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Property, Liberty and Self-Ownership in the English Revolution

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Property, Liberty and Self-Ownership in the English Revolution Property, Liberty and Self-Ownership in the English Revolution Lorenzo Sabbadini Queen Mary, University of London Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of London November 2013 Abstract This thesis seeks to develop our understanding of ideas about political liberty in the English Revolution by way of focusing on the issue of property, a topic unduly neglected in the secondary literature. Most writers of the period conceived of liberty as absence of dependence, but what has been little examined is the extent to which it was believed that the attainment of this condition required not only a particular kind of constitution but a particular distribution of property as well. Here the central ideal became that of self-ownership, and the thesis is largely devoted to tracing the rise, eclipse and re-emergence of this way of thinking about the connections between property and liberty. Chapter 1 considers the emergence, in the ‘paper war’ of the early 1640s, of the radical Parliamentarian view that all property ultimately resided in Parliament. It was to oppose this stance, Chapter 2 argues, that the Levellers began to speak of ‘selfe propriety’, transforming the Parliamentarian notion of popular sovereignty into an individualist doctrine designed to protect subjects and their property from not only the king but also Parliament. Elements of both the Parliamentarian and Leveller discussions of property were taken up by John Milton and Marchamont Nedham (Chapter 3), while James Harrington offered an alternative theory that eschewed the notion of self-ownership (Chapter 4). After a chapter considering the relationship between property and freedom in Henry Neville and Algernon Sidney, the final chapter focuses on John Locke’s revival of self-ownership in his attempt to ground property rights in the individual’s ownership of his ‘person’. Although Locke is shown to offer a theory of private property, the Locke that emerges is not a proto-liberal defender of individual rights but a theorist of neo-Roman freedom whose aim was to explain the connection between property and non-dependence. 2 Contents Acknowledgments page 5 Notes on the text 7 Introduction 9 1 Property, ship money and the paper war 30 Property and liberty in the early Stuart Parliaments 31 The ship-money case 34 The Parliamentarians’ defence of private property 40 Henry Parker’s theory of popular sovereignty 45 The Royalist challenge 49 Some Parliamentarian responses 58 From popular sovereignty to parliamentary absolutism 64 2 The Levellers and self-ownership 72 The concept of ‘selfe propriety’ 73 Freedom and private property 79 Property and the Putney Debates 87 The Levellers and economic levelling 91 Freedom without property 99 3 The Commonwealth and ‘common wealth’ 107 Anti-republican defences and republican critiques of the Commonwealth 109 Milton’s attack on hereditary monarchy 114 Private property and common wealth 121 Milton’s critique of luxury 125 Nedham against levelling 130 Popular sovereignty and republicanism 133 The dangers of luxury and the ‘excellencie’ of free-states 137 4 James Harrington and the equal commonwealth 145 The constitutional mechanism of Oceana and the concept of liberty 148 The doctrine of the balance 155 The equal commonwealth 163 The immortal commonwealth and individual freedom 171 3 5 Republican liberty in the Restoration Crisis 180 The revival of the ancient constitution 180 Neville and the doctrine of the balance 186 Neville and the Restoration monarchy 190 The ancient constitution in a Harringtonian key 196 Sidney and republican liberty 200 The issue of property in Sidney’s political thought 205 6 John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and the revival of self-ownership 214 Locke and republican liberty 217 Self-ownership and natural liberty 223 From property in the person to private property 227 Private property and political liberty 233 Should Locke have been a Leveller? 244 Conclusion 249 Bibliography 255 4 Acknowledgments In writing this PhD thesis I have incurred numerous debts, and it is a great pleasure to acknowledge some of these here. Given my topic it seems appropriate to begin by thanking the generous support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, whose grant ensured that I was not dependent on the arbitrary will of anybody in undertaking my research. The School of History at Queen Mary, University of London has provided a congenial and stimulating environment in which to pursue doctoral research, and I should like to pay particular tribute to Miri Rubin for her support over the past three years. I should also like to thank the Newberry Consortium for providing funding to attend conferences in Washington, D.C. and Chicago. My greatest intellectual debt is to my supervisor Quentin Skinner, whose guidance and inspiration have played a vital role in bringing this thesis to fruition. It was by reading his work as an undergraduate at Oxford that I first became interested in early-modern intellectual history, and I feel privileged to have benefited at first hand from his outstanding learning, generosity and kindness. I would also like to express my sincerest gratitude to my examiners David Armitage and Jason Peacey for making the viva voce examination such a rewarding experience, and for offering such probing and helpful comments in their reports. Joad Raymond read my manuscript with meticulousness and acuity, helping me to sharpen my argument and saving me from several textual infelicities. I received much encouragement and stimulation from my correspondence with James Tully, who read my work with his characteristic insightfulness and offered some highly perceptive comments on my chapter on Locke. For their helpful feedback on my thesis at various stages, I finally wish to thank Georgios Giannakopoulos, Elliott Karstadt, John Miller and Evangelos Sakkas. I have gained immeasurably from being part of a thriving community of intellectual historians in London and beyond, and I should like to acknowledge in 5 particular Richard Bourke, Katie Harper, Maurizio Isabella, Jeremy Jennings, Giorgio Lizzul, Eric Nelson, Joanne Paul, Sophie Smith, Gareth Stedman Jones, Georgios Varouxakis and Hanna Weibye. I also wish to thank my MPhil supervisor Annabel Brett and numerous other teachers for the inspiration they have provided over the years, among them Dermot Allen, James Campbell, Leon Cohen, Nicholas Davidson, Bob Harris, Felicity Heal, Peter Heather and John Robertson. My warmest thanks are reserved for my friends and family, and in particular my parents, whose unfailing affection and support mean more to me than I can express in words. I dedicate this thesis to them, with love and gratitude. 6 Notes on the text Bibliography. The Bibliography lists only those primary and secondary sources that I have actually referred to in my thesis. I have not attempted to provide a full list of works relating to my subject. Anonymous sources are listed alphabetically by title. Where a text is issued anonymously but a widely accepted attribution exists, I provide the author’s name in square brackets. I do not follow this practice, however, when quoting from a modern edition of a text originally published anonymously, e.g. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. For sources published pseudonymously whose author has not been identified, the pseudonym is provided in inverted commas. Dates. Dates are given in old style, but years are taken to begin on 1 January. The month of publication (based on Thomason’s dating) is provided for most of the texts discussed in the first chapter and many of those in the second, where precise dating is of particular relevance; elsewhere I generally confine myself to the year. Editions. I use modern editions where these are reliable and readily available; otherwise my preference is for original editions. For the pamphlet literature of Chapters 1 and 2, I have opted to use the original editions contained in the Thomason Collection at the British Library, even though in a few cases an acceptable modern text exists. The only exception is Winstanley’s pamphlets, for which I have availed myself of the critical edition of his Complete Works recently published by OUP. References. I follow the author-date system, except for anonymous sources and for documents such as parliamentary proceedings that are unattributable to any one author. In both cases I provide a short version of the title. For the sake of consistency, all passages are cited by page number. This includes works such as Aristotle’s Politics that are more commonly cited using conventions such as 7 Bekker numbers. Where a text is referred to repeatedly within a chapter, and where this would not result in confusion, page numbers are given in brackets in the body of the text rather than in the footnotes. Likewise, when quoting from poetry, I give the line number in the main text. Transcriptions. My general rule is to preserve the spelling, punctuation, capitalization and italicization of the texts from which I quote. However, I normalize the long ‘s’, alter ‘u’ to ‘v’ and ‘i’ to ‘j’ and vice versa in accordance with modern usage, and adjust the case of initial letters when inserting quotations into my text. I apply this rule also to titles, except for works widely known in a modernized form. Thus An Essay concerning Human Understanding, not An Essay concerning Humane Understanding. Translations. When quoting from non-English sources, my general practice is to use a modern English translation, providing excerpts from the original in square brackets where this is deemed necessary. When quoting from an English source with the occasional passage in a foreign language, I have preserved the original and included my own translation in square brackets. Titles are provided in the original language, except in the case of works commonly referred to in English, e.g. Aristotle’s Politics.
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