Freedom and Land: Common Destinies

The emphasis we use today, speaking of the decline of territorial state as the main cause of the crisis of political autonomy with respect to economic forces, hides the fact that other very important factors contributed to the weakening of political autonomy since ancient times. In this article it is suggested that one of these decisively important historical causes was the dissolution of the relationship between the political action of the free citizen and his access to land as an agricultural resource, a typical feature of the Greco-Roman civilization. Tracing the parable of this relationship through the writings of authors such as Marx, Weber, Brunner and Smith, the main factors of its dissolution can be identified in the separation between ‘rural lordship’ and ‘urban community’ that occurred in the Middle Ages, and in the rise of the liberal market in which land was transformed into a commercial property and a means of unlimited production, whereas the state became a political authority which had to constantly satisfy the action of the ‘invisible hand’.