THE COLLECTED WORKS OF THORSTEIN VEBLEN: Business Theories, Economic Articles & Essays. Thorstein Veblen
of a pecuniary liquidation seems to have been wholly remote from the range of ideas - habits of thought - on which these relations and duties were originally based.
This is not the place for research into the origin and the primitive phases of ownership, nor even for inquiry into the views of property current in the early days of the Western culture. But the views current on this head at present - the principles which guide men's thinking and roughly define the right limits of discretion in pecuniary matters - this common-sense apprehension of what are the proper limits, rights, and responsibilities of ownership, is an outgrowth of the traditions, experiences, and speculations of past generations. Therefore some notice of the character of these traditional views and the circumstances out of which they have arisen in the recent past is necessary to an understanding of the part which they play in modern life.40 The theory of property professed at a given time and in a given cultural region shows what is the habitual attitude of men, for the time being, on questions of ownership; for any theory that gains widespread and uncritical acceptance must carry a competent formulation of the deliverances of common sense on the matter with which it deals. Otherwise it will not be generally accepted. And such a commonplace view is in its turn an outcome of protracted experience on the part of the community.
The modern theories of property run back to Locke,41 or to some source which for the present purpose is equivalent to Locke; who, on this as on other institutional questions, has been proved by the test of time to be a competent spokesman for modern culture in these premises. A detailed examination of how the matter stood in the theoretical respect before Locke, and whence, and by what process of selection and digestion, Locke derived his views, would lead too far afield. The theory is sufficiently familiar, for in substance it is, and for the better part of two centuries has been, held as an article of common sense by nearly all men who have spoken for the institution of property, with the exception of some few and late doubters.42
This modern European, common-sense theory says that ownership is a "Natural Right." What a man has made, whatsoever "he hath mixed his labor with," that he has thereby made his property. It is his to do with it as he will. He has extended to the object of his labor that discretionary control which in the nature of things he of right exercises over the motions of his own person. It is his in the nature of things by virtue of his having made it. "Thus labor, in the beginning, gave a right of property." The personal force, the functional efficiency of the workman shaping material facts to human use, is in this doctrine accepted as the definitive, axiomatic ground of ownership; behind this the argument does not penetrate, except it be to trace the workman's creative efficiency back to its ulterior source in the creative efficiency of the Deity, the "Great Artificer." With the early spokesmen of natural rights, whether they speak for ownership or for other natural rights, it is customary to rest the case finally on the creator's discretionary dispositions and workmanlike efficiency. But the reference of natural rights back to the choice and creative work of the Deity has, even in Locke, an air of being in some degree perfunctory; and later in the life-history of the natural-rights doctrine it falls into abeyance; whereas the central tenet, that ownership is a natural right resting on the productive work and the discretionary choice of the owner, gradually rises superior to criticism and gathers axiomatic certitude. The Creator presently, in the course of the eighteenth century, drops out of the theory of ownership.
It may be worth while to indicate how this ultimate ground of ownership, as conceived by modern common sense, differs from the ground on which rights of the like class were habitually felt to rest in mediaeval times. Customary authority was the proximate ground to which rights, powers, and privileges were then habitually referred. It was felt that if a clear case of devolution from a superior could be made out, the right claimed was thereby established; and any claim which could not be brought to rest on such an act, or constructive act, of devolution was felt to be in a precarious case. The superior from whom rights, whether of ownership or otherwise, devolved held his powers by a tenure of prowess fortified by usage; the inferior upon whom given rights and powers devolved held what fell to his lot by a tenure of service and fealty sanctioned by use and wont. The relation was essentially a personal one, a relation of status, of authority and subservience. Hereditary standing gave a presumption of ownership, rather than conversely. In the last resort the chain of devolution by virtue of which all rights and powers of the common man pertained to him was to be traced back through a sequence of superiors to the highest, sovereign secular authority, through whom in turn it ran back to God. But neither in the case of the temporal sovereign nor in that of the divine sovereign was it felt that their competence to delegate or devolve powers and rights rested on a workmanlike or creative efficiency. It was not so much by virtue of His office as creator as it was by virtue of His office as suzerain that the Deity was felt to be the source and arbiter of human rights and duties. In the course of cultural change, as the medieval range of ideas and of circumstances begins to take on a more modern complexion, God's creative relation to mundane affairs is referred to with growing frequency and insistence in discussions of all questions of this class; but for the purpose in hand His creative relation to human rights does not supersede His relation of sovereignty until the modern era is well begun. It may be said that God's tenure of office in the medieval conception of things was a tenure by prowess, and men, of high and low degree, held their rights and powers of Him by a servile tenure. Ownership in this scheme was a stewardship. It was a stewardship proximately under the discretion of a secular lord, more remotely under the discretion of the divine Overlord. And the question then pressing for an answer when a point of competency or legitimacy was raised in respect of any given human arrangement or institution was not, What hath God wrought? but, What hath God ordained?
This medieval range of conceptions first began to break down and give place to modern notions in Italy, in the Renaissance. But it was in the English-speaking communities that the range of ideas upon which rests the modern concept of natural rights first gathered form and reached a competent expression. This holds true with respect to the modern doctrines of natural rights as contrasted with the corresponding ancient doctrines. The characteristically modern traits of the doctrine of natural rights are of English derivation. This is peculiarly true as regards the natural right of ownership. The material, historical basis of this English right of ownership, considered as a habit of thought, is given by the modern economic factors of handicraft and trade, in contrast with the medieval institutions of status and prowess. England, as contrasted with the Continent, during modern times rapidly substituted the occupation of the merchant and the ubiquitous free artisan as the tone-giving factors of her everyday life, in place of the prince, the soldier, and the priest. With this change in the dominant interests of everyday life came a corresponding change in the discipline given by the habits of everyday life, which shows itself in the growth of a new range of ideas as to the meaning of human life and a new ground of finality for human institutions. New axioms of right and truth supplant the old as new habits of thought supersede the old.
This process of substitution, as a struggle between rival concepts of finality in political theory, reached a dramatic climax in the revolution of 1688. As a battle of axioms the transition comes to a head in the controversy between John Locke and Sir Robert Filmer. Filmer was the last effective spokesman of the medieval axiom of devolution. Locke's tracing of natural rights, the right of property among the rest, back to the workmanlike performance of the Creator, marks the form in which, at the point of transition, the modern view pays its respects to the superseded axiom of devolution and takes leave of it.
The scope given to the right of ownership in later modern times is an outgrowth of the exigencies of mercantile traffic, of the prevalence of purchase and sale in a "money economy." The habits of thought enforced by these exigencies and by the ubiquitous and ever recurring resort to purchase and sale decide that ownership must naturally, normally, be absolute ownership, with free and unqualified discretion in the use and disposal of the things owned. Social expediency may require particular limitations of this full discretion, but such limitations are felt to be exceptional derogations from the "natural" scope of the owner's discretion.
On the other hand, the metaphysical ground of this right of ownership, the ultimate