The State by Anthony de Jasay Read Online Free PDF Page B

large extent produced by these very arrangements, so that political institutions are either addictive like some drugs, or allergy-inducing like some others, or both, for they may be one thing for some people and the other for others. If so, theories that people in general (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau), or the ruling class (Marx, Engels), mount the political arrangements that suit them, need be approached with much mistrust. Conversely, the view (Max Weber's) that historical outcomes are largely unintended, deserves a préjugé favorable as the more promising approximation to many of the relations linking state and subject.
     
    1.1. 9
     
    Author: Jasay, Anthony de Title: The State
     
    Anthony de Jasay
     
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    1. The Capitalist StateTitle and Contract The state is a capitalist state if it does not demand ownership to be justified, and does not interfere for his own good with a person's contracts.
     
The origin of capitalist ownership is that "finders are keepers."
     
This is the acknowledgement that permits the passage from possession to ownership, to good title to property, independently of its particularities, of who the title-holder may be and also of the use he may or may not make of the property. The state which recognized title to property on this ground (though it may do so on other grounds as well) fulfils one of the necessary conditions of being a "capitalist state" in the sense I am using here (a sense which will become very clear as I proceed). The title is not invalidated by scarcity, is contingent neither upon merit nor status, and entails no obligation. The reference to scarcity may need some elucidation. What I mean is that if a man can own an acre, he can own a million acres. If his title is good, it is good regardless of whether, in Locke's famous words, "enough and as good" is left for others. Ownership is not invalidated by the scarcity of the things owned nor by the non-owners' desire for it, so that in a capitalist state access to scarce goods is regulated by price and substitution and not by sovereign authority, however constituted.
     
Those brought up on the notions of primitive accumulation, division of labour and appropriation of surplus value as the source of continuing accumulation, might balk at this manner of approaching the origin of capital and the essence of the capitalist state. No doubt very little capital has ever been "found" and a lot has been accumulated. Moreover, to both Marxists and perhaps
    most non-Marxists it might look like putting the cart before the horse to proceed from the "relations of production" (which, as Plamenatz has demonstrated, mean relations of ownership "if they are to have any identity at all")*10 to the "means of production," the things owned. Yet it is not, or at least not generally, a change in the means of production or in the techniques applied to them, that transforms them into capitalist property. Land held by any major French or German noble family down to the Thirty Years' War was owned by it in the most tenuous sense only. It was a means of production but assuredly not capitalist property in the manner of English or Italian land. Land owned by the English nobility and gentry from the sixteenth century on, can rightly be regarded as capital and has in fact served as the main springboard of English capitalism. Shipping and other mercantile accumulation of capital got off to a flying start in late Tudor and Stuart times due, in great part, to the stakes put up by landowners. Non-capitalist (I am advisedly avoiding the term "feudal") tenure of land usually originated in service and continued on the strength of a (more or less well founded and realistic) expectation of future service. This was true of the landlord who was supposed to owe service, directly or indirectly, to the sovereign, and of his serfs who owed service to him.*11 It is characteristic of English social evolution that land tenure became so rapidly unconditional, and that such