The rejection of self-ownership in Edward Bellamy’s egalitarian utopia

Abstract

In the face of various objections to egalitarianism, this article examines Edward Bellamy’s insightful rebuttal to the principle of self-ownership. The main purpose is to make sense of Bellamy’s egalitarianism rather than mounting a full-fledged critique against one of the key concepts of libertarianism. First, I present the principle of self-ownership and Bellamy’s early objections, encompassing arguments based on fraternity as a social duty and the right to life as prior to the right to property. Second, I analyse Bellamy’s conception of talents as a common asset and his outright condemnation of self-ownership as a ‘fraudulent principle’, because it allows those with better natural and social endowments to take advantage in the economic domain. Third, I tease out the egalitarian dismissal of material incentives, founded on the idea that it is wrong to conflate effort as a moral matter, with economic reward, which is an economic issue. Lastly, I take up Bellamy’s visionary rejection of the proposition according to which liberty upsets equality and show that the utopian argument is based on the idea that it is inequality that jeopardizes liberty.