During the last forty years a theory has made its way into historical
literature, according to which private ownership in land was preceded
by a system of cultivation in common. The authors of this theory do not
confine themselves to saying that there was no such thing as private
property in land among mankind when in a primitive or savage state. It
is obvious that when men were still in the hunting or pastoral stage,
and had not yet arrived at the idea of agriculture, it did not occur to
them to take each for himself a share of the land. The theory of which
I speak applies to settled and agricultural societies. It asserts that
among peoples that had got so far as to till the soil in an orderly
fashion, common ownership of land was still maintained; that for a
long time it never occurred to these men who ploughed, sowed, reaped
and planted, to appropriate to themselves the ground upon which they
laboured. They only looked upon it as belonging to the community.
It was the people that at first was the sole owner of the entire
territory, either cultivating it in common, or making a fresh division
of it every year. It was only later that the right of property, which
was at first attached to the whole people, came to be associated with
the village, the family, the individual.
“All land in the beginning was common land,” says Maurer, “and belonged
to all; that is to say to the people.”[51] “Land was held in common,”
says M. Viollet, “before it became private property in the hands of
a family or an individual.”[52] “The arable land was cultivated in
common,” says M. de Laveleye; “private property grew up afterwards
out of this ancient common ownership.”[53] In a word, the system of
agriculture was, in the beginning, an agrarian communism.
This theory is not, strictly speaking, a new one. Long before the
present century, there were thinkers who loved to picture to themselves
mankind living together, when society was first formed, in a fraternal
communism. What is new in this, what is peculiar to our own times, is
the attempt to rest this theory on a foundation of historical fact, to
support it with quotations from historical documents, to deck it out,
so to speak, in a learned dress.
I do not wish to combat the theory. What I want to do is only to
examine the authorities on which it has been based. I intend simply
to take _all_ these authorities, as they are presented to us by the
authors of the system, and to verify them. The object of this cold and
tedious procedure is not that of proving whether the theory is true or
false; it is only to discover whether the authorities that have been
quoted can be fairly regarded as appropriate. In short, I am going to
discuss not the theory itself, but the garb of learning in which it has
been presented.
[51] G. L. von Maurer, _Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark- Hof- Dorf-
und Stadtverfassung_, 1854, p. 93.
[52] P. Viollet, in the _Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes_, 1872, p.
503.
[53] Em. de. Laveleye, _De la propriété et de ses formes primitives_,
1874.