Market and Nature [ 193 ]
nation, according to which functionless institutions or traits may
continue to exist by virtue of inertia. Yet it would be truer to say that
no institution ever survives its function—when it seems to do so, it is
because it serves in some other function, or functions, which need not
include the original one. Thus feudalism and landed conservatism re-
tained their strength as long as they served a purpose that happened to
be that of restricting the disastrous effects of the mobilization of land.
By this time it had been forgotten by free traders that land formed part
of the territory of the country, and that the territorial character of sov-
ereignty was not merely a result of sentimental associations, but of
massive facts, including economic ones. "In contrast to the nomadic
peoples, the cultivator commits himself to improvements fixed in a
particular place. Without such improvements human life must remain
elementary, and little removed from that of animals. And how large a
role have these fixtures played in human history! It is they, the cleared
and cultivated lands, the houses, and the other buildings, the means of
communication, the multifarious plant necessary for production, in-
cluding industry and mining, all the permanent and immovable im-
provements that tie a human community to the locality where it is.
They cannot be improvised, but must be built up gradually by genera-
tions of patient effort, and the community cannot afford to sacrifice
them and start afresh elsewhere. Hence that territorial character of
sovereignty, which permeates our political conceptions."* For a cen-
tury these obvious truths were ridiculed.
The economic argument could be easily expanded so as to include
the conditions of safety and security attached to the integrity of the
soil and its resources—such as the vigor and stamina of the popula-
tion, the abundance of food supplies, the amount and character of de-
fence materials, even the climate of the country which might suffer
from the denudation of forests, from erosions and dust bowls, all of
which, ultimately, depend upon the factor land, yet none of which
respond to the supply-and-demand mechanism of the market. Given
a system entirely dependent upon market functions for the safe-
guarding of its existential needs, confidence will naturally turn to such
forces outside the market system which are capable of ensuring com-
mon interests jeopardized by that system. Such a view is in keeping
with our appreciation of the true sources of class influence: instead of
* Hawtrey, R. G., The Economic Problem, 1933.
[194] The Great Transformation
trying to explain developments that run counter to the general trend
of the time by the (unexplained) influence of reactionary classes, we
prefer to explain the influence of such classes by the fact that they, even
though incidentally, stand for developments only seemingly contrary
to the general interest of the community. That their own interests are
often all too well served by such a policy offers only another illustra-
tion of the truth that classes manage to profit disproportionately from
the services they may happen to render to the commonalty.
An instance was offered by Speenhamland. The squire who ruled
the village struck upon a way of slowing down the rise in rural wages
and the threatening dislocation of the traditional structure of village
life. In the long run, the method chosen was bound to have the most
nefarious results. Yet the squires would not have been able to maintain
their practices, unless by doing so they had assisted the country as a
whole to meet the landslide of the Industrial Revolution.
On the continent of Europe, again, agrarian protectionism was a
necessity. But the most active intellectual forces of the age were en-
gaged in an adventure which happened to shift their angle of vision so
as to hide from them the true significance of the agrarian plight. Un-
der the circumstances, a group able to represent the endangered rural
interests could gain an influence out of proportion to their numbers.
The protectionist countermovement actually succeeded in stabilizing
the European countryside and in weakening that drift toward the
towns which was the scourge of the time. Reaction was the beneficiary
of a socially useful function which it happened to perform. The identi-
cal function which allowed reactionary classes in Europe to make play
with traditional sentiments in their fight for agrarian tariffs was re-
sponsible in America about a half-century later for the success of the
TVA and other progressive social techniques. The same needs of soci-
ety which benefited democracy in the New World strengthened the in-
fluence of the aristocracy in the Old.
Opposition to mobilization of the land was the sociological back-
ground of that struggle between liberalism and reaction that made up
the political history of Continental Europe in the nineteenth century.
In this struggle the military and the higher clergy were allies of the
landed classes, who had almost completely lost their more immediate
functions in society. These classes were now available for any reaction-
ary solution of the impasse to which market economy and its corol-
lary, constitutional government, threatened to lead since they were
Market and Nature [ 195 ]
not bound by tradition and ideology to public liberties and parlia-
mentary rule.
Briefly, economic liberalism was wedded to the liberal state, while
landed interests were not—this was the source of their permanent
political significance on the Continent, which produced the cross-
currents of Prussian politics under Bismarck, fed clerical and milita-
rist revanche in France, ensured court influence for the aristocracy in
the Hapsburg empire, and made church and army the guardians of
crumbling thrones. Since the connection outlasted the critical two
generations laid down by John Maynard Keynes as the practical alter-
native to eternity, land and landed property were now credited with a
congenital bias for reaction. Eighteenth-century England with its
Tory free traders and agrarian pioneers was forgotten as were the Tu-
dor engrossers and their revolutionary methods of making money
from the land; the Physiocratic landlords of France and Germany with
their enthusiasm for free trade were obliterated in the public mind by
the modern prejudice of the everlasting backwardness of the rural
scene. Herbert Spencer, with whom one generation sufficed as a sam-
ple of eternity, simply identified militarism with reaction. The social
and technological adaptability recently shown by the Nipponese, the
Russian, or the Nazi army would have been inconceivable to him.
Such thoughts were narrowly time-bound. The stupendous in-
dustrial achievements of market economy had been bought at the
price of great harm to the substance of society. The feudal classes
found therein an occasion of retrieving some of their lost prestige by
turning advocates of the virtues of the land and its cultivators. In liter-
ary romanticism nature had made its alliance with the past; in the
agrarian movement of the nineteenth-century feudalism was trying
not unsuccessfully to recover its past by presenting itself as the guard-
ian of man's natural habitat, the soil. Had the danger not been genu-
ine, the stratagem could not have worked.
But army and church gained prestige also by being available for the
"defence of law and order," which now became highly vulnerable,
while the ruling middle class was not fitted to ensure this requirement
of the new economy. The market system was more allergic to rioting
than any other economic system we know. Tudor governments relied
on riots to call attention to local complaints; a few ringleaders might
be hanged, otherwise no harm was done. The rise of the financial mar-
ket meant a complete break with such an attitude; after 1797 rioting
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