This is my first post to this blog. I want to thank Cara and Chris for inviting me to be a part of it. My first post is not immediately on territory and justice, but it is on land and politics. At the bottom I’ll make a link to territory and justice. It’s kind of speculative and open-ended. Do let me know if this is stupid, but please be nice about it.
Aristotle says that a polis needs to be self-sufficient. Plato in effect says the same thing, as does Rousseau: the state has to have enough that it doesn’t start wars to get stuff from others, but not so much that others start wars to get stuff from it.
Kant says the opposite: that a state needs to be engaged in trade with others because this is how Nature executes her plan to bring about perpetual peace. This divergence is interesting in itself, to me at least, inasmuch as I think of Rousseau and Kant as basically aligned on most things (and where they’re not aligned it’s typically not because of Kant’s greater interest in the machinations of Mother Nature). Or so I think, in a broad-brushstroke and probably historically naive way. So this divergence between Kant and Rousseau is interesting in itself. Kant’s line, of course, has become the touchstone of neoliberalism and cosmopolitanism, whereas the Plato/Aristotle/Rousseau line has been taken up by agrarians, which is another way of saying it has been all but ignored in mainstream political philosophy. (Though Tami Meisels makes interesting use of Rousseau’s line.)
I’m somewhat sympathetic to the P/A/R line, and in light of the current economic and environmental situation it may be worth developing in some form as an alternative to globalization.
Part of Aristotle’s reasoning is the linked but independent idea that citizens should have property in both the city and the countryside in order that their own interests be linked to the long-term interests of the polis. I believe Jefferson says the same. My understanding is that this democratization of the country plot is today most fully developed in the Netherlands, which is also interesting, because you’d think of the Netherlands as not having enough space for this. Yet another instance of how the Netherlands proves wrong all our assumptions about the material basis of national wealth.
What could be said in favor of the state’s adopting a policy of encouraging everyone to have a foot in the countryside as well as a foot in the city? Would such a shift in the direction of two pieds-à-terre per household undermine community in each place? If your neighbors are around only on weekdays when you’re working, and disappear on weekends when you have some leisure time, you don’t get to know them.
On the other hand, it might tend to break down one of the most persistent social divisions, that between the city and the countryside – typically, each is dependent on the other but neither really gets the other, and mutual contempt is not uncommon. It might also give city-dwellers a stake in the land and in sustainability that they would lack if they were just in the city. It would value and foster meaningful work, insofar as working the land is meaningful work, as well as leisure and perhaps time away from cell phones. If the countryside plots were too small for ride-on lawnmowers, then people would also be working with their hands, and they might become reconnected with working animals if they raised chickens or something. As for the city plots of country folk, I worry that anything I say will reflect the social division I mentioned above, but having a flat in the city would seem to involve access to diversity and political & cultural opportunities that are not easily available in the countryside. If such a policy would have such virtues, arguably it should be supported.
And now for a last thought on it. If this is indeed a worthwhile policy goal, oughtn’t we to build it into a global theory of territorial rights that each people/nation/state/polis ought to have enough space that each of its citizens can have two pieds-à-terre, one of which is a plot of productive land – or better, is modeled on the lifestyle of their country-dwelling compatriots – and the other of which is a place in the city, modeled on the lifestyle of their urban compatriots? If so, this would seem to constitute a minimum-quantity and perhaps a minimum-quality claim that each state would have in any theory of the just distribution of territory. How would such a criterion of territorial justice sit with other, independent, criteria that we might endorse, such as special attachments between national groups and particular places, or territorial stability despite population fluctuations?
