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I think that libertarians have often joined the aspiration to this anti-statist, privacy-oriented freedom with Lockean property and contract theory. The union does not succeed. Locke’s state is a state with excellent maps, the better to settle disputes about land ownership. It is a state that knows who its members are, the better to call upon their financial and military resources. It is a fully functioning modern state. As Scott’s Yale colleague Steven Pincus shows in his recent book 1688, Locke and his revolutionary friends were state-builders and state-modernizers. They completed the work the Stuarts had begun of transforming Britain into a modern bureaucratic state, one in which trade and market-based wealth (rather than, as the Stuarts had hoped, land and agricultural wealth) would support military and imperial might. “Truck, barter, and exchange,” in Smith’s words, are everywhere; but the modern commercial economy is coeval with the modern state, and has always in part been a tool of state purposes. Libertarians need to better understand such entanglements of market and state. Those who have been influenced by Elinor Ostrom’s pioneering work on the variety of property regimes and social orders in the world can probably see these issues more clearly — but Ostrom’s lessons, like Scott’s, have to be allowed to reshape rather than merely add onto traditional libertarian habits of thought.
