“For the land is Mine”:
The Hebrew Commonwealth and the Rise of Redistribution
Eric Nelson
Harvard University
It is one of the great ironies in the history of European political thought that republicanism has come to be associated with the redistribution of wealth. For contemporary political theorists—particularly those in the Anglophone tradition, but increasingly those on the Continent as well—a chief attraction of the republican perspective has been the belief that, unlike liberalisms of various sorts, republicanism incorporates a robust critique of economic inequality, as well as a commitment to its rectification. Thus, in Philip Pettit’s influential recent account, the republican view of freedom as “non-domination,” unlike the liberal view of freedom as the absence of interference or impediment, is to be preferred in large part because it validates the intuition that economic dependence (for example, that of a worker on his employer, or that of society in general on a large corporation) is a form of unfreedom with important civic consequences.[1] In a similar vein, communitarian writers have become interested in the republican alternative because of their conviction that “a good society must constrain extreme inequalities,” and that “redistributive measures are necessary to maintain moral equality, to express compassion for fellow citizens, and to reflect the broader prudential interdependencies that are part of any genuine civil association.”[2] Michael Sandel, for one, has defended “the republican tradition” on the grounds that it “teaches that severe inequality undermines freedom by corrupting the character of both rich and poor and destroying the commonality necessary to self-government.”[3] The republican reply to contemporary liberalism, then, consists largely in the claim that the state should redistribute wealth in order to guarantee the sort of rough equality that makes civic self-government sustainable.
Before pointing out the irony of this account, it is important to acknowledge its force. It is, after all, undoubtedly the case that the “priority of liberty” in present-day liberal political philosophy significantly constrains the range of responses it can offer to the problem of economic inequality. Even John Rawls, however strongly he might reject the perspective of his more libertarian critics, nonetheless insists that inequality per se is not inconsistent with the principles of justice. On his view, as long as the position of the least well-off social group is improved under a particular economic arrangement, it does not matter that the arrangement in question might improve the situation of the most fortunate to a greater degree.[4] The only relevant question is whether some rival scheme might be envisioned that would make the least advantaged even better off; if so, the latter would be preferred even if it would result in greater inequality. So the notion that contemporary liberalism is, to a certain degree, indifferent to the demands of equality seems reasonably uncontroversial. It is also the case that, beginning in the middle of the seventeenth century, an important strand of republican political theory developed which did indeed advocate the imposition of a rough equality in holdings—and to that degree can certainly be recruited to challenge the liberal perspective. What is not appreciated, however, is that this seventeenth-century development represented the most dramatic possible break with the earlier tradition of republican thought, which had accorded enormous respect to private property rights, and had exhibited a particular horror of coercive attempts to redistribute wealth. It was this earlier brand of republican politics, and not its redistributive rival, which defended the idea of freedom as “non-domination”—a fact which suggests that contemporary republicans are engaged in the somewhat dubious enterprise of reviving a tradition of thought that never existed. The purpose of this chapter is to explain how and why republicanism became redistributive, and to highlight the ways in which this redistributive republicanism is incompatible with the express commitments of the contemporary writers who claim it for their own. My suggestion is that here again the Hebrew revival emerges as a transformative force. It was the meditation on Biblical land law—seen through the prism of rabbinic commentaries—which convinced a new generation of republican writers to reexamine the antipathy toward redistribution they had inherited from their forebears.
I
To a truly remarkable degree, early-modern debates over what we now call “distributive justice” took the form of debates about the Roman agrarian laws.[5] This in itself is a somewhat surprising fact, since these laws did not, strictly speaking, affect private property. Under Roman law, lands captured in war or bequeathed to Rome by foreign princes were designated ager publicus, “public land.” The uncultivated portions of this public territory were, in theory, meant to be distributed in small parcels among Roman citizens, who would then farm the land and pay a tithe to the republic. In reality, however, patricians quickly acquired vast tracts of the uncultivated ager publicus, often by means of fraud and violence, and then neglected to pay the required tax—a practice which provoked the ire of even some of the most rabidly anti-plebeian Roman authors. However, by the time of the Gracchan laws (133 and 122 BCE) these large estates had been in private hands for generations, and had acquired the aura of private property. As a result, the debate over the ager publicus—both in ancient Rome and in early-modern Europe—came to be regarded as much more than a simple controversy over the distribution of Roman public land. It emerged instead as a debate over the question of whether the commonwealth ought to impose limits on private landholding.
Beginning in the fifth century BCE, tribunes periodically proposed laws designed to redivide the ager publicus and distribute it among the plebs; such laws became known as leges agrariae (“agrarian laws”).[6] It is an article of faith of the surviving Latin sources (almost all of them sympathetic to the patrician cause) that these agrarian laws constituted unjust expropriations of private property, and that the controversy surrounding their proposal and passage ultimately brought about the fall of the republic. Speaking of the land law put forward by the tribune Spurius Cassius in 486 BCE, Livy observes pointedly that “this was the first proposal for agrarian legislation, and from that day to within living memory it has never been brought up without occasioning the greatest instability” (II.41).[7] Livy’s Roman successors were even more emphatic on this subject, but they directed their animus chiefly toward the agrarian program of Tiberius and Caius Gracchus. In Lucan’s Pharsalia, the Gracchi, “who dared to bring about immoderate things” (ausosque ingentia Gracchos) appear in the underworld alongside other famous Roman traitors in the “criminal crowd” (turba nocens) which rejoices at Rome’s civil war, while the blessed dead weep (VI.794).[8] Velleius Paterculus likewise insists that the Gracchi, having been “infected by pernicious theories,” had “turned the state upside down, and brought it into a position of critical and extreme danger” by proposing agrarian laws[9]; and Florus observes that, while the Gracchan laws may have had “the appearance of equity” (species aequitatis), in that they claimed to give the plebs their due (ius), in fact they brought the state to “ruin” (perniciem). For “how could the plebs be restored to the land,” Florus asks, “without dispossessing those who possessed it, who were themselves part of the people and held estates left to them by their forefathers by a kind of right [ius]?”[10]
The most forceful Roman opponent of the agrarian movement was, however, Marcus Tullius Cicero.[11] Cicero lays the groundwork for his view in the first book of the De officiis. “Property becomes private,” he writes, in part “through long occupancy” (vetere occupatione), and “each one should retain possession of that which has fallen to his lot; and if anyone appropriates to himself anything beyond that, he will be violating the laws of human society” (I.21).[12] In Book Two, he makes clear that the agrarian laws should be regarded as precisely such a violation. “The man in administrative office,” he explains, “must make it his first care that everyone shall have what belongs to him and that private citizens suffer no invasion of their property rights by act of the state” (II.73).[13] As his example of this kind of “invasion,” he submits that “ruinous policy” (perniciose) called the lex agraria. This policy, he continues, favored an “equal distribution of property.” “What plague could be worse?” (qua peste quae potest esse maior), he asks, especially since it negates the basic purpose for which people enter civil association—namely the preservation of their private property (custodia rerum suarum). In De legibus, Cicero adds that the strife over the Gracchan laws in particular brought about “a complete revolution in the State” (III.20).[14] In short, Cicero characterizes the agrarian movement as seditious, dangerous, and violently unjust. For what is an agrarian law, he asks in De officiis, but an initiative “to rob one man of what belongs to him and to give to another man what does not belong to him?” (II.84).[15]
For Cicero, as for so many other Roman writers, agrarian laws driven by plebeian envy had disrupted the concordia of the Roman republic, given rise to factions, and ultimately dismembered the body politic. This conviction had profound consequences for the shape of early-modern political theory. The influence of the Roman sources (and of Cicero in particular) was so pervasive among civic humanists that the rejection of agrarian laws (or “levelling,” as the English had it) became a powerful republican orthodoxy. The commonplace is on display as early as Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (1362). Alerting the reader that he intends to discuss several women who were famous but wicked, Boccaccio defends this decision by remarking that he has often read accounts of famous men which included even “the treacherous Iugurtha” and “the most seditious Gracchi” (seditiosissimus Graccos).[16] Leonardo Bruni takes a similar view in the Cicero novus (1415), praising his hero for beating back the great “threat to the republic” (hanc rei publice turbationem) posed by the agrarian law of 64 BCE. On Bruni’s account, “the Agrarian Law (first introduced by Tiberius Gracchus, and subsequently agitated for by raving tribunes with serious confrontations almost every year) that was drawing senators and plebs into endless conflict, was easily laid to rest by Cicero’s prudence and eloquence.”[17] Bartolomeo Sacchi (better known as Platina) agrees in the De optimo cive (composed between 1457 and 1461) that the Gracchi are to be classed with Saturninus, Drusus, and Spurius Melius, all rabble-rousers “whose entire lives were based on vain display.”[18] Writing later in the Dialogus de falso et vero bono, Platina compares the schemes of the Gracchi to the “savageness, wantonness, and avarice” of Rome’s other famous traitors, even going so far as to liken the agrarian laws to the rape of Virginia by Appius Claudius.[19] Francesco Patrizi of Siena, whose works became perhaps the most widely-read civic humanist writings of the Cinquecento, summed up this tradition of thought in the De institutione, statu, ac regimine reipublicae (c. 1460) by observing that, while the Gracchi were sons of a venerable father, they themselves “turned out to be the most factious and seditious men” (turbulentissimi, & seditiosissimi).[20] One of them, he continues, “was overcome by Scipio Nasica in the Capitol for the preservation of the republic, and the other was forced to take his own life.”[21]
The remarkable hegemony of this account within republican circles is reflected in the fact that even Renaissance writers who thoroughly rejected the Roman defense of private property rights nonetheless retained a visceral distrust of the agrarian remedy. Thus Thomas More, whose Utopia embraces a theory of justice requiring the elimination of wealth and poverty, has Raphael Hythloday go out of his way to denounce one specific strategy for its implementation. There are some, Raphael tells us, who suppose that “laws might be made that no one should own more than a certain amount of land or receive more than a certain income.”[22] But, he insists at the end of Book I, “laws of this sort may have as much effect as poultices continually applied to sick bodies that are past cure.”[23] The only plausible remedy is the outright abolition of private property; redistribution is not a viable option. A similarly conflicted posture is on display in Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. Although Machiavelli certainly has no patience for the Roman notion of property rights, and takes the position that “well-ordered republics have to keep the public rich and the citizens poor” (I.37),[24] he nonetheless feels obliged to follow Cicero in describing the agrarian laws as a “plague” (morbo) which “in the end was the cause of the destruction of the republic” (infine fu causa della distruzione della Republica).[25] Rome, for Machiavelli, may indeed have had a problem in respect of its distribution of wealth, but agrarian laws had only made the problem worse.
Nor was this ritualized condemnation any less ubiquitous in seventeenth-century England. When James Harrington wrote in 1656 that “agrarian laws of all others have ever been the greatest bugbears,” he was not exaggerating. Early in the century, Sir Walter Raleigh had insisted in his Discourse of the Original and Fundamental Causes of... War that the Roman republic had fallen victim to the “state-phrensy of sedition...occasioned by the reviving of the Agrarian Law.”[26] “The contention about this law,” Raleigh insisted, “kindled such a hatred between the people and the senate, that it never ended but with the loss of the liberty of Rome, and the dissolution of that republic.”[27] Likewise, in the 1633 poem The Reigne of King Henry the Second, Thomas May attributed the Roman agrarian laws to the personified figure of Sedition, about whose “denn” we read: “storyes carved there/ Of his atchievements numberlesse were seene,/ Such as the Grachis factious stirres had beene/ In ancient Rome” (I.532-35).[28] Such sentiments were not confined to writings of poets and essayists. In 1641, Edmund Waller gave a speech in the House of Commons in which he worried that an assault on episcopal prerogatives might mean that the “next demand might be Lex Agraria, the like equality of things Temporall.”[29] And as late as 1650, the supremely malleable Marchamont Nedham could write in The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated that the masses are principally to be feared because “they fly out ever and anon into violence; and from plundering to those Licinian and agrarian laws made by the populacy of Rome whereby it was provided that no man should grow too rich nor be master of above fifty acres of land.”[30] From here, Nedham writes, the next expression of plebeian degeneracy is “to introduce an absolute community,” although he adds that “neither the Athenian nor Roman levelers ever arrived to this high pitch of madness.”
We see, then, that the rejection of redistribution was a remarkably consistent feature of early-modern political discourse, particularly within the republican tradition. By the time of the Restoration, however, this was no longer the case. A powerful new perspective on republican politics developed during the 1650s in England which placed the previously derided agrarian laws at its very center. As I have explained at length elsewhere,[31] this new approach was characterized by a pronounced turn from Roman to Greek sources and ideas—to the Greek historians of Rome (Plutarch and Appian), who lionized the Gracchi and regarded the agrarian movement as a crucial effort to save the faltering republic, and to the Greek philosophers (Plato and Aristotle) who outlined a theory of justice which seemed to make moral sense of these commitments. But the question remains, why then? What caused such an abrupt reorientation of political commitments to seem suddenly plausible in the 1650s, and not before? After all, Plutarch and Appian were well known during the Renaissance, even if less ubiquitous than Livy and Cicero[32]; yet their rival view of the agrarian laws was never considered a serious alternative to the Roman orthodoxy until the middle years of the Interregnum. My explanation centers on a seemingly innocuous semantic move, first made by the Dutch Hebraist Peter van der Cun (Cunaeus) in his path-breaking study of “the republic of the Hebrews” (1617). When Cunaeus, a professor of jurisprudence at the University of Leiden, came to reflect on the equal division of land mandated by God among Israelite families and tribes—and on the institution of the jubilee which secured it against time and contingency—it seemed immediately obvious to him that this should be called an “agrarian law” (lex agraria), just like the one proposed by Licinius Stolo among the Romans. With one small gesture of analogy, Cunaeus rendered the agrarian laws not only respectable, but divinely sanctioned. If God had ordained agrarian laws in his own commonwealth, then Cicero had to be wrong.[33] It now became a matter of the utmost urgency to understand in detail the character and operation of the “Hebrew agrarian law,” and, for this task, Cunaeus and those who followed him turned to the rabbinic tradition.