Political Works

"The doctrine which found the justification of private property in the fact that it enabled the industrious man to reap where he had sown, was not a paradox, but, as far as the mass of the population was concerned, almost a truism."

"The English Parliamentarians and the French philosophers who made the inviolability of property rights the centre of their political theory, when they defended those who owned, were incidentally, if sometimes unintentionally, defending those who laboured."

"Before the rise of capitalist agriculture and capitalist industry, the ownership, or at any rate the secure and effective occupation, of land and tools by those who used them, was a condition precedent to effective work in the field or in the workshop. ...The interference... involved the sacrifice of those who carried on useful labour to those who did not. To resist... was to protect not only property but industry, which was indissolubly connected with it."

"Property, it is argued, is a moral right, and not merely a legal right, because it insures that the producer will not be deprived by violence of the result of his efforts. The period from which that doctrine was inherited differed from our own in three obvious, but significant, respects."

"The course of wisdom is neither to attack private property in general nor to defend it in general; for things are not similar in quality, merely because they are identical in name. It is to discriminate between the various concrete embodiments of what, in itself, is, after all, little more than an abstraction."

"It is idle... to present a case for or against private property without specifying the particular forms of property to which reference is made, and the journalist who says that "private property is the foundation of civilization" agrees with Proudhon, who said it was theft, in this respect at least that, without further definition, the words of both are meaningless."

"Property... covers a multitude of rights which have nothing in common except that they are exercised by persons and enforced by the State."

"In most discussions of property the opposing theorists have usually been discussing different things."

"The general note of what may conveniently be called the Socialist criticism of property is what the word Socialism itself implies. ...that the economic evils of society are primarily due to the unregulated operation, under modern conditions of industrial organization, of the institution of private property."

"The American Constitution and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man both treated property as one of the fundamental rights which Governments exist to protect. The English Revolution of 1688... had in effect done the same. The great individualists from Locke to Turgot, Adam Smith and Bentham all repeated... a similar conception. ...the dogma of the sanctity of private property was maintained as tenaciously by French as by English ; and the theory that property is an absolute, which is held by many modern Conservatives, is identical... with that not only of the men of 1789, but of the Convention itself."

"If society is to be healthy, men must regard themselves not as the owners of rights, but as trustees for the discharge of functions and the instruments of a social purpose."

"All rights... are conditional and derivative, because all power should be conditional and derivative. They are derived from the end or purpose of the society in which they exist."

"It was the reaction against the abuses of absolute power by the State which led in the eighteenth century to the declaration of the absolute rights of individuals. ... Because Governments and the relics of feudalism had encroached upon the property of individuals it was affirmed that the right of property was absolute; because they had strangled enterprise, it was affirmed that every man had a natural right to conduct his business as he pleased."

"A right should not be absolute for the same reason that a power should not be absolute."

"We have been witnessing... both in international affairs and in industry... the breakdown of the organization of society on the basis of rights divorced from obligations."

"A balance of power... whether in international politics or in industry, is unstable, because it reposes not on the common recognition of a principle by which... nations and individuals are limited, but on an attempt to find an equipoise... without adjuring the assertion of unlimited claims. Thus... on this plane, there is no solution."

"The perversion of nationalism is imperialism, as the perversion of individualism is industrialism. ...because the principle is defective and reveals its defects as it reveals its power. For it asserts that the rights of nations and individuals are absolute, which is false. ...their sphere itself is contingent upon the part which they play in the community of nations and individuals... It constrains them to a career of indefinite expansion, in which they devour continents and oceans, law, morality and religion, and last of all their own souls, in an attempt to attain infinity by the addition to themselves of all that is finite."

"To expect that international rivalry can be exorcised as long as the industrial order within each nation is such as to give success to those whose existence is a struggle for self-aggrandizement, is a dream which has not even the merit of being beautiful."

"The world reaps in war what it sows in peace."

"They [nationalism and individualism] rose together. It is probable that, if ever they decline, they will decline together."

"Nationalism is... the counterpart among nations of what individualism is within them. ...emphasis on the rights of separate units, not on their subordination to common obligations. ...it appeals to the self-assertive instincts, to which it promises opportunities of unlimited expansion. And.... pushed to its logical conclusion, it is self-destructive. ...condoning the subjection of the majority of men to the few."

"It is not a chance that the last two centuries, which saw the new growth of a new system of industry, saw also the growth of the system of international politics... Both... are the expression of the same spirit and move in obedience to similar laws. The... former was the repudiation of any authority superior to the individual reason. It left men free to follow their own interests or ambitions or appetites.... The... latter was the repudiation of any authority superior to the sovereign state."

"To what can one compare such a society but to the international world, which also has been called a society and which also is social in nothing but name?"

"They destroy religion and art and morality... and having destroyed these, which are the end, for the sake of industry, which is a means, they make their industry itself what they make their cities, a desert of unnatural dreariness, which only forgetfulness can make endurable, and which only excitement can enable them to forget."

"It is the social purpose of industry which gives it meaning and makes it worth while to carry it on at all."

"It is not difficult either for individuals or for societies to achieve their object, if that object be sufficiently limited and immediate, and if they are not distracted from its pursuit by other considerations. The temper... dedicates itself to the cultivation of opportunities, and leaves obligations to take care of themselves... The eighteenth century defined it. The twentieth century has very largely attained it."

"It [the workman's guarantee of lower prices and higher quality] can be offered only in so far as he stands in an immediate and direct relation to the public for whom industry is carried on, so that, when all costs have been met, any surplus will pass to it, and not to private individuals. It will be accepted only in so far as the workers in each industry are not merely servants executing orders, but themselves have a collective responsibility for the character of the service, and can use their organizations not merely to protect themselves against exploitation, but to make positive contributions to the administration and development of their industry."

"If to-day the miner or any other workman produces more, he has no guarantee that the result will be lower prices rather than higher dividends and larger royalties, any more than, as a workman, he can determine the quality of the wares which his employer supplies to customers, or the price at which they are sold. Nor, as long as he is directly the servant of a profit-making company, and only indirectly the servant of the community, can any such guarantee be offered him."

"Those to whom a leisure class is part of an immutable order without which civilization is inconceivable, dare not admit, even to themselves, that the world is poorer, not richer, because of its existence."

"The procedure by which, whenever any section of workers advance demands which are regarded as inconvenient by their masters, they are denounced as a band of anarchists who are preying on the public may be a convenient weapon in an emergency, but... is logically self-destructive."

"The first step to preventing the exploitation of the consumer by the producer is simple. It is to turn all men into producers."

"It is useless either for property-owners or for Governments to lament the mote in the eye of the trade unions as long as, by insisting on the maintenance of functionless property, they decline to remove the beam in their own."

"The grievance, of which the Press makes so much, that some workers may be taking too large a share compared with others, is masked by the much greater grievance, of which it says nothing whatever, that some idlers take any share at all."

"Industry, it is thought, moves in a vicious circle of shorter hours and higher wages and less production, which in time must mean longer hours and lower wages; and every one receives less, because every one demands more. The picture is plausible, but it is fallacious. It is fallacious not merely in its crude assumption that a rise in wages necessarily involves an increase in costs, but for another and more fundamental reason. ...what the worker foregoes the general body of consumers does not necessarily gain, and what the consumer pays the general body of workers does not necessarily receive. If the circle is vicious, its vice is not that it is closed, but that it is always half open, so that part of production leaks away in consumption which adds nothing to productive energies."

"The owners of mines and minerals, in their new role as protectors of the poor, lament the "selfishness" of the miners, as though nothing but pure philanthropy had hitherto caused profits and royalties to be reluctantly accepted by themselves."

"The most conservative thinkers recognize that the present organization of industry is intolerable in the sacrifice of liberty which it entails upon the producer. But each effort which he makes to emancipate himself is met by a protest that... .efficient service is threatened by movements which aim at placing a greater measure of industrial control in the hands of the workers."

"The control of a large works does... confer a kind of private jurisdiction in matters concerning the life and livelihood of the workers... described as "industrial feudalism." It is not easy to understand how the traditional liberties... are compatible with an organization of industry which... permits populations almost as large as those of some famous cities... to be controlled... in their work, economic opportunities, and social life by... half-a-dozen Directors."

"It is this collective liability for the maintenance of a certain quality of service which is... the distinguishing feature of a profession. It is compatible with several different kinds of government, or indeed, when the unit of production is not a group, but an individual, with hardly any government at all. What it does involve is that the individual, merely by entering the profession should have committed himself to certain obligations in respect of its conduct, and that the professional organization, whatever it may be, should have sufficient power to enable it to maintain them."

"It is precisely, indeed, in the degree to which that obligation [of professional responsibilities] is interpreted as attaching to all workers, and not merely to a select class, that the difference between the existing industrial order, collectivism and the organization of industry as a profession resides. The first involves the utilization of human beings for the purpose of private gain; the second their utilization for the purpose of public service; the third the association in the service of the public of their professional pride, solidarity and organization."

"The organization of industry as a profession does not involve only the abolition of functionless property, and the maintenance of publicity as the indispensable condition of a standard of professional honor. It implies also that that those who perform its work should undertake that its work is performed effectively. ...that they should treat the discharge of professional responsibilities as an obligation attaching not only to a small élite of intellectuals, managers or "bosses,"... but as implied by the... corporate consent and initiative of the rank and file of workers."

"These things should be done steadily and continuously... not in order to establish a single form of bureaucratic management, but in order to release the industry from the domination of proprietary interests... vicious in principle, because they divert it from the performance of function to the acquisition of gain. If at the same time private ownership is shaken... by action on the part of particular groups of workers, so much the better. There are more ways of killing a cat than drowning it in cream... But the two methods are complementary, not alternative, and the attempt to found rival schools on an imaginary incompatibility between them is a bad case of the odium sociologicum [sociology of hatred] which afflicts reformers."

"The objection to public ownership, in so far as it is intelligent, is in reality largely an objection to over-centralization. But the remedy for over-centralization, is not the maintenance of functionless property in private hands, but the decentralized ownership of public property."

"The phraseology of political controversy continues to reproduce the conventional antitheses of the early nineteenth century; "private enterprise" and "public ownership" are still contrasted with each other as light with darkness or darkness with light. But, in reality, behind the formal shell of the traditional legal system the elements of a new body of relationship have already been prepared, and find piece-meal application through policies devised, not by socialists, but by men who repeat the formulæ of individualism, at the very moment when they are undermining it."

"The first [stage] is to free it [industry] from subordination to the pecuniary interests of the owners of property, because they are the magnetic pole which sets all the compasses wrong, and which causes industry, however swiftly it may progress, to progress in the wrong direction."

"The object in purchasing land is to establish small holders, not to set up farms administered by state officials; and the object of nationalizing mining or railways or the manufacture of steel should not be to establish any particular form of state management, but to release those who do constructive work from the control of those whose sole interest is pecuniary gain, in order that they may be free to apply their energies to the true purpose of industry, which is the provision of service, not the provision of dividends."

"Modern societies aim at protecting economic rights, while leaving economic functions, except in moments of abnormal emergency, to fulfil themselves."

"A society which aimed at making the acquisition of wealth contingent upon the discharge of social obligations, which sought to proportion remuneration to service and denied it to those by whom no service was performed, which inquired first not what men possess but what they can make or create or achieve, might be called a Functional Society, because in such a society the main subject of social emphasis would be the performance of functions. But such a society does not exist, even as a remote ideal, in the modern world."

"Revolutions, as a long and bitter experience reveals, are apt to take their colour from the régime which they overthrow. Is it any wonder that the creed which affirms the absolute rights of property should sometimes be met with a counter-affirmation of the absolute rights of labour, less anti-social, indeed, and inhuman, but almost as dogmatic, almost as intolerant and thoughtless as itself?"

"Economic egotism is still worshipped. ...economic rights remain, whether economic functions are performed or not."

"During the greater part of the nineteenth century the significance of the opposition between the two principles of individual rights and social functions was masked by the doctrine of the inevitable harmony between private interests and public good. Competition, it was argued, was an effective substitute for honesty. Today... few now would profess adherence to the compound of economic optimism and moral bankruptcy which led a nineteenth century economist to say: "Greed is held in check by greed, and the desire for gain sets limits to itself.""