Land Ownership, Individualism, and Government

The Macfarlane Thesis

Alan Macfarlane, in The Origins of English Individualism, argued that English culture became more individualistic than elsewhere because land came to be thought of as owned by the head of a nuclear family rather than by a larger collective, such as an extended family or a village.

As Americans, it is difficult to imagine an alternative model of land ownership, in which no single individual (or married couple) has the authority to sell their property. But in the late middle ages, Macfarlane contends, England was the only place where property belonged to the nuclear family.

This means that it is no longer possible to ‘explain’ the origins of English individualism in terms of either Protestantism, population change, the development of a market economy at the end of the middle ages… Individualism, however defined, predates sixteenth-century changes and can be said to shape them all. p. 196

Macfarlane posits a direct link between individual land ownership and the English conception of liberty. It accustoms the English to commercial transactions, familiarizing them with the norms of capitalism.

What strikes me is the way that this conception arrives in the New World. English, unlike Spaniards, come primarily as settlers, because of the availability of land. The Englishman, unless he is the first-born inheritor of an estate, needs his own land in order to obtain autonomy and the ability to marry and form a separate household.

Leaders in the colonial era and in post-independence America may have wanted to maintain peaceful relations with Native Americans by not encroaching on their lands. But the central role that property ownership played in Anglo-American culture meant that settlers would always drive further into the frontier in order to claim land.

Note that in most states the right to vote was restricted to owners of property. Note that Jefferson held up the “yeoman farmer” as the ideal democratic citizen.

Macfarlane’s thesis has not gone unchallenged. David Hackett Fischer, in Albion’s Seed, describes the nuclear family as strong entrenched among Puritans, Quakers, and Cavaliers. But the fourth group of settlers, the Scotch-Irish Borderers, were more loyal to clans and consequently less oriented toward separate nuclear families. But I believe that they, too, regarded land ownership as individual rather than collective.

Joseph Henrich offers a different challenge. He sees the breakdown of clan systems as coming from Christianity’s ban on cousin marriage. Thus, individualism became characteristic of Western Europe more broadly, not just England. But I think that Macfarlane would argue that England’s institutional rules regarding property inheritance and the right of sale were uniquely conducive to individualism and inconsistent with collective ownership.

Where property is collectively owned, clan leaders play an important role in allocating land and determining its use. Where property is individually owned, the individual makes decisions autonomously, subject to the rule of law of the larger polity. Thus, government takes on a more important role in Anglo-American property systems. We look to government rather than clan leaders to set and enforce the rules related to property.

I think this explains how government came to play such a large role in housing finance in the United States. Home ownership has such cultural significance in Anglo-American society that political leaders felt unable to adopt a laissez-faire stance. It was inevitable that government would intervene on behalf of the typical home owner, even when intervention proves misguided or counterproductive.