I asked Claude AI to write a dialogue between these two men discussing More's book Utopia. The image was created by Google's AI Gemini. One particular issue that came up was the "encolsure acts." I have more about this after the discussion.
Thomas More was executed in 1535. Adam Smith was born in 1723. The two never met — but their ideas have been arguing with each other for five centuries, so it seemed worth letting them do it directly.
A plain wooden table, outside of time. One man wears the fur-trimmed robe of a Tudor Lord Chancellor; the other, the modest coat of an eighteenth-century Scottish professor. Between them lies a worn copy of Utopia.
SMITH: Master More, I confess I came to your book with the same suspicion I bring to any scheme promising to cure poverty by decree. I finished it uncertain whether I had read a proposal or a jest.
MORE: Both, Mr. Smith, and neither — which is the trouble with being taken seriously. I named my traveler Hythloday, "well-practiced in nonsense," and my island Utopia, "no-place." I left myself a door to escape through, should anyone call it sedition. The door has not stopped every leveller since from quoting me as a prophet.
SMITH: Then let me ask you plainly, before we go further. Your Hythloday says that wherever there is private property, there can be no just commonwealth. Do you mean it?
MORE: I mean that I watched sheep eat men. That is not a figure of speech I offer you for color, sir — I watched lords enclose the common fields their tenants had ploughed for generations, to run sheep instead, because wool paid better than tenants did. The tenants went to the roads, and from the roads, being idle by necessity, to the gallows for theft — since a hanged man costs nothing to feed. I wrote Utopia because England disgusted me, and satire was the only form in which a man might say so and keep his head. Though I lost mine regardless, in the end, for an entirely different offense.
SMITH: On the disease, sir, we will not quarrel. I have made a similar case against my own country's laws — the statutes of apprenticeship that lock a poor man out of a trade for want of the right guild, the settlement laws that pin a laborer to his parish like a nail in a board so he cannot follow his wage to where it is wanted, the corn laws that starve the many to enrich the few who own the land. Bad law manufactures poverty as reliably as any famine. Where I part from you is the remedy. You would abolish property. I would abolish privilege. They are not the same thing, though I grant they are easily confused by men who profit from the confusion.
MORE: Tell me the difference, then, and tell it plainly. I've little patience left for men who hedge.
SMITH: Privilege is a law that says: only this guild may weave, only this company may trade to the Indies, only this house may hold this land entailed forever regardless of what use it makes of it. Property, plainly held and freely exchanged, is another matter entirely — it is what lets the weaver keep the coat he wove and trade it to the baker for bread, each following his own advantage, and between them producing more coats and more bread than any office of state could requisition into being. I have called the mechanism, in a phrase that has embarrassed me rather more than I foresaw, an invisible hand. Free the man from the abbey and let him bargain — do not simply move him from a private master to a public one, which is, forgive me, what your Syphogrants are beginning to resemble as you describe them.
MORE: My magistrates stand for election every year and answer to the men they govern, Mr. Smith, which is rather more than I can say for the gentlemen who wrote your enclosure Acts. But I won't pretend I built Utopia on faith in the bargain. I built it on the conviction that a man left to his own advantage will help himself to his neighbor's roof to build his own barn, and call it industry. You speak of sympathy checking self-love — of a butcher who feeds the town not from kindness but from interest — and I don't doubt the butcher feeds the town. I ask what becomes of the town the day the butcher discovers he can feed it better, and himself far better, by enclosing the very pasture the town's cattle graze on.
SMITH: Then he has stopped being a butcher trading in a free market and become a lord securing a monopoly by force of law — and I object to him as strenuously as you do. Perhaps more strenuously, since I have spent a great many pages of a very long book cataloguing the tricks by which merchants and manufacturers conspire against the public. I'll confess to you privately that I trust a room full of tradesmen discussing prices about as far as I'd trust a fox auditing a henhouse. My quarrel isn't with your diagnosis of greed, Master More. It's with your cure. You cure greed by removing the possibility of gain. I'd rather cure it by multiplying the number of men competing for it, so no single greed ever grows large enough to swallow a parish whole.
MORE: And when the competition itself becomes the disease? When men labor from dark to dark at one motion of one pin, so that one merchant may undersell his neighbor?
SMITH: (a short, rueful laugh) You've found my own objection and turned it neatly against me — I suspect you enjoyed that. I have written, and I stand by it though it pleases me less each year I consider it, that a man confined his whole life to a few simple operations has no occasion to exert his understanding, and becomes generally as stupid as it is possible for a human creature to become. I did not write that to celebrate the division of labor without condition. I wrote it as a debt: whatever a commonwealth gains from the pin trade, it owes its pin-makers something back — an education, at public charge if need be — to restore what the trade has worn away. In that much, sir, I think we stand nearer than you'll allow. Your citizens labor six hours and give the rest to the mind. I would not hand England six hours yet; we haven't the wealth for it. But I would not have her forget that the wealth is for the six hours, and not the other way round.
MORE: (something eases in him) That is very close to the only sentence in political philosophy I have ever fully believed. Since you set such store by gold as a medium of exchange, tell me — what do you make of my Utopians melting it down for chamber pots, and forging it into chains for their slaves, and giving their children pearls to play with until the children are old enough to be ashamed of wanting them?
SMITH: I admired that passage more than any other in your book, and for reasons you may not expect. I have spent the opening pages of my own work insisting that gold and silver are not wealth at all, only its counters — that a kingdom which piles up bullion while its fields go unplowed and its people go hungry has mistaken the coin for the bread it buys. Spain filled her galleons with the silver of the Americas and grew poorer doing it. On the folly of worshipping metal, Master More, you and I are in perfect agreement. We differ only in this: you conclude the metal should be despised. I conclude it should be correctly understood — as a tool, useful for exactly as long as no one mistakes the tool for the work it does.
MORE: A tool. (he turns the word over) I built an island where the tool could never be mistaken for the work, because I gave it no honor at all to begin with. You would leave the tool its honor, but keep it watched.
SMITH: Watched, and multiplied in the watching — by every baker and weaver and farmer bargaining in his own light, none of them trusted alone, all of them checked by one another's competing interest, which I have found, in my long study of merchants, to be a steadier guard than any single virtue a state can instill by statute. You built your Utopia on citizens persuaded, or bred, or schooled, never to want more than their fellows. I have not met that man, Master More. I have met a great many men who want a great deal more than their fellows, and my whole design is to arrange the traffic between them so the wanting does some good on its way past.
MORE: Then here, perhaps, is the true quarrel between your century and mine, stripped of pins and gold and sheep. You believe a man's wanting can be harnessed. I believed it first had to be shamed.
SMITH: And which of us, do you suppose, asked less of human nature?
MORE: (a long pause; then, almost a smile) That may be the better question, and I am not sure I care for my own answer to it. I never mistook my island for a plan, you know. Hythloday sails home, and no one follows him there — I saw to that myself, before any censor could. I threw a stone in the water once, only to see how far the ripples traveled. It pleases me more than I can easily say, to learn they reached a Scotsman writing about pins.
SMITH: They reached further than pins, sir. I built my whole system on the same wager you built your island on — that the true measure of any commonwealth is what it leaves for the poorest man in it at the close of the day's work. You would likely call mine unfinished business. I'm not entirely sure I'd argue with you.
A silence, not unfriendly. More closes the book on the table between them.
MORE: Then we are agreed on the only question that ever truly mattered, and in disagreement on every method of answering it. I find, on reflection, that this is roughly the condition of most of philosophy.
SMITH: (rising, gathering his coat) Then I'll leave you your island, and keep my pins, and we may each hope the other was wrong about the details, and right about the debt.
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."
"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."
