argument of the book therefore turns on the notion of moral climate. Empirically, the account of resistance to commodification is applied to the UK in the Long Century between the middle of the nineteenth century and the last quarter of the twentieth. In that period, an intellectual stratum formed a view of society as dominated by an unrestrained market with profound – and immoral and dangerous – consequences for society as a whole. The ideology it developed was actually an uneasy combination of elements emphasizing social justice with those that stressed the importance of social order, all roughly stitched together by the stress on the collective interest. The ideology of Money Talk was, of course, not uncontested during the Long Century and by the 1970s it had been replaced by a radically different ideology – Coined Liberty – that stressed the importance of individual freedom and the defects of a society organized around the collective interest.
The moral climate of Money Talk is pervasive and I illustrate its influence by three case studies, each of which shows how a disposition, a set of cultural conventions, forms a moral framework for economic activity in different markets. The case studies draw on the history of the UK in the Long Century. That focus on a single society is not as powerful as a cross-national study might be in developing a theory of resistance. However, it does permit a much more detailed empirical investigation of how a moral climate has an impact on market regulation.
The three case studies form part I of the book. In part II, chapter 5 describes the principal elements of market institutions that must be controlled in order to block market activity, concentrating on the attribution of property rights and the construction of objects entering a market as properly tradable by defining them as sacred or not. Chapter 6 gives an account of that control as moral regulation, which is exercised at different levels, from the more formal by the state to the less so by such means as shame and gossip. Moral regulation of this kind is made possible by the generation of a distinctive moral climate which combines an impulse to social order with an insistence on social justice, and which relates to the dispositions of economic practices such as those described in part I. In chapter 7, the origin and maintenance of Money Talk are explained by the activities of a cadre of intellectuals interacting with a particular audience. Resistance to commodification in the Long Century was not wholly successful, however, and in the final chapter I attempt an account of why both commodification and its resistance are necessarily incomplete social processes producing a society with a great deal of moral complexity. All societies must pay attention both to long-term stability and to the short-term generation of resources, and the outcome may well be an oscillation in the dominance of the ideological formations that create and maintain those outcomes.
2 Land
Land is special. Most fundamentally, perhaps, it excites emotional commitment. Much of the spirit of nationalism is based on the conviction that a particular territory gives an identity that is celebrated in rituals of various kinds as well as in popular culture. The notion of home is a place where one is safe, whether that is a building, a locality or a nation, perhaps because of the protection given by other people (Linklater, 2015). Religions have sacred spaces – churches, mosques, stone circles, groves of trees or tracts of land – which inspire feelings of awe, of devotion and of a kind of power. And secular spaces can also celebrate what Emile Durkheim thought of as the collective impulse of sacredness, whether they are football stadia, rock concert venues or roadside memorials. Places – religious or not – that carry this emotional charge prove resistant to being treated as commodities like any other. The earliest known lawsuit in Britain, in the year 118, concerned the sale of a woodland sacred to the ancient Britons (Jessel, 2011). Ever since then, the private ownership of land and its purchase and sale, particularly common land, have been hotly contested, but not, it should be said, particularly successfully (Linklater, 2015). In contemporary Britain, the countryside has legal protections and national parks are revered. A study (Rose et al., 1982) found that farmers in Britain, operating in a capitalist market, also manifest a commitment to the land, to its stewardship, and to farming as a practice that is bound up with their ownership of land but is not impersonal. Karl Polanyi puts the point in referring to land as a ‘fictitious commodity’. He argues that: ‘The economic function is but one of the many vital functions of land. It invests man’s life with stability; it is the site of his habitation; it is a condition of his physical safety; it is the landscape and the seasons. We might as well imagine his being born without hands and feet as carrying on his life without land’ (Polanyi, 2001: 187).
There are more mundane considerations too. Land is a social and economic resource. It is required to grow food, to put up buildings, to provide roads and build factories. There is a strong collective interest in its use. It is difficult to imagine a society in which people were not able to move about, build houses or earn a living. As the authors of an influential textbook on land law say in introducing their book: ‘Since land provides the physical base for all human activity, there is no moment of any day in which we lie beyond the pervasive reach of land law … Largely unnoticed, land law provides a running commentary on every single action of every day’ (Gray and Gray, 2007: 1).
These special qualities of land have implications for the control over its use, a control that is, in modern times, given by ownership that is expressed in law and supported by the state. That ownership, however, is not straightforward.
Law, Land and Property
There is a conventional account of land ownership and the law that goes with it that suggests a radical change took place between medieval conceptions of the use and control of land and a later notion of absolute property that developed slowly from the fourteenth century onwards (Linklater, 2015). A ‘landscape of rights and customs’ was replaced by ‘a landscape of private property’ (Williamson and Bellamy, 1987: 102). In the early Middle Ages, farmers had customary rights to the land that they worked, but they also had obligations to their lord. Gradually, however, these relationships changed so that large landowners had contractual relationships with their tenant farmers rather than customary ones and a class of larger farmers emerged who had ownership of the land that they worked. The large landowners saw themselves as absolute owners mainly, though not entirely, free to do what they liked with their land and were less constrained by customary obligation. Such a view of land ownership was, of course, contested by landless farmers and farm labourers over a very long period, mainly with a view to installing a system of peasant proprietorship. A different form of this ideological argument became prominent in the later nineteenth century, organized around the possibility of the nationalization of land promoted by followers of Henry George (Douglas, 1976; Tichelar, 2018b). No less a figure than J. S. Mill notably argued that: ‘No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the entire species.’ People should only own what it is that they create. There can therefore be no private property in land, only in its produce. For Mill, therefore, one possibility is that ‘the State might be the universal landlord, and the cultivators tenants under it’ (Mill, 1978: 94, 96). Since then, this movement has helped to create a different view of property in land.
Legal textbooks warn against an intuitive or everyday understanding of land law in England. By that is meant a notion of land as a physical presence whose ownership is absolute; either one has ownership of a piece of land or one does not. Land ownership, however, is not a question of a physical object; it is rather an issue of control over use. The ownership of property in land is best conceived as a set of rights of control some of which may be legally exercised by an owner but others of which may be held by some other person, or institution. Land may not be unique in this respect but
