Comments Elsewhere

Sudha: Historical materials are not plasticine to be moulded at will by philosophers.

Who claimed that they were?

I don’t see anywhere that quasibill denies that the political process of enclosure involved calculations of “value” that were done in the way that you describe. What he denied is that such calculations actually told anyone something useful about value or rightful ownership or legitimate rights to the land.

An historian has every right to expect that the understandings of these concepts by decision-makers at the time — and not a philosopher’s contemporary reflections on the true nature of the concepts — will be used in trying to understand the decisions that they made. But she has no right to expect that the understanding of whose claims were legitimate, or whether compensation was appropriate to the loss of value, or whether the resulting allocation of land respected the rights of the people who had used or laid claim to it it up until the enclosure. Whether enclosure violated or respected the property rights of the people working the land at the time is something that you need to know historical details to judge accurately. But it is not something that the historical details alone determine; it requires independent reflection on the categories, such as rights, ownership, value, compensation, law, claim, etc., that are used to describe the situation.

There are many examples throughout history of people who believed false things about philosophical concepts such as value, right, ownership, law, consent, justice, etc., and many examples of those false beliefs being encoded in the formal law or the political proceedings of the states that they lived under. To take an example from a very different time, under the statutory law in the Southern United States the overwhelming majority of black human beings were treated as “a species of property” and members of the white political class in those states equated respect for private property rights with deference to slavery by the free states and by the federal government. They were, however, mistaken: there is no such thing as rightful ownership over another person and respect for genuine private property rights demanded (then as much as now) the nullification of slavers’ claims, not deference to them. It would be a mistake for contemporary libertarians to bend or twist historical facts in such a way as to ignore the nature of the claims that slavers made on behalf of their so-called “private property rights” in fellow human beings. It is, however, no sin to point out that slavers did not actually own their slaves, and were no different, from the moral standpoint, than any other band of kidnappers and pirates.

Of course, you might claim that Carson’s or Stromberg’s or somebody else’s understanding of the historical details goes beyond making judgments about the legitimacy of the claims; that they gloss over, or ignore, important historical facts about what claims were made, and by whom they were made, and how the claims were responded to. Fine, but the problem then has to do with some universal human failings (oversimplification and confirmation bias) and nothing at all to do with the proper relationship between historians and philosophers.