Land reform kills the aristocracy

So I’ve got a theory on ~aristocrats~ as a social class and I wanted to yap about it a bit. Because it is something that essentially no longer exists in the West — or most of the world writ large — but as late as the 1930s, and for almost our entire settled existence as a species, aristocrats were the dominant social order on the planet. As late as the year my grandparents were born, from the Elbe to Bengal, Humans were lorded over by a landed hereditary gentry class which held essentially all economic, cultural, and political power. The process through which they disappeared is poorly publicly understood in America, if for no other reason than we have been free of them — with the exception of the rural South — for centuries. But it is arguably one of the biggest transformations since the first creation of organized societies.

This is an enormous claim, since it is in competition with shifts like the industrial revolution and female emancipation, doubly compounded by the fact that no change is easily separable from another. The decline of the aristocracy is primarily the result of secular economic trends, which are themselves the result of the industrial revolution, which was the result of cultural changes in Europe, which were the result of something else … all the way back to Cain and Abel, or if the Mormons are to be believed, even further. So I’m not going to claim that the collapse of the traditional landed aristocracy was the biggest change. But it did break down the emotional and physical core of pre-industrial society, which in turn has substantially altered our beliefs about the world on a basal level.

By the dawn of the 20th century the landed gentry were doomed for a slow slide out of power, but the exact process through which they were to be dissolved was not predestined to be either as thorough, or as permanent, as it ended up being. In countries like pre-WW1 Germany or mid-20th-century Brazil, industrial global economies coexisted with, and in a way supported, the continued existence of this class. What actually ended up happening was that they were liquidated in the aftermath of WW2, because of a substantial alignment between progressive liberals and Soviet communists on the necessity, if not the shape, of land reform. The result of this alignment was a near-global reallocation of land away from traditional aristocracies: into smallholder plots, as in Korea, Taiwan, and — in a shallower, more lawyerly way — India; or into large collective farms, as in mainland China, Ethiopia, and Cuba.

What makes landed wealth different?

You can think about land as a type of capital that trends toward local natural monopolies. The mechanism for this process is simple. The larger a plot of land is, the larger — in absolute terms — the surplus that is concentrated in one pair of hands. This larger surplus allows the owner to invest in capital, increasing his total surplus further, as well as specialize the labor of his employees. It was this very same logic behind the communists’ collectivization of agriculture: since they believed that peasant plots would be unable to pool enough resources to do things like buy tractors et al., the solution was to pool smallholder plots into large collective assets.

This dynamic of course predates industrial agriculture, and is the same force behind the consolidation of land in nearly every settled society. Often these large pre-industrial farms were small self-sufficient societies with their own manufacturing and defense. A plantation in the American South or a latifundium in ancient Rome would often have its own blacksmiths, horse breeders, bakers, etc. — Varro, writing his farming manual in the first century BC, advises that a large estate far from town simply keep its own smiths and craftsmen on the grounds. With scale you also get real variation in the way land is used: orchards, crop rotation, not just one horse but an entire team of horses and the breeding of horses — things that are simply impossible on a small plot. And rather than just growing food, the great estate could also devote energy to producing cash crops designed for export, granting further access to manufactured goods.

Arguably even more important in the pre-industrial world was the fact that large plots of land were better insured against poor harvests. Often farmers were only one or two bad years from falling deeply into debt, and since they were very cash-constrained they would often be forced to sell — even if they could, given enough time, have paid off their loans. Usury was historically hated, at least partially, for a reason.

The Harvest

For the same reason land consolidates it also also refuses to divide. A great estate is too interconnected as a unit to truly split. Best case scenario, you end up with the Carolingian problem — Charlemagne’s heirs carving the Frankish empire into weird pseudo-kingdoms layered on top of one another — which is roughly what happens any time you try to divide ownership of a working agricultural complex among sons. You can artificially split the title in some way, but doing so creates enormous problems, so mostly people didn’t.

What these two dynamics — consolidation on the way up, resistance to division on the way down — created was a mostly static structure of land ownership. Or in other words, it produced a quasi-fixed income across generations. It’s not that these families had unlimited money, or unlimited access to capital, but rather that they were, at least by local standards, rich, with wealth that was difficult to save, and renewable. Hence a set of social incentives which is totally alien to us, where we think of money as some fungible thing we can shift across space and time. To aristocrats it was instead a consistent Harvest, where the big questions were ones of division.

I’m not trying to give the impression that wealth was truly static historically. The past is full of nobles who squandered their inheritance, or commoners who climbed their way to power; there was far more social mobility in the medieval world than a casual observer might believe. You don’t have noble houses ruling the same place for 4,000 years, the way a George R.R. Martin–style fantasy universe would imply. But a family that holds for five, six, seven generations is holding long enough to give a very specific character to a society — and a very specific conception of wealth, as a thing that is simply always there, in roughly the same amount.

The Type

This flavor of society produces a very specific sociological set of behaviors among its aristocrats, largely irrespective of the political background they exist inside. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and frankly most of the Founding Fathers were aristocrats by any reasonable definition, irrespective of whether society bestowed them with formal titles or not. There is no reasonable way you could characterize someone like Jefferson as anything other than an aristocrat — the personality, the flavor, is obviously of the aristocratic line.

To list out a few of those behaviors:

• Surplus sons. Because the estate cannot be easily divide, every generation throws off younger sons who must be exported into the army, the church, and the state. This in turn gives these institutions elite prestige and flavor which bolsters their power in society.

• The morality of leisure. We don’t like to admit this, but based on the morality of their own time, aristocrats were almost always more “moral” than commoners. It isn’t hard to imagine why, they defined morality and had time to abide by it. Honor, learning, patronage, and public service are luxury goods, and the aristocrat was the only man who could reliably afford them. This creates a sense of awe and belief in the existence of a ~natural~ aristocracy.

• Attachment to the locale. Since wealth is a specific place — a house, a district, a name — rather than a fungible asset, it has to be defended. This means that power is always deeply local and particular.

• Instinctive defense of hierarchy. Because aristocrats derive their wealth and status from the existing social order, they have a strong interest in preserving it.

The Triangle

Now, in every one of these societies there is a countervailing tension: the desire to redistribute the land. It is a three-way fight. The peasants want to break up the big estates because they hate them — the permanent, perpetual desire of the plebeian class is small tenant-based farming on land of its own. The central government wants to break them up because it wants everyone reduced to the same level relative to the king — call it the Septimius Severus dynamic: you want to be the one person everyone else is basically a slave relative to. And the aristocrats want to hold, which mostly means capturing the machinery that would otherwise be used against them.

The fight gets sharpest around public land. There is almost always some degree of public ownership in these societies, and it is almost always co-opted by the aristocratic class — producing a standing tension between the legal right to the commons and the implicit economic right the aristocrats have established over it. You can see this with the Gracchi brothers in Rome. And I’d almost argue the English enclosure acts are best read as a formalization of a co-option that had already occurred de facto on the commons.

At various points in history the aristocracy would be wrestled off of their land and it would be reformed but overwhelmingly they succeeded in holding onto their right.

How it died

After World War II though it was simply over for them. Across the whole planet there was significant and persistent land reform, caused primarily by both of the victorious sides being revolutionary reformers, from a nineteenth-century perspective. The world’s option set for acceptable politics was either radical progressive liberalism — of the New Deal variety — or literal revolutionary communism. It should go without saying that neither of these groups was particularly sympathetic to the planter or aristocratic classes.

In the United States, all of this was further fueled by the fact that Anglo-Yankee society — victorious within living memory in a civil war against an aristocratic planter class — had defined itself strongly against landed aristocracies, in favor of monied aristocracies.

But above and beyond that was a general vibe that aristocrats were a doomed chapter in history, that they had caused too many problems to justify their pomp. The specific flavor of the locals’ problems with their aristocrats changed from country to country — in the postcolonial world they were collaborationists; in Latin America they were reactionaries — but the conclusion was shared everywhere. And it coincided with that permanent, perpetual desire of the plebeian class to break up the big landholders and put small tenant-based farming in their place.

In some cases the reforms were implemented at gunpoint. In Japan, the US occupation compulsorily purchased about 5.8 million acres between 1947 and 1949 — roughly 38 percent of the country’s cultivated land — and resold it to the tenants working it. The share of farmland under tenancy collapsed from 46 percent to 10, and because the purchase prices were fixed in nominal terms while postwar inflation ran wild, the landlords were expropriated in everything but name: by the time they were paid, the money was worth almost nothing (Ramseyer, 2015). In the Soviet zone of Germany, the Bodenreform — slogan: Junkerland in Bauernhand, Junker land into farmers’ hands — expropriated every holding over 100 hectares without compensation: 7,112 estates, some 3.2 million hectares by the end of 1948, with most former owners expelled from their home districts outright.

Aristocrats inside modernity

You can see the way the secular trend toward de-aristocratization combined with the accelerant of land reform in the case of Brazil. João Goulart’s push for expropriation-based land reform helped trigger the 1964 coup, after which the military government then passed its own Land Statute which was mostly left inactive. As a result there continues to exist in Brazil, in a weakened and anemic form, a politically and economically active landed aristocracy of sorts — rural land there remains about as unequally held as anywhere on Earth, essentially unchanged since the 1980s.

It’s worth being clear that industrial modernity alone did not kill them, because the two demonstrably coexisted. Germany is the most famous example. From unification in 1870 you have a basically functional democracy alongside industrialization, scientific rationalism, and the whole modern package. And inside that universe you still have genuine aristocrats in the form of the Junkers, ruling on their great estates east of the Elbe. As a quick aside, in my opinion, this is part of the reason you get such schizophrenia in German politics of the era.

The claim

So my basic claim is this: when you break up the land — and in particular, when you take agricultural production and move it into the capitalist system — you dissolve over time, even if you don’t do it violently, the existence of an aristocratic class. And with it you lose the basic defender of hierarchy in most old societies, along with the standing economic argument for hierarchy itself.

I don’t think the liberal-democratic consensus we inherited is some kind of clever ideological victory of liberalism. It is downstream of the fact that the class which would have fought for the alternative had its material basis liquidated, almost everywhere, inside a single generation — mostly unconsciously, as a byproduct of the postwar settlement. Ordinary capital produces its own elites but because it is easily divisible, easily fungible, and treated as just a source of income. The high bourgeoisie lack the character of the truly aristocratic.