Kenneth Minogue (1930 – 2013):
The Greek despotes and the Roman dominus both signify the specific form of power exercised by the master of slaves. …
The essence of despotism is … the unchecked power of the master. …
The sole object of the subjects must be to please.
There is … no public voice except that of the despot.
Such powerlessness is, oddly enough, the reason why despotisms are notable generators of spiritual enlightenment.
A reaction sets in against a world governed by the caprice of power, and thoughtful subjects take up mysticism, Stoicism, and other forms of withdrawal.
The essence of life is then found in a spiritual realm beyond that of the senses, and social and political life is devalued as illusion.
The result is usually scientific and technological stagnation …
All that one can confidently say about despotism is that able rulers will sooner or later be followed by mad or feeble heirs.
(Politics: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1995)
Thomas Piketty (1971)
Land of the Free
The total number of slaves on Euro-American plantations in the Atlantic region [peaked at] 6 million in 1860 (4 million of whom were in the southern United States, 1.6 million in Brazil, and 0.4 million in Cuba). …
[The] 4 million slaves exploited in the southern United States on the eve of the Civil War (1861–1865) constituted the largest concentration of slaves that ever existed. …
[The] market value of all slaves exceeded the value of all other private property (land, buildings, and equipment). …
[Politically,] the number of slaves played a key role in determining the number of seats assigned to each state in the House of Representatives and therefore the number of members of the Electoral College, which chooses the president: each slave counted for three-fifths of a free person. …
Of the fifteen presidents who served prior to the election of the Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1860, no fewer than eleven were slaveowners. …
In the 1850s, on the eve of the American Civil War, 75 percent of the cotton imported by European textile factories came from the southern United States.
[It] was this “empire of cotton,” intimately associated with slave plantations, that was the heart of the Industrial Revolution and more generally of the economic domination of Europe and the United States. …
The necessity of compensating slaveowners [for loss of their property] was obvious not only to the political and economic elites of the time but also to many thinkers and intellectuals. …
Tocqueville … proposed in 1843 that half the indemnity be paid to slaveholders in the form of government annuities (hence by increasing the public debt, to be repaid by the taxpayers) and the other half by the slaves themselves, who would work for the state for ten years at low wages, allowing the wage differential to be used to reimburse their former owners.
In that way, he argued, the solution would be “fair to all participating parties,” since the former slaveowners would, after ten years, be obliged to pay “the increased price of labor” due to emancipation. …
[He also] proposed that former slaves be deprived of property rights for a long period of time, from ten to twenty years, to give them time to acquire a taste for work and effort; this lesson might be lost if they were to discover the comforts of property too quickly (and “unnaturally”).
From Ownership Society to Social Democracy
OWNERSHIP SOCIETY (sometimes called proprietarian society):[In] 1880 nearly 80% of the land in the United Kingdom was … owned by 7,000 noble families (less than 0.1% of the population), with more than half belonging to just 250 families (0.01% of the population), a tiny group that largely coincided with the hereditary peers who sat in the House of Lords. …
A social order based on a quasi-religious defense of property rights as the sine qua non of social and political stability.
Ownership societies flourished in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. …
Proprietarian ideology is the ideology of ownership society, based on the sacralization of property rights.
[The] House of Lords played a clearly dominant role in British becameralism until the last third of the nineteeth century. …
Specifically, all laws had to be approved in identical terms by both houses, effectively conferring a veto power over all legislation, including fiscal and budgetary matters and anything to do with property rights, on the House of Lords (and thus on a few hundred hereditary peers). …
In the early 1860s, roughly 75 percent of the seats in the House of Commons were still occupied by members of the [landed] aristocracy, which accounted for less than 0.5 percent of the British population at the time. …
[Before the] secret ballot was … introduced [in] 1872 … each individual vote was announced publicly and recorded …
Hence it was not easy for voters to make political choices that went against the wishes of their landlords or employers. …
The local member of Parliament (MP) was reelected in election after election and often in generation after generation.
In 1860 the House of Commons was still profoundly aristocratic and oligarchic. …
[The] famous Black Act of 1723 … stipulated the death penalty for anyone caught pilfering wood or poaching game on land they did not own.
Humble folk had taken to blackening their faces and trying their luck by night, and landlords in the House of Lords and their allies in the House of Commons were determined to prevent this.
Anyone who killed a deer, cut down a tree, poached fish from a breeding pond, pulled up plants, or abetted or incited such activity fell under the shadow of the act and could be sentenced to death by hanging without trial of any kind.
Initially intended to expire after three years, the law was renewed and reinforced over the next century until these acts of rebellion ceased and the proprietarian order was restored. …
Universal male suffrage was established in 1918, and the vote was finally extended to women in 1928.
This final phase of reform also witnessed the first decisive successes of the Labour Party.
The [Swedish] social democrats of the SAP came to power in the early 1920s …
The party subsequently held power more or less permanently from 1932 to 2006, and this long period in government allowed it to develop a very sophisticated welfare and tax system, which in turn achieved one of the lowest levels of inequality ever observed anywhere.
[Prior to] the early twentieth century, Sweden was a profoundly inegalitarian country …
In 1885, Sweden still had a law on the books allowing anyone without either a job or sufficient property to live on to be arrested and sentenced to a term of forced labor. …
[In] Sweden from 1865 to 1911 … the number of votes each voter could cast depended on the size of that voter’s tax payments, property, and income.
The men sufficiently wealthy to vote in elections for the lower house were divided into forty-odd groups, and each group was assigned a different electoral weight.
Specifically, each member of the least wealthy group could cast one vote, while each member of the wealthiest group could cast as many as fifty-four votes.
A similar system applied to municipal elections … with the additional wrinkle that corporations also had the right to vote in local elections, again casting a number of ballots that depended on their tax payments, property, and profits.
No voter in an urban municipal election, whether a private individual or a corporation, could cast more than one hundred ballots.
In rural towns, however, there was no such ceiling; indeed, in the municipal elections of 1871, there were 54 rural towns in Sweden where one voter cast more than 50% of the votes. …
[Yet] in the space of a few years Sweden moved from the most extreme hyper-inegalitarian proprietarian system … to a quintessential egalitarian social-democratic society once the SAP came to power in the 1920s …
People sometimes imagine that each culture or civilization has some “essence” that makes it naturally egalitarian or inegalitarian. …
In fact, everything depends on the rules and institutions that each human society establishes, and things can change very quickly depending on the balance of political and ideological power among contending social groups as well as on the logic of events and on unstable historical trajectories …
Sweden reminds us that equality is always a fragile sociopolitical construct, and nothing can be considered permanent: what was transformed in the past by institutions and the mobilization of political movements and ideologies can be transformed again by similar means, for better or for worse.
(Capital and Ideology, 2019)
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