2 Land, Tenures and the Property State
Property and Politics 1870-1914 (Offer 1981) is a work of high ambition that was acknowledged by reviewers on publication as a stunning debut. Here, Avner aimed to anatomise English society before the Great War by working through the relationships of landed wealth and income, taxation, regulation, private and municipal enterprise, land and credit markets, professional human capital (with a special focus on lawyers and clerics), local and national politics and the cultural and ideological dimensions of landholding.
The material covered was dense, but skilfully ordered with ideas drawn from classical and modern political and economic theory. In the Offerian vision, Adam Smith's rational actors seek approbation and acceptance from their status as property holders, as well as maximisation of incomes. Ricardo's capitalists avoid competition and capture rents from property ownership. Pareto's elites partake of a culture of “romantic residues” derived from past forms of economic life and property. Bentham's State regulates and stabilises the allocation of resources by conferring property rights, with owners paying a portion of their wealth to maintain the State which establishes and protects their property. Henry George's land monopolists extract unearned increments from industry and labour as towns expand and the economy grows. Rousseau, who is accorded the first and last lines of the book, describes property as a coercive source of inequality, the original worm of self-regard, destroying the pre-lapsarian world of natural community. Underpinning the entire study was a basic problem in political theory from Hobbes and Locke, through Rousseau, to Mill and Marx: How can fallen man civilise an unequal property-holding world through politics?To make sense of it all, Avner developed his own theory of “tenures”, or claims by groups to privileged status and income by virtue of their cohesion as owners or professionals.
Tradition and expertise vest these groups with lucrative control of resources and skills. The first part of the book, entitled “Law as Property”, is the main instantiation of the tenure thesis and threw light on some highly technical aspects of the development of property law and practice (elaborated earlier in Offer 1977). Lawyers were the tenured professional group par excellence, extracting a share of social wealth by their monopoly control of legal transactions, especially land conveyance. These ideas of rent seeking and regulatory capture were deployed at the same time that they were first being modelled more formally in the United States. Land law reform, pre-eminently land registration as a rationalisation of conveyancing, was the proving ground for lawyers' independent, self-governing professional status. Edwardian solicitors' incomes were threatened by a downturn of the property cycle and by overcrowding of the profession. Self-interested solicitors, organised under the umbrella of the Law Society, blocked attempts by Benthamites and Liberals to institute a system of land registration as a quick, cheap and secure form of recording and conveying titles, a system that reformers held to be clearly superior to common law conveyance by deed. The lawyers disagreed, claiming that their arcane techniques were beyond the reach or understanding of non-professionals. The legislation that finally emerged in 1922-1925 was designed to rationalise property law on the legal professionals' terms. It solved a string of particular problems and assisted in the liberal commodification and clarification of land entitlements, but also preserved the lucrative role of lawyers in executing title searches, land contracts and conveyances. Self-interested professionalism thus defeated the public interest, and Britain's economy remained saddled with high legal transaction costs for the remainder of the twentieth century.These conceptions of monopolistic human capital and professional identity, cartelisation and rent seeking exerted a wide influence amongst economic, social and legal historians in the decades that followed (see, for example, Perkin 1989 and Anderson 1992).
Avner's critique of the professions came from the left but chimed with the Thatcherite assault on establishment and professional formations in the 1980s. At the same time, his critical account of the lawyers' promotion of their own interests attracted rebuttals or demands for adaptation by scholars who found value in the pre-modern sensibilities of the old learned professions (Anderson 1992; Pottage 1994; riposte from Offer 1994).Moving from legal to political authority, Avner was also interested in the reciprocal nature of State authority and property prerogatives. In the liberal (Lockean, Kantian) equation, the representative State exists to protect and manage property, which requires taxation and administration—but not redistribution, which is seen as an illegitimate violation of vested rights beyond the reach of politics. How is that line to be held in modern times when the State's power rests on a growing franchise, and the public realm, both local and national, is called upon to shoulder new and heavy tasks of military and welfare investment? This was the conundrum that led to the People's Budget of 1909 and the constitutional crisis that followed, and launched a deeper crisis of State legitimacy in Britain that fluctuated in intensity but that has never really ended.
Avner went on in Property and Politics to describe the mounting conflict between town and country, Liberals and Tories, capitalists and rentiers, over who should bear taxation burdens necessary to support the modern welfare and warfare state, and who should reap the benefits of expanding social wealth expressed in rising property values. He deployed quantitative data to describe wealth distributions, modes of land ownership and levels of income and taxation over the period covered by the volume, dissecting high politics and the motivations of leading actors, giving due weight to the social and cultural dimensions of ownership in the politics of property. In later quantitative work, Avner showed that economic payoffs could not explain the premium prices commanded by land, a gap which he explained in terms of the social and political status and self-esteem that command of acres or houses conferred on the owner (Offer 1980, 1991). He went on to examine the reduction or abolition of rates, the capping of local government taxation, the sell-off of public housing and promotion of private home ownership to reshape the electorate, the channelling of savings via profit-taking banks into the domestic land market (Offer 2014a, 2017a), and the opening of property ownership to investors as a store of value and leveraging opportunity, which effected a febrile boom in both commercial and domestic land markets in Britain. Current work in progress shows how mass home ownership in the twentieth century could only be achieved by means of government mandates, sanctions and subsidies.
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