1.2.2. Land ownership
Private property was born with agriculture. In the past, people lived from hunting in areas close to where they lived and had no need to have any rights to the land they cultivated. They simply sought food. However, as soon as they became farmers, as soon as they got the food that they and their families consumed from the land, they wanted to protect the piece of land they were farming: through legislation, especially property rights, family land ownership appeared. Some individuals then owned more than the one piece of land needed for their own consumption. They sold the surplus and had income that allowed them to meet other, previously unknown needs.
Originally small in size, land ownership would not cease to grow, becoming seigniorial or domanial throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages, leading to the power, both political and economic, of its owners, and to the material and moral misery of other members of the agricultural class who saw no hope for their future. The form of ownership determined the political system of a nation. The concentration of property in a small number of hands was harmful for political freedom, because then the aristocracy prevailed: the people could not be entrusted with the control of political decisions when they were not empowered to manage private interests.
As we will see, the rural exodus of peasants to the factory and the city reduced the number of landowners while increasing the size of each estate. However, one of the main causes of pauperism lay in the existence of the indivision of land. De Tocqueville (2010) therefore recommended, as was the case in France and contrary to what existed in his time in England, the maintenance of small plots as a means of fighting poverty, so that poor peasants had something that belonged to them that could be exploited when economic difficulties arose: “The small landowner receives impetus only from himself, his sphere is narrow, but he moves freely within it. His fortune grows slowly, but it is not subject to sudden chance. His mind is tranquil as his destiny, his tastes regular and peaceful as his work, and, needing precisely no one, he places the spirit of independence in the midst of poverty itself”.
Moreover, when property was owned by a large number of citizens, democracy was easier to establish and apply satisfactorily since responsibilities could be shared. “There is nothing more conducive to the rule of democracy than the division of land into small properties”. However, de Tocqueville explained, and this was a very common argument in his own country, that French centralization encouraged a large number of small landowners to come to Paris to take up much more rewarding positions, close to power, in the public administration, while entrusting farmers with the exploitation of their land. However, on the one hand, these farmers did not have a spirit of innovation and therefore did not advance agriculture, and, on the other hand, the landowners became bourgeois, forming a very powerful class enjoying many privileges.
With liberalism and the emergence of the capitalist enterprise, the nature of property rights changed: land and family property was divided and became movable, both individual and collective.
1.2.3. Property rights and savings
The right to hold property involves the right to dispose of one’s own property, to sell it, to give it away and to pass it on through inheritance, so that “property breeds property”. In particular, the right to property means that savings can exist. Indeed, it is an essential element for thinking about the future: people became provident as soon as they knew that they risked losing things they cared about, and they knew that, with the right of ownership, they would be able to bequeath to their offspring what they had saved. However, no one agrees to work if they are not sure that them or their descendants will benefit from the fruits of their activity, that is, from the savings they manage to build up. An individual therefore tends to do everything to increase their wealth and put aside what they do not consume. As soon as individuals felt fully responsible for their fate and were convinced that only their efforts were likely to make them progress in the social hierarchy, not only did they enrich themselves, but they also became actors in the progress of their country.
We will see that Weber explains that this willingness to save and the foresight it generates through property rights have combined with the precepts of Protestantism and constitute the essential causes of the development of capitalism through the investment to which these two attitudes lead. Wealth can then increase and, as a direct consequence, more and more rich people appear. On the contrary, the absence of savings – a consequence of the absence of property – is an insurmountable obstacle to becoming rich: not only do people not see the usefulness of working, but even if they did work, they would immediately spend all their income.
This is why de Tocqueville, ahead of his time, encouraged the division of industrial property, by setting up what is known today as employee participation, which consists of giving workers shares in their companies in order to interest each of them in the activity of their manufacture and to make them responsible. “This would produce for the industrial classes effects similar to those brought about by the division of land ownership among the agricultural class […] The worker of our days, like the farmer of the Middle Ages, having no property of his own, seeing no means of assuring by himself the tranquility of his future and gradually rising to wealth, becomes indifferent to anything that is not present enjoyment. Moreover, the savings that the wage earner could thus constitute would enable him to face the difficulties (think of unemployment) caused by industrial crises. In this way, the condition of workers would improve thanks to the ownership of movable property and progression in the social hierarchy would be facilitated”. However, de Tocqueville (2010) did not fail to warn against the risks of movable property, which “almost always depends, more or less, on the passions of another. Whoever owns it must always bend either to the rules of an association or to the desires of man. He is subject to the slightest vicissitudes of his country’s commercial and industrial fortune, his existence is constantly disturbed by the alternatives of well-being and distress, and it is rare that the agitation that reigns in his destiny does not introduce disorder into his ideas and instability into his tastes”.
The philosopher took advantage of this to criticize the socialists who “directly or indirectly attack individual property”. However, to attack property is not to protect the individual; it is to attack their freedom, their responsibility, and therefore their morality. No doubt this is the reason why he warned owners about the durability of this right: “They should not be under any illusions about the strength of their situation, nor should they imagine that the right of ownership is an impassable rampart, because nowhere up to now has it been crossed. For our time is like no other”. His argument was based on the fact that this right was originally the basis of many other rights, giving rise to no criticism: “it formed then like the surrounding wall of the society of which all the other rights were the defenses put forward. The blows did not reach it. They didn’t even try to reach it”. On the contrary, it was then considered “the rest of a destroyed aristocratic world, an isolated privilege in the middle of a leveled society, behind many other more questionable and hated rights. It is now alone in sustaining the direct and incessant clash of democratic opinions every day”. Thus, it is not enough to say that property is inviolable; it must, at the same time, be protected from the temptations of power and the usurpation of those who wish to appropriate it.
As in many fields, de Tocqueville had a premonitory vision of the evolution of society: “There is little doubt that one day, it is between those who own and those who do not that the political struggle will be established, that the great battlefield will be ownership and that the great political questions will relate to more or less profound changes in the rights of owners”.
1.3. The advent of the bourgeoisie
At the sociological level, it was the urban bourgeoisie who, from the Middle Ages onwards, because of their power, both economic and political, were at the origin of modern capitalism. Previously, in spite of the hold of the military and the nobility in Antiquity, no social class had been capable, neither politically nor economically, of imposing this economic structure.
1.3.1. The hold of the military and the nobility in Antiquity