Part 4

Should it not be robbery to take the possessions of people who accumulated them for hundreds and thousands of years? Yes, but how did these upper classes accumulate their property and riches? Tolstoy replies on this question together with his teacher Proudhon: They heaped up their properties by theft from other people. La propriété c’est le vol, said Proudhon. Sobstvenost est koren zla (Property is the root of evil), continues his disciple, by the same axiomatic language as the master.

Is this statement categorical? From the standpoint of Proudhon and Tolstoy it is, but from the point of view of economists this doctrine is at fault. The Russian iconoclast, Tolstoy, like the American advocate of Single Tax, George, maintains that the land question may be solved simply by restoration of the land to the people who work on it. This is, undoubtedly, the best, the easiest, and quickest way to make private property common and equitable, but what do history and economics say of this quaestio vexata.

It is not needful here to go with historians and jurists far beyond the Greek and Roman lawyers in this inquiry. Let us begin the discussion with Plato and Aristotle. We know already that Plato in his Republic is a communist. He permits no citizen to have any property of his own beyond what is absolutely necessary. The land is divided into equal parts among all the citizens, in order that all may be interested in the defence of the country. This communism of Plato was vigorously combated by Aristotle in a brief passage of The Politics, which contains many of the best arguments since used on that side of the controversy. However, Aristotle was not an exclusive individualist. He wants in a state, Private property and common use. In Plato’s judgment, the state should be governed in the reverse way, Common property and private use. In Greek history we find a constant struggle about these questions of inequality among people and private dominion of land. But the ideas of communism and social possessions among ancient nations are prevalent. The learned historian, Theo. Mommsen, in his Roemische Geschichte stated that in the earliest times the arable land was cultivated in common, and it was not till later that land came to be distributed among the burgesses as their own property. Mommsen’s thesis is based on the quotations of Cicero, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Plutarch. In later time it is supported by the historian, P. Viollet, economist E. de Laveley, sociologists Ch. Letourneau, Sir Henry Main, and almost all socialist writers.

During the Middle Ages the idea of common ownership was theoretically maintained by church Fathers and their followers, on the basis of Christ’s teaching which perpetually sympathized with the poor. St. Fathers regarded community of goods as the ideal order of society, private property as a necessary evil, trade as an occupation hardly compatible with the character of a devout Christian, and the receipt of interest for the use of money as altogether sinful. They said that individual property is contrary to the Divine Law, therefore Omnia debent esse communia. These principles could never be applied with logical severity. Ecclesiastics theoretically preached equality of men, and in practice they were the wealthiest class among other classes. Roderigo Borgia, later Pope Alexander VI, was one of the richest men of his time. The luxury, immorality and privileged wealth of clergy caused the Reformation, but the Reformation could not restrain the clergy from acquiring immense private possessions. Communism of the Middle Ages was then a pure utopia, as it is today.

In the philosophy of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries the institution of private property was justified by many jurisconsults, reformers, and philosophers who, based their teachings on human nature. Among these are significant theories of Grotius, Locke, Hobbes, Thiers, and Coulanges. In opposition to these writers we find, throughout the French Revolution and later on, the writers who assailed private property as pernicious. Rousseau expressed himself with all his fervid eloquence upon this theme, and he found a large public to sympathize with his declamations. Rousseau was the inspirer of those revolutionary writers, inferior in genius but equally daring, who helped to diffuse his doctrines. Mirabeau and Robespierre were also Rousseau’s adherents. Even the socialists, though they have dropped some of his first principles and have adopted some of the conclusions of modern science, have inherited no small portion of his spirit.

In America we find many of Rousseau’s followers who were inspired by philosophers of the French Revolution. Among these followers is Henry George, and in Russia, Tolstoy. The difference between these two reformers is that George would put the rent of real property in the hand of government for better and more righteous taxation than is now the case. Tolstoy, meanwhile, is against all taxation, because it can only be collected by force, and all force is forbidden by Christ. George is for nationalization of land, Tolstoy for full communalization, against all government and all state ownership.

Tolstoy is, indubitably, influenced by Rousseau, Proudhon, and anarcho-communistic writers of the nineteenth century. His teaching of property has many elements of chimerical schemes, sometimes confounded with mediaeval communism and Christian primitive utopias, sometimes with anarchistic principles which reject both private and social property. The labor question is solved by Tolstoy simply in the destruction of private ownership and in the distribution of land to the people who work manually. Mental labor and intellectual production are ignored and disdained. In many books printed during Tolstoy’s life we find “no rights reserved”. Literary property, accordingly, is the common property of mankind. Ideas and facts are free to all men. There are no patents and copyrights of mental exertions cum privilegio. The author of a work has no right of property in the book he has made; he took the common stock and worked it over, and one man has just as good a right to it as another. If the author is allowed to be the owner of his works, the public are deprived of their rights. The immaterial property in writing is in the same degree a robbery as it is material.

Finally, literary labor does not belong to this question. According to Tolstoy’s interpretation, inventions, arts, literature, and science, are privileged only to the higher classes. The class of people exclusively occupied with physical labor nowhere read books, neither have the masses learned from books to plough, to make kvas, to weave, to make shoes, to build huts, to sing songs, or even to pray.

Of this Tolstoy’s criticism of literature, science, and private property, were cogent objections. He was called an utopian, a sophist, an inconsistent author who speaks one thing and works something else. Some called him charlatan, destroyer of sacred institutions, and a man who did not know what he was preaching. These epithets remind one of that which Jean Bodin gave to Machiavelli calling him a “butt of invective”, and “wretched man”, or of those names which Voltaire gave Rousseau honoring him as a “Punchinello of letters”, “the fanfaron of ink”, “arch-madman”, “scoundrel”, “mountebank”, and other choice epithets.

Such criticism might be valuable and apropos to a certain sort of newspapers, but not to serious investigators and critics. Throwing this kind of adjectives at an author, does not mean that he is really wrong. Indeed, Tolstoy’s doctrine of abolishing individual ownership constitutes no valid grounds for criticism of the historic right of private property in land. Most of his great expectations would not be realized. The problems of wealth distribution, land, and money, are much deeper and more complex than he presumed. They cannot be explained solely by a theory, nor solved by refusing to serve in military and state obligations. They are the inheritance of the present generation from a long past, the resultant of a complex of forces, material and spiritual, political, economic, moral, and social. They can only be unraveled by a most minute and careful study of historical records, interpreted by the aid of the best results of the thought of economists, sociologists, and politicians. And yet, in many ways, Tolstoy aided the solution of these problems. He helped to accelerate it by the example he set of earnestness, altruism, and intense devotion to ideals which he made the creed of future society.

FOOTNOTES:

See these quotations on Solon and Lycurgus in Property, by Ch. Letourneau, ch. XIV, sec. V, 6.

That property was created by law it is proved by Montesquieu and Bentham. In the Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu argues that civil law is Paladium of property, and as the people acquired by political laws liberty, so they acquired by the civil laws property. [The Spirit of Laws, book XXVI, ch. 15].--In The Principles of Civil Code, by J. Bentham, we find the same idea expressed in these words: “Property is entirely the creature of law.... Property and law are born and must die together. Before the laws, there was no property; take away the laws, all property ceases”. [The Principles of the Civil Code, pt. I, ch. VIII].

Cf. Ch. Letourneau, Property, ch. XIV and XV. See also Aristotle’s Politics, bk. I, ch. VIII.

Cf. F. de Coulange, Cité Antique, English by W. Small, 1901, book II, ch. VIII, p. 120.

What Shall We Do Then, ch. XXI. p. 163.

Cf. Qu’est ce que la Propriété, 1840, English translation by B. Tucker, 1876, First Memoir, ch. I.

What Shall We Do Then, ch. 39. Wiener’s ed. p. 318.

Plato’s view on property is expressed in The Republic, bk. III, IV, V and VIII. Then in The Laws, bk. III, where he speaks of distribution of land and equalizing of property. In the same work, he further on says that property does not belong to the individual but to the whole family, and property and family alike belong to the State, The Laws, b. XI.

“I do not think”, says Aristotle, “that property ought to be common”. [The Politics, bk. VII, ch. 10]. On the other place he argues that there are two things which principally inspire mankind with care and affection, namely, the sense of what is one’s own, and exclusive possession. [The Politics, bk. II, ch. IV]

In aeltester Zeit das Ackerland gemeinschaftlich, wahrscheinlich nach den einzelnen Geschlechtsgenossenschaften bestellt und erst der Ertrag unter die einzelnen dem Geschlecht angehoerigen Haeuser vertheilt ward ... erst spaeter das Land unter die Buerger zu Sondereigenthum aufgetheilt ward. [Roemische Geschichte, 2te Auflage, 1856, bd. I, st. 171-72.]

Tum [zur Zeit des Romulus] erat res in pecore et locorum possessionibus, ex quo pecuniosi et locupletos vocabantur.-- primum agros, quos bello Romulus ceperat, divisit viritim civibus. [Cited by Mommsen from De Republica, 2, 9, 14.]

Du Caractere Collectif des Premieres Propriétés Immobilieres, 1872.

De la Propriété et de ses Formese Primitives, 1874. [English tr. 1878].

L’Evolution de la Propriété, 1888. [English translation, 1892].

Ancient Law, ch. VIII. London, 1861.

Especially P. Lafargue, The Evolution of Property, 1908.

On this Pope, Professor P. Villari says: “One of his strongest passions was an insatiable greed for gold ... he accumulated the immense fortune that served to raise him to the papacy”.... See Storia di Girolamo Savonarola e de’ suvi tempi, 1859. English by Ll. Villari, 1909, ch. IX, 152.