The Rhetoric of Self-Ownership

The Rhetorical Turn in Self-Ownership

The rhetorical turn in self-ownership is enacted by feminist theorists, in conjunction with critical legal theorists, who challenge the appeal of self-ownership as a first principle in political philosophy and law and economics analysis. ¹⁰ To counter the universal guise of the highly abstracted terms of self-ownership in the work of Robert Nozick and G. A. Cohen, among others, Carole Pateman returns the language of self-ownership to its originary Lockean term, “property in the person.” The older language draws out a more complex relationship between a person, her capacities, and body that is obscured by the self-reflexivity of self-ownership. ¹¹ This linguistic substitution enables Pateman to highlight political questions of who counts as persons and the problem of subordination that she finds occluded by the limited frame of individual autonomy and unjust exploitation. The obfuscating power of self-ownership, she concludes, helps maintain a “political fiction” that our labor is separable from our person, denying the inextricable relation of the self to its body and capacities. ¹² There is more than one way of speaking about the self and its qualities, she suggests, and the fiction of self-ownership carries distorting political effects.

Recognizing linguistic plurality while decrying rhetorical deception is not uncommon among those scholars considering self-ownership as a rhetoric. On the one hand, rhetoric highlights the multiple modes of invoking property to describe various aspects of selfhood, as exemplified in Margaret Radin’s analysis of the double meanings of property and alienation in the liberal tradition. ¹³ On the other hand, critical attention focuses on what is seen as the predictable effects of adopting property-talk for the self, as captured by Margaret Davies and Ngaire Naffine’s claim that “the rhetoric of self-ownership has tended to draw upon a fairly simple notion of property involving actual possession, the right to control and exclude, and the sovereignty of mind over bodies.” ¹⁴ Anne Phillips shares these perspectives on the legal invocations of self-ownership, but transforms them in a significant way. Self-ownership inevitably returns to a single exclusionary definition not only in law but in an unbounded political and philosophical field. It is hopeless to try to change its meaning or effects not because of specific legal institutions or practices, but because of a “collective imagination,” where “popular understandings of property claims are still mostly mired in the world of absolute dominion, and there is a certain wishful thinking in imagining that this can be changed.” Attempting to invoke self-ownership in alternate form is always too politically risky, in this view. ¹⁵

For these theorists, attending to rhetoric, specifically its metaphorical qualities of transferring meaning between domains of property and selfhood, enhances critical leverage by highlighting linguistic plurality and framing effects. Yet they reject self-ownership rhetoric because it is based in a definition of property so intransigent that it is best eradicated altogether. Rhetoric, in this view, releases us from a given vocabulary but cannot be used to generate new meanings. The option to reject the language remains, but not to adopt it in new or simply different ways.

Using rhetoric in this limited way fails to grasp its capacious and creative aspects, and in doing so overlooks important political questions. The rejection of self-ownership rhetoric is based on strategic considerations in judging probable consequences in law or through broader philosophical frameworks. The courts and legal precedent is an important arena with political consequences, but it does not encompass the rhetorically rich arena of political action, both institutionally situated and manifested in social movements. ¹⁶ The unqualified scope of Phillips’s philosophical frame specifies no context, speakers, or audiences for which to justify strategic or practical judgments. Instead, inquiry into the varied uses and effects that can follow from changing contexts and audiences might look like this: Are there strategies that prove unsuccessful in law that generate other effects in political protest? Could a political claim that is unlikely to persuade a general audience have the power to mobilize actors in a social movement? How do political formulations that work at one time and place for a particular audience cease to have meaning or gain new salience when climates change? This is to shift inquiry onto the contingent grounds of political action. Understanding rhetoric as effective and affective speech is not a retreat from pragmatic and strategic political questions, but rather an opportunity to creatively work from the plurality of particular contexts and perspectives that characterize political contestation.

The limited understanding of the rhetoric of self-ownership held by critics has not gone unchallenged. Rosalind Petchesky considers the language of self-ownership as “a commonplace of feminist rhetoric.” ¹⁷ Inspired by self-ownership claims in the feminist struggle for reproductive freedom, she identifies different contextualized and subversive ways people claim their bodies as their own that run counter to the alienating and exclusionary modes emphasized by critics. Self-ownership can convey caretaking and collective ownership as well as protection of their sexual and personal experience and security. ¹⁸ Petchesky offers an important challenge to critics of self-ownership, to say nothing of its champions, who reproduce an overly narrow focus on the individuated, alienating sense of what she calls the “Lockean paradigm.” She joins Pateman, Phillips, and and Macpherson in repudiating self-ownership as possessive individualism, but does not see that as its only meaning. We should, she argues, seek out versions of self-ownership worth claiming.

Petchesky’s view of rhetoric challenges those who view the self-ownership as intrinsically counterproductive, which is instantiated in Phillips’s warning that “Using property against property is a risky business, for we do not control the social meanings attached to the terms we employ, and it is all too likely that a restricted endorsement of property rights will be read in a more expansive vein.” ¹⁹ Phillips’s fear is that a deceptive plurality of self-ownership will ultimately betray its well-intentioned speakers, turned to unintended purposes. Petchesky rejects this approach because insisting on a single, immutable definition of self-ownership “tends to reify the idea of property itself, to encase it in a prevailing economism and nullify its tremendous cultural variation.” ²⁰ Moreover, Petchesky worries that “rejecting a language because it got constructed in misogynist ways may be to abandon language as a site of political struggle.” ²¹

The language of self-ownership should indeed be understood as a site of political struggle, but this prospect is undercut by Petchesky’s own modified version of the betrayal narrative of possessive individualism. She lauds the embodied, relational self-ownership of Levellers Richard Overton and the Women’s Petition, but this radical usage is soon narrowed to an exclusive notion based on absolute dominion when Locke “appropriates the radical language of the Levellers, with whose writings he was undoubtedly familiar, and rechannels it toward different ends from theirs.” The defeat is cinched, on her account, when the narrowly conceived notion of property in the “Lockean paradigm” is codified in Blackstone’s Commentaries as the “sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world.” ²² The resonances with Phillips’s view are clear here, despite the different orientation toward the plural meanings of self-ownership. How then can a struggle over self-ownership unfold when the “Lockean paradigm” has both the capacity to co-opt other definitions and yet retain its univocal character? ²³ As Petchesky’s only case of the conversion of self-ownership, it appears as a sound defeat. The threat of linguistic appropriation here exhibits an uneasiness with ambiguity between competing notions of self-ownership that undercuts her view of the linguistic dimensions of political struggle. This is not to suggest that property as absolute dominion carries no linguistic or cultural weight or that any definition of self-ownership has equal chance of adoption. Rather, Petchesky does not take her own insight into linguistic plurality far enough to see that ambiguity is the condition not only of Overton’s version, but also of Locke’s (to say nothing of Blackstone’s). ²⁴

We will return to Overton and Locke below, but for now it is important to note the unease with ambiguity that the rhetoric of self-ownership elicits. Absent from these various formulations is a notion of rhetoric as ingenious and creative activity, that is, the transferring and combining of words in unauthorized or unexpected ways. It may be that among Petchesky’s diverse examples, there is evidence of innovative borrowings and mixture, but such actions do not feature in her analysis. Overlooking rhetoric as creative conversion leads to a disavowal of ambiguity as a political threat and lament. I challenge this aversion to ambiguity in language not because ambiguity is an end in itself but because it offers conditions for rhetorical innovation that are vital to political action and criticism.

Self-Ownership, Betrayal, and Beyond

The foregoing analyses of the rhetoric of self-ownership replay an earlier wave of criticism of possessive individualism in one important, but unacknowledged, way. This is the fear that one’s own words in claiming self-ownership will be used against oneself. The possibility of a conversion in the meaning of self-ownership is received as betrayal. Note the unsettling irony of the anxiety that words are never our exclusive possession when voiced by those repudiating self-ownership as dominion. Such unease does not plague The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism because Macpherson never attended to rhetoric, yet it shares the concern that an initially egalitarian and inclusive notion of self-ownership will give way, perhaps imperceptibly, to an individuated, inegalitarian version. Recognizing the Macphersonian undertones of more recent debates clarifies their failure to grapple with the difference that rhetoric makes in understanding self-ownership. This also brings into focus the narrative habits that I seek to challenge with a rhetorical framework for self-ownership. Finally, I draw out of Macpherson’s work a more promising path forward out of his ambivalent commitment to transforming self-ownership.

The fullest and most familiar version of the conversion of self-ownership as betrayal for Macpherson is in chapter five of Locke’s Second Treatise. The account begins with the origins of property in labor and proprietorship in the self, capaciously defined as life, liberty and estate. ²⁵ On this definition, property is held by each person and on condition of limits based in natural law that require attention to the welfare of others, such as the limits on spoilage and waste and of leaving enough and as good for others. Locke defines property in more than one way and, for Macpherson, this shift enables material and political dispossession. With the invention of money, limits on accumulation are circumvented, creating scarcity in land that is held unequally. ²⁶ Indeed, Macpherson contends, the livelihoods of many come to depend solely on the alienation of property in their labor. It is not simply that one definition of property replaces another in this account. Rather, the expansive claim of property in the self garners the obligation of the many, while the redefinition of property for a market economy restricts political benefits and authority to those few who hold property in the exclusive, landed sense. ²⁷

Macpherson interprets the plural notions of property in the Second Treatise as legitimating exploitation and disenfranchisement where equality and liberty were initially promised. This promise is subverted not only by Locke, but even earlier (contra Petchesky) by the seemingly proto-democratic Levellers. In a broader trajectory of narrowing notions of property and selfhood, the Levellers set the stage with “an ill-defined but strongly asserted natural property right” that, even if it served democratic and radical causes later, “worked the other way as well.” In so doing, they “paved the way, unwittingly, for Locke and the Whig tradition, for their whole doctrine of natural rights as property, and natural right to property could be converted as readily to Locke’s purposes as to any more radical ends.” Macpherson is attuned here to the pivotal and pivoting nature of self-ownership given its ambivalent invocations. He concludes unambiguously, however, by holding not only Locke but also the Levellers responsible for what would come after them. They “made it easy” for Locke to convert an equal property right to a right to unlimited property. ²⁸ The Levellers become a cautionary tale about how self-ownership claims can subvert one’s political goals.

Macpherson’s account of possessive individualism, despite his neglect of rhetoric, attests to the plurality and convertability of meanings of property and selfhood, across varied texts and authors, but he abandons this insight to resolve the plurality into a single, inevitable assumption. This mode of interpretation accords with what Rita Felski, adapting Paul Ricoeur, calls a hermeneutics of suspicion. The rhetorical complexity of the text is noted as a surface phenomenon that is traced back to an underlying cause, in this case the assumption of possessive individualism. ²⁹ There are numerous criticisms that have been made as to Macpherson’s textual and contextual claims. ³⁰ I focus here, however, on what it would mean to shift this suspicious mode because it is a tendency that lives on in the debate on self-ownership today and limits the questions that can be asked about self-ownership as a rhetorical and political practice. Rather than unmasking the plural invocations of property to show how their promises are betrayed by a single, exclusionary doctrine lurking below, what might we learn from the plurality of invocations within and across texts? Can we understand the articulation of selfhood and property beyond a horizon of betrayal, even when such claims did not achieve their desired ends? Can the language of self-ownership be carried forward into new contexts and new projects without replaying this narrative arc, that is, as a rhetorical and political practice for a future that is still unscripted?

To begin to take up these questions, Macpherson, in his more ambivalent moments, suggests some promising, if underdeveloped, paths. Possessive individualism operates as an assumption, but it is also a problem. This problem is one I would call a failure of political imagination. His early modern investigation seeks to show the contingent origins of possessive individualism as a challenge to a prior sociopolitical order. Once the new way of thinking and acting according to market relations is established, the assumption persists even as it no longer serves its original context and purpose, generating a contradiction between beliefs and practices. This story denaturalizes possessive individualist assumptions by explaining how they came to hold us captive, but it can also be seen as attesting to the creative capacity to remake shared practices and ideas.

Macpherson observed the increasing allure of notions of property talk in his own time, just as current challengers to market logic and commodification do, and he wrestled with how to respond to this unfavorable political environment. ³¹ In one mode, a pragmatic but rather fatalist response, Macpherson seems to concede to the forward march of market relations. He makes a case for extending the language of property to the notion of human rights, arguing that “property right is so deeply embedded in the Western liberal tradition that we might more effectively campaign for human rights by treating them as individual property rights than by treating human and property rights as opposites.” This, he continues, would “be to restore the original liberal meaning of property, as when Locke and his contemporaries spoke of a property in one’s person, one’s life and liberty, as well as one’s worldly goods.” ³² There are echoes of the practical judgment advised by Phillips above, but here it leads to extending the language of property, rather than rejecting it.

While Macpherson often treats the advance of the narrow version of property right as inevitable, at least in the short term, elsewhere he holds out hope for transformation. In “A Political Theory of Property,” he proposes a second version of a property right for a more democratic future: “property as an individual right not to be excluded by others.” ³³ In essence, this second notion of property right reverses the narrowing definition of property and property right that he sees as both a historical and textual trajectory. The more expansive notion of property as “one’s own person, one’s capacities, one’s rights and liberties” once included two attenuating rights: (1) an individual right to exclude others from use and enjoyment and (2) an individual right not to be excluded from the use or enjoyment of things the society had declared to be for common use. Over time, he recounts, they were pared down to an exclusive right to use and dispose of material things. ³⁴ In these essays, Macpherson seeks to effect what Étienne Balibar calls a “reversal of possessive individualism” to a more inclusive and relational sense of property. ³⁵ I take such a reversal to entail a rhetorical conversion of self-ownership.

Where Macpherson is most familiar as challenger of possessive individualism as a betrayal of more inclusive and relational notions of property and selfhood, and by extension equality and freedom, his work also presses toward a project of converting narrower, impoverished senses of self-ownership to more expansive and relational versions. In this unrealized project, I find a tacit acknowledgment of the rhetorical possibilities of self-ownership that have yet to be accounted for.

The Rhetoric and Politics of Self-Ownership

I now turn to the formative claims of self-ownership in seventeenth-century England to consider them in more expansive rhetorical terms, focusing on those sites taken by Macpherson, Petchesky, and others as a loss or betrayal of inclusive and relational idioms of property and selfhood: chapter five on property of the Second Treatise, the writings of the Levellers and the Putney Debates. ³⁶ Whether or not older definitions of self-ownership can be meaningfully invoked today, the manifold uses of self-ownership that I highlight in the early modern context are exemplary for the ingenious activity of recognizing ambiguity in the language of property and working within it to unsettle and reinvent the terms of debate.

The broad swathe of critics of self-ownership are right in one respect: the concept is rife with ambiguity. Indeed, the ambiguity dates at least to the 1640s. Rather than a failure of conceptual clarity, this ambiguity can be viewed as a politically effective feature of self-ownership in the contentious contexts of the English civil wars and the Exclusion Crisis. In a sense, the possessive individualism framework tends to this ambiguity: How should we understand claims such as Thomas Rainborough’s at Putney that “I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he” and the call for an expanded suffrage in the first Agreement of the People when the same debates also endorse more restricted notions of the body politic for the poor and servants? ³⁷ Insofar as this complexity is definitively resolved into an underlying principle of exclusion and subordination, we risk losing sight of how plural modes of property talk can productively open social and political, even constitutional, arrangements to question.

When we speak of the Levellers, we already note one of their ingenious conversions of the language of property in their very name. In their own words, levelling “is commonly meant an equalling of mens estates, and taking away the proper right and Title that every man has to what is his own” and it was lodged against civilian and army radicals to “fram[e] a Name for them which of all others is most distastefull to the People.” ³⁸ There were those, like Gerard Winstanley, who challenged private property, but the Levellers did not and instead challenged the association of their ideas with lawless destruction of property. ³⁹ This refusal secured a central place for the vocabulary of law and property in their writings, but they notably did not dissociate from the language of levelling. In a bold reversal in the Humble Petition (1648), they call upon the House of Commons to bind themselves “and all future parliaments from abolishing propriety, levelling men’s estates or making all the things common,” an irony reiterated later in the “Manifestation” (1649). ⁴⁰ John Lilburne goes further by rejecting the insult ‘levelling’ only to affirm principles under the proper name, Leveller: “if ever the Nation be happy, it must be by a conjunction in the Leveller Principles.” ⁴¹ He enumerates those principles in declaring his love of England’s “just boundaries, that distinguish meum and tuum, . . . and that I hate and abhor, all subverting and Levelling, of the just Lawes, Liberties, and Freedomes thereof.” ⁴² Lilburne’s liberty, as we will see, extends beyond existing bounds of property. The Levellers adopted the insult as their own, redirected it at their detractors, and positively resignified it. Such agonistic transformation of the language of property recurs throughout Leveller tracts and in the Putney Debates.

The Levellers acted and wrote in an unusually unsettled political and rhetorical moment of the English civil wars, marked by the end of censorship and expanding literacy and access to printing presses. They rapidly produced pamphlets, petitions, and other occasional writings, often printed and distributed surreptitiously amidst political urgency and personal threats. ⁴³ These conditions of an emergent movement yield diversity and some inconsistency, serving as a record of the formulation and revision of their ideas amidst struggle. ⁴⁴ The Putney Debates additionally provide a window onto the contentious negotiations over, and redefinitions of, the people and their place in the political nation, under mounting pressure to compromise. Attunement to such conditions cautions against a quick sorting of underlying assumptions from so-called empty rhetoric. Ironing out unexpected claims and disruptive effects can obscure the way that words and concepts are productively unsettled.

Richard Overton’s An Arrow against All Tyrants (1646) issues a clear call for the protection of individual equality, freedom, and property in terms of self-ownership: “To every Individuall in nature, is given an individuall property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any: for every one as he is himselfe, so he hath a selfe propriety, else could he not be himselfe.” He continues, “as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature into this world, every one with a naturall, innate freedome and propriety (as it were writ in the table of every mans heart, never to be obliterated) even so are we to live, every one equally and alike to enjoy his Birthright and priviledge.” ⁴⁵ The endowment by God of natural propriety, liberty, and freedom written on the hearts of each individual declares its affiliation to the natural rights tradition, much as it would appear in Locke’s Second Treatise several decades later. In this claim for each individual’s property in the self, Overton invokes the early modern sense of property as interchangeable with propriety. Drawing on an older notion of property bound up in social relations and obligation, the language here evokes property as something in one’s possession, but also the right to claim it as properly one’s own. ⁴⁶

Self-propriety, for Overton, serves as the foundation on which all further property claims depend: “mine and thine cannot be, except this be: No man hath power over my rights and liberties, and I over no mans.” ⁴⁷ Self-propriety, he argues, buttresses civil as well as natural property rights. Divine and natural law intermingle and support an “innate freedom and propriety” that calls for each to enjoy his “birthright and privilege.” A condensed language of scripture, nature, and national identity recurs, for example: “For by nature we are the sons of Adam, and from him have legitimatly derived a naturall propriety, right and freedome, which only we require, and how in equity you can deny us, we cannot see; It is but the just rights and prerogative of mankind (whereunto the people of England, are heires apparent as well as other Nations) which we desire.” ⁴⁸ Overton’s “earnest and fervent desires after the universall freedomes and properties of this Nation in generall” interweave the particularities of nation, birthright and privilege with appeals to the common, the natural, and the universal. ⁴⁹ This signals a more widespread practice of stylized combinations of vocabularies, especially of law, from which self-ownership is drawn. Accordingly, self-propriety in Overton’s articulation contains a tension between a universal natural right and the delimited notions of privilege and birthright. This tension between the exclusive dimensions of self-propriety and its more inclusive invocations would become a central point of contention in the Putney Debates, but first let’s consider how the notions of birthright and privilege could be joined to a notion of self-propriety as broadly inclusive as “every individual” and common right.

Birthright in Overton’s account of self-propriety has roots in natural and divine law, but the term appears frequently in Leveller writings, sometimes with broader notions of law and liberty. For Lilburne, birthright was tied to the law as an inheritance of the English people, including the common law. This use of common law was controversial at times, as some Leveller writers identified it with the Norman Yoke as an imposition to be rectified. ⁵⁰ He urges “the regaining of your Liberties, and recovery of your Birth-right (the Law).” ⁵¹ Lilburne saw this legal birthright as a possession of a novel figure, the “free-born Englishman.” The term was not common before his invocation, though it is readily found in Leveller writings and at Putney, controversial sources notwithstanding. Indeed, it was important for Lilburne’s rhetorical situation of his audience and himself, serving as the object of his address and—known as “free-born John”—his self-presentation. ⁵² The language inventively borrowed from and combined two conventional ways of speaking: the “free-born subject” with patriotic appeals to Englishness. In this way, Rachel Foxley writes, “‘Subjects became Englishmen,” understood as the possessors of an ancient birthright from the common law. ⁵³

Through this creative reworking of an existing vocabulary, the “freeborn Englishman” acquired a claim of political status. ⁵⁴ This status was fleshed out in Leveller writings with charges of liberties denied, notably “disfranchisement.” Lilburne gave particular texture to the liberties claimed on behalf of freeborn Englishmen by repurposing the language of law, including that of property. Monicka Patterson-Tutschka highlights Lilburne’s use of “entail” to articulate the right and freedoms of the people as commonly held. As he writes, “by vertue of being an Englishman, I am entailed to all the Liberties and Freedomes, that the Lawes and good customes of England, will afford to any of her children whomsoever.” ⁵⁵ He references the feudal right of entail, a medieval term of prescriptive right relevant to landed estates where rights of use are held without the right to sell, squander, or exclude others with right of entail. ⁵⁶ The native rights of the people, their freedoms, were thereby cast as an inalienable share in something commonly held. His invocation of a traditional property right (entail) concludes with an avowal of property rights and an attack on levelling, but none of which can be understood in the conventional manner. ⁵⁷ For entail functions as a shared political right while the levelling that he abhors is not of property but of laws, liberties, and freedoms shared by any of England’s children, as collective and individual. A vocabulary of property law is converted here into a capacious political claim irrespective of estate.

The use of entail fits into a larger effort in Lilburne’s writings to cast specific privileges and immunities granted to individuals or select groups as rights of the people in general. Alongside “freeborn Englishman,” Lilburne invokes the “freeborn denizen,” exploiting its ambiguous definition as both inhabitant and, in law, “an Alien borne that is infranchised or denizated by Letters Patent.” ⁵⁸ Lilburne drew on both aspects of denizen to write as “a free borne Denizen of England” that “I doe not know that ever I did an Act in all my life, that disfranchised me of my fredome, and by vertue of my being a free man . . . I have as true a wright to all the priveledges that do belong to a free man as the greatest man in England whatsoever he be, whether Lord or Commoner.” ⁵⁹ As Foxley explains, the “granting of denizen status was in a way a legal acknowledgment that there was a set of rights which accrued to native Englishmen precisely because of that status” where no such comprehensive record was codified. As both inhabitants and those to whom liberties and privileges had been granted, “denizen” linked the people, expansively construed, with a specified, or specifiable, conception of their liberties and privileges. ⁶⁰ Lilburne’s inventive use of birthright consolidated and generalized exclusively and unevenly granted privileges of law into a common right and freedom of the English people.

The recasting of limited and dispersed privileges and liberties into a ‘reclaimed’ birthright of freeborn Englishmen might appear as simply extending a legal vocabulary. Such a significant transfer to a different notion of the people, as dispossessed rights-holders and sovereign, marks a change in kind that is better understood as metaphor. ⁶¹ Such rhetorical license is evident elsewhere in Lilburne’s propertied language, particularly his use of monopoly. Exclusively granted trading privileges were a frequent Leveller complaint, but Lilburne expands its reference to matters of speech and conscience. Recalling “Monopolisers” whose patents of soap, salt, and leather had been recently restricted by Parliament, Lilburne complains of “the Patent of ingrossing the Preaching of the Word only to such men as weare Black and rough garments to deceive,” a monopoly compounded by printers seeking “against all common freedom, to engrosse into their owne hands the sole and only selling of them [Bibles].” ⁶² Lilburne later extends the metaphor to the franchise as “a Monopoly to chuse Parliament men.” ⁶³ A term of trade serves as a common idiom for economic and religious arrangements tailored to an audience of Protestant sects and artisans, and is then projected onto the franchise as stolen possession.

Lilburne’s invention of “freeborn Englishmen” transforms the birthright that is integral to self-propriety on Overton’s definition. Overton’s writings instantiate more dramatic and vivid modes of rhetoric that combine with subtler turnings of words to new meanings and contexts. In The Commoners Complaint (1647), he brings together a number of recognizable threads: a common legal inheritance, English liberty, and self-propriety. The following passage exhibits overlapping notions of individual and shared properties and proprieties as guards against usurpation—of one’s self, family, birthright, nation, and liberty—as well as the varieties of law undergirding it: divine, natural, and human. These layers are interwoven with vivid images of embodied resistance to the beastly threat of “the Arbytrary tyrannie and usurpation of the house of Lords”:

I would not be so treacherous to my own selfe, to my wife and children, and especially to this Nation (the Land of my Nativity) in general, as personally to yeeld my active submission of any limbe that was mine . . . to any Arbitrary Vipers or Pests, Egyptian Grashoppers, Norman Invaders and Destroyers of the Commoners legal inheritance and birth-right, their liberties and freedoms confirmed to them, both by divine, naturall, and humane Right: or once to set one leg before another in subjection or attendance to any of their Canibal, Canker-worm, Arbytrary Orders Warrants, Significations of their pleasures (so flatly contrary to all good laws, justice, and equity) . . . as so many Wild-Bores out of the Forrest, to root up, devour, disfranchise and destroy this Nation of all her antient legall immunities and freedoms, root and branch. ⁶⁴

The heightened language of insult and monstrosity are immediately recognizable as hyperbole and metaphor, but there is more here. While self-propriety is not named as such, the image of Overton’s refusal to move his legs, or any limb, in submission or to dance attendance before arbitrary authority expresses self-ownership through an embodied metonym. This image attests to the alternative self-ownership that Petchesky appreciates in Overton. The metonym of a politically resistant body (Overton’s legs) accrues deeper meaning, however, from its juxtaposition with a seemingly traditional vocabulary of ancient legal freedoms and native land as a common possession. The result is an unconventional self-propriety that is uncommonly personalized and generalized. The work of rhetoric in this image of self-propriety and the wider language of birthright issues from a creative turning and intertwining of terms and metaphors of law and property, of exclusive privileges and liberties, toward a common liberty that includes and exceeds conventional property right.

Such claims of common liberty are rhetorically enacted through appeals to the people, most famously instantiated in the Agreement of the People (1647), which addresses “the noble and highly honoured the Free-born People of England” and speaks to them as “Country-men and fellow-Commoners” and then as friends. ⁶⁵ The document justifies its form in soliciting the people rather than petitioning Parliament: “Parliaments are [t]o receive the ext[e]nt of their power, and trust from those that betrust them; and theref[o]re the people are to declare what their power and trust is which is the intent of this Agreement.” ⁶⁶ The metaphor of legal appeal to a higher court announces an active popular sovereignty, in contrast to a parliamentary sovereignty where the people’s voice is not manifest. ⁶⁷

The Putney Debates, unfolding around the Agreement and The Case of the Army Truly Stated (1647), give particular focus to the plural and contentious use of property talk to define, unsettle, and transform the terms of popular sovereignty. ⁶⁸ We can see key sections of this debate as staging a confrontation between competing versions of self-propriety, neither side ceding property talk but rather exploiting and adapting it to their advantage. The documents forward many socioeconomic and political claims, on behalf of the Army as soldiers but especially as Commoners. By no means limited to the interests of estate owners, claims include: calls for the Army’s arrears, poor relief, legal reform, and opening forests for public revenues; opposition to tithing, burdensome taxes, and imprisonment of debtors. Among the most contentious issues was the removal of property qualifications on the franchise.

The Agreement calls for a “more indifferently proportioned” electorate, “according to the number of Inhabitants.” ⁶⁹ Opposition to this claim from Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton focused on its natural law basis and framed it as a threat to all civil law and property. ⁷⁰ In a telling statement, Ireton says, “All the main thing that I speak for, is because I would have an eye to property. . . . For here is the case of the most fundamental part of the constitution of the kingdom, which if you take away, you take away all by that.” ⁷¹ More precisely, an expanded franchise challenges the conception of Parliament, expressed by Ireton, as representing those with “a permanent and local interest in the kingdom. Those who have, and who taken all together do comprehend the whole.” ⁷² The representative body here is identified with the sum of landed interests. ⁷³ It is not only that representatives are chosen by men with estates, but that the nation itself is conceived as the sum of landed interests. This notion of representation is challenged not just in concept but rhetorically enacted through direct appeals to the people as in the Agreement. ⁷⁴ Natural law secures nothing more, Ireton argues, than a very limited notion of property in the self, because civil law “is the foundation of all the right any man has to anything but to his own person.” ⁷⁵ He presents a weak notion of self-ownership against an expanded franchise: a natural law of self-preservation that extends no further than property in the person, without tie to land, possession, or civil liberty.

The distance between self-propriety in Ireton’s weak sense and the more robust version of his challengers is captured in their use of property for the franchise itself. In the words of one participant, “the grand question of all is, whether or no it be the property of every individual person in the kingdom to have a vote in election[s]; and the ground [on which it is claimed] is the Law of Nature,” with the very constitution at stake. ⁷⁶ On both sides of the debate and serving different ends, property in land and things is both analogue of the franchise and an instance of property—the franchise as properly one’s own. In Ireton’s case, “property descends from other things [than the law of nature], as well as our right of sending burgesses.” ⁷⁷ Like ownership of land and goods, “by civil constitution, the propriety of having voices in election was fixed in certain persons.” ⁷⁸ Property and the franchise are characterized jointly here as exclusive privileges. ⁷⁹ To grant the franchise to everyone with “breath and being,” Ireton argues, will lead either to a vote against propertied interests or against property itself. In notable contrast to Lilburne, Ireton’s rejection of natural law claims equates denizens with foreigners, all beneficiaries of the law without say in their creation. ⁸⁰

Conversely, Ireton’s challengers at Putney repeatedly identify the propriety of voice in elections as a possession by equal birth that is unceded or inalienable. Rainborough refutes Ireton’s analogy, distinguishing exclusive from inclusive property: “As for estates and those kind of things, and other things that belong to men, it will be granted that they are property; but I deny that that [the franchise] is a property, to a lord, to a gentleman, to any man more than another in the kingdom of England,” raising the question of “how this comes to be a property in some men, and not others.” ⁸¹ The interventions that follow bring into view more inclusive conceptions of natural property and propriety, presenting those without estate as dispossessed of their natural propriety. Rainborough depicts disfranchisement as dispossession of self-propriety in two ways. First, he asserts that “Almighty God gave men reason” and that “there is nothing that god hath given a man that any [one] else can take from him.” He laments the fate of those who have lost their estates for their cause, “so that a man cannot lose that which he hath for the maintenance of his family but he must [also] lose that which God and nature have given him!” ⁸² The loss of the franchise with estate is theft of one’s reason. Second, he gives vivid expression to the dispossessed propriety of the propertyless in a manner recalling Overton’s self-ownership as protection against invasion:

There’s a property, the Law of God says it. . . . I am a poor man, therefore I must be [op]pressed: if I have no interest in the kingdom, must suffer by all their laws be they right or wrong. Nay thus: a gentleman lives in a country and hath three or four lordships, as some men have (God knows how they got them); and when a Parliament is called he must be a Parliament-man; and it may be he sees some poor men, they live near this man, he can crush them—I have known an invasion to make sure he hath turned the poor men out of doors; and I would fain know whether the potency of [rich] men do not this, and so keep them under the greatest tyranny that was [ever] thought of in the world. ⁸³

The franchise based on permanent and local interest here enables invasion and exclusion of the poor from their local residence. Where Rainborough previously distinguished exclusive landed property from an inclusive franchise, here he critically ties a tyranny of the rich in land to an unequally distributed franchise.

Edward Sexby, a more moderate voice, firmly underscores the equality of birthright between those with and without estate, as an inalienable possession of those soldiers who have risked their lives for the kingdom “all for this: to recover our birthrights and privileges as Englishmen . . . it may be little estate they have at present, and yet they have as much a [birth]right as those two who are their lawgivers, as any in this place. I shall tell you in a word my resolution. I am resolved to give my birthright to none.” ⁸⁴ Sexby recasts the language of privilege for a propriety in life and franchise that includes those with little or no estate, refuting Ireton’s equation of denizens and foreigners with a common birthright.

It is worth pausing to appreciate, in the speech of Rainborough and Sexby, the paradox of a self-propriety of the propertyless. Such a paradox issues from speaking in a language that one also contests. Such paradoxes are generative, as Joan Scott explains, for their presentation of a “disturbing spectacle,” in which “the identification and display of inconsistency and ambiguity—of self-contradictoriness—within an orthodoxy that strenuously denies their existence is surely destabilizing and sometimes even transformative.” ⁸⁵ The spectacular effects of such paradox depend on the rhetorical capacity to creatively adopt existing political forms and redeploy them for novel and seemingly impossible purposes, such as inaugurating a sovereign people that does not yet exist. ⁸⁶ Scott spoke of these unsettling effects in a different context—Olympe de Gouges’s 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Woman—but there is a parallel. To speak the language of universalism as a woman, for Gouges, or of self-ownership as a leveller, extends and confounds the ostensible political logic of their respective contexts. Each accepts the challenge of speaking as that which is properly excluded from political authority in the very language that legitimates that authority. They neither simply repeat nor reject prevailing political-rhetorical modes. They exemplify the art of rhetorically refusing to choose between speaking and acting as an insider or outsider.

At Putney, self-propriety, narrowly construed, is not repudiated as much as reinvented to serve claims for an expanded notion of the sovereign people, a reimagining of the polity. Decentering and pluralizing self-propriety, agitators and their Leveller allies exhibit a keen eye for ambiguities within the language of property and a willingness, even courage, to exacerbate them by projecting the language into new contexts and combinations. For all this, the Putney Debates did not usher in universal manhood suffrage, yielding instead a compromise excluding apprentices, servants, and almstakers “because they depend upon the will of other men” and are spoken for by their masters, in the words of Maximilian Petty. This falls short of claims made earlier in the debates, Petty’s included, to say nothing of those implicit exclusions noted by subsequent readers, particularly women. ⁸⁷ How then do we understand such vigorous conversions of the language of property in light of such concessions or failures, by their own standards or those of latter-day audiences? This is a question for the Putney Debates as for the Leveller movement, which did not have significant impact after 1650.

The Afterlife of Lost Causes

Political failure is not necessarily linguistic failure. As we have seen, self-propriety was extended, with the language of birthright and freeborn Englishmen, through multiple rhetorical modes, invoking plural meanings and figures, to project legal and economic terms beyond their conventional spheres and referents. The Levellers and Putney debaters took the terms of their opponents and turned them not only to their own goals but tropically to their own meaning. To press, even transgress, linguistic propriety in this way need not yield nonsense. Unintelligible speech would not incur the opposition evidenced at Putney or the imprisonment and raids targeting Levellers. Their ingenious rhetoric invited intense opposition because it solicited an emergent audience and cultivated a new political voice. They created what Linda Zerilli calls “counterpractices of association” that “might create public spaces in which something is said that changes what can be heard as a political claim.” ⁸⁸ Levellers tracts and the Putney Debates show a remarkable effort to change the ways that property in the person could be heard politically.

One way in which the Levellers and their allies were heard beyond their political demise is in the language of Locke’s Second Treatise. “What survived the Levellers’ organizational defeat in the 1650s was the political language they employed in their writings,” as Richard Ashcraft explains. ⁸⁹ Locke echoes the earlier claims of ownership of one’s self, focused particularly on labor: “the Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his.” ⁹⁰ Leveller ideas resonate with many of Locke’s claims: the ownership of one’s life, liberty, and estate as the grounds for political authority based in consent and the ultimate right to revoke the trust endowed by the people to those holding authority, who are in turn held to a standard of ruling for the common good of the people. Common ground also lies in their appeals to respective audiences that were not yet politically crystallized, that is, to coalitions in formation. ⁹¹ Locke’s rhetoric of self-ownership is part of his political efforts to cultivate a sympathetic audience drawn from traders and artisans as well as landed gentry, while fostering counter-identification with an aristocracy cast as unproductive and wasteful. ⁹² Locke used self-ownership to form and reinforce emerging political associations and counterassociations around property in narrow material terms and in expanded senses of labor and trade as well as life, liberty and estate. He draws on long-standing vocabularies including, but not limited to, natural rights, but inherits as well the socially and politically challenging precedent of the Levellers.

Locke’s claims differ, however, in that he does not specify the scope of the franchise or institutional manifestations of the voice of the people, even as their judgment is ultimately sovereign. Ashcraft reads this silence as significantly unrestricted for its lack of property or status qualifications on who counts as part of the people. ⁹³ Such silences can also be read in relation to subordination and exclusion made evident in other passages and texts of Locke’s, some of which echo those of the Levellers (women and the poor) and others that mark innovations on Locke’s part (under colonialism). ⁹⁴ Locke’s emphasis on labor and improvement carries these differential effects: claims of property and authority of some aristocrats are rendered illegitimate while the expansive notion of self-ownership in life, liberty, and estate can be abridged for those unrecognized as engaging in productive and improving labor at home and abroad. It is such closures in the language of property that indicate a second or belated defeat in the eyes of readers such as Macpherson and Petchesky. Is this the only way to hear the story of self-ownership?

If we understand the rhetoric of self-ownership in Leveller Tracts and at Putney as a creative transformation of existing idioms of property for innovative appeals directly to and on behalf of the people, we gain a different vantage point on Lockean self-ownership. Locke adopted Leveller notions of self-ownership and converted them to purposes not their own in ways that subsequent readers may experience as loss. It is also the case, however, that Locke reenacts their rhetorical ingenuity in using the language of property in the person, its plural meanings and hybrid formulations, for other contexts and audiences, even if he is not faithful to their ends. In this sense, Locke’s faithless conversion of self-ownership is not necessarily, or not only, a cautionary tale about property’s inevitable enclosures, though it attests to the uncontrollable effects of political words and deeds. It may be that we need more rhetorically innovative conversions of this persistent idiom, not less. This is to tell what Lida Maxwell calls a “lost cause narrative” rather than a fatalist version in which defeat was inevitable. Lost cause narratives acknowledge loss, especially the “inability to control the actions and beliefs of others with whom they share a world,” but takes them as contingent, as having possibly gone otherwise. ⁹⁵ This does not change the facts of seventeenth-century English politics, but it is to think more expansively about how their words and deeds might be meaningful for more receptive audiences and political opportunities that they could not have anticipated. It is to consider how experiences of defeat may generate resources or possibilities beyond their moment, for belated audiences. ⁹⁶

The contemporary theorists of self-ownership considered here offer their own belated responses in the form of loss and betrayal, but these are not the only options. While this disappointment is understandable, what drops out is the possibility that it could have gone otherwise, that the unpredictable reception and conversion of one’s words is not uniquely endemic to expansive notions of self-ownership. Widening the frame, we see that Lilburne, Overton, Rainborough, Sexby, and others also make unauthorized use of the words of others before them—those who spoke of property, patriotism, and law without ever envisioning an active voice for people with little or no estate. To do so, they leveraged plural notions of property and of the self, and when that was not enough they invented new iterations through metaphor and metonym. They relentlessly substituted and mixed idioms of property and selfhood to generate expansive and sometimes even novel claims. At different times, property (and propriety) referred to land, possessions, franchise, life, liberty, birthright, reason, and conscience. The self in question is figured as narrowly and materially as Overton’s leg and as broadly as freeborn denizens and their familial relations. The claims of self-ownership traced above are not tethered to narrow definitions of ownership, but rather accrue meaning through their combination with plural notions in and of law, uttered not in a courtroom but before a listening and reading public. With these tools, they open self-propriety to experimentation in remarkable ways. This is to suggest that their failures demonstrate not the excesses of unsanctioned property talk, but rather that there was not enough.

The continuity of property and propriety available in the seventeenth century serves as a rich site for rhetorical invention that does not always function as meaningful speech today. Their attention to plural and ambiguous definitions of property and selfhood, and especially their figural substitutions and inventions, still offers insights for belated publics, including but not limited to twenty-first-century feminists. The images of Overton’s unbending leg, like the uterus whose business is its own, are metonyms that highlight a structure of self-ownership that is never wholly unified or self-identical. In these images, a part is made to stand in for the whole, where the goal is to effect change in the very definition of the rights and liberties claimed as possessions. Neither the part, the whole, nor their relation is indelibly fixed, yet such claims carry meaning and generate responses. Such iterations of self-ownership are made in oppositional modes, attuned to the ways that others’ definitions of property and selfhood can be and are detrimental. Indeed, we can recognize, in the concerns of feminist critics of self-ownership, the corrosive metonyms that present women’s bodies as mere machines of reproduction or as labor and skills disconnected from the human performing them. But just as Lilburne’s bold risk in claiming a language of common law and property for his own purposes was deemed too dangerous even by fellow Levellers, his talk of freeborn Englishmen and denizens helped enable the expansion of claimants to self-propriety and bolstered rebuttals to the exclusive franchise at Putney. So too, idioms of self-ownership today are not immune to ambiguity and refiguration. The technological and commercial innovations that Phillips sees as emerging sites of commodification and inequality attest, in one sense, to destabilized conditions of property, selfhood, and their metaphorical relations. The ingenious rhetorical activity of the Levellers and Putney Debates recalls us to the possibility, however fragile, of seizing on the plurality and ambiguity of self-ownership to generate a more expansive popular and political imagination.