Henry George, Emile de Laveleye, and the Issue of Peasant Proprietorship

I Introduction ROBERT ANDELSON timed the first edition of The Critics of Henry George to celebrate the centennial of Progress and Poverty. The appearance of a second and enlarged edition a quarter of a century later was testimony to the growing interest in reexamining the debates between George and his critics. All who are interested in Henry George and who wish to learn about the reception that his work received can be grateful to Dr. Andelson for bringing together in one set of volumes these critiques of George by significant and influential writers on the land question. This paper discusses one of those critics, Emile de Laveleye, a man who studied the land question as carefully as did Henry George, who provided some of the important evidence upon which George based his conclusions, who saw much to praise in George's work, and who was in considerable, though not complete, agreement with George on the importance of the land question to the social problem of poverty. However, de Laveleye differed with George on the solution to the problem and on the roles of capital and government. De Laveleye was an informed and careful critic, and his analysis can contribute to understanding George's proposals and to evaluating their application in the 21st century. II Primitive Property EMILE DE LAVELEYE (1822-1892) was a Belgian scholar and professor of political economy at the University of Liege. He was a contemporary of Henry George, and his major work was, like George's, a study of the land question. His most famous book, De La propriete et de ses formes primitives, was published in 1873. The English translation by G. R. L. Marriott appeared in 1878, with the title Primitive Property. It is an investigation, across all the continents, of the early forms of property in land. The two men were familiar with each other's work. In Progress and Poverty George quoted from Primitive Property (1) and from an important paper that de Laveleye had given at London's Cobden Club. (2) Within a year of the publication of Progress and Poverty, de Laveleye had written a review of that book, and in 1882 he wrote a 21-page critique in the Contemporary Review. Both men explored the relationship between the distribution of land and the social evil of poverty. Both were convinced that the root of that evil was to be found in humanity's unequal access to land. De Laveleye's studies led him to conclude that the form of private property familiar to us today is a recent development, that in every society's past the soil was held in common by communities bound by kinship. A characteristic of this communal land holding was that the period of time for which an individual had exclusive use of a plot of land was limited, usually to a few years, at the end of which time land was redistributed among the members of the commune. But: notwithstanding the periodic partition of lands, it is always to the advantage of the cultivator to till it well, as he alone takes the harvest, be it good or bad. This practice, therefore, strange as it appears, does not prevent the usufructuaries giving the soil good manure and proper dressings. (1878: 30) A parallel passage from Progress and Poverty illustrates how fully George and de Laveleye agree that private property in land is not a necessary condition for production. All that is necessary is the right to the fruits of one's labor. What is necessary for the use of land is not its private ownership, but the security of improvements. It is not necessary to say to a man, "this land is yours," in order to induce him to cultivate or improve it. It is only necessary to say to him, "whatever your labor or capital produces on this land shall be yours." Give a man security that he may reap and he will sow.... The ownership of land has nothing to do with it. (1992: Book VIII, Ch 1:398) As the Russian mir testified, communal holding of land had not completely disappeared by the late 19th century. …