How redistribution became the Founders' orthodoxy

Reformation-era republicans took God's claim to all land seriously

The American Founders wanted rough economic equality. So did most of their contemporaries in the new states' legislatures. Some of them, presumably, wanted it out of concern for the poor. But all of them wanted it out of concern for the new republic. That concern lead the new states to move toward redistributing wealth.

The Founders weren't socialists. They were republicans—small "r," as in supporters of a republican rather than a monarchical form of government. They believed what most republicans had believed since the middle of the seventeenth century—that wealth redistribution was necessary to secure a long-lasting republic.

Photo by Calvin Ma on Unsplash

Republicans hadn't always believed in wealth redistribution. During the Renaissance, republicans took their cue from ancient Roman sources and argued for the protection of private property at all costs. But following the Protestant Reformation, republicans began examining Greek histories of Rome as well as the Hebrew Bible for what they taught about how economics affected government. They discovered in the Torah a perfect republic, what they called "the Republic of the Hebrews."¹ Over the course of a century, they debated among themselves and consulted rabbis about the interpretation of key passages about kingship and property from the Torah and the Prophets.

During this shift from Roman to Greek and biblical sources, republicans took God's claim to ultimate land ownership ("all the land is mine") and its biblical ramifications seriously. They understood God's claim as well as the Torah's laws aimed at avoiding stark wealth inequality to mean that a republic's health must take priority over an individual's right to accrue unlimited riches. As a result, long before the time of our nation's founding, redistribution had become republican orthodoxy.

Our country's steady movement away from this biblical standard of rough economic equality and our championing of greed, materialism, and vast income disparity now threaten our republic's existence.

During the Renaissance, the republican debate about property began as a debate about Roman history. Republicans joined Rome's debates about whether public lands captured in war or given to the state should have been distributed to the plebeians (the commoners) or left for the patricians (the nobles) to acquire "often by means of fraud and violence," as Harvard professor Eric Nelson says. The Roman debates often took place after a fait accompli—after "these large estates had been in private [patrician] hands for generations and had acquired the aura of private property."²

These "agrarian laws," which were never passed,³ would have divided these public lands among the plebeians. The laws would have moved the Roman Republic closer to rough economic equality. The Roman sources, particularly Cicero and Livy, believed that the agitation brought about by the agrarian-law debate contributed to the republic's demise. Early-modern republicans fell in line with Cicero and Livy, and their position on the Roman agrarian laws amounted to a republican bulwark against the adoption of measures to redistribute land.

The republican position on agrarian laws changed during the Reformation, however. By 1600, as part of a wide "Hebrew revival" among Protestant scholars, republicans were studying both the Bible as well as "rabbinic materials in their analysis of land laws," according to Nelson.⁴ Chief among the land laws were the Torah's initial and equitable distribution of land among tribes and families and the laws intended to perpetuate the distribution.

The main enforcement mechanisms, of course, were the Torah's sabbatical years and the years of jubilee. Every seven years, all debts were forgiven. There would be "no option to seize the debtor's land as collateral," as Nelson says, so the sabbatical year was "designed in part to preserve the initial distribution."⁵ Jubilee occurred every fifty years, and it involved "the return of all patrimonies to their initial holders."⁶ All Israelite land purchases, then, were really leases since the possession would revert to the original owners in the year of jubilee.

The Bible contains warnings that a monarchy would threaten this economic equilibrium. A king, Samuel warns Israel, "will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants."⁷ And, sure enough, King Ahab and his wife Jezebel have Naboth killed when he cites his family's inheritance as a reason not to sell his vineyard to Ahab.⁸ Whether or not jubilee was actually practiced before Ahab's time, Ahab and Jezebel frustrated the purpose of jubilee, which as Leslie J. Hoppe points out, was designed "to restore the equilibrium of Israelite society."⁹

In an agrarian society, the sabbatical years and the years of jubilee amounted to a cap on wealth, or at least a deterrent against great disparities of wealth. On the other hand, the Bible associates monarchy with great disparities of wealth.

Early in the seventeenth century, republicans began to associate the Roman Empire with great disparities of wealth. A Dutch Hebraist, Peter Cunaeus, in 1617 associated the Torah's year of jubilee with Roman agrarian laws. Around the same time, republicans began siding less with Roman sources and more with the Greek historians of Rome concerning Roman agrarian laws. Plutarch and Appian "regarded the agrarian movement as a crucial effort to save the faltering republic," Nelson says.¹⁰ In other words, the proposed agrarian laws didn't lead to the Roman Republic's downfall. Instead, the failure to pass the agrarian laws did.

But even more than did these Greek sources, the Torah helped to carry the day for republican redistribution. Cunaeus's association of jubilee with agrarian laws was the trick, according to Nelson:

With one small gesture of analogy, Cunaeus rendered the agrarian laws not only respectable but also divinely sanctioned. If God had ordained agrarian laws in his own commonwealth, then Cicero had to be wrong.¹¹

We might find it difficult today to understand why Reformation-era republicans would look to the Torah for guidance on how to run a republic, or what republicans often called a commonwealth. Doesn't the Torah set up a theocracy? To these republicans, a proper theocracy is a republic. God is king, but he rules through a balanced constitution that lets no one person or group rule on his behalf. The book of Deuteronomy is understood by Daniel J. Elazar¹² and Bernard M. Levinson¹³ to present a balanced constitution among king, prophets, judges, priests, and local assemblies.

In fact, from roughly the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries, the republican championing of redistribution came with the rising belief that republican government was the only legitimate form of government. This "republican exclusivism," as Nelson calls it,¹⁴ gave even more importance to the means of establishing and keeping the republic, including redistribution.

Republican exclusivism challenged Greek and Roman beliefs in "constitutional pluralism.” Aristotle and other classical writers believed that "monarchy, aristocracy, and polity (later called 'republican government')," Nelson says, were good forms of government.¹⁵ But with the help of rabbis, the republicans wrestled with Deuteronomy 17, which places kings within a balanced constitution, and with 1 Samuel 8, which accounts for the confrontation between Samuel and the Israelites over their desire for a king. Republicans discovered in those passages God's rejection of human monarchy.

By 1650, according to Nelson, John Milton and other republicans had worked out republican exclusivism based on the premise that God claims to be the world's sole legitimate sovereign:

God, it now seems, can be enthroned as monarch in any commonwealth, and perhaps must be if, as Milton says, the kingdom of God is the “only just & rightful kingdom."¹⁶

Republican exclusivism, therefore, conforms to the Torah's brand of theology, which locates sovereignty in heaven and not on earth. Likewise, republican redistribution conforms to the Torah's brand of economy, which locates ownership in heaven and not on earth. In Leviticus, God explains the reason for jubilee: "The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me."¹⁷

Photo by Sergio Kian on Unsplash

Following republican exclusivism, one influential English republican philosopher repurposed Aristotle's constitutional pluralism to tie a republic's rough economic equality to its survival. James Harrington resurrected Aristotle's distinction among monarchies, aristocracies, and republics (what Harrington called commonwealths), but he used Aristotle's three categories of government to assert the particular balance of property that had to be present in any one of these categories for it to survive. Nelson summarizes Harrington's analysis:

The distribution of land determines the distribution of power: if one person owns the preponderance of the land in a given territory, the result is monarchy; if a few own it, we have aristocracy; if "the whole people be landlords," it is a commonwealth. When a particular territory has a government that corresponds to its distribution of land, it exists in peace; when the two are mismatched, the territory suffers calamity and civil war. No regime can long survive unless it enacts laws that "fix" the balance so as to provide a stable foundation for its future.¹⁸

In order to help secure a republic in England, Harrington in 1656 published The Commonwealth of Oceana in which he proposed an agrarian law inspired by the Torah's sabbatical and jubilee. Under Harrington's proposal, the largest lawful estate would not be allowed to yield more than £2,000 each year. There was more:

. . . no citizen is allowed to purchase additional land if doing so would raise his annual revenue above that threshold. Large fortunes are to be broken up by requiring the relatively equal division of estates among children, and dowries are restricted to the value of £1500.¹⁹

Cunaeus and Harrington helped to resolve a longstanding republican dispute between emphasizing the protecting private property and abolishing private property. Cunaeus and Harrington, Nelson says, helped republicans embrace a middle way; they “would now embrace neither the protection nor the abolition of private property, but rather its redistribution.”²⁰

After Harrington, according to Nelson,

Writers from Montesquieu to Rousseau, and from Jefferson to Tocqueville, would regard it as axiomatic that republics ought to legislate limits on private ownership in order to realize a particular vision of civic life.²¹

Jefferson favored redistribution along the lines of Harrington. In a 1785 letter to James Madison, he proposed the end of primogeniture with regard to inheritance, an indexed property tax rate, and the grant of small parcels of land. But Jefferson wouldn't stop there:

I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property . . .²²

Jefferson drafted laws, passed by Virginia's General Assembly, that ended primogeniture and ended entails, which had allowed large estates to be handed down within powerful, aristocratic families. These laws, Jefferson said, "laid the ax to the root of pseudo-aristocracy."²³ Other states did the same, according to Ganesh Sitaraman:

In 1784, when North Carolina adopted a bill restricting primogeniture and entails, the bill gave as its justification that “it will tend to promote that equality of property which is of the spirit and principle of a genuine republic.”²⁴

Noah Webster agreed with Virginia's and North Carolina's strategies, and for the same political reason:

“An equality of property, with a necessity of alienation, constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the very soul of a republic—While this continues, the people will inevitably possess both power and freedom; when this is lost, power departs, liberty expires, and a commonwealth will inevitably assume some other form.”²⁵

These sentiments and statutes are just a few examples of republican redistribution at work around the time of America's founding. Sitaraman summarizes the Founders' operative understanding:

During the time of the American Revolution, through the era of the Articles of Confederation, and into the ratification period and the early republic, there was a robust and strong belief that a truly republican form of government was only possible in a society with relative economic equality.²⁶

Americans thought enough of their relative economic equality to risk balancing their Constitution's powers roughly by functions and not, as the ancients had done, by classes of people. The laws passed by early state legislatures to increase that economic equality through redistribution were meant to increase that equality. Sitaraman wonders, though, if we can keep what he calls our "middle-class Constitution."

John Adams thought that things in 1776 were bad, marveling at ". . . so much Rage for Profit and Commerce among all Ranks and Degrees of Men even in America," causing him to "sometimes doubt whether there is public Virtue enough to support a Republic."²⁷ But the overemphasis on what Jeff Bezos now champions as "personal liberties and free markets" at the expense of public liberty is far worse now.

There are any number of resources that establish a significant rise in America's wealth disparity, and I won't present any of that material here. Two books that, in the spirit of James Harrington and America's Founders, detail this disparity and connect it with the loss of public liberty are Sitaraman's The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic and The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz.

Once a republic begins to move away from rough economic equality, its descent into oligarchy is gradual but hard to stop. Sitaraman agrees:

There is no constitutional moment in which there is a decision to change the form of government. Republics descend into oligarchy quietly, through the slow shifting of power from the people to the economic elites. As John Taylor of Caroline put it in 1814, when the “rich plunder the poor,” it is always “slow and legal.”²⁸

It happened in Rome, and it’s happening in the United States. We’ll need our own Hebrew revival, among other things, to stop it.

Above: photo by Max Böhme on Unsplash

The footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

1. Nelson, Hebrew Revival, 16.

2. Nelson, 59.

3. Nelson, 84.

4. Nelson, 6, 73.

5. Nelson, 67.

6. Nelson, 68.

7. 1 Samuel 8:14 KJV.

8. 1 Kings 21.

9. Leslie J. Hoppe, There Shall Be No Poor among You: Poverty in the Bible (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2004), 33.

10. Nelson, 63.

11. Nelson, 64.

12. Elazar, Covenant & Polity, 199-212.

13. Levinson, “First Constitution,” 1859-85.

14. Nelson, 23.

15. Nelson, 3.

16. Nelson, 38-39. Italics in the original.

17. Leviticus 25:23 KJV.

18. Nelson, 79.

19. Nelson, 79.

20. Nelson, 86.

21. Nelson, 86.

22. Jefferson, Political Writings, 106-107.

23. Jefferson, 188-89.

24. Sitaraman, Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution, 72.

25. Quoted in Sitaraman, 69.

26. Sitaraman, 9.

27. John Adams, “From John Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, 8 January 1776,” Founders Online, accessed March 13, 2025, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-03-02-0202.

28. Sitaraman, 238.