The third fundamental aim is that the land must irrevocably and for all time be the property of the community. "Mine is the land, saith the Lord, and ye shall work it for Me". In modern dress we must restore the primeval agricultural laws of Israel, which allocated the land for all time to the tribe or village community, which for its part only possessed it in fief from the nation as a whole.
The ancient world knew no other means of maintaining that equality of land tenure, which it fully recognized as the only possible foundation of a sound national life, than to return every piece of ground sold or pawned to the heirs after a certain period: at the year of jubilee. Only because the return could not be effected on account of the power of the big landowners being strong enough to prevent the application of the law, only because of this did Israel fall like Sparta and Rome; that in the last resort is the cause of all Ahasver's sufferings.
p.74 We must forfend this evil, and 2000 years of history have provided us with a better means than the year of jubilee. The individual colonies possess their land corporately under the overlordship of the whole nation; and every individual colonist is only hereditary lease-holder within his community, paying a fixed sum which may not be raised. He cannot be given notice to leave as long as he fulfils his civic obligations to the nation and his economic and communal obligations to his community.
This way of holding land, imperfectly carried into effect under all the old systems of Common Law, insures all the advantages of individual land property and is free from its worst shortcomings. It grants complete security of possession, it bestows the home feeling in the fullest sense and forges this indissoluble link with the soil which roots the soul of the peasant in the field he tills; but it precludes the mortgaging of the soil, which deprives the peasant of the fruits of his labour throughout all the countries under Roman Law and throws them into the lap of the landlord. Further, it precludes that breaking up of agricultural holdings here and their accumulation there which divides the village community into an unfriendly aristocracy and proletariat, and thereby destroys that community of interests which alone, as the history of the world testifies, can make it invulnerable.--Franz Oppenheimer (1903) "Extract from his address at the sixth Zionist Congress in Basle," "Translated by E. I. M. Boyd,
A sympathetic discussion of the sociologist Franz Oppenheimer by Raymond Aron in his (1936) German Sociology, got me interested in the relationship between Oppenheimer (who seems to have been a left-Liberal inspired by Georgism) and Ordoliberalism. Indeed, Oppenheimer seems to have been the doctoral supervisor of Ludwig Erhard (and perhaps Röpke).+
And indeed Oppenheimer was a social liberal (or liberal socialist) who believed, "in the evolution of a society without class dominion and class exploitation which shall guarantee to the individual, besides political, also economic liberty of movement, within of course the limitations of the economic means. That was the credo of the old social liberalism, of pre-Manchester days, enunciated by Quesnay and especially by Adam Smith, and again taken up in modern times by Henry George and Theodore Hertzka." (The State (1908), chapter 7, translated by John M. Gitterman) And while Röpke would not self-identify as a social liberal (let alone a liberal socialist) or a Georgist, the quoted sentence describes Röpke's program in the 1940s very well (and these form the basis of Foucault's interpretation of ordoliberalism).
Much to my surprise, I then learned that not Röpke, but Oppenheimer coined the term 'the third way' in 1933. And then I suddenly realized that this Franz Oppenheimer was the same Oppenheimer as the one time Zionist Oppenheimer who co-founded Altneuland (1864-1943).
This Oppenheimer was one of the guiding lights behind the cooperative (now Moshav) Merhavia (מֶרְחַבְיָה) not far from Afula, which even received publicity from the New York Times at the time. Unlike other settler-colonists, Oppenheimer did not assume that Palestine was empty, but rather he hoped for collaboration between Zionists and local Arabs. So plenty of reasons to take a look at Oppenheimer's writings.
Today's digression is focused on one of his Zionist texts. On Oppenheimer's view, the first two aims of Zionism are (i) self-help or independence; (ii) and that agrarian development should be prioritized. He then quotes Leviticus 25:23, and returns to the recently much discussed passage of the Jubilee in the same chapter of Leviticus in order to provide the third aim.
And Oppenheimer then claims that the fall of biblical Israel was due to the undermining of the institution of the Jubilee not from without, but from within: the ordinary functioning of the property arrangements allowed for temporary concentrations of wealth. But these riches became the source of the power of large landholders to resist the Jubilee and so prevent the rule of law. Oppenheimer implies that this either undermined national solidarity and/or fatally weakened the military capacity of biblical Israel which now could not rely on on independent citizenry. There are, thus, lurking in Oppenheimer republican and limitarian commitments.
Now, it is worth noticing that Oppenheimer's diagnosis of this material and its relationship to the biblical Israel's decline is not far removed from Spinoza's account of this fall in the Theological Political Treatise, 17.106, p. 320. This is also, as Beth Lord has argued, rooted in growing inequality and, in my view, the growing accompanying appetite for luxury of the wealthy (and so accompanying lack of focus on martial virtues, etc.)
In fact, I think Oppenheimer's solution to the diagnosed problem is probably inspired by a proposal in the Political Treatise by Spinoza. For in the context of describing the best monarchy, Spinoza writes,
The fields, and all the land, and if possible, the houses too, should be public property [publici iuris sint], i.e. subject to the control of the one who has the Right of the Commonwealth [ius civitatis habet]. He should lease them for an annual rent [annuo pretio] to the citizens, or to the city residents and farmers. (TP 6.12)
Now out of context it may seem that Spinoza is advocating a dependence of citizens on the King, but, in broader context, it is clear that the whole point of Spinoza's set up is to create a community of interests among rulers and citizens. (It's pretty clear that for Spinoza the leases cannot be abolished at will.) Oppenheimer achieves the same end by substituting the whole nation (the one with Right of the commonwealth) for royalty.
Now I am not claiming that Spinoza must be the source of Oppenheimer's approach. There are, after all, plenty of nineteenth century utopian projects that have similar schemes. But I do think it likely that Oppenheimer was aware the connection. Throughout his System of Sociology he cites and quotes Spinoza's Political Treatise (a work by no means widely read or fashionable).
*For the claim about Rüstow, see The Birth of Austerity, Edited by Thomas Biebricher and Frieder Vogelmann, p. 137.
+Glossner, Christian Ludwig, and David Gregosz. The formation and implementation of the Social Market Economy by Alfred Müller-Armack and Ludwig Erhard: incipiency and actuality. Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung eV, 2011.
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