The Agricultural Argument and Original Appropriation: Indian Lands and Political Philosophy

In: Canadian journal of political science: CJPS = Revue canadienne de science politique : RCSP, Band 22, Heft 3, S. 589-602

Abstract

Behind the legal dispute over aboriginal rights in North America lies the question of whether European settlers had a right to appropriate land used by the original residents for hunting & gathering, for the purpose of farming. While the approach that conquest produces a sufficient title is logical, it is too much of an appeal to raw power to satisfy political theorists. One justification for the European takeover of Indian lands -- that the Indians were not using most of the land & did not really own it because they were hunters rather than farmers -- is considered. Three versions of this approach -- by John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the English liberal philosopher John Locke, & Emer de Vattel, an eighteenth-century expert on international law -- are considered. Recent debate on the agricultural argument is examined, & it is noted that the argument deals with only a small proportion of the actual events accompanying the European takeover of the New World. The real issue, in consequence, is one of sovereignty, & this should receive further study. In Reply to Professor Flanagan, Nicholas Griffin (McMaster U, Hamilton, Ontario) holds that Flanagan believes that the agricultural argument will stand without the distinction between the state of nature & civil society, having in mind a system of bourgeois private ownership using a market mechanism. Flanagan's argument requires stronger assumptions than those he presents, & the appropriate question should be whether one group has the right to demand that another change its way of life in order to solve the perceived problems of the former. InReply to Griffin, Flanagan notes that he did not propose the agriculture argument as a satisfactory justification for the European seizure of North America. F. S. J. Ledgister