In the previous posting on this subject, we looked at William Cobbett, to whom some have referred as “the Apostle of Distributism,” meaning a sort of proto advocate of small ownership. Of course, in some cases, the people who attach such a label have little understanding of what ownership consists. We can sum up what Cobbett was talking about by quoting American statesman Daniel Webster: “Power naturally and necessarily follows property.”
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| Daniel Webster |
As far as Cobbett was concerned, if you do not control the means of production, you are totally at the behest of those who do — the legal definition of slavery. In what some regard as hyperbole, but which is simply the logical conclusion to be drawn from the proletarian (i.e., non-owning) condition, he declared,
Freedom is not an empty sound; it is not an abstract idea; it is not a thing that nobody can feel. It means, — and it means nothing else, — the full and quiet enjoyment of your own property. If you have not this, if this be not well secured to you, you may call yourself what you will, but you are a slave. (William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (1827), § 456.)
Political rights? Voting? Social welfare programs? In common with Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin a century later, Cobbett considered them irrelevant, misguided, or downright evil, however well-intentioned . . . although he usually questioned the intent; his rhetoric tended to the conspiratorial. As far as Cobbett was concerned, social welfare run by government or an established church, instead of private charity and programs run by an independent church, were simply additional ways in which the owning ruling elite controlled non-owners. As he said,
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| William Cobbett |
You may twist the word freedom as long as you please, but at last it comes to quiet enjoyment of your own property, or it comes to nothing. Why do men want any of those things that are called political rights and privileges? Why do they, for instance, want to vote at elections for members of parliament? Oh! because they shall then have an influence over the conduct of those members. And of what use is that? Oh! Then they will prevent the members from doing wrong. What wrong? Why, imposing taxes that ought not to be paid. That is all; that is the use, and the only use, of any right or privilege that men in general can have. (Ibid.)
The question becomes how those whom Cobbett described as the free peasantry and yeomanry of Catholic England degenerated into the de facto slaves he saw populating the Protestant Great Britain of his day.
Readers with a tolerance for polemics can get a good overview of the process from a political and social perspective by reading Cobbett’s history of the Reformation. His analysis of the politics of the Reformation in England (despite the title, Cobbett does not say very much about Ireland) is good, up to a point.
Similarly, Cobbett’s understanding and presentation of the political revolutions, especially his comparison of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution of 1776, serves to orient readers. As articulated by Cobbett, it explains how ordinary people of the early nineteenth century viewed the political process and the role of government.
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| Adam Smith |
Both as an individualist and a populist, however, Cobbett had an inadequate grasp of the import of the Financial and Industrial Revolutions. He also laid more blame for the situation on the motives of the English religious reformers of the sixteenth century than the evidence supports. They excelled at taking advantage of the economic, political and, yes, religious situation for their personal benefit but cannot be said to have created it. Cobbett’s analyses of the effects of profound changes in finance and production following the Reformation are good, but those same analyses betray an unconscious failure to understand sound principles of money, credit, banking, and economics.
Cobbett was not alone in this. Even so profound a thinker as the moral philosopher Adam Smith (1723-1790) failed to realize the true import of some key aspects of his own economic and social thought, as we hope to see in the next posting on this subject.
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