ENCLOSURES, MACHINES, AND MARKETS

PART 1: POLANYI IN THE SPATIAL REVOLUTION

This post is part of a series on the implications of Karl Polanyi’s “great transformation” argument for analysis of Schmitt’s spatial revolution. An index to the series is provided below.

PART 2: ECONOMY, SOCIETY, AND THE BARTER MYTH

PART 3: MARKET COMMODIFICATION (AND THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION)

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In our last series on Schmitt’s spatial revolution we saw with Grossi the spatial revolution driven transformations of law within European history. He argued that such changes in jurisprudence were the product of material and social changes, primarily driven by the expansion of mercantilism. He emphasized such expansion as being across geographic trade routes, though one could as well point to the expansion of trade, through commercialization and commodification, into the corners of personal, family, and community life.

Toward an effort of better understanding those processes posited by Grossi, in this series we look at the scholarship of Karl Polanyi, who explains these developments as a great transformation of economy and society. And that transformation, you won’t be surprised to learn, I’m sure, is a fractal of Schmitt’s spatial revolution.

In the past, I’ve reviewed in broad strokes the scholarship of Karl Polanyi (see A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars), in the current context though, of examining the spatial revolution, it seems a little deeper exploration would be helpful. In his seminal (though much neglected) book, The Great Transformation¹, Polanyi sets out to refute those epigones of the unfettered free market who take the intellectual posture that such an arrangement is the normative state of nature. As long, the story goes, as nefarious characters – from the state to cartels – don’t interfere with the free market, this is how nature works out our needs and differences. There’s no coincidence in the popularity of the phrase laissez-faire in referring to such idealized arrangements. The phrase laissez-faire literally means to “leave alone.” Let the market take its objectively natural course.

In contrast, though, Polanyi’s scholarship indicates that far from being some naturally emergent force, unfettered free markets are actually the result of draconian interference in social processes on the part of the monist sovereign. It was largely upon Polanyi’s analyses that I developed my argument that modular individualism and mass society, far from being opposites, in reality are symbionts (see A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars). But let’s go through his claims with more precision, and an eye to how these events factor into the spatial revolution.

The key areas that we’ll touch upon in this series will be the enclosures, the barter myth, and commodification. And of course, from the perspective of Schmitt’s analysis, we have the benefit that Polanyi is examining these processes in the country which the former identified as the central mover in the spatial revolution. There may be more than in most past series a set of interconnecting threads between the installments, such that the fullest implications for Polanyi’s relevance to Schmitt’s spatial revolution may not be entirely clear until the final post.

Though there has been indeed a long history of enclosures over the history of England, Polanyi is particularly (though not exclusively) focused on those that clearly dovetailed with the emergence of the industrial revolution. Indeed, it can be reasonably argued that those enclosures made the industrial revolution – at least as it actually happened – even possible. But Polanyi has more than that to say on the topic. So, as per our usual way about here, we give him some considerable leash in laying out the broad strokes of his position.

Our purpose in thus evoking the plight of the people brought about by enclosures and conversions will be on the one hand to demonstrate the parallel between the devastations caused by the ultimately beneficial enclosures and those resulting from the Industrial Revolution, and on the other hand—and more broadly—to clarify the alternatives facing a community which is in the throes of unregulated economic improvement.

...the highly profitable occupation of raising sheep and selling their wool might ruin the country. The sheep which “turned sand into gold” could well have turned the gold into sand as happened ultimately to the wealth of seventeenth-century Spain whose eroded soil never recovered from the overexpansion of sheep farming.

This formula appears to take for granted the essence of purely economic progress, which is to achieve improvement at the price of social dislocation. But it also hints at the tragic necessity by which the poor man clings to his hovel doomed by the rich man’s desire for a public improvement which profits him privately.

Enclosures have appropriately been called a revolution of the rich against the poor. The lords and nobles were upsetting the social order, breaking down ancient law and custom, sometimes by means of violence, often by pressure and intimidation.

They were literally robbing the poor of their share in the common, tearing down the houses which, by the hitherto unbreakable force of custom, the poor had long regarded as theirs and their heirs’.

The fabric of society was being disrupted; desolate villages and the ruins of human dwellings testified to the fierceness with which the revolution raged, endangering the defences of the country, wasting its towns, decimating its population, turning its overburdened soil into dust, harassing its people and turning them from decent husbandmen into a mob of beggars and thieves.

...anti-enclosure legislation never seemed to have stopped the course of the enclosure movement, nor even to have obstructed it seriously.

...it proved impossible to collect evidence against the enclosers, who often had their servants sworn upon the juries, and such was the number “of their retainers and hangers-on that no jury could be made without them.”

These facts suffice to identify the change from arable land to pasture and the accompanying enclosure movement as the trend of economic progress. Yet, but for the consistently maintained policy of the Tudor and early Stuart statesmen, the rate of that progress might have been ruinous, and have turned the process itself into a degenerative instead of a constructive event.

Polanyi is particularly concerned to address a common defense of the enclosures at the time of his writing, that they were an expression of market forces, and so, as we’ve referenced above, somehow assumed to be an expression of natural progress.

The usual “long-run” considerations of economic theory are inadmissible; they would prejudge the issue by assuming that the event took place under a market system. However natural it may appear to us to make that assumption, it is unjustified: such a system is an institutional structure which, as we all too easily forget, has been present at no time except our own, and even then it was only partially present.

If conversion of arable land to pasture involves the destruction of a definite number of houses, the scrapping of a definite amount of employment, and the diminution of the supplies of locally available food provisions, then these effects must be regarded as final, until evidence to the contrary is produced.

...in no case can we assume the functioning of market laws unless a self-regulating market is shown to exist. Only in the institutional setting of market economy are market laws relevant; it was not the statesmen of Tudor England who strayed from the facts, but the modern economists, whose strictures upon them implied the prior existence of a market system.

Polanyi covers the impacts of enclosure for many centuries. And, as already seen, has positive things to say about the policies of the Tudors and Stuarts in mitigating the worst effects of the enclosures for their destruction of traditional social life. However, it is the eventual dovetailing of England’s long struggle with enclosures with the rise of the industrial revolution that finally sets the social forces off into new directions. And as we’d say around here, such was the symbiosis which hyper-charged the spatial revolution – remembering as well of course the great importance Schmitt invested in the English industrial revolution as engine of the spatial revolution.

England withstood without grave damage the calamity of the enclosures only because the Tudors and the early Stuarts used the power of the Crown to slow down the process of economic improvement until it became socially bearable—employing the power of the central government to relieve the victims of the transformation, and attempting to canalize the process of change so as to make its course less devastating.

The government of the Crown gave place to government by a class—the class which led in industrial and commercial progress.

...the real nature of the crisis was not realized when, some 150 years later, a similar catastrophe in the shape of the Industrial Revolution threatened the life and well-being of the country.

This analysis leads into a second vital phase of the spatial revolution as it was examined by Polanyi. That was the emergence of freed markets, and particularly their dynamic with the country’s industrial towns.

...the laboring people had been crowded together in new places of desolation, the so-called industrial towns of England; the country folk had been dehumanized into slum dwellers; the family was on the road to perdition; and large parts of the country were rapidly disappearing under the slack and scrap heaps vomited forth from the “satanic mills.” Writers of all views and parties, conservatives and liberals, capitalists and socialists, invariably referred to social conditions under the Industrial Revolution as a veritable abyss of human degradation.

...an avalanche of social dislocation, surpassing by far that of the enclosure period, came down upon England; that this catastrophe was the accompaniment of a vast movement of economic improvement; that an entirely new institutional mechanism was starting to act on Western society; that its dangers, which cut to the quick when they first appeared, were never really overcome; and that the history of nineteenth-century civilization consisted largely in attempts to protect society against the ravages of such a mechanism. The Industrial Revolution was merely the beginning of a revolution as extreme and radical as ever inflamed the minds of sectarians, but the new creed was utterly materialistic and believed that all human problems could be resolved given an unlimited amount of material commodities.

And, in an interesting Innisian-style twist, Polanyi puts the blame for the developments which were so destructive of traditional life, upon the very nature and demands of the industrial machinery itself. In Innisian terms, Polanyi conceives the machine of the industrial age as inherently space biased, which is to say ever expanding, breaking down the traditional barriers to market expansion eating into the communal bonds of Gemeinschaft and customary institutions and law.

...we insist that once elaborate machines and plant were used for production in a commercial society, the idea of a self-regulating market system was bound to take shape.

Since elaborate machines are expensive, they do not pay unless large amounts of goods are produced. They can be worked without a loss only if the vent of the goods is reasonably assured and if production need not be interrupted for want of the primary goods necessary to feed the machines. For the merchant this means that all factors involved must be on sale, that is, they must be available in the needed quantities to anybody who is prepared to pay for them. Unless this condition is fulfilled, production with the help of specialized machines is too risky to be undertaken both from the point of view of the merchant who stakes his money and of the community as a whole which comes to depend upon continuous production for incomes, employment, and provisions.

Contrast, for example, the merchant-producer’s selling activities with his buying activities; his sales concern only artifacts; whether he succeeds or not in finding purchasers, the fabric of society need not be affected. But what he buys is raw materials and labor—nature and man. Machine production in a commercial society involves, in effect, no less a transformation than that of the natural and human substance of society into commodities.

These insights lead Polanyi to his famous thesis, arguing that what distinguished this period, what in fact constituted the eponymous “great transformation” of the book’s title, was the response to these conditions of (what I’d call) the spatial revolution of transforming the non-inherent commodities of land, labor, and money, indeed into commodities – treated as though they’d been produced for the market. Though, clearly that was a pretense elevated by the partisans of the new economic, and social, order.

The idea, completely foreign to agricultural society, that “all incomes must derive from the sale of something or other, and whatever the actual source of a person’s income, it must be regarded as resulting from sale,” was not – as its proponents posited – some expression of nature. Rather, reflective of Grossi’s observations about the character of natural law (see here), both the social theory underpinning that pretense – i.e., that the system, once established, must be allowed to function without outside interference – and its social imposition upon concrete institutions and customs was the manifestation of a self-interested political project.

It was the gradual imposition of the new machine-like market, with its inexorable internal logic, demanding freedom to follow its natural course, and the profound impacts of unleashing such a logic upon both traditional economy and society, to which we turn our attention in the next installment to this series on Polanyi in the spatial revolution. So, if you don’t want to miss that, and haven’t yet, please...

And if you know anyone who would appreciate what we do around here, please…

Meanwhile: Be seeing you.

1. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2 edition (Boston, Mass: Beacon Press, 2001).