Land and the Given Economy: The Hermeneutics and Phenomenology of Dwelling
272
Land and the Given Economy: The Hermeneutics and Phenomenology of Dwelling
272Paperback
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Overview
Todd S. Mei grounds this work in a rigorous review of problematic economic conceptions of land in the work of John Locke, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Henry George, Alfred Marshall, and Thorstein Veblen.
Mei then draws on the thought of Martin Heidegger to posit a philosophical clarification of the meaning of land—its ontological nature. He argues that central to rethinking land is recognizing its unique manner of being, described as its "givenness." Concluding with a discussion of ground rent, Mei reflects on specific strategies for incorporating the philosophical account of land into contemporary economic policies.
Revivifying economic frameworks that fail to resolve the impasse between economic development and sustainability, Land and the Given Economy offers much of interest to scholars and readers of philosophy, environmentalism, and the full spectrum of political economy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810134065 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/15/2017 |
| Series: | Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Land and the Given Economy
The Hermeneutics and Phenomenology of Dwelling
By Todd S. Mei
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2017 Northwestern University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3407-2
CHAPTER 1
Retrieving the Classical Theory of Rent
My aim in this chapter is to explain the classical theory of rent with respect to its formal inception in the work of David Ricardo and its more extensive application in the work of Henry George. Having said that, accomplishing this aim is not so straightforward. My intention to explain this theory is presupposed by the idea that it can be meaningful and relevant to our current historical situation. This presupposition meets with two types of criticism which rely on different conceptions of historical understanding. For one, history is the subject of a critical exercise of unearthing hidden shifts in thinking. For the other, history is a processual medium in which theoretical knowledge at the forefront most often involves an improvement, if not a refutation, of antecedent theories. According to the second type of criticism, the classical development of rent was generalized in neoclassical reformulation to the extent that land was seen to be no different from other types of capital that similarly gave rise to unearned increments. I will dispute this claim in chapter 2 when examining neoclassical economic thought.
I will treat the first kind of criticism herein. It appeals to a different kind of obsolescence which is not so simply said because it involves surreptitious transformations in historical forms of discourse. Given the classical period, does a theory like rent really explain what it purports to? This question can be described generally as post-structural since it follows on from Foucault's archaeology. Specifically, it takes issue with the way in which discursive formations employ rules and modes of representation that go unnoticed, where "discursive" denotes the non-epistemological conditions and assumptions required for the formation and articulation of practices. Such formations therefore delimit thought and determine the arrangement of social relations. When applied to economic theory, archaeological investigation finds a wealth of material in the kinds of models economists construct and how technical terminology differs or changes depending on what any particular model assumes and excludes (e.g., assumptions about rationality and normativity). Thus the general heading of "an archaeology of economics" would include primarily an identification of the ways in which concepts within models become discursively meaningful. There are no "real," "pure," or "essential" meanings to economic terminology that scientifically ground its method, but rather there are only a series of shifts by which the category of the economic itself becomes viable and autonomous and thus formative of the human agent who is forced to fit this category. Subsequently, economics is no science at all, but a disciplinary fabrication viable only because it has abstracted its objects of observation from their natural, historical, and social contexts. This shift, which Till Düppe claims is the central illusion underwriting an economic formalism that remains intact even today, precludes meanings and descriptions of life not only external to its conceptions but much closer to the elements driving and directing life as a whole, human and nonhuman.
While Foucault's focus in The Order of Things was broad in attempting to convey disruptions in the history of political economy, one might expect that looking more discretely at specific terms within political economy might lead to identifying other kinds of disruptions. In his critical study Land, Labor and Economic Discourse Keith Tribe undertakes such an examination, looking at how the feudal conceptions of rent and land were transformed in the classical period to benefit the scientific standing of economic analysis, yet only at the cost of distorting the social world. This tension involves the refinement of a formal system for analyzing value and wealth that enables prediction but at the same time marginalizes the life of the human being — most notably, as an abstract producer instrumental to the will of surplus production.
In this chapter I confront Tribe's allegation that a theory of rent is coherent only within the classical ordering of relations that prioritize production and surplus. I accept that disruptions in our forms of knowing require exposure, but I do not believe it necessarily follows from such diagnoses that the objects under investigation are irredeemably confined to its respective form of discourse. Conceptual disruptions can never be so total. So I offer instead a retrieval of the classical theory of rent by tracing what remains undisrupted in it — or, how rent retains a meaning relating to nature as gift. To recall my introductory remarks, I will not argue in subsequent chapters that we must therefore return to a notion of gift. Instead, the elucidation of the role of nature in classical thought will allow me to develop the theory of rent and land according to a different tack.
The first section of this chapter deals with the complexity of the meanings of rent as they appear historically in the transition from feudalism to the classical period. The aim of this section is not to present a history of the theory of rent,but rather to show the clarity Tribe's examination brings to an understanding of this concept. In the second section, I engage Tribe critically in view of methodological problems. The third section performs a type of "positive archaeology" in discussing how the classical theory of rent presupposes a fundamental link with nature and how its bounty entails the production of wealth. Respectively, sections 4, 5, and 6 explain rent according to difference (Ricardo), its application to all types of land (George), and how social progress is figured in the generation of rent (Thorstein Veblen).
Disambiguating Rent and the New "Economic Terrain"
The two basic meanings of rent are (1) the fee one pays for usage of land to its owner, and (2) the value generated as a surplus above and beyond the expenditure of labor and capital. The former meaning inevitably involves various qualifications of legal ownership, usually in the sense of allowing a lessee a right to use and possession of land, but not the right to sell or transfer its legal ownership during the period of possession. It is a meaning more or less pervasive in economic writing since the seventeenth century, though this is contested by Tribe. The latter meaning involves the attribution of value to a factor of production other than labor or capital. While distinct, the two meanings are interrelated. But grasping this interrelation is more complicated than might appear. Certainly, one can make a basic inference: if rent is the fee paid for usage of land, this fee reflects a value that must be based on something identifiable by, and therefore agreeable to, both landlord and lessee. Some general notion of the surplus in production provided by a particular plot of land in comparison to plots of inferior quality would provide a way of determining a range for the fee. This inference is essentially correct. However, explicating this "economically" in relation to the historical development in which land and rent become economic concepts is, as we shall see, a rather tangled affair.
The theory of rent is typically ascribed to David Ricardo (1772–1823), who gave formal expression to it in relation to agricultural land. Yet to say that land and rent were never a concern for economic thinking prior to Ricardo and his contemporaries would be a gross overstatement. William Petty (1623–1687), Richard Cantillon (c. 1680–1734), and François Quesnay (1694–1774) all gave serious attention to the role of land in economic production. One even finds in Aristotle's Politics (1318b6–1319a19) a consideration of land usage and ownership for the effective maintenance of agricultural production. Nonetheless, land and rent were not the focus of the kind of economic scrutiny and modeling that Ricardo employed. Spurred on by the debate over the cause of higher corn prices and the concern for circulation of wealth, Ricardo sought a model of explanation that attributed the increase in rents to higher prices in corn.
However, Tribe alleges that this conventional way of characterizing rent is overly simplistic and therefore deceptive. He begins his analysis further back in history in order to show how, with a shift in the conceptualization of rent and land, there emerges a radically new form of representing the human being. So while the notion of rent can be traced back to the pre-classical period of the seventeenth century, Tribe argues that one should not be tempted to assume there are similarities of meanings with the classical period of the eighteenth century; and more radically, one should not see the two periods as being continuous but separated by a decisive break. The classical period thus establishes a new "economic terrain" on which "economic agents" are no longer "real persons" but representations "constituted by relations of labor and capital" geared toward production of surplus. More significantly, Tribe argues that co-emergent with the discursive form of this new terrain are the classical concepts of rent and land which, by virtue of being internal to a closed system of newly defined economic relations, only seem to have empirical and therefore law-like qualities.
Put straightforwardly, Tribe's analysis presents a challenge to my supposition that rent, as a historically determined concept, is in fact amenable to something like a philosophical reappropriation. It would be entirely questionable to assert a relation between rent and the ontological nature of land. There cannot be a non-discursive philosophical justification of a discursive form since rent is a practice arising from a discursive social order (i.e., capitalism) while the ontology of land is a non-discursive philosophical description. There can only be a non-discursive form indicating the ordered system of the discursive form.
Tribe's case is quite convincing. He argues that it is crucial to note how each period understands the relation between the two meanings of rent within their respective social contexts. Simply because there is reference to rent in the literature concerned with husbandry in the seventeenth century, one cannot assume there is the same type of organization of relations that we know today in terms of "fee taken" and "use given." Tribe is not alone in this claim. Stephen Marglin argues that understanding the enclosure movements in England beginning in the fifteenth century requires seeing how the shift from a feudal system of rent and tenancy undergoes a significant transformation with the social restructuring of society. Apart from the modern association of ownership with exclusive rights, the feudal period involved a social system in which access to land was extended to those who did not own it. Rent paid by the feudal tenant is not a fee for right of use, but a tribute legitimating the sociopolitical system in which tenants, landlord, and monarch all have their appropriate place in carrying out God's work (which is notably not capitalist production). The feudal system conceives of the laborer and landlord as figures whose meanings and roles are constituted by the polity and not by some notion of autonomous economic forces working to produce and circulate wealth. Indeed, the emergence of the concern for a theory of value in the classical period is itself evidence of the removal of "real persons" from production and how specific and local notions of the polity may be the very constituents of value formation. That a theory of value is crowned by the economic good of freedom is only an admission of this deletion, since it is through economic relations that the ethico-political sphere is henceforth constructed.
Following Moses Finley, Tribe's point of contrast is the ancient Greek conception of "economy." In Plato and Xenophon, one can see there is a presumption of organization based on the household, or what is the meaning of the Greek oikonomikos. Book 1 of Aristotle's Politics is, of course, famous for the identification of household management as the basis for conceiving larger economic relations in the polis apart from trade and wealth-getting. As Dotan Lesham has pointed out, the ancient Greek conception conceives this management "as encompassing any activity in which man, when faced with nature's abundance or excess, acquires a prudent disposition that is translated into practical and theoretical knowledge."
The organization of oikonomia is patriarchal and local; even more, it is not concerned with rent in view of economic production and distribution of wealth but with an affirmation of a social bond. And this form of organization is consistent with practices in Europe prior to the classical period. For example, Tribe comments that in the primary historical sources on husbandry during the seventeenth century, "the good ordering of the household is vital to the well-being of the husbandman as representative of the household order." Beyond the local household is the connection to the larger feudal system:
Far from the agricultural producer being placed in an economic terrain, we have seen that the relation of the landlord to the tenant is conditional upon its conception as a juridical relation, and is not expressed as an economic relation.
How is the shift to the "economic relation" visible?
Tribe focuses on the transition from the small farm to the large farm (c. 1770), where the emergence of the large farm involved diminishing the practices of the seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries, in which the roles of laborer/farmer and caretaker of the land were, if not the same, then intimately bound. To recall from above, the landlord held a social role, not an economic one; rent is a tribute and not a fee. With the advent of large farms, the emphasis on agriculture moves toward profit and stock, that is, economic incentives that replace the affirmation of feudal, social bonds. In turn, with large farms there was the subsequent creation of monopoly by which their owners soon realized they could withhold their produce until a rise in price. This not only reinforced the gearing of farming "technologies" toward profit, but it also had a detrimental effect on the small farms which could not afford to withhold produce. The shift here is notable: while it is arguable that landholding in general may be a monopoly, we see with the large farm a form of subordination that is not political or juridical, but economic. This is not to say in contrast that feudal society was unproblematic, but that its form of subservience had above all a social and political role reinforced by communal norms of responsibility and care.
There was also a change in the nature of production in which the end product of labor was no longer seen within the bond/relation of the farmer to the gift of nature, that is, where one performed a task given by God to reap the bounty of his gift. Instead, the aim of farming was to produce a profit by virtue of a better organized system. Herein, the farm is "an independent capitalist enterprise" where profit is the outcome, and farmers are not liable for rent as an expression of a local subservient legality (tribute), but as a payment in view of maintaining the production of stock. For the feudal use of land, according to Tribe, " 'production' is a quality of the individual, and is not a category of economic organisation."
What, then, does the expressly economic rendering of rent do to the conception of persons involved in production and rent? Quite simply, it represents the person in terms of the economic mode of production, no longer having the capacity of self-creation. Tribe sees this form of representation resulting from what post-structuralism generally refers to as conceiving "Man as the Subject." Experience of the person is ordered by a conception of "Man" as a subject integral to a respective form of scientific analysis. Foucault thus notes:
Man for the human sciences [i.e., biology, economics, and philology] is ... that living being who, from within the life to which he entirely belongs and by which he is traversed in his whole being, constitutes representations by means of which he lives, and on the basis of which he possesses that strange capacity of being able to represent himself precisely that life.
(Continues...)
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