Sunday, August 11, 2013

Property-Owning Democracy: A Short History

An interesting article by Ben Jackson of Oxford University here. A quote:
The earliest versions of this form of argument, articulated for example by such pre-commercial renovators of classical republicanism as James Harrington and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, were agrarian and austerely critical of commerce and luxury. ...
This is important because whereas I don't see, after much research, Rousseau as being influential on America's Founders (perhaps he influenced them by osmosis), Harrington was.

2 comments:

Tom Van Dyke said...

Doesn't even mention John Locke.

The "property-owning democracy" thing is more a Brit thing, as you can tell from the bibliography.

Meade in fact advocated both: greater collective capital ownership
and
the equalisation of private property-holdings. Indeed, we should be clear that the leftist tradition of thinking examined in this chapter has been historically distinguished from its right-leaning counterpart by an acceptance that the scale and social interdependency of modern industrial production is such that, if the aim is to prevent a small class from controlling both the means of production and democratic political life, then it is necessary to exercise collective democratic control over the economy and not just to diffuse individual ownership more widely.


Fucking leftist scum. Both government ownership AND redistributionism. "Democratic control" my ass. Leviathan.

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