societyprior to the writing of Smith’s visionary text. These are: (1) private prop-erty and (2) a system of self-regulating markets. Related to this I examinetwo social movements, the enclosures, that brought forth private ownershipof land � and the material resources on and in it � and the expansion ofProtestantism that provided its theological framework for a set of moralbeliefs that made it meaningful. I then turn to show how the new cultureand its institutions were carried across the globe to become almost univer-sal today.

THE ENCLOSURES, JOHN LOCKE AND

PRIVATE PROPERTY

John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (2003) may be read likeSmith’s Wealth of Nations as a model for a proposed set of economicand political relations that were not yet a reality but were in the processof being made into one. Unlike Smith, Locke (1632�1704) was not an“ivory tower” theorist. After a career in the academy at Oxford focusedon medicine and philosophy, he entered the household of AnthonyAshley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, “one of the shrewdest and mostknowledgeable political figures of the age” (Barone, 2007, p. 60), servingas his physician and tutor for his children. Under Shaftesbury’s patron-age, Locke obtained the position of secretary of the Board of Trade andPlantations (1669) and then Secretary to the Lords Proprietors of theCarolinas (1673�1674). In these posts, he gained familiarity and experi-ence in matters of trade, economics, and colonial affairs. Locke’s activeparticipation in colonial affairs was demonstrated by his contribution tothe drafting of the Fundamental Constitution of the Carolinas in whichhis patron had a financial interest.

Born and raised a Protestant, Locke sided with Parliament during theturbulent 1680s. Along with Shaftesbury, he spent much of the decade inexile in France. He returned to England with the Glorious Revolution in1688 when Protestantism replaced Catholicism as the official religion andthe Catholic monarchs were banished. William of Orange was placed on


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the English throne and Parliament secured the power to govern and to con-trol finances that formerly were in the hands of the crown.

Under the new regime, Locke returned to a revived Board of Trade asits most influential member. He participated in issues ranging from theIrish wool trade and the suppression of piracy, to the governance of thecolonies and the treatment of the poor (Laslett, 1990, p. 127). The Board ofTrade, among its many responsibilities, administered the United Statesbefore the revolution (ibid.).

While Locke’s arguments also are couched in universalistic and evolu-tionary terms, he wrote to influence his readers with respect to two majorissues being debated at the time: (1) enclosing common lands in England;and (2) taking over the territories of the native peoples in the Americancolonies.

English agriculture and social life for centuries “had been organizedaround villages, most of which contained large common fields with stripsof land on which villagers could sow and reap. While each villager had hisown strip, decisions about when to plant, when to harvest, and when toglean were made collectively” (Appleby, 2010, p. 80).8

As early as the middle of the fourteenth century, lords and nobles inthe English countryside began to enclose their estates (demesne), and alsoextend them by taking in part of the common waste area. “This arousedstrong opposition, for it deprived the peasants of an important part oftheir living � the right to turn small stock out to forage, and to gatherfuel, house timber, and thatching materials” (Bonham-Carter, 1952,pp. 44�45). Enclosing and fencing common fields facilitated the raisingof sheep that in turn led to the commercialization of English farming.9

The wool of the sheep was exported to Flanders where it was sold andthen the finished product was sent elsewhere. In this way, English land-owners became part of an international market for manufactured goodsthat brought them cash. By the sixteenth century, after Flemish immi-grants began wool manufacturing in England, the English became the pri-mary manufactures of wool products in Europe. Enclosing the demesne,meanwhile, “was repeatedly forbidden by Parliament, but with littleavail” (Bonham-Carter, 1952, p. 48). By Locke’s time the enclosure move-ment, although far from its peak, already was well advanced. Polanyi(1957 [1944], p. 35), looking at this development from the perspective ofthe displaced villagers, refers to it as the elites “robbing the poor of theirshare of the common, tearing down houses which by the hithertounbreakable force of custom, the poor had long regarded as theirs andtheir heirs.”


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The enclosure movement in England had been the subject of extensivedebate long before Locke put forth his justification for it. Those claiming itto have been beneficial, as Peters (1998, p. 355) reminds us, have used thesole (economic) criteria of the “improvement in ‘productivity and effi-ciency’ of land use.” Appleby, for example, in spite of the fact that systema-tic data for agricultural output were not kept in England until after 1860,offers guesstimates, based on fragments of information, to indicate thatcrop yields increased following the enclosures by showing that fewerworking people were needed to feed the population than had been the casepreviously. “Having a bounteous supply [of food] within a country,” how-ever, as Stiglitz (2013) reminds us, “does not ensure that the citizens of thecountry are well fed.” Those displaced, of course, relocated to the townsand cities to become consumers of what they had previously helped pro-duce. This so-called “triumphal” interpretation (see Peters, 1998) is offeredto indicate that the enclosures created a more efficient means of food pro-duction. Appleby, like most who take this position, does not tell us howthe increase in productive efficiency was distributed, but she concludes thatthe enclosure movement “brought in its train greater disparity between thepoor and the prosperous” (Appleby, 2010, p. 81).10

Long before Locke entered the debate, small numbers of families ofonce independent villagers already had been driven from their homes andforced to roam the countryside11 or congregate in the towns and cities.In the poignant words of novelist Jim Crace (2013, p. 110), “their ancientlivelihoods [had] been hedged and fenced against their needs.” “We’veplowed these fields,” Crace (2013, p. 132) adds elsewhere, “since Adam’stime, they say, counting back the granddads on their fingertips. They’reancient families. They’ll not easily be driven out before the torrents ofthe law, to disappear in towns or villages where their names and facescannot ring a bell, robbed of their spirits and their futures, as well as oftheir fields.”12 Deprived of access to the means that enabled them to pro-duce their sustenance, the urban migrants now had to purchase whatthey previously produced for themselves. The lords and nobles (with theirremaining field-hands providing the labor) now offered these town andcity dwellers what they had formerly raised for themselves, but at a price.The once self-reliant villagers13 were in the process of being transformedinto consumers in a newly emerging system of price-making markets.They were presented with the option of either paying for what theyrequired or do without.14 Where were these displaced people to obtainthe currency with which to purchase what they needed to stay alive?Without money they faced a fate not unlike what their ancestors


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confronted during periods of crop failure, only now it could be a perma-nent condition.

Like other human populations before and after them faced with chan-ging circumstances that jeopardized their survival, they experimented,creating new cultural forms within the constraints of the conditions theyencountered. Some, for example, went so far as to sell or indenture them-selves (or members of their families), or make their services available towhoever was willing to provide them with a few coins, some food, or otherbasic necessities. Others bought � or perhaps stole � and repackaged andsold again in smaller quantities items for which there already was localdemand. People begged, sang, danced, or offered other forms of entertain-ment to those passing by in the streets. Theft was rampant, leading to theurban newcomers being referred to by the established population as abunch of beggars and thieves. All these activities were part of a creativeeffort to survive in the new milieu.15

In the name of protecting the established (entrepreneurial) classes andtheir property, the authorities responded by declaring many of the newbehaviors illegal. Polanyi (1957 [1944], p. 35), in words that sound as ifthey could be written about our own day, summarizes the enclosures andthe privatization of the countryside as a revolution of the rich against thepoor. “The fabric of society,” he states, “was being disrupted; desolate vil-lages and the ruins of human dwellings testified to the fierceness with whichthe revolution raged, endangering the defenses of the country, wasting itstowns, decimating its population, … harassing its people and turning themfrom decent husbandmen into a mob of beggars and thieves.”16

The obvious solution for those driven into the urban centers would havebeen to sell their labor, but even when Locke was advocating for privateproperty as the justification for the enclosure movement, the IndustrialRevolution and manufacturing was still a century away from beginning itsimpact on English and world society. There wasn’t as yet sufficient demandfor wageworkers to absorb the growing numbers of men, women, and chil-dren in need of monetary earnings.

Locke’s two treatises are devoted mostly to government. He critiquesabsolute monarchy and those who ruled in England and most of Europe.In its place he advocates that the people17 select those who would governthem. Before making his case, he sets out a series of behavioral, legal, andmoral understandings relating to property. Locke elaborates the means bywhich it was to be acquired and the way its earnings were to be allocated.Only with what today we call the economic principles of society in placedoes Locke turn to issues of governance.


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In chapter V of his second treatise, the activist-intellectual repeatedlyacknowledged the all-powerful Judeo-Christian creator God that he, andother Enlightenment thinkers relied on � explicitly or implicitly � to justifymany of the views and arguments they used their reason to make. Withrespect to the material aspects of the world Locke (2003, p. 111) writes:

God, who hath given the world to men in common, hath also given them reason

to make use of it to the best advantage of life and convenience. The earth, and all that

is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being. And though all

the fruits it naturally produces … belong to mankind in common … and nobody has

originally a private domain … there must of necessity be a means to appropriate them

some way ….

Locke reasons that people appropriate to themselves, as private prop-erty, what God has given to them in common through their labor. “[F]or itis labour,” he (Locke, 2003, p. 117) maintains, “… that put the differenceof value on every thing; …. As much land as a man tills, plants, improves,cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property” (Locke,2003, p. 113). If he takes more than he can use, he has no right to the excesssince it will spoil and be of no use to him or anyone. This changes inLocke’s (2003, p. 115) reasoning with the appearance of money and mar-kets. “…[T]he invention of money, and the tacit agreement of men to putvalue on it,” he continues, “introduced (by consent) large possessions, andthe right to them …” (Locke, 2003, p. 115). Ownership for Locke alsorequired a written title and a market in which the property could be boughtand sold for specie. It is not labor alone that justifies the ownership of landor other forms of property for Locke, but it is the monetary value added inthe market to what is obtained by labor.

MARKETS, LABOR, AND PRIVATE PROPERTY

Locke does not provide a historical background for the introduction ofmoney and markets. For him they seem to appear in the course of evolu-tion. The phrase (by consent) gives the impression that there was a suddenacceptance at some point of what was inevitable. Money and markets, intheir many forms and uses, as Polanyi later would make clear, are quite oldin human history. Since time immemorial they were one of several waysgoods and services were exchanged (see Polanyi 1957, pp. 243�270). It wasonly in England in the years following the institutionalization ofEnlightenment thinking about property that price-making markets, as a


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self-regulating system, came to be the predominant way in which the mem-bers of society exchanged and distributed what was produced. This hap-pened in the wake of, and quite likely was precipitated by, the enclosuresand by encoding the private ownership of property in the law.

Locke used the word labor in a sense that differed from the way Smithand later economists came to understand it. For Locke, labor was theactivity or effort associated with enterprise. This becomes clear whenhe claims “… the grass my horse has bit; the turfs my servant has cut; andthe ore I have digged in any place, where I have a right to them in commonwith others; become my property …. The “labour” that was mine, remov-ing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my propertyin them” (Locke, 2003, p. 112). The implications of this are huge. Forexample, if a horse is a form of capital,18 the work it and other forms ofcapital do, and what they produce, according to this reasoning, areincluded conceptually as part of the “labor” of the person owning the capi-tal. The grass, ore, oil, etc. created by God for the use of all,19 when takenfrom nature by the labor of a horse, or other form of capital, along withthe part of nature from which it is taken, is removed from the common.It then becomes the private property of the owner of the capital used in theproductive process. Moreover, if the grass a servant cuts belongs to themaster, so do all of the other fruits of the servant’s efforts. When thosedriven from their rural villages into the towns and cities find a buyer fortheir labor, they become, in the understandings of the time, the servants oftheir masters. And the fruits of their labor, like that of the animalsand machines they may operate or toil alongside, belong to � become theproperty of � their employer who owns all that is taken or produced bythe effort of his capital equipment and workers.

Entrepreneurship then, and not labor as it is commonly understood, isthe activity by means of which property is made private. The orchestrationof the extraction of iron ore, for example, from a part of the earth that pre-viously had been held in common, and adding market value to it, todaywould be called entrepreneurship. The person who accomplishes this is anentrepreneur.20 Locke was a staunch Protestant, raised by Puritan parents.He returned from exile only after the victory of the reformers. His theoryof private property may be viewed as an adaptation in secularized, enligh-tened terms of the Protestant worldview that was to provide the foundationfor the economics of capitalist private property as Weber maintained inThe Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. For those Protestantswho believed in predestination, entrepreneurial success was the sign of theirbeing amongst the elect. A person organizing an enterprise now had


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a moral right to what he acquired, since he attained it in a religiously sanc-tioned and proper way. He earned it by means of his entrepreneurialefforts. It followed that since the organizer of an enterprise appropriatedlabor in his undertaking, in a morally proper way, it was just that the work-ers he employed, like the animals and machines he used, did not necessarilyshare in his prosperity. In economic terms the labor of workers, along withmachines and other forms of capital, were factors of production in entre-preneurial undertakings � the fruits of which went to the entrepreneur.

The many Protestant preachers active in the towns and cities into whichthe dispossessed villagers were forced, who, especially after the beginningsof industrialization, helped redefine labor and the relationship betweenentrepreneur and those in his employ, provided motivation for the newurbanites to pursue a life devoted to work.21 They also extended the con-cept of a calling to cover laboring in the employ of others for a wage.Work in either sense was itself morally good � and idleness next to godless-ness. If an employee worked hard, saved from his wages, and invested themwisely, he too, he was taught, could enter the world of enterprise and opena shop and profit from the sale of some goods or services. Or perhaps hemight take some item previously shared in common by all, such as a plant,an item of food, or even a song or dance and perform it, in exchange cash,in the market. The new commodity could even be owned, by means of apatent, and become his private property and a source of earnings.Conversion to Protestantism provided the new city dwellers with a beliefsystem that induced the poor and propertyless to accept, as morally right,Locke’s argument for the private ownership of property attained throughentrepreneurship. It also supported the belief that the contribution ofemployees to the process, while also morally good, was the property of theentrepreneur.

As mechanical devices were invented or new forms of energy discovered,they contributed to facilitate the expansion of the activities of entrepre-neurs.22 When the wool of sheep raised on enclosed lands first was madeinto cloth, or the cotton gin made possible large-scale wool production, anincreased demand for wageworkers followed. The once independent subsis-tence farmers, who continuously were being driven from the places that tra-ditionally provided their sustenance, and were now in the towns and citieswhere the new factories were located, provided that labor. Former servants,now called workers, operated, for wages, a variety of new forms of capitalequipment, but the fruits of the labor with which they produced commod-ities for sale in the market, was not theirs. It belonged to their employerwho rightly, in terms of the new set of cultural and moral understandings,23


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owned all that was manufactured for sale in the market by his machines(capital) and workers.

THE NEW ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY

When an entrepreneur needed to obtain animals, machinery, or add work-ers to begin or expand an enterprise he could acquire financing from adeveloping banking system. Alternatively he might offer a stake in the nowcommercialized venture to others who became shareholders in an organiza-tion that took bureaucratic form by employing rational management andaccounting procedures. Supervisors were hired to oversee the managementof machinery and other capital equipment, resources (taken from the com-mon), and workers in the productive process. Later, these bureaucraticallyorganized enterprises took corporate form. The profits earned from whatLocke and his followers agreed that God had created for the benefit of all,now went exclusively to the owners of the enterprises. It was their privateproperty. The workers they employed, whose labor Locke, Smith and theirintellectual descendants � including Marx24 � continue to claim creates allvalue, and which justifies the private ownership of property � by the entre-preneur � received only what they were paid as wages, the value of whichwas independent of and separate from the earnings of the enterprise towhich their labor contributed. The great increase in wealth amassed byfirms (and their shareholders) when new technologies were added andforms of energy harnessed in the productive process � the IndustrialRevolution � now went exclusively to those engaged in entrepreneurshipand the shareholders in the companies they created. The workers (andmanagers) they hired were paid wages that were treated as a cost of pro-duction, to be kept as low as possible in the name of efficiency.Employment in the service of an entrepreneur, or a company formed tomanage his venture, became the primary way most of those forced off theland into the towns and cities25 were to be able to obtain the money theynow needed to purchase in the market the requirements for their survival.Opportunities to earn cash was available in the formal sector of the econ-omy to those who provided goods and/or services that the new productioncompanies required or to satisfy the growing needs and wants of theirwage-earning employees.

To complete the vision of a new society based on the institutionalrelationships Smith would take to be the expression of invariant human


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nature, Locke added what he called the essence of governance. This was aset of laws that encoded the rules of the entrepreneurial process, privateproperty, and self-regulating markets.26 Political power, Locke (2003,p. 101) informs us, is “to be a right of making laws with penalties of death,and … all less penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property, andof employing the force of the community, in the execution of suchlaws ….” To this he adds, with emphasis, “and all this only for the publicgood.” The criminal justice system of the previous social order that hademerged over time in a rural, agrarian society was reorganized so as toenable it to protect property and enforce the workings of the market inurban centers.27 With all this in place, Locke could turn his attention to thetype of government that would replace divine monarchy and ostensibly res-cue “men from political and moral injustice and misery …” (Berlin, 1997,p. 244).

By the end of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, when Smithwas completing the text of what would serve as the foundation for thescience of political economy, the enclosure movement was in full swing.28

Ever greater numbers of English families were being forced to relocate intourban centers where they, like their predecessors, would be socialized interms of new institutions. The children and grandchildren of those whosetraditional way of life was taken from them had little knowledge of theirpast. With its material foundation gone, except perhaps for nostalgic mem-ories, people adapted and learned the new ways. Physically separated andno longer able to fulfill previous obligations, traditional social bonds couldno longer be maintained. With their kinship system in tatters, the citydwellers had no alternative but to function more and more as individuals.They chose their own mates and, if they had earnings that were sufficient,married and established independent nuclear family households. Themarket was at the heart of this new, urban world in which each individualwas born, and to survive in it, he or she needed money. Everyone was aconsumer who had to live in terms of the rules of the market and the lawsthat enforced them. As a result, they behaved very much in the way Smithand his fellow Enlightenment theorists maintained they would. This wasnot because such behavior was the product of an inherent human natureheld prior to entering into society, but because of it. Either way Smith’sastute observations and his vision of the society he derived from his univer-salization of them, enabled him to pen a model of and for a reality that heand his followers would use as the foundation for a distinctive view of theworld. But how would the behavior of the rest of humanity, who were notproducts of the novel English institutions and culture, but of very different


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ones, change and become like this? For an answer I return to Locke andthe second set of issues he intended his social activism and writings to influ-ence: control over the territories in England’s colonial possessions.

EXPANDING THE SYSTEM OF PROPERTY AND

MARKETS

When Locke was writing his justification for the future economic arrange-ments for Great Britain, there already were settlements of English immi-grants in North America and the Caribbean. In North America, thecolonists around Massachusetts Bay were living in terms of Protestantinspired notions of enterprise and the view of private property that Lockehad advocated. They appropriated native lands and founded self-sustainingand self-governing settlements. The dissenting residents in these colonieswere not the (personal) concern of Locke, his patron or their associates.They had a greater ambition. Many were familiar with what had happenedin the island of Barbados during an earlier time in the seventeenth centurywhen there was social and political turmoil in England. A group of Englishcolonists had established themselves in the uninhabited Caribbean Island atthe same time the Puritans arrived in New England. The goal of the mem-bers of Locke’s entrepreneurial group was to establish plantations in NorthAmerica, to be worked by slave labor and produce commercial crops onthe model of what had taken place in Barbados (Greenfield, 2010 [1966],chapter II). It was there that the Dutch, after being driven out of Brazil inthe 1640s, introduced sugarcane plantations and African slaves to theEnglish settlers. The riches flowing from the sale of Barbadian sugarcane inthe elite markets of Europe by the 1660s became the envy of entrepreneursplanning projects in England’s North American colonies. They, too,wanted to own properties, worked by slaves that would produce commer-cial crops from which they could profit. But the lands in the Carolinas, andelsewhere in the south, already were occupied by native people who lived interms of cultures that had their own understandings of the relationshipbetween nature and the material goods that provided their sustenance.How were Englishmen to justify and enforce taking these lands from thosealready occupying them? Locke’s theory of private property and the beliefsand institutions he helped craft to support them provided the answer.

The native peoples in the Americas, Locke maintained, rightfullydeserved what they produced for their own consumption. Excesses, hunted,


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gathered, or cultivated, along with the places from which they were taken,remained, in his logic, not privately owned, but (metaphorically) part ofthe common prior to being enclosed in England. Since the indigenous peo-ple had no system of self-regulating markets, the excesses they did not con-sume, Locke reasoned, would spoil and be of no use to anyone. Subsistenceproduction, and the segment of nature from which it was taken, remainedpart of the common still available to all. When Locke’s associates andother European entrepreneurs introduced their capital � such as animalsand machines � and employed servants and introduced slaves, or employednatives, to produce sugar, tobacco, and cotton on these lands, and addedvalue to them through sale in the markets in England or elsewhere inEurope, things changed. If the assumption was accepted that the Englishcrown owned the lands in its colonies by right of conquest and could grantthem to its subjects, it followed that the recipients of the grants were itsowners as were the landlords in the English homeland. Consequently, thesituation in the colonies, as Locke presented it, could be interpreted asbeing analogous to the enclosures. The European entrepreneurs, and theirinvestors, justly owned, as their private property, not only the sugar andcotton produced by the labor of the workers they hired (or the slaves fromAfrica they imported) and the capital equipment they introduced, whichthey sold for a profit in the market, but also the portion of nature fromwhich it was removed. The plantations, in the enlightened English under-standings provided by Locke, were similar to the English common whosetransformation into private property through the entrepreneurial processwas being implemented. Those who were living on these lands and who hadderived their sustenance from them since time immemorial, like the Englishvillagers before them, no longer had a legal or moral claim to them. Thelands of the New World were now the private property of the exemplars ofthe socioeconomic system being cobbled together in England and beginningto be imposed on the world.

Entrepreneurs, along with Protestant missionaries, led the way as GreatBritain expanded its empire across the globe in the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries. This was a new European imperial/colonial order, basedon a new set of rules.

At the opening of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese had taken thelead in the expansion of Europe overseas. They did so in terms of a setof assumptions, with a logic that led to behavior and the imposition ofcolonial institutions that differed from the ones that later were to guideEngland, Holland, and other Post Reformation Protestant nations. By theend of the fifteenth century, Portugal was joined in expansionist overseas


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activities by a recently unified Spain. Both nations sought their justificationfor empire building in the theology of the Roman Catholic Church. God, itwas asserted, had created the world.29 His vicar, The Pope, who repre-sented Him on earth, communicated God’s intent as to how humankindwas to use it. In 1494, to prevent the Catholic monarchs from open conflictas they competed for territory, resources and dominion over people, ThePope divided the world, with half ceded to the King of Portugal and theother half to the King of Spain. Although a tiny fraction of humanityaccepted Roman Catholic teachings at the time, and the Reformationalready was underway, under papal authority, the Kings of Portugal andSpain became the owners of the world whose inhabitants became their sub-jects. In return for converting this mass of humanity to the only true faith,as required in the papal grant, the monarchs, and those to whom theygranted it, received usufruct over all resources. These provisions of TheTreaty of Tordesillas served as the basis for what developed into themercantile economic system Adam Smith railed against. When English andDutch entrepreneurs sought to extend their activities beyond the borders oftheir small continental states, they were, in terms of the beliefs of theirIberian neighbors, encroaching on places over which they had previousjurisdiction, though they may not necessarily have exercised it. This claimwas made not by the indigenous people who were the occupants living therein terms of their own cultural understanding, but by the royal houses ofPortugal and Spain operating under a set of assumptions, rules, and lawsthat differed from those to take form later in Holland and England. Fromthe perspective of Portugal and Spain, English and Dutch entrepreneurswere interlopers attempting to steal what belonged to them, or those towhom the monarchs had granted rights and jurisdiction. When the Iberiancrowns or their subordinates took action in defense of their God givenclaims, the English and Dutch responded leading to a series of wars thattook place both in Europe and destinations far away across the globe. Inbrief, to protect its entrepreneurs and their right to make private territoriesand resources beyond their national borders, England and Hollandemployed military force. When they defeated their Roman Catholic adver-saries, the lands and those inhabiting them ceased to be parts of the Iberiancolonial systems and subjects of their respective king, but extensions of anew mother country bound by its laws that now enforced the privatizationof property based on the entrepreneurial process and the rules of themarket. What started as a set of institutions with rules encoded in laws andenforced by a judicial system within the national borders of Great Britainbecame international and eventually global. As a result, England, and to


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a lesser degree Holland, began to impose its only recently fashionedculture, based on entrepreneurship, private property, Protestantism, andmarkets on the world.

In North America, after the United States gained its political indepen-dence and created a nation based primarily on Enlightenment philosophy,its enterprising citizens carried the institutions based on them westwardwhere they imposed them wherever they went. Entrepreneurs � and/ormissionaries � normally travelled first. If they met resistance from indigen-ous peoples, American military force was sent to protect the private prop-erty and the interests, if not lives, of the encroaching Euro-Americans.Commercial hubs, established first to transship commodities, developedinto urban centers to become the locations of an emerging market-centered, consumer-oriented national society. Great wealth was made asresources were taken � with the aid of new technologies and sources ofenergy � from what previously had been occupied by other peoples withcultures that utilized them differently. The United States prospered.This material enrichment (of the nation) seemed to validate Smith and hisfollower’s claims leading to a growing acceptance of their thinking.Political economy was born as an academic discipline primed to advisegovernments on the policies they should implement to proceed along thepath to the continuing expansion of wealth and power.30 Included impli-citly as part of a philosophy adopted for its pragmatic material (economic)value were Enlightenment assumptions about human nature and universalevolution.31

Following decolonization after World War II development, as guided byeconomists, came to be the primary responsibility of governments. JefferySachs (2005, p. 12), the award winning economist and architect of the UNMillennium Development Project Sachs writes of the freedom youngwomen from rural Bangladesh have to leave their homes and families andmove to Dhaka to take jobs in the sweatshops of the emerging garmentindustry. Though they may work long hours, have poor working conditionsthat may be detrimental to their health and safety, lack labor rights, earnmeager wages, and often are subjected to harassment, in Sachs’ view, forthese young women the “factories offer … opportunities for personal free-dom.” Moreover, he interprets this metaphorically as the first rung on a(universal and evolutionary) ladder of rising skills of the development pro-cess. “Virtually every poor country,” he tells us, “that has developed suc-cessfully has gone through these first stages of industrialization” (Sachs,2005, p. 12). Taken for granted is that the entrepreneur who owns the fac-tory, whether it is a locally financed firm or a multinational corporation


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investing at a great distance from where it is incorporated, is entitled to allits earnings, less the costs of production. Included in these costs are theminimum amounts of wages that make possible the opportunities for the“personal” freedom of the workers.

England, and later the United States were taken by scholars, politicalleaders, and the general population to be the most advanced stage on theevolutionary ladder. Everyone else eventually would arrive there if they �their governments � would establish in law and enforce systems promotingentrepreneurship, private property, self-regulating markets, representativegovernment, and the beliefs and values that promoted them. Nations, andtheir people, could assist the process and advance on their own by adoptingthe ways of those ahead of them who were referred to as modern andcivilized. The people and governments of England, and later the UnitedStates, moreover, accepted as the mission for their nations on the worldstage to bring the Protestant and Enlightenment notions of civilization tothe heathens.

To be fair, Locke believed that there was sufficient wilderness in thecolonies to continue to provide for the subsistence of the indigenous peo-ples. But as more and more of it was removed32 from the common,33

over the following centuries and made private property by entrepreneurialEuropeans and Euro-Americans, the native peoples were increasinglydisplaced. In North America, they were moved to reservations or, as hadhappened to their English predecessors, forced onto the roads and intothe towns where the broad outlines of what they were to experience repli-cated much of what happened to the victims of the enclosures.Elsewhere, as the forests, mountains, and plains that provided the suste-nance of peoples across the globe were increasingly subjected to privatiza-tion through the entrepreneurial process untold millions relocated tourban centers in which they must find a way to obtain money in order tosurvive in the market.34 Without the skills needed for employment inestablished enterprises in the formal sector,35 most seek their livelihoodsin the informal economy where those with property treat them, as hadtheir English predecessors centuries before, as beggars and thieves whomust be controlled by the criminal justice system. Using the imagery firstoffered by Van Gennep (1960) and elaborated by Turner (1967, 1969),we might say that this large and diverse segment of humanity enteredinto a liminal state that they, or more often their descendants, wouldleave only after being schooled successfully in the educational system.This educational system emerged from the codification of Enlightenmentthought. Its degrees were accepted as qualifying those to graduate for


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employment in the formal economy � primarily as income earningemployees of entrepreneurs and the companies they founded.

In the decades following World War II, in the name of modernizationand economic development, markets, private property, and the legalmachinery to enforce them were adopted by former European colonies thatwere emerging as independent nations. When the Marshall Plan usurped itsoriginal purpose � to rebuild the economies of a Europe devastated bywar � the International Monetary Fund (IMF) revised its mission toundertake advising and financing � through the World Bank � developingthe economies of what then were called third world nations. These coun-tries included those of Latin America that, although no longer colonies atthe time and politically independent, still lived in terms of institutionsinherited from their Iberian conquerors that differed from those ofmodernity. The notable exceptions were the states and territories alignedwith the Soviet Union whose incorporation into the market, or what hascome to be called the worldsystem, was delayed by half a century. Underthe guidance primarily of economists, who dominated global institutionssuch as the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO),and the many agencies of the United Nations, the governments of countriesworldwide adopted the vision of a progressive evolutionary transforma-tion36 � guided by policies derived from Locke and Smith � that is implicitin the concept of development.

The new states embraced the belief that under the guidance of theeconomists running the IMF and the World Bank they too would progress,develop, and in time become as rich and prosperous as the UnitedStates and the nations of Western Europe. At the core of this envisionedtrajectory was the view of the world in which acquiring private propertyby means of entrepreneurship and distributing accumulating wealthto capital and labor (as wages), in the way Locke, Smith and theirEnlightenment influenced economist followers proposed, was incorporatedand institutionalized.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

I have argued that Adam Smith’s economic man was as much the productof an emergent social and cultural system as of the Enlightenment fantasiesat the core of his thinking. As a result of a revolution brought on by theenclosures, the institutionalization of private property obtained by means


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of entrepreneurship, the establishment of a system of price-making marketsand finally of Protestantism’s glorification of the entrepreneurial process,the people he lived amongst and observed, who already had been socializedin terms of the limitations and constraints of the new order, behaved verymuch as he described them. Driven from their homes and traditionalsources of subsistence by the enclosures, and forced into the more confiningand controllable spaces of the towns and cities where sustenance was avail-able only through markets, people in Britain’s urban places needed moneyto survive. Exposed to the preaching of the new Reformed religious minis-ters and the Protestant belief that one serves God through enterprise, com-bined with Locke’s view of private property obtained by means ofentrepreneurship, they had little choice but to strive to obtain money andbehave with it in the way of Smith’s homo economicus. This behavior wasnot the result of a universal set of characteristics inherent in them thatwould be found if they were observed in a state of nature. Moreover, thesuccess and rise to world power and domination of Great Britain and laterthe United States was not that they represented an advanced evolutionarystage in a universal scheme that others, guided by Enlightenment teachings,modern science and technology also would inevitably achieve, but ratherbecause the militaries of these nations prevailed when sent to impose therules of private ownership and extend the system of self-regulating marketsin support of entrepreneurs. As Huntington’s (1996, p. 51) stated it,“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values orreligion … but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.” Inplace of a historical record that laid bare to moral questioning the meansby which dominance by the culture of one nation over so many others wasachieved, it was preferable � for the victors � to see their conquest as theresult of an impersonal and abstract evolutionary process in which thedeeds of human actors played little if any part. “Westerners,” again accord-ing the Huntington (ibid.), “often forget this fact; non-Westerners neverdo.” The foundational economics of Adam Smith brought together theEnlightenment evolutionary vision with a theory explaining human beha-vior scientifically. And from this theory, when modified appropriately toincorporate new technologies and social conditions, policy proposals couldbe derived that, if pursued by governments, would lead each nation and itspeople in the direction of progress.

Following the guidelines of Smith’s Enlightenment science and itstechnological applications, his economist disciples, and those who acceptedtheir reasoning, could reduce human behavior to mathematics. Theycounted market transactions, for example, to obtain a measure called Gross


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Domestic Product (GDP) that would represent for them the wealth of anation.37 Moreover, GDP came to stand for a way to measure evolutionaryprogress and advancement. If GDP were low, policies would be made avail-able that would lead to its increase. Continuous growth meant more andmore goods and services flowing through self-regulating markets, signifyingthat a nation was moving forward along the universal evolutionary path.The reason economics, its theories, and policy proposals have been sopersuasive, I suggest, is that, when combined with (modern) science andtechnology, it provides an abstract mechanical model of the economy thatcan be improved by moving it along a ladder of evolutionary progress.Government leaders and the general population do not have to understandthe complexities of the economy. They can leave that to the specialists towhom they may turn for technical solutions when problems arise.38 Theproblem in the economic realm is that a recurrent series of disastrous eventshave led many to question the viability of the system. Today the economy issick and, after treatment, not only seems not to be getting better but forsome to be stagnating or growing worse. A large and growing segmentof humanity, continuously flowing into the urban centers of the non-Euro-American regions of the world, that are swelling with those displacedby the enclosing of the (metaphoric) common by today’s corporate entrepre-neurs, does not have access to sources of money needed to participateadequately in the hegemonic world of private ownership and price-makingmarkets. In the formal sector, wages worldwide have been stable or on thedecline for decades and the fruits of the progressively growing GDP havegone almost exclusively to an ever-smaller segment of the population.Moreover, jobs are still being eliminated. They are replaced by technologyor by economic downsizing resulting from efforts to improve competitiveefficiency, or outsourced to areas paying low wages. The result has been eco-nomic downturns, recessions, and depressions, forcing growing numbersinto the informal sector where their opportunities for earnings are evenmore problematic. There, like their predecessors, starting with the enclosingof the common in England when the modern world began, their options andincomes are limited. For solutions political leaders, including most ofthe intellectual elite, turn to economists. This, I suggest, is like Einstein’sdefinition of insanity: trying to solve problems “with the same thinking usedto create them …. doing the same thing over and over again and expectingdifferent results.” The root of the problem is in the institutions created andjustified by the assumptions and reasoning of the Enlightenment. If wewish to make changes that might solve what are now recognized as majorproblems, it seems necessary that we start by reexamining the thinking and


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the assumptions that got us where we are. This would negate turning toeconomics and economists for assistance. It also would rule out the princi-pal alternative based on the writings of Karl Marx. While Marx provided avaluable critique of the disheartening effects of the Enlightenment visionin early nineteenth century England, he used it to develop another evolu-tionary39 model based, not on individual entrepreneurs seeking to maximizethe acquisition of private property, but on centralized planning by the repre-sentatives of a social class that would replace the entrepreneurs and theirsupporters. The mobilization of the working classes, he contended, wouldlead humanity to the next, more advanced evolutionary stage. Bothapproaches leave little room for human creativity and agency outside theconstraints of the inevitable paths each proposes. By deconstructing the evo-lutionary vision of the Enlightenment and the assumptions about humannature on which it is based, we might be able to get back to the ethno-graphic conditions that gave rise to our current world economic system andbegin the search for other � hopefully less destructive for so many � waysto relate to our environment in the production and distribution of goodsand services.

NOTES

1. Hobbes (1909 [1651]) added competitive aggression to inherent human natureleading him to argue that “During the time men live without a common Power[i.e. in the state of nature] … they are in that condition which is called Warre; andsuch a warre, as is of every man, against every man,” (quoted in Barone, 2007,p. 15), thus justifying the need for the Leviathan, or state authority that exists toprevent the conflict. Locke, Rousseau, and a host of others contend that theLeviathan is to be representative of its citizens as opposed to the personal dictatesof an absolute monarch.

2. The evolutionary model shows how humanity advances through variousstages from individual to family to kingdom and then to representative government.

3. Individual behavior, writes Laville (2010, p. 78), “is aggregated by the marketand no consideration is given to the institutional framework that shapes it. If we seethe market as a self-regulating mechanism, or one that uses prices to match supplyand demand, we overlook the institutional changes that were required to bring itinto being and the institutional structures that make it possible.”

4. The reason for this, is the enclosure movement and privileging entrepreneurship.5. Those that accept the assumptions of these authors on a priori grounds will

see no reason for questioning them. But I will argue that the lack of success of somany of the policies to assist those the world economic system is failing to providefor adequately based on them is an instance of doing the same thing over and overagain and expecting the outcome to be different.


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6. It reasserted itself in the sixteenth century skeptics and also is found in socio-logically minded thinkers from Bodin to Montesquieu (ibid.).

7. See Carrier (2010) for a recent summary of the arguments with relevantreferences.

8. The villagers, in common, also had access to the wooded areas surroundingtheir cottages and fields from which they could take firewood and what else theyneeded to make and maintain the dwellings in which they lived.

9. Converting the common fields into pastures first required the emptying of vil-lages and cutting down of the remaining woodlands and forests. This set the prece-dent for deforestation as an element in rational decision-making for commercialdevelopment and progress.10. The poor laws, as draconian as they may have been, were all that stood

between many of the poor and extinction.11. Laborers without land remained a minority in England until the Great

Enclosures of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when a large,permanent and depressed class of landless countrymen � “who were absolutelydependent on their wages and the farmers who paid them” (Bonham-Carter, 1952,p. 50) � appeared. In the mid-sixteenth century, for example, only 11 percent ofpeasants were employed as wage laborers. By 1688, the percentage was 56(Lachmann, 1987, p. 17).12. Crace’s novel, The Harvest, depicts the plight of one community as they are

being displaced with their homes and communal lands transformed into pasturage.13. “The old order of village farming was essentially a system of subsistence, inher-

ited from an age that set hierarchy above efficiency” (Bonham-Carter, 1952, p. 62).14. Other cities in Europe and elsewhere in the Old World had markets where

the residents purchased what they consumed; but in England, by the time of AdamSmith and the Industrial Revolution, the combination of private property, self-regulating markets, and the institutionalization of the entrepreneurial process wasto affect a major transformation in society enabling Smith to set apart what cameto be called the economy. Cities and their hinterlands, reconceptualized as the urbanand the rural, were to become two parts of a single system integrated by the marketin which the nonurban was to be the source of foodstuffs and raw materials to betransformed into commodities and sold to those in the urban spaces who hadmoney to purchase them.15. Two centuries later, after the wished for world of the authors being discussed

had been instituted and became normative practice as the official or “formal” sectorof the economy, the activities of those outside it who were forced to innovate toobtain cash, came to be referred to as the “informal” sector.16. The process of driving people from their traditional subsistence bases and

forcing them into towns and cities where they must survive in the market as consu-mers, started in England, and, was to be reproduced across the globe in the centu-ries to follow.17. He was referring to male owners of property.18. Capital includes animals, machines, patents, all other forms of technology

and money.19. According to Locke, his fellow Enlightenment theorists, and later economists,

governments and their legal systems worldwide.


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20. The usage of the word labor by Locke is not surprising. Max Weber (1992[1930]) has shown the role of enterprise, in the sense Locke used it, to be the wayreformist Protestant theologians redirected Christians to seek the path to salvationthrough activities of this world.21. Methodism, for example, redefined Calvin’s notion of grace making it avail-

able to all. The value it placed on methodical discipline marked its followers assober, dependable, and capable of hard work, values that led them to accept theirplace in the new society in which the fruits of their efforts belonged to the entrepre-neurs who employed them.22. See Cook (2012) for a review of the contribution of science to the develop-

ment of entrepreneurial capitalism.23. Protestant preaching, to quote Weber (1992 [1930], p. 121), “is saturated with

the idea that faithful labour, even at low wages, on the part of those whom lifeoffers no other opportunities, is highly pleasing to God.”24. I include Marx here because, while he used them in a different way, he

accepted and built on the same universalistic, evolutionary assumptions as theothers.25. And their descendants in ever increasing numbers in the years to follow in

England and wherever this system diffused in the following centuries.26. “Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau all recognized the need to justify a state of

sovereign order before individual property rights could be established” (Gudeman,2010, p. 66).27. Locke, Smith, and their neoliberal followers today do not oppose government

making and enforcing laws to protect property, the way it is obtained, the rights ofownership and the workings of the market. When they advocate for restricting gov-ernment intervention they are not referring to these laws but to legislation, and itsenforcement that protects individuals from the harmful effects brought about by thesystem of private ownership and markets already is in place.28. Between 1760 and 1793, 1,355 Enclosure Acts had been passed with the num-

ber going up to 1,934 by 1815 (Bonham-Carter, 1952, p. 62).29. They also had universalized the Judeo-Christian God who was claimed to

have created the entire world and not just the part inhabited by those in whobelieved in him.30. Emphasis on economic progress enabled the consequences for native peoples

worldwide to be downplayed, if not disregarded.31. With the emphasis on the material, the term development came to be used

masking the implications of the single and inevitable directionality that the wordevolution carried.32. Some would say it was plundered and stolen.33. The term is again used metaphorically to emphasize the features similar to

those of the enclosure process that took place in England.34. For an excellent analysis of this in India, see Shiva (1988).35. Many of which have taken multinational corporate form.36. This vision was made explicit as recently as 2014 when in his State of

the Union address, President Barak Obama exhorted that for the United States toovercome its present adversities, we must “put our shoulder to the wheel ofprogress.”


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37. One implication of this for the people of nonmarket societies was that theirtraditional ways of producing and distributing the goods and services that sustainedthem could be discounted and cast aside. Most economists erroneously assume thathuman populations are not producing wealth until ways to measure it flowingthrough markets are devised. Consequently, those encountered in the process ofWestern expansion were assumed to start in abject poverty and, therefore, in needof help. Development programs that enabled them to produce commodities ofcountable commercial value in the market, it was assumed, would put them on thepath to modernization and progress.38. The imagery makes economics comparable to modern medicine in the sense

that someone who is ill need not understand the complexities of how the bodyworks, what causes sickness or what will aid in the cure. All that is necessary is tovisit a specialist, receive a diagnosis, and take the medicines or undergo the surgicalprocedures prescribed.39. Many Marxists claimed that dialectical materialism revealed long-sought

laws of historical development (see Golinski, 2012, p. 27).

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