On land, life, and labour: Abundance and scarcity in Locke, Smith, and Ricardo

Abstract

In the modern age, and not before, men began to doubt that poverty is inherent in the human condition… This doubt, or rather the conviction that life on earth might be blessed with abundance instead of being cursed by scarcity, was prerevolutionary and American in origin; it grew directly out of the American colonial experience… Theoretically speaking, the stage was set when first Locke… and then Adam Smith held that labour and toil, far from being the appanage of poverty, the activity to which poverty condemned those without property, were, on the contrary, the source of all wealth. Ricardo inverts the terms of this analysis… What makes economics possible, and necessary… is a perpetual and fundamental situation of scarcity: confronted by a nature that in itself is inert and, save for one very small part, barren, man risks his life… [I]t is related… to the biological properties of a human species…; it is related also to the situation of those living beings that run the risk of not finding in their natural environment enough to ensure their existence; lastly, it designates in labour, and in the very hardship of that labour, the only means of overcoming the fundamental insufficiency of nature and of triumphing for an instant over death. As these epigraphs attest, the emergence of economic thought has long been understood by theorists as a crucial development for politics in the modern era. These comments appear in the context of quite different projects. For Arendt, the concern was how what she termed the “social question”—that of the existence of poverty—had informed the development of revolutionary thought and practice since the late 18th century. Foucault, instead, made his observations as part of what he termed an “archaeology of the human sciences,” an investigation that provided crucial foundations for his subsequent—more explicitly political, and today more famous—genealogy of modern “government.” In spite of their divergent aims, the comments of Arendt and Foucault revolve around a remarkably similar constellation of ideas: Both are concerned with notions of abundance and scarcity, and both link this to a discourse on labour. Perhaps less intuitively, both give centrality to new understandings of “life,” Arendt through a critique of how economic analysis placed “the life process of society… at the very centre of the human endeavour” (1977);1 Foucault by arguing that the emergence of political economy marked the birth of a new kind of political rationality—a “biopolitics” centered around the government of life (see also Foucault, 2008, 2009).2 Although these passages read almost as if they were a continuous commentary, this is something of a sleight of hand. In fact, neither thinker traced Locke–Smith–Ricardo lineage in this way: Arendt did not acknowledge a subsequent shift in liberal political economy marked by Ricardo and the economists of the early 19th century; Foucault, meanwhile, was not here comparing Ricardo to Locke or Smith—though he did address their work elsewhere—but rather to the French Physiocrats. Yet, it is more than a linguistic accident that these comments seem to speak so directly to each other. In fact, the genealogy suggested by the juxtaposed quotes traces an important lineage, though one with which neither Arendt nor Foucault engaged in detail. While not addressing directly the arguments of either of these two thinkers, therefore—the resonances and tensions between which have already been explored in some depth elsewhere (Blencowe, 2010)—this article takes their provocative respective commentaries as a fruitful starting point for tracing a new approach to the development of a modern politics of life. As insightful as these commentaries are, I seek to go beyond an anthropocentric bias that has been the focus of recent criticism within political theory (Bennett, 2004; Krause, 2016), and for which Foucault in particular has been criticized (Lemke, 2015). What interests me especially is how setting these three canonical discussions side-by-side helps chart the transformation of notions of life, understood not only as specifically human life, but rather in terms of the relationship between humans and the broader panoply of nonhuman life on earth. In short, I suggest that Arendt and Foucault were both right—that Locke and Smith should be regarded as thinkers of abundance, while Ricardo should be seen as a thinker of scarcity—but that making sense of this shift, and its ramifications, requires coming to terms with changing underlying ontologies of nature. While the natural law influence in Locke and Smith's work placed emphasis on the human capacity to adapt the abundance of nonhuman life on earth to meet human ends, Ricardo's modern political economy represented a loss of faith in the essential fecundity of nature, and the ability of humans to overcome environmental limits through technological and sociopolitical innovation. In order to carry out this investigation, I turn to an important though often overlooked category that was touched on by both Arendt and Foucault, but which was for neither a central focus—that of land. Here, rather than assuming a view of land—more conventional in political theory—as a purely passive “resource” that is subject to appropriation,3 I look at how, within a specifically British tradition of thinking about “improvement” within discourses on government, land acted as a privileged site of the action—even agency—of nature, with property rights forming the principal means through which relations between human and nonhuman life were articulated. In particular, I suggest, contra Foucault, that it was this discourse, which here I trace through the work of Locke and Smith, that was the theoretical precursor to the new “biological” political rationality of which Ricardo's work is emblematic. Viewed in these terms, the birth of 19th-century political economy appears not as the sudden irruption of life into theories of government, but rather a radical schematization of earlier ideas about life, marked by the disavowal of the spontaneous agency of nature, and the hardening of a separation between the human and the nonhuman. As much as Arendt and Foucault did not focus on land specifically, their respective comments on life, and their shared concern for the concept of labour, still provide crucial guidance. It is well known both that land was the primary object of labour for Locke and that the conceptual affinity between land and labour was foundational to what is often called by economists the “classical economics” of Smith and Ricardo (e.g., Hollander, 2016)—even if, as this article goes some way to demonstrating, the discursive unity that this label implies is one that should be treated with caution.4 For both Arendt and Foucault, however, the significance of labour goes beyond both appropriation (traditionally more a concern of political theorists) and the creation of value (traditionally more a concern of political economists) and instead points to more fundamental questions around subsistence, understood as the survival of biological life. While, for Foucault (2009), the political economy of the 19th century embodied a new understanding of man as a “species,” crystallized especially in the concept of “population,” I suggest that this, in fact, represented the disappearance of a view of man as one species amongst many, and the emergence of a new and anthropocentric lens for understanding subsistence that has informed economics to the present day. The argument proceeds in three sections. The first section addresses the famous chapter “Of property” in book two of Locke's Two Treatises of Government (2017; hereafter TT), emphasizing the ways in which regimes of property are seen to encode shifting relations between humans and nonhuman nature, as well as the important work done here by notions of death and decay. Section two moves to Smith's seminal The Wealth of Nations (2014; hereafter WN), reading the central arguments of the work, and the stadial history on which they hinge, as essentially an elaboration of the schema sketched by Locke, but sharpening the sense of property as articulating relations between human and nonhuman life. Section three turns to a work read by Foucault and others as the quintessential statement of political economy in the early 19th century, Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (2004; hereafter PPET), arguing that its treatment of land in fact represents a radical departure from the Lockean/Smithian schema, inverting ideas about the inherent fecundity of nature, and instantiating a much bleaker reading of human–environment relations. The conclusion returns to a discussion of Arendt and Foucault. Locke's Second Treatise famously placed questions around land at the heart of a theory of government. Private ownership of land, he argued, was the very basis of “civil”—by which he meant civilized—society, “the chief end whereof is the preservation of property” (TT II.85). His work distinguished itself from that of other major 17th-century legal theorists such as Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf, however, by suggesting that private property rights were derived not simply from the use of land, in a general sense, but specifically from the application of labour in order to better the condition of land for cultivation, an idea understood through the distinctively English concept of “improvement.” It was this argument that required Locke to expand at some length on the nature of this labour, and, by extension, on the relations between human and nonhuman life that it encoded. [t]he Labour of his Body, and the Work of his hands,… are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. (TT II.27) As much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property. He by his Labour does, as it were, inclose it from the Common. (TT II.32) For Locke, then, the concept of labour was above all associated with subsistence—understood as the preservation of human life—and it was this irrevocable connection that underpinned justifications for property of all kinds.5 Yet, property in land was not an immutable fact of human existence. In fact, the toil of gathering uncultivated wild goods, and the patient industry of agriculture and husbandry represented, for Locke, starkly divergent modes of human interaction with the natural fertility of the earth, associated with very different phases of human social development. In fact, as various commentators have noted, though not developed in detail, Locke's commentary hints at a notion of the development of societal subsistence in distinct stages. Recent scholarship has helped to reveal this by stressing the central role of animal life in Locke's text (Guha-Majumdar, 2020). Such work captures something essential about Lockean property rights: They are expressed first and foremost not merely in terms of the relations between humans that they necessarily imply, but, more fundamentally, in terms of how they articulate modes of relation between humans and a broader web of life on earth. Nevertheless, these arguments can be extended to think not only about animals, but nonhuman life in general, including plants. [I]f the Fruits rotted, or the Venison putrified, before he could spend it, he offended against the common Law of Nature, and was liable to be punished; he invaded his Neighbour's share… (TT II.37) This was a central point for Locke—humans had a natural right to appropriate plant and animal life, but only insofar as they could make use of these goods before they spoiled. Property over nonhuman life, that is, could be justified only by the preservation of human life. Anything else was an infraction against natural law, and, indeed—what for him amounted to the same thing—the will of God (TT II.31). The impetus of this natural right carried into his theory of government. Though frequently overlooked, the chapter on property in fact hinted at another distinct nonsedentary mode of subsistence, that of pastoralism.6 The implications of this are not developed by Locke, but it seems clear enough that he saw this as implying quite a different mode of interaction between human and nonhuman life. This described a system based around the domestication of animal life, but “without any fixed property in the ground they made use of,” discussing through biblical examples societies that “wandred with their Flocks, and their Herds, which was their substance” (TT II.38). being now not the Fruits of the Earth, and the Beasts that subsist on it, but the Earth it self; as that which takes in and carries with it all the rest (TT II.32) For Locke, then, property in land was explicitly understood in terms of the command over plant and animal life that it grants. While appropriation of land was synonymous with “inclosure” (e.g., TT II.33), it was not simply the erecting of boundaries—real or imagined—that interested Locke. Rather, it was the labour expended in improving the land that explained and justified private appropriation of the earth. subdue the Earth, i.e. improve it for the benefit of Life, and therein lay out upon it something that was his own, his labour (TT II.32) Undoubtedly, by “life,” here, he intended specifically human life. Improvement was thus specifically the process of directing a fertility always-already present in nature by directing it toward the production of those goods that met human needs. The same measures governed the Possession of Land too: Whatsoever he tilled and reaped, laid up and made use of, before it spoit, that was his peculiar Right; whatsoever he enclosed, and could feed and make use of, the Cattle and Product was also his. But if either the Grass of his Inclosure rotted on the Ground, or the Fruit of his planting perished without gathering, and laying up, this part of the Earth, notwithstanding his Inclosure, was still to be looked on as Waste, and might be the Possession of any other. (TT II.38) This so-called no spoilage proviso was accompanied by another qualification of the right to appropriate land, which suggested that, according to the law of nature, this was only justified if there was “enough, and as good left” for others (TT II.33). What is sometimes overlooked, however, is that Locke's provisos were immediately nullified by the introduction of money. His well-known proclamation that “in the beginning all the World was America” occurs in the midst of a discussion of commerce and its relation to property and spoilage, and these words are immediately followed by the less well known, “and more so than that is now; for no such thing as Money was any where known” (TT II.49). [I]t is plain, that Men have agreed to disproportionate and unequal Possession of the Earth, they having by a tacit and voluntary consent found out a way, how a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the overplus, Gold and Silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to any one, these metals not spoileing or decaying in the hands of the possessor. (TT II.50) Indeed, though the implications of this change are only hinted at by Locke, it is even possible to suggest that there is at least a hint here of an additional property regime, one which no longer reflected property relations conceived as expressing the form of a society of subsistence cultivators, but which was instead premised on an extended division of labour, and the primacy of commerce. Although there are doubts amongst scholars regarding the extent to which Locke's comments constitute a stadial history of the kind that came to assume a prominent role in 18th-century thought (Palmeri, 2016), it seems clear that there is at least a nascent sense of distinct regimes of property within the Two Treatises, and also a sense of progress through these regimes.8 Most obviously, the development of agriculture is seen unambiguously as superior when compared with the supposed poverty of hunter-gatherer subsistence, allowing the conversion of unproductive “waste” land to productive cropping and husbandry. To the extent that commerce appears—according to Locke's reasoning—to do away with the problem of spoilage, the introduction of monetized subsistence relations appears too as a clear advance. [C]onsidering the plenty of natural Provisions there was for a long time in the World, and the few spenders,… there would be then little room for Quarrels or Contentions about Property so establish'd. (TT II.31) Here and elsewhere, Locke's writing reveals a concern for the relationship between forms of property and population density at a given stage of development. Later, he clarifies that, “in the Beginning,” though labouring the earth may have provided an original right of property, it was not until “the Increase of People and Stock… had made Land scarce” (TT II.45) that such property rights would have been formalized through a kind of compact between men. There cannot be a clearer demonstration of any thing, than several Nations of the Americans are of this, who are rich in Land, and poor in all the Comforts of Life; … And a King of a large and fruitful Territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day Labourer in England. (TT II.41) Value was created by improving the natural fertility of the land, directing it toward the fulfillment of human needs. In this way, Locke was able to argue that private appropriation, far from diminishing the resources available for others, actually served to increase what he termed “the common stock of mankind” (TT II.37).9 Foucault suggested that it was only somewhat later that saw the sudden irruption of “life” into theories of government, with a new concern for humanity considered as a “species.” But in fact Locke already thought in terms of a human species, using the term explicitly throughout the Two Treatises (e.g., TT II.79), and embedding ideas of population dynamics deep within his political theory. To an extent, he had inherited such a way of thinking from the natural law tradition.10 But in Locke's hands, and especially modulated by English ideas of improvement, this was sharpened into what was already a clear, if still nascent, account of the historicity of human subsistence relations, understood in terms of relations to nonhuman nature. It was this, most importantly, I suggest, that he bequeathed to a tradition that would subsequently give rise to modern political economy. Within The Wealth of Nations, the only direct references to Locke are to other writings on currency, with Locke appearing here as one of Smith's “mercantilist” adversaries.11 Nevertheless, it is clear that Smith was well aware of the content of the Two Treatises, as is evident from the surviving records of his Lectures on Jurisprudence (Meek et al., 2014; hereafter LJ) delivered during his tenure at Glasgow University. The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. (WN I.x.c.12) Yet, he rejected the applicability of a “labour theory of property” beyond the most primitive forms of appropriation.11 Smith's work also diverged from Locke in the crucial respect that it jettisoned the notion of a distinct “state of nature.” In this view, as Foucault aptly noted of the work of Smith's Scottish contemporary Adam Ferguson, “civil society is an historical-natural constant for humanity” (Foucault, 2008). Rather than theorizing a transition from a “natural” state to a “civil” one—which for Locke required positing an instantiating contract between men—Smith instead sought to explain a more gradual development of social institutions.12 Nevertheless, as significant as these differences might be, focusing on them detracts from broader continuities in the overall scope of their arguments, specifically around land and property. Locke's defense of private property had hinged on the claim that, by encouraging the improvement of the earth, this institution served to increase the “common stock of mankind.” Although pointing to supposed examples, in the form of a contrast between the few “conveniences” afforded to Native Americans and the many to day labourers in England, he stopped short of attempting any kind of analytical demonstration of exactly how private property and improvement would increase societal wealth. Nearly a century later, however, Smith attempted precisely such a demonstration. the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages. (WN I.i.11) Within the literature, this parallel has been noted most forcefully by Hont and Ignatieff (2010), who found in both Locke and Smith's work a recognition of an apparent “paradox of commercial society”—as they put it, why was it that a modern society which did not return the whole produce of labour to the labourer provided a better standard of living to the very poorest than the societies of the past? Smith's answer, though developed in much more detail and at vastly greater length, paralleled that already suggested in Locke's Treatises: private property in land, and the improvement that this engendered, was understood as the foundation of a productive societal order based around commerce and an advanced division of labour that ultimately increased resources for all. It was not only these central concerns that the two shared, but also their mode of reasoning by appeal to a conjectural history of human development. In particular, the central place of improvement within The Wealth of Nations led Smith to place a similar emphasis on the ways in which different regimes of property expressed and mediated relations between human and nonhuman life.13 Whereas a sense of societal stages remained largely implicit in Locke's work, in Smith's a stadial history was fully formed. This was laid out in the greatest depth in his Lectures, where he had instructed students explicitly that, “[t]here are four distinct states which mankind passes through:—first, the Age of Hunters; secondly, the Age of Shepherds, thirdly, the Age of Agriculture; and fourthly, the Age of Commerce” (LJ(A) i.27), but the same understanding plays a central role also within The Wealth of Nations.14 The step betwixt these two is of all others the greatest in the progression of society, for by it the notion of property is extended beyond possession, to which it is in the former state confined. When this is once established, it is a matter of no great difficulty to extend this from one subject to another, from herds and flocks to the land itself. (LJ(A) ii.97) When once it has been agreed that a cow or a sheep shall belong to a certain person not only when actually in his possession but where ever it may have strayed, it is absolutely necessary that the hand of government should be continually held up and the community assert their power to preserve the property of the individualls. The chase can no longer be depended on for the support of any one. All the animalls fit for the support of man are in a great measure appropriated. Certain individualls become very rich in flocks and herds, possessed of many cattle and sheep, while others have not one single animall. (LJ(A), iv.21) For Smith, this innovation enabled pastoralists to support a far greater number of individuals on “the same extent of equally fertile territory” (WN IV.vii.c.100). And yet the concentration of animals in a single space necessitated that a shepherd “should frequently change his situation, or at least the place of his pasturing, to find pasture for his cattle” (LJ(A) i.48–49). The most important operations of agriculture seem intended, not so much to increase, though they do that too, as to direct the fertility of nature towards the production of the plants most profitable to man. (WN II.v.12) Through this direction, “the labourers and labouring cattle” (WN II.v.12) were able to produce well in excess of their own subsistence, allowing the further extension of a division of labour, as expressed, in particular, in the historical divide between the agricultural countryside and the trade- and manufacturing-oriented towns (WN III). And yet, as Smith was also keenly aware, especially looking at the condition of parts of his native Scotland, agriculture too raised its own problems in relation to the direction of nature's fertility. In particular, soil could quickly become “entirely exhausted” (WN I.xi.k.3) without careful attention, and the feudal property regimes that had dominated across Europe—and which, for Smith, provided the archetype of the agricultural stage of society—had provided cultivators with neither the resources nor the incentive to maintain the condition of land (WN III.ii). It was this question, in fact, that lay at the heart of Smith's tentative optimism regarding the prospects of a burgeoning fourth, “commercial” stage of society. The little offals of their own table… supply those animals with a part of their food, and they find the rest in the neighbouring fields without doing any sensible damage to any body. (WN I.xi.k.10) But, as he observed, with progressive enclosure and conversion to commercial farming, such “unimproved wilds” (WN I.xi.b.6) were diminishing, decreasing the availability of various subsistence goods, and thus raising their exchangeable value, creating incentives for landowners to convert land specifically to commercial forestry or pasture. In all farms too distant from any town to carry manure from it, that is, in the far greater part of those of every extensive country, the quantity of well-cultivated land must be in proportion to the quantity of manure which the farm itself produces; and this again must be in proportion to the stock of cattle which are maintained upon it. The land is manured either by pasturing the cattle upon it, or by feeding them in the stable, and from thence carrying out their dung to it. (WN I.xi.k.3) By increasing the exchangeable value of animals and increasing conversion of land to pasture, the rise of commerce thus offered new opportunities for improved farming practices. What Smith envisioned, then, was that commercial society would continue to enhance soil fertility until a point at which the “compleat improvement and cultivation” (WN I.xi.k.12) of the country had been reached, at which point it would be “fully peopled” (WN I.ix.14). For Smith, it was not only agriculture that would benefit. Rather, this improved direction of the earth's fertility was the foundation for the advancement of human industry in general and the increase of societal wealth (Steeds, 2022). Here, as in Locke's work, population appeared as the key driver of evolving property relations (Smith, 2020). Each successive societal stage represented, for Smith, an improvement in the mode of relation between human and nonhuman life, such that a greater human population could be sustained, and, indeed, with ever greater access to the “necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life” (WN I.v.1). In this way, his argument, albeit elaborated in far more detail, paralleled central threads of Locke's thought around property. However, while Smith's argument can be read, and indeed has been, as putting forward at least an implicit justification of private property in land,15 as a work of political economy the main conclusions of the text operated on another level, addressing what Smith termed matters of “police.” Key to his intervention in this respect was his introduction of a theory of capital. While his stadial theory suggested that the “natural” course of societal development was one in which the rise of commerce would lead to the improvement of land, Smith's argument was that the misguided policy of European states to date had frustrated this process, through misguided attempts to privilege high-value manufacturing exports in the hope of bringing bullion into the territory. This, he suggested, had held back investment in agriculture, slowing the progress of improvement. His famous promotion of the “natural liberty” (WN IV.ix.51) of the market was premised on the idea that removing government attempts to steer industry would provide the surest means to encourage the natural progress of land improvement and the increasing abundance that this engendered. It was this idea that the growth of capital should be a central focus of government that was to set the direction for political economy in the nineteenth century. Like Locke and Smith, Ricardo put forward an argument that accorded questions around land and improvement a central place. As in Smith's political economic text, the only direct reference to Locke in Ricardo's Principles is to his work on currency (PPET, 369), but unlike Smith, there is no evidence that Ricardo was also familiar with the Two Treatises. The influence of Smith is unambiguous, however, and indeed much of the work is set up as a response to The Wealth of Nations. The writer, in combating received opinions, has found it necessary to advert more particularly to those passages in the writings of Adam Smith from which he sees reason to differ; but he hopes it will not, on that account, be suspected that he does not, in common with all those who acknowledge the importance of the science of Political Economy, participate in the admiration which the profound work of this celebrated author so justly excites. (PPET, 6) This preface accordingly outlines a number of distinctly familiar themes, from a concern for agriculture and the way that the “produce of the earth” is realized by