Thomas Paine and Agrarian Justice

One hundred years after John Locke died, his views on private property came under fire from Thomas Paine.  Paine had been born in England, but emigrated to America in 1774 in order to leave his wife.  His well-known tract, Common Sense, aided fuel to the American War for Independence; but his later interest in the French Revolution led to his writing the pamphlet Agrarian Justice. 

The French Revolutionaries desired to take the revolutionary notions of the ancient Roman agrarianism and apply them to their new society.  The months of the year were re-named using agrarian terms and saint's days were turned into agrarian holidays, like "Harvest."  Paine wrote Agrarian Justice in 1795, in the aftermath of the revolution in 1789, and his article was read widely by the French.  He titled his work "agrarian justice" instead of "agrarian law," which would be the forced, equal redistribution of property, as in the ancient Roman Lex Sempronia Agraria.  After the fall of Robespierre, the French National Convention had approved the death penalty for anyone proposing "agrarian law," so Paine needed a more fitting title.

Paine begins by arguing that there are two kinds of property: natural and artificial.  Natural is the right to land, air, and water; which he insists every human being is born into.  He says that artificial property is that which is bought and acquired by man.  He states, similarly to Locke, that the earth is the natural, common property of all mankind and that the cultivation of agriculture is what marks property as being owned by a particular individual.  However, contrary to Locke, he does not believe that this is inherited by the right of a king, since we are descendants of Adam.  Instead Paine argues for economics: that the wealthy who can cultivate more, own more.  Therefore, Paine proposes that those who are rich in property should pay an income tax to the poor.  This is what he calls agrarian justice, but is extremely similar to the ancient Roman agrarianism.