Towards an Embodied Citizenship - Part I: The Ancient City

Beyond its use-value, property serves a psychological, symbolic—even spiritual—function as an index for identity.

There is a noble, if neglected, vein running through the Western tradition according to which communal membership and political participation had its ground in ownership: To be a member of a community was to own a piece of that community.

Plato and the Prophets

In his final work, Plato argued that each household in his ideal city ought to receive a land allotment or “kleros” (κλῆρος). Says his “Athenian stranger:”

“As a further consequence of what has preceded I would enact another law of the following type … there must be no place for penury in any section of the population, nor yet for opulence … the legislator must now specify the limit in either direction. So let the limit on the side of penury be the value of an allotment; this must remain constant, and no magistrate, and no other person who is ambitious of a repute for goodness must connive, in any case, at its diminution. The legislator will take it as a measure, and permit the acquisition of twice, thrice, and as much as four times its value.”

—Plato, The Laws V:744

As an aside, while Plato maintains that collective ownership over land by all citizens would be ideal, recommending these private, household allotments as a concession to Greek character or human nature, Aristotle provides an excellent critique of his master’s opinion when commenting on The Republic:

“…there is a point at which a state may attain such a degree of unity as to be no longer a state, or…become an inferior state, like harmony passing into unison, or rhythm which has been reduced to a single foot.”

—Aristotle, Politics, II:5

As in the Greek tradition, the Biblical plan for Israel was that it come into its promised land not as a state attaining “such a degree of unity as to be no longer a state,” but with each of her tribes (excluding the Levites) and families in turn coming into a portion of that land, where familial and tribal land is indivisible:

“The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers.”

—Leviticus 25:23

The salient concept here, for Plato and Aristotle as for Leviticus, is that the city or nation is not a uniform category within which tribes, families and individuals are interchangeable (something like the modern, liberal, nation as social contract), but consists of distinct parts that should each own (or act as caretaker to) some physical portion of the whole specific to themselves.

We find this doctrine in archaic Rome. Long before Plato (indeed, by most reckonings, before even Pythagoras) there lived Numa Pompilius, the semi-mythical king of Rome and successor to Romulus whose doctrines anticipate those of the Greek philosophical tradition according to historians of late antiquity. Writes Plutarch:

“… the portion of lands which the Romans possessed at the beginning was very narrow, until Romulus enlarged them by war; all those acquisitions Numa now divided amongst the indigent commonalty, wishing to do away with that extreme want which is a compulsion to dishonesty, and, by turning the people to husbandry, to bring them, as well as their lands, into better order. For there is no employment that gives so keen and quick a relish for peace as husbandry and a country life, which leave in men all that kind of courage that makes them ready to fight in defence of their own, while it destroys the licence that breaks out into acts of injustice and rapacity. Numa, therefore … divided all the lands into several parcels, to which he gave the name of pagus, or parish, and over every one of them he ordained chief overseers; and, taking a delight sometimes to inspect his colonies in person, he formed his judgment of every man’s habits by the results; of which being witness himself, he preferred those to honours and employments who had done well, and by rebukes and reproaches incited the indolent and careless to improvement.”

In fact, according to the historiographical tradition, Numa was not only a “distributist” philosopher king, but also a sort of “guild socialist” or “corporatist:”

“But of all his measures the most commended was his distribution of the people by their trades into companies or guilds…”

—Plutarch, Parallel Lives: Numa Pompilius

Nations as Inherited Land Covenants

The above link between political membership of a community and propertied co-ownership of that community also appears in pre-modern accounts of the founding of nations, which are often imagined as ancestral, inherited, land covenants.

Prominently, the Book of Jubilees, which is partly an expanded version of Genesis describes Europeans as descending from a common patriarch, a son of Noah, who receives the continent of Europe as his inheritance and in turn divides it up between his seven sons, the originators of seven primordial European nations, so to speak. This influenced the medieval self-conception of Europeans as heirs to a common land, downstream recipients of a patriarchal blessing. We find this in St. Jerome (4^th century) and St. Isidore of Seville’s (7^th century) highly influential works, and the concept was still current when Martin Luther invoked it in his writings.

We may argue, then, that the implicit understanding in much of the Hellenic and Biblical worldview is that, beyond its use-value, property (including the co-ownership of that common home that nationhood implies) serves a psychological, symbolic and even spiritual function as index for identity. This describes not only individual property and that of the nuclear family, but also the grounding of wider layers of community.

The Commons

Indeed, today, we have empirical evidence that communal property at the level of a neighbourhood or village does not, contrary to the economic liberal’s assumptions, necessarily (or even probably) lead to a so-called “tragedy of the commons.”

As Nobel-prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom has shown, sustainable management of communal resources and avoidance of overexploitation can occur indefinitely over many generations so long as certain key “design principles” are observed, one of which is “clearly defined boundaries.” In Governing the Commons, Ostrom notes that “individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the common-pool resource (CPR) must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself.”

I know myself as a member of a community (and am inclined to care for that community) when I use its walkways and toss loose branches out of my path after a strong wind. This sense of caretaking can apply to different contexts. It is better, for example, for children to think of their school as co-owned by their parents and take a period at the end of some schooldays to clean their classroom (as is apparently the case in some Japanese schools), rather than for a foreign, culturally alienated, economically exploited janitorial staff to do the same.

Work should connect us to a resource that represents some community of which we are members. Work and belonging should be of a piece, just as mind should not be divorced from body, or finance from the real economy. Simon Weil describes this principle beautifully:

“Participation in collective possessions—a participation consisting not in any material enjoyment, but in a feeling of ownership—is a no less important need [to mere use-value]…Where a real civic life exists, each one feels he has a personal ownership in the public monuments, gardens, ceremonial pomp and circumstance…But it isn’t just the State which ought to provide this satisfaction; it is every sort of collectivity in turn. A great modern factory is a waste from the point of view of the need of property; for it is unable to provide either the workers, or the manager…with the least satisfaction in connection with this need. When methods of exchange and acquisition are…a waste of material and moral foods, it is time they were transformed…”

Here, we have the traditional ideal vision of organically nested communities, from family to town to nation to wider federation or civilisation, each existing not as mere legal fiction but grounded by a corresponding “commons” in which its members may participate, from which they may benefit materially as well as taking psychological enjoyment, and through which they represent their belonging in a given community to themselves. Of course, these members must be enfranchised by individual property, as well as a satisfactory purchasing power and living standard.

Having established the principle at stake and its historical pedigree, we may move onto its relevance and what practical policy it might lead us to support.