LITMIR.BIZ

      Enclosure is a place to start to deconstruct the free market narrative. Before the enclosure movement began, there were, in the British Isles and elsewhere, extensive public lands. Lands on which local residents could create a life and a livelihood. Common land on which to fish, farm, hunt, and be housed. Enclosure, actively begun in the sixteenth century and reinforced by James I, fenced in the public lands and made them private. There were protests and battles over the years, but after a couple of hundred years, virtually all the public lands went into private ownership. The landless working class became “labor” to service the machine, and the land went to feeding sheep. More profitable than feeding people.

      The end result was a culture ordered by private interests. Commerce became married to king. What was produced was a culture that abandoned subsistence living and the values of local economy; it became a market devoted to scale, speed, and cost. A market that sanctified buying and selling. A culture where place, history, and tradition became irrelevant. A market culture based on contracts and void of covenantal relationships.

      The language of covenant speaks to a market built on neighborliness, kinship, and common ownership. These are the cornerstones of the neighborly economy. An other kingdom. A covenantal relationship is based on a vow. It requires an act of imagination about neighborliness. You cannot point to covenant. You can only point to specific performances of covenant. Generosity, for example, is a specific performance of covenant. We are most familiar with the marriage vow. This is in our terms an act of neighborliness in which we choose to expend ourselves in care for someone who has no claim except personal needs and being in relationship. It is an act of fidelity that we could easily have avoided. We do not have to make that vow. Yet we felt summoned in some way to do it.

      The modern consumer market economy is based on contract rather than covenant. A contractual relationship is based on a specific exchange of interests. It has a date and a dollar sign and a specific balanced exchange. For example, if you say I promise to give you $10.00, that’s not a contract because nothing is specified in return. A contract is also time limited, it has a date. If I give you $10.00 and you promise to return it to me, it still is not a contract until you specify when you will pay it back. A covenant, by contrast, is free of specifics, free of date, and free of something in return.

      When the public good is replaced with concern for private rights, we substitute a contract for what was covenant. When this happens we become ordered for scarcity instead of abundance. Time is contracted and we become concerned about speed. Certainty replaces mystery. Perfection substitutes for fallibility. Individual rights trump the common good, the common wealth.

      A covenant is not without its risks. It demands reciprocity over time and violating it has its consequences: for example, loss of trust and consequent isolation. Covenant is a different way of ordering social relationships. It leads to a more intimate, a more interdependent way of being. Contracts are more based on agreement between autonomous individuals.