This is a follow up to a recent post where I had Claude AI write a dialogue between Adam Smith and Thomas More discussing the book Utopia. See Sheep and Pins: Thomas More and Adam Smith on Utopia. Claude AI wrote this one as well. The image is from Google Gemini.
David Hume was a philosopher and friend of Adam Smith. Hume was critical of Utopian schemes (see links below). Once again More mentions enclosures (or the enclosure acts). Below are also the links enclosures I had on the Adam Smith post.
David Hume and Thomas More, imagined
What follows is an invented conversation, in the old tradition of the "dialogue of the dead" that Lucian began and Fontenelle later revived — a meeting history never allowed, between two men born nearly two centuries apart. Thomas More could not have read a word of Hume's; Hume, writing in the 1740s and after, certainly knew More's book, and even named it in one of his own essays. The exchange below is invented, but the arguments are drawn as faithfully as invention allows from what each man actually wrote.
HUME: Sir Thomas, let me begin with the difficulty that struck me first on reading your book. Your traveler Hythloday insists that no commonwealth can be just or happy so long as there is private property — that mine and thine are the root of the whole trouble. Now, I have spent a good many pages arguing something rather close to this myself: that justice is no law of nature, but a convention we invent only because nature is a niggardly (stingy, miserly, or very reluctant to give and spend) housekeeper and our own generosity has limits. Imagine a people supplied with every convenience in such profusion that no one need ever compete for it, I once wrote, and every kindly impulse in human nature would grow stronger for the ease of it — while justice, that "cautious, jealous virtue," would simply never arise, for the excellent reason that there would be nothing left worth dividing. So I confess some curiosity: has your island found the abundance that would make property needless, or has it merely been decreed away by wishing?
MORE: You do Hythloday the courtesy of making him more careful than he sometimes is, David — I hope I may call you David, since you've clearly given up on ceremony with me. He does not wish scarcity away. He removes its causes. On my island every hand labors, but only six hours in the day — three before the midday meal and three after — and no hand is spared to hold a sword it need not hold, or wait at table for a hundred idle retainers some great man keeps about him for show, or beg in a ditch because his farm has been hedged in for a lord's sheep. Strip away the idle rich, the swollen households, and the beggars our English enclosures have lately made of honest ploughmen, and put all those hands to the plough and the loom instead, and you would marvel how far six hours can stretch. So yes — I think Hythloday would tell you he has found your abundance. But he built it. He did not simply wish for it.
HUME: Built by whom, and held together by what, is precisely my next question — and I ask it as a confession against my own hopes as much as an objection to yours. In that very passage, I noted that a community of goods has in fact been attempted more than once, in the heat of some new religious fervor — and that nothing but the bitter experience of its failures, as men's ordinary selfishness returned or simply stopped hiding itself, ever talked the enthusiasts back into property and law. I did not have your island in mind when I wrote it, but I can hardly pretend it isn't aimed at it now that I've found it. Grant you the six hours, and the idle hands set to honest work — I'm not so ungenerous as to deny that England wastes labor shamefully. But give a man his sufficiency, and I have never once seen him fail to next demand his precedence. What does a commonwealth with no property do about that?
MORE: Humiliate it, mostly — and I mean that almost literally. Gold and silver, having no honest use among us, are given to slaves to wear as fetters and to convicted men as the badge of their disgrace; our chamberpots, if you must know, are made of the very metal your goldsmiths would commit murder for. We give children pearls and gems for playthings, and they outgrow them the way an English child outgrows its rattle, and is faintly embarrassed to be caught still wanting one. Ambassadors came to us once dressed head to foot in gold chains and jewels, hoping to dazzle a simple people — and our citizens, seeing it, mistook the glittering lords for the embassy's fools, and paid their respects to the plainly dressed servants instead. Pride does not vanish, David. I would not claim that of any child of Adam, on my island or off it. But you may starve it a little, if you take away its usual food and feed it something more embarrassing instead.
HUME: That is cleverer than I expected, and I withdraw the word "wishing." Though I notice you haven't killed the ornament, only redirected the shame of it — and I still suspect pride merely changes coin. It will trade in gold where gold is honored, and trade in six-hour diligence, or a fine turn of Greek, or a seat nearer the Prince, where those are honored instead. You haven't defeated the passion. You've only decided what it's allowed to purchase.
MORE: I wouldn't call that a small victory. A commonwealth that can only get its citizens to compete over who serves it best has arranged its vanities rather better than most.
HUME: Now that is a sentence I might have written myself, on a good day. It brings me, in fact, to a matter nearer my own trade, since I've made something of a name defending luxury and commerce against the old complaint — as old as your Plato, and as fresh as our pulpits — that refinement softens a people into vice. Trade civilizes, to my mind: it gives men something to be curious about beyond their own parish, teaches them to deal with strangers without cutting their throats, and has done more for the good humor of Europe than a century of sermons on charity. Your Utopians, by contrast, dress all alike in undyed wool, and think a taste for fine plate close to madness. Are we simply opposed?
MORE: Less than you might think, if you read past the wool. My Utopians are no Carthusians shut up in cells. They keep gardens they compete to make the finest on the street, they make music, they crowd into public lectures before dawn for the plain pleasure of it, and they hold, as frankly as any Epicurean, that nature gave us pleasure to follow and would hardly have done so as a joke. What they scorn isn't refinement — it's one particular counterfeit of it: ornament whose entire value lies in the fact that your neighbor cannot afford it too. Take away the comparison, and the diamond is just a hard stone that happens to catch light. I'd wager you call that sort of thing "vicious luxury" in your own essay on the subject — the kind that costs more than a man's fortune can bear, or crowds out everything he owes his household and his friends. We may only be arguing over where to draw a line we both admit is there.
HUME: That may be the most alarming thing anyone has said to me all week — to be told that a man who wants his whole island to go without money agrees with me about something. I'll allow it, though: I've never defended vanity, only appetite, curiosity, and the arts that grow out of having a little more than one strictly needs. Where I still balk is upstream of the wool and the gold entirely. You've arranged a whole commonwealth — its labor, its property, its marriages, even its crockery — by design, on paper, as though a single legislator could reason out the best form of a society and hand it to a people ready-made, the way a tailor hands over a coat. I have generally thought this the most dangerous confidence a political thinker can hold. And I said so of you directly, sir, though I don't know if it ever reached you: I put your Utopia in the same breath as Plato's Republic and called both "plainly imaginary" plans of government, because each one supposes that human character would first have to be made over for the better before the scheme could take a single step — whereas Harrington's Oceana asks nothing of men's souls, and everything of their institutions.
MORE: I had wondered whether you'd bring that up. You are not the first to notice it, David, nor even the first to say it to my face, in a manner of speaking — my own book got there ahead of you, if you read to the very end. Hythloday finishes his account of the island, and the fellow who happens to share my name and my profession sits and listens, and admits, privately, that a great many things about Utopia struck him as plainly absurd, and that he could wish, without much hoping, to see a few of its customs tried at home. I did not need you to tell me the scheme presumed too much on human goodness. I told myself so, in my own pages, before you were born to tell me twice.
HUME: Then we are nearer agreement than I assumed. I begin to think you agree with me rather more than your own island does.
MORE: Say instead that I agree with you about how much confidence any one man should place in his own blueprint — and disagree about whether that ought to stop him from drawing one at all. I did not hand Hythloday's account to England as a coat to be worn tomorrow morning. I held it up as a glass, mostly so my countrymen might see what their hedgerows and their gallows and their endless small wars looked like standing next to it. A glass needn't be a door, to be worth looking into.
HUME: That much I'll grant without reservation — I said something not so far from it myself, defending my own excursion into commonwealth-building: that even a plan no one will ever build in full may still be worth having, as a mark to build toward. I suppose I only trust the mark further when it's drawn by a Harrington, who asks of men only that they be exactly as self-interested and shortsighted as I've always found them, than by a Plato or a More, who asks them to be something better first.
MORE: Then let me ask after one corner of the glass I suspect troubles you rather more personally than a chapter on property ever could. My Utopians tolerate a great many faiths under a single law — more, if I'm honest, than most Christian kingdoms of my day or yours have quite managed — but they make one exception. A man who doubts the soul survives the body, or thinks the world runs on blind chance rather than any providence, may hold no public office among them, and is scarcely reckoned a man of full standing at all — on the reasoning that such a fellow, once unwatched, has no particular reason left to prefer the common good to his own skin.
HUME: I did rather wonder when we'd arrive at my own chapter. I've spent a career giving reasoned doubt about providence and a future state the fullest and most careful hearing I knew how to give it, and I like to think myself not entirely without honesty or public spirit for the trouble. Your island would have found me a very suspicious character indeed, and shut every office in it against me.
MORE: It would have, and I won't insult either of us by pretending otherwise. I'll say two things for the island, and one against its author. For the island: Hythloday's Utopians don't rack such a man, or starve him, or drag him to any stake for his opinion — they only decline him public trust, and ask him not to preach the point to a mob that may not share your patience for an argument. They leave the door open, too, for him to be reasoned back through it, which is more than most inquisitors of my own century thought to offer. Against the author: you'd flatter me more than I deserve if you assumed the man who wrote of such patience practiced it half so well. I spent a good part of my life, as Chancellor, on the far side of that very door — arguing against, and worse than arguing against, men I believed were leading souls to ruin. History hasn't been gentle with me over it, nor, on reflection, should it be. Hythloday's island was, in that one respect, a rather better man than I ever managed to be.
HUME: That's a franker answer than I had any right to expect, and I won't press it further — a man needn't be his own best book. Let me try to end where we began, closer to agreement than either of us likely expected an hour ago. You hold that the only pleasures worth calling true are the ones nature and reason together approve — health, friendship, a mind given something worth doing, a conscience left in peace — and that gold and precedence are false pleasures precisely because they cannot survive being set beside a neighbor's lack. I wouldn't have put it in quite those terms; I ground my own account of virtue in sentiment and utility rather than nature's design, and I have no need of your Utopians' heaven and hell to keep a man honest when no one's watching. But we arrive, by rather different roads, at much the same suspicion of vanity, and much the same respect for a mind occupied with something better than its own reflection.
MORE: Then let's shake hands on the suspicion, and leave the roads to quarrel over some other evening. Though I notice you got the easier bargain — your virtue asks no priest, and risks no flame. Mine had rather more trouble getting past both, and it's only honest to tell you it didn't always manage.
HUME: I know a good deal more of how your story ends than you presently do, sir, having the considerable advantage of writing after it. I'll only say I've read your history as closely as your book, and I have never once thought a man's willingness to die by his own conscience was an argument any essay of mine could answer. Whatever else we owe your island, we owe rather more to the fact that its author wasn't merely clever about pride, in the way of a man who has only ever theorized about it, but proof against it, at the one hour it would have cost him everything to be otherwise.
MORE: You're kinder than my scaffold deserves, and kinder than I generally am about myself — ask my daughter Meg sometime, who had the whole of it firsthand, and none of your flattering distance. I always thought a good jest did more honest work in the world than a good martyrdom, and would rather be remembered for the one than the other, if history would only take instruction. But I'll accept the compliment, David, on one condition: that you let me return it. It's no small thing to spend a whole life saying exactly what you believed about providence and the soul, in a country quite prepared to make you sorry for it, and to die in your own bed anyway, still saying it, forty years on. Perhaps courage keeps more than one coin. You'll forgive me if I still think mine bought slightly more.
HUME: I'll forgive you almost anything, sir, for a line that good. I take it that settles our account — for this evening, at any rate.
Links on Hume and utopias:
The Utopian Dimension in the Philosophy of Social Betterment in the Scottish Enlightenment by Maria Pia Paganelli of Trinity University
David Hume, "Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth" This site has the following quote from Hume: "All plans of government, which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind, are plainly imaginary. Of this nature, are the Republic of Plato, and the Utopia of Sir Thomas More."
Links on enclosures:
See The Enclosure Acts from the University of Delaware. Excerpts:
"The Enclosure Acts were essentially the abolition of the open field system of agriculture which had been the way people farmed in England for centuries. The ownership of all common land, and waste land, that farmers and Lords had, was taken from them. Any right they had over the land was gone. New fields were designed, new roads were added, and the land was eventually re-allocated to different farmers and Lords. Originally this process was agreed upon through informal agreement but Parliament took over during the 17th century. Between 1604 and 1914 there were over 5,200 bills enacted by Parliament which equates to a little more than one fifth of England.
England utilized an Open Field system for much of its history before the start of the Enclosure. This system worked well because it suited what was needed by society at the time. Agricultural and cultivation systems were not very advanced, but it allowed each village to be self-sufficient. This was extremely necessary because transportation was still very primitive. However, over time things began to change. Transportation became much easier with the implement of new roadways, canals and waterways were easier to navigate, and agricultural knowledge increased. In the end, the open field system was not capable of reaping all of the benefits of the newly industrialized England. Therefore, by taking control of the land, the government was able to decide the uses for the land based on what suited it best. This increased the efficiency and profitability of farming. Efficient agriculture was greatly needed at this time due to the fast increase in population; demand for food was at it’s all time highest."
See A lot of educated people, especially if they’ve read Marx, have heard about enclosures. Most of what they know ain’t so by
"Enclosures increased the number of workers in villages."
In the 1700s "Inefficient growing of wheat was replaced by efficient growing of wheat.
"The factories were in the North of England, not in the South, where the enclosures actually happened. No one moved from the South to the North. The Workers in the factories came from Ireland or the North-which were areas with no enclosures."
See The Enclosures and the Industrial Revolution from Don Boudreaux.
"In her remarkable 2010 volume, Bourgeois Dignity, McCloskey writes on page 154 that, in attempting to explain the industrial revolution, Karl Marx
instanced enclosure in England during the
sixteenth century (which has been overturned by historical findings
that such enclosure was economically minor) and in the eighteenth
century (which has been overturned by findings that the labor driven off
the land by enclosure was a tiny source of the industrial proletariat,
and enclosure happened then mainly in the south and east where in fact
little of the new sort of industrialization was going on, and where
agricultural employment in newly enclosed villages in fact increased).
A few pages later (pages 172-173), McCloskey adds:
By now, though, several generations of
agricultural historians have argued (contrary to the Fabian theme first
articulated in 1911, which followed Marx) that eighteenth-century
enclosures were in many ways equitable and did not drive people out of
the villages…. Contrary to the pastoralism of [Oliver Goldsmith’s 1770]
poem – which as usual reflects aristocratic traditions in poetry back to
Horace and Theocritus more than evidence from the English countryside –
the commons was usually purchased rather than stolen from the goose.
One can point with sympathy to the damaging of numerous poor holders of
traditional rights without also believing what appears to be false –
that industrialization depended in any important way on the taking of
rights from cottagers to gather firewood on the commons.
Industrialization, after all, occurred first in regions to the north and
west, mainly enclosed long before, such as Lancashire or Warwickshire,
and especially (as Eric Jones pointed out) in areas bad for agriculture,
not in the fertile East Midlands or East Anglia or the South – the
places where the parliamentary acts of the eighteenth century did
transform many villages, though non “deserted.” In such freshly enclosed
areas, I repeat, the local populations increased after enclosure."
