Historical Overview of Property

main source: Waldron, Jeremy, “Property and Ownership”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

Historical Overview of Property

From: Property and Ownership in Philosophy

There are extensive discussions of property in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Marx, and Mill. The range of justificatory themes they consider is very broad, and I shall begin with a summary.

The ancient authors speculated about the relation between property and virtue, a natural subject for discussion since justifying private property raises serious questions about the legitimacy of self-interested activity. Plato (Republic, 462b-c) argued that collective ownership was necessary to promote common pursuit of the common interest, and to avoid the social divisiveness that would occur ‘when some grieve exceedingly and others rejoice at the same happenings.’ Aristotle responded by arguing that private ownership promotes virtues like prudence and responsibility: ‘[W]hen everyone has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another, and they will make more progress, because every one will be attending to his own business’ (Aristotle, Politics, 1263a). Even altruism, said Aristotle, might be better promoted by focusing ethical attention on the way a person exercises his rights of private property rather than questioning the institution itself (ibid.). Aristotle also reflected on the relation between property and freedom, and the contribution that ownership makes to a person’s being a free man and thus suitable for citizenship. The Greeks took liberty to be a status defined by contrast with slavery, and for Aristotle, to be free was to belong to oneself, to be one’s own man, whereas the slave was by nature the property of another. Self-possession was connected with having sufficient distance from one’s desires to enable the practice of virtuous self-control. On this account, the natural slave was unfree because his reason could not prescribe a rule to his bodily appetites. Aristotle had no hesitation in extending this point beyond slavery to the conditions of ‘the meaner sort of workman.’ Obsessed with need, the poor are ‘too degraded’ to participate in politics like free men. ‘You could no more make a city out of paupers,’ wrote Aristotle, ‘than out of slaves’ (ibid., 1278a). They must be ruled like slaves, for otherwise their pressing and immediate needs will issue in envy and violence. Some of these themes have emerged more recently in civic republican theories, though modern theories of citizenship tend to begin with a sense of who should be citizens (all adult residents) and then proceed to argue that they should all have property, rather than using existing wealth as an independent criterion for the franchise (King and Waldron 1988).

In the medieval period, Thomas Aquinas continued discussion of the Aristotlean idea that virtue might be expressed in the use that one makes of one’s property. But Aquinas gave it a sharper edge. Not only do the rich have moral obligations to act generously, but the poor also have rights against the rich. Beginning from the premise that ‘[a]ccording to the natural order established by Divine Providence, inferior things are ordained for the purpose of succoring man’s needs…’ (Aquinas ST, p. 72), Aquinas argued that no division of resources based on human law can prevail over the necessities associated with destitution. This is a theme which recurs throughout our tradition-most notably in Locke’s First Treatise on Government, (Locke 1988 [1689], I, para. 42)-as an essential qualification of whatever else is said about the legitimacy of private property (Horne 1990).

In the early modern period, philosophers turned their attention to the way in which property might have been instituted, with Hobbes and Hume arguing that there is no natural ‘mine’ or ‘thine,’ and that property must be understood as the creation of the sovereign state (Hobbes 1983 [1647]) or at the very least the artificial product of a convention ‘enter’d into by all the members of the society to bestow stability on the possession of…external goods, and leave every one in the peaceable enjoyment of what he may acquire by his fortune and industry’ (Hume 1978 [1739], p. 489). John Locke (1988 [1689]), on the other hand, was adamant that property could have been instituted in a state of nature without any special conventions or political decisions.

Locke’s theory is widely regarded as the most interesting of the canonical discussions of property. In part this is a result of how he began his account; because he took as his starting point that God gave the world to men in common, he had to acknowledge from the outset that private entitlements pose a moral problem. How do we move from a common endowment to the ‘disproportionate and unequal Possession of the Earth’ that seems to go along with private property? Unlike some of his predecessors, Locke did not base his resolution of this difficulty on any theory of universal (even tacit) consent. Instead, in the most famous passage of his chapter on property, he gave a moral defense of the legitimacy of unilateral appropriation.

Though the Earth…be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other Men. (Locke 1988 [1689], II, para. 27)

The interest of Locke’s account lies in the way he combines the structure of a theory of first occupancy with an account of the substantive moral significance of labor. In the hands of writers like Samuel Pufendorf (1991 [1673], p. 84), First Occupancy theory proceeded on the basis that the first human user of a natural resource-a piece of land, for example-is distinguished from all others in that he did not have to displace anyone else in order to take possession. It did not particularly matter how he took possession of it, or what sort of use he made of it: what mattered was that he began acting as its owner without dispossessing anyone else. Now although Locke used the logic of this account, it did matter for him that the land was cultivated or in some other way used productively. (For this reason, he expressed doubts whether indigenous hunters or nomadic peoples could properly be regarded as owners of the land over which they roamed.) This is partly because Locke identified the ownership of labor as something connected substantially to the primal ownership of self. But it was also because he thought the productivity of labor would help answer some of the difficulties which he saw in First Occupancy theory. Though the first occupier does not actually dispossess anyone, still his acquisition may prejudice other’s interests of others if there is not, in Locke’s words, ‘enough and as good left in common’ for them to enjoy (Locke 1988 [1689], II, para. 27). Locke’s answer to this difficulty was to emphasize that appropriation by productive labor actually increased the amount of goods available in society for others (ibid., II, para. 37).

Immanuel Kant’s work on property is less well known than Locke’s, and is more formal and abstract. Kant began by emphasizing a general connection between property and agency, maintaining that there would be an affront to agency and thus to human personality, if some system were not arrived at which could permit useful objects to be used. He inferred from this that ‘it is a duty of right to act towards others so that what is external (usable) could also become someone’s’ (Kant 1991 [1797], p. 74) Though this legitimated unilateral appropriation, it did so only in a provisional way. Since the appropriation of a resource as private property affects everyone else’s position (imposing duties on them that they would otherwise not have), it cannot acquire full legitimacy by unilateral action: it must be ratified by an arrangement which respects everyone’s interests in this matter. So the force of the principle requiring people to act so that external objects can be used as property also requires them to enter into a civil constitution, which will actually settle who is to be the owner of what on a basis that is fair to all.

G.W.F. Hegel’s account of property centers on the contribution property makes to the development of the self, ‘superseding and replacing the subjective phase of personality’ (1967 [1821], para. 41a) and giving some sort of external reality to what would otherwise be the mere idea of individual freedom. These rather obscure formulations were taken up also by the English idealists, most notably by T.H. Green (1941 [1895]), who emphasized the contribution that ownership makes to ethical development, to the growth of the will and a sense of responsibility. But neither of these writers thought of the development of the individual person as the be-all and end-all of property. In both cases it was thought of as a stage in the growth of social responsibility. Both saw the freedom embodied in property as ultimately positive freedom-freedom to choose rationally and responsibly for the wider social good. In Karl Marx’s philosophy, Hegel’s sense of there being several stages in the growth of positive freedom is framed in terms of stages of social development rather than stages of the growth of individuals (Marx 1972 [1862]). And for Marx, as for Plato, social responsibility in the exercise of private property rights is never enough. The whole trajectory of the development of modern society, says Marx, is towards large-scale cooperative labor. This may be masked by forms of property that treat vast corporations as private owners, but eventually this carapace will be abandoned and collectivist economic relations will emerge and be celebrated as such.

The general merits of private property versus socialism thus became a subject of genuine debate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. John Stuart Mill, with his characteristic open-mindedness treated communism as a genuine option, and he confronted objections to the collectivist ideal with the suggestion that the inequitable distribution of property in actually existing capitalist societies already partakes of many of these difficulties. He insisted however, that private property be given a fair hearing as well:

If…the choice were to be made between Communism…and the present state of society with all its sufferings and injustices,…all the difficulties, great or small, of Communism would be but as dust in the balance. But to make the comparison applicable, we must compare Communism at its best, with the regime of individual property, not as it is, but as it might be made…The laws of property have never yet conformed to the principles on which the justification of private property rests. (Mill 1994[1848], pp. 14-15)

Mill is surely right, at least so far as the aims of a philosophical discussion of property are concerned. Indeed, one way of looking at the history we have just briefly surveyed is that it is the history of successive attempts to tease out, from the mess of actually-existing maldistribution and exploitation, some sense of the true principles on which the justification of an ideal system of private property would rest, and a sense too of other aspects of moral enterprise which such an institution might serve.
3. Is Property a Philosophical Issue?

What is it about property that engages the interest of philosophers? Why should philosophers be interested in property?

Some have suggested that they need not be. John Rawls argued that questions about the system of ownership are secondary or derivative questions, to be dealt with pragmatically rather than as issues in political philosophy (Rawls 1971, p. 274). Although every society has to decide whether the economy will be organized on the basis of markets and private ownership or on the basis of central collective control, there was little that philosophers could contribute to these debates. Philosophers, Rawls said, are better off discussing the abstract principles of justice that should constrain the establishment of any social institutions, than trying to settle a priori questions of social and economic strategy.

On the other hand, with the growing attention that is being paid in the discipline to public policy generally, it is difficult to deny that questions about property can be posed in terms that are abstract enough for philosophers to address. Though Rawls counsels us to talk about justice rather than property, in fact issues about property are inevitably implicated in some of the issues about justice that have preoccupied political philosophers in recent years. Certain property institutions may be better than others for justice. A system of markets and private property covering all or most of the resources in society will make it very difficult to ensure the steady application of principles like equality, distribution according to need, or even as some have argued-see e.g., Hayek 1976-distribution according to desert. Some have argued that property rights in a market economy ought to be treated as resistant to redistribution and perhaps as insensitive to distributive justice generally except possibly at the moment of their initial allocation (see Nozick, 1974). If we take this view and if we also take distributive issues seriously, we may have to commit ourselves to a compromised or eclectic system rather than a pure market system of private property.

What about the ownership relation itself? Is there any inherent philosophical interest in the nature of a person’s relation to material resources? When someone says ‘X is mine’ and X is an action, we see interesting questions about intentionality, free-will, and responsibility, which philosophers will want to pursue. Or when someone says ‘X belongs to person P,’ and X is an event, memory, or experience, there are interesting questions about personal identity. But when X is an apple or a piece of land or an automobile, there does not appear to be any question of an inherent relation between X and P which might arouse our interest.

This was one of David Hume’s conclusions. There is nothing natural about private property, wrote Hume. The ‘contrariety’ of our passions and the ‘looseness and easy transition [of material objects] from one person to another’ mean that any situation in which I hold or use a resource is always vulnerable to disruption (Hume 1978 [1739], p. 488). Until possession is stabilized by social rules, there is no secure relation between person and thing. We may think that there ought to be: we may think, for example, that a person has a moral right to something that he has made and that society has an obligation to give legal backing to this moral right. But according to Hume, we have to ask what it is in general for society to set up and enforce rules of this kind, before we can reach any conclusions about the normative significance of the relation between any particular person and any particular thing.

Our property is nothing but those goods, whose constant possession is establish’d by the laws of society; that is, by the laws of justice. Those, therefore, who make use of the words property, or right, or obligation, before they have explain’d the origin of justice, or even make use of them in that explication, are guilty of a very gross fallacy, and can never reason upon any solid foundation. A man’s property is some object related to him. This relation is not natural, but moral, and founded on justice. Tis very preposterous, therefore, to imagine, that we can have any idea of property, without fully comprehending the nature of justice, and shewing its origin in the artifice and contrivance of man. The origin of justice explains that of property. The same artifice gives rise to both. (ibid., p. 491)

The view that the issue of property begs questions about the general basis of social organization had already been foreshadowed by Thomas Hobbes. Indeed Hobbes regarded property as the key to political philosophy: ‘[M]y first enquiry was to be from whence it proceeded, that any man should call any thing rather his Owne, th[a]n another mans’ (Hobbes 1983 [1647], pp. 26-7). For Hobbes, property rules were the product of authority-the acknowledged authority of a sovereign, whose commands could guarantee the peace and make it safe for men to embark on social and economic activities that outstripped their ability to protect themselves using their own individual strength. Hume, by contrast, was interested in the possibility that the relevant settlement might emerge as conventions from ordinary human interactions rather than as impositions by an acknowledged figure in authority (Hume 1978 [1739], p. 490).[3]

Still even if we concede that property is the product of social rules, and that normative thinking about the former must be preceded by normative thinking about the latter, there might be facts about the human condition or our agency as embodied beings that provide philosophical premises for an argument that property relations should be established in one way rather than another. Clearly, there is at least one material object with which a person does seem to have an intimate pre-legal relation that would bear some philosophical analysis-namely, that person’s body. We are embodied beings and to a certain extent the use and control of our limbs, sensory organs etc. is indispensable for our agency. Were a person to be deprived of this control-were others to have the right to block or manipulate the movements of his physical body-then his agency would be truncated, and he would be incapable of using his powers of intention and action to make something he (and others) could regard as a life for himself. Some modern authors, following John Locke, have tried to think about this in terms of an idea of self-ownership. According to G.A. Cohen (1995) a person owns himself when he has all the control over his own body that a master would have over him were he a slave. Now since a master is entitled to make comprehensive use of his slave for his own profit without owing any account or any contribution to anyone else, it seems to follow from the idea of self-ownership that a person must be allowed to profit equally comprehensively from the control of his own mental and bodily resources. Taking his cue from Nozick (1974) that taxation on earnings is a form of coerced labor (for others or for the state), Cohen concludes that various egalitarian arrangements (like welfare paid for out of taxation) are incompatible with the self-ownership of the rich. We have to choose therefore between principles of equality and principles of self-ownership. Debate on this issue continues: some argue that what we owe to others must be figured out first before there can be any question of owning either our selves, our bodies, or other material resources; while others say that any attempt to make the argument in that order will lead to counter-intuitive results (Nozick 1974, p. 234).

There is a further question whether self-ownership affords a basis for thinking about property in external objects other than my body? John Locke thought that it did (Locke 1988 [1689], II, para. 27). He suggested that when I work on an object or cultivate a piece of land, I project something of my self-owned self into the thing. That something I have worked on embodies a part of me is a common enough sentiment, but it is difficult to give it a analytically precise sense. That an object is shaped the way it is may be an effect of my actions; but actions don’t seem to have the trans-temporal endurance to enable us to say that they remain present in the object after the time of their performance. The idea of mixing one’s labor seems to be a piece of rhetoric which enhances other arguments for private property rather than an argument in its own right.

Others have speculated about an effect in the opposite direction-not so much the incorporation of the self into the object as the incorporation of the thing into the self (Radin 1982). This was a theme in Hegel’s work, where there was a suggestion that owning property helped the individual to ‘supersede the mere subjectivity of personality’ (Hegel [1821] 1991, 73); in plain English, it gave them the opportunity to make concrete the plans and schemes that would otherwise just buzz around inside their heads, and to take responsibility for their intentions as the material they were working on-a home or an sculptor’s block of marble-registered the impact of the decisions they had made (see Waldron 1988, pp. 343-89). Even the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham toyed with a version this idea. Though property, he said, depended on positive law, the law of property had an effect on the self that makes redistribution particularly objectionable. Law provided security for our expectations, and when that security came to be focused on a particular object, that object formed part of the structure of one’s agency: ‘It is hence that we have the power of forming a general plan of conduct; it is hence that the successive instants which compose the duration of life are not like isolated and independent points, but become continuous parts of a whole’ (Bentham 1931 [1802], p. 111).

Continue in Genealogies of Property .

Conclusion

Notes

See Also

References and Further Reading

About the Author/s and Reviewer/s

Author: international

Mentioned in these Entries

Genealogies of Property, Property and Ownership in Philosophy, Right in Rem, Historical.


Posted

in

, , ,

by

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *