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PROPERTY

Property is a general term for things such as land or other material resources and goods,

or the relations between persons and those things, or the relations between persons with

respect to those things, or the system of rules that governs these relations. Every society

with an interest in avoiding conflict between persons over things requires such a system;

without it, a civilised common life is impossible. We may distinguish three ideal types of

system that could be used to organize property in a society. Under the first type of

system, property is held in common and all members of the society are free to use it as

they choose without spoiling it for others. Under the second type of system, property is

held collectively and society collectively determines its use. Under the third type of

system, property is held privately and those who hold it are free to use it as they choose.

Each of these systems has been proposed at some time as the best possible system for

organizing property in society, and the proponents of each have thought their favoured

system the best for many different reasons. Most serious political thinkers have had

something to say about property. This entry describes some of the more influential

discussions of property in the history of political thought.

The Ancient Greeks on Property: Aristotle and Plato

In hisPolitics, Aristotle asked, what are best arrangements to make about property if a

political community is to be as well-constituted as it is possible to make it? Should its

members have all things in common, or nothing in common, or some things in common


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and some not? The second he considered impossible, because living together in a

community presupposed having at least some things in common. Thus the first and the

third were the only practicable alternatives. Aristotle understood Plato to have proposed

the first alternative in hisRepublic.Republic was concerned in the first instance with

justice as a condition of the human soul but, because Plato assumed that a political

community was a replica of the human soul writ large, his conclusions about justice in

the soul had some very important implications for the character of a just political

community.Republic implied that, as a general rule, common or collective ownership

should be the governing system of property among the rulers of the community, because

collective ownership was necessary to promote the common pursuit of the common good.

Aristotle argued, against Plato, that collective ownership was injurious to the good of

individuals and to the common good, and concluded that, as a rule, it were better that

property were private than common, even though it should be used in common.

Aristotle adduced several considerations in support of this conclusion. One

consideration was that collective ownership was inefficient: because everyone thought

about their own interests more than the common interest, what was held in common was

apt to be neglected as everyone left it to others to put it to good use. Another

consideration was that conflict between persons would increase rather than diminish if

there were no clear distinctions in property. More positively, he suggested that individual

well-being and virtue were advanced by private ownership. Private ownership

encouraged happiness and generosity by enabling people to do services for their friends

and companions. At the same time, it allowed people to be independent of one another

and in that sense free and equal. Free and equal persons enjoyed the status of citizens, a


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status that stood in contradistinction to that of a slave. A slave was neither free nor equal,

not a person but a thing, an item of property to be owned privately but shared freely with

ones friends and companions like any other. If Aristotle could not imagine a system in

which private ownership went with purely private use, it was because, to his mind, people

were by nature political animals that lived together with others for the sake of their

common good. Private property was in accordance with natureas was slaveryand its

abolition would be contrary to human nature.

Property in the Roman Law tradition

A rather different view developed in the Roman law tradition. On this view, private

property was not naturalnor was slaverybut a product of convention. In emphasising

the conventionality of private property, the Romans were led to consider, as Aristotle

really had not, the modes by which it was acquired. They distinguished several, but all

involved action under legal authorisation. Earlier Roman writers such as Seneca had

asserted that the conventions that established private property stood in contrast to an

original dispensation of nature by which all things were made equally available to

everyone. The Roman lawyers now suggested that this original freedom and equality

existed by a right or law of nature (ius naturale), and they distinguished between this

state of affairs and current arrangements which derived their authority from the positive

law of a particular political community or from the law common to all nations (lex

positiva and ius gentium respectively). Most of their statements about property dwelt on

the second and third of these lawstheir interest in the first was slight in comparison.

These statements indicated that individuals became entitled to things under the terms of


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one or other of these laws: some things were theirs by natural law, some by civil law,

some others again by the law of nations. The Roman lawyers used the words dominium

and, less often,proprietas to describe the sum of these legal entitlements to things, and

typically ascribed it to the current possessor of the things in question. The recovery of

Aristotles works in the thirteenth century changed matters. Central to these changes was

Aquinas.

Aquinas on Property

Aquinas followed Aristotle in arguing that private property was natural and good. He

explained the naturalness of private property by reference to peoples entitlement to it

under natural law and the ius gentium (which he treated as an adumbration of natural law)

and its goodness by linking its use to the development of virtue (much as Aristotle had

done). But he emphatically subordinated private property to the common good, which

trumped the claims of any one person. People had duties to others to use what they had to

meet their needs, duties shared by the rulers of the political community. Accordingly, the

idea of individual rights to private property figured in his writings, if at all, as

entitlements which enabled people to do what was right, whether to develop their own

potentialities and those of the community in which they lived, or to succour the needs of

their fellow men. Aquinas underscored the moral element inproprietas, a word he used

to mean not only possession but also rightfulness, or propriety.

Conceptions of Property in Modern Political Thought

Later commentators on Aquinas elucidated the idea of individual rights but introduced


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complications by arguing that the ius gentium simply represented an aspect of positive

human law rather than natural law. Their arguments cut against the naturalness of private

property and implied that property rights were merely privileges granted to the members

of a political community by its laws, which could be withdrawn without impropriety.

This suggested in turn that property, and private property in particular, should be referred

to government, a suggestion taken up eagerly in the seventeenth century. The most

influential explanation of private property in this period was Hugo Grotiuss. Grotius

assumed that originally mankind held all things in common and subsequently agreed to

partition it, thus producing private property. Samuel Pufendorf added some refinements

but retained the fundamental theory. If this theory implied nothing specific about

government, the two came together easily in the idea that only government could enforce

a stable partition and so make private property viable. Thus Thomas Hobbes could argue

that there could be no property, and no distinction between mine and yours, without

government. Private property was therefore a creation of government power.

John Locke

This way of thinking about property was challenged by John Locke. Locke took it

that God had given the world to mankind collectively. The question was how to move

from that to private property. Locke explained this move by broadening the scope of

property to include not only a persons thingsthe land or goods to which he was

entitledbut also his person. Locke claimed that people had dominium over themselves

and their powers of body and mind. These powers he used as the means to private

property. By using the labour of their bodies, people could appropriate things from the

world and make them their own, effectively extending the natural right they had over

themselves into those things. Now, others before him, including Grotius and Pufendorf,


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had recognised that people could use their own powers to take things from the world, but

they had not seen appropriation as an instrument for legitimately acquiring property.

Indeed, as Rousseau would later observe, a person who takes a piece of the world and

calls it his own may be a thief or an imposter.

Locke dealt with this problem by arguing that the world already belonged to God,

who had given it to mankind for certain ends. The qualities of body and mind with which

He had endowed people were means to be employed to further those ends. Gods ends

embraced the preservation and increase of the human race in a single great design. Thus

the person who laboured in order to sustain life acquired property for himself because he

did as God willed with Gods creation. His unilateral action gave him a right to property

without the need for government. Equally, someone who occupied land without labouring

productively upon it would have no claim to own it, while those in need had claims upon

the assistance of the propertied and wealthy. Thus with Locke, as with Aquinas, property

was connected to virtue and the common good, though the precise character of those

connexions and their ramifications within his political theory remains moot. In any event,

Locke was immensely proud of his account of private property, which proved extremely

influential in at least two directions.

Kant and Hegel

In one direction, thinkers like Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel adopted

Lockes view that property went together with personhood but rejected the theological

presuppositions in which that view was implicated. Kant elevated human freedom to an

end in itself and depicted individual human beings as striving to realise their own

freedom on terms that registered the freedom of others. This implied the existence of a

system of private property rights, and a political order that protected these rights against


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the intrusions of others, which enabled people to develop their own freedom, equality and

independence. On his view, people acquired property not by mixing their labour with

things but by the transcendental operation of directing their wills upon those things. This

notion was further developed by Hegel and became in time the standard theory of

property among Idealist thinkers, from T. H. Green onwards. The Idealists saw the

freedom embodied in property as one stage in human beings growth towards perfect

freedom, which culminated in their membership of a national state as citizens. The

property rights they held as individuals were transcended by the claims made upon them

by the state, which meant in practice that, once the state was established, its positive laws

determined property ownership.

Smith and Ricardo

In another direction, thinkers like Adam Smith and David Ricardo transformed

Lockes theory of appropriation into a labour theory of value, which made labour alone

the source of economic goods and the increase in value that privatisation brought. The

inference they drew from this theory was not, as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon would later

insist, that individuals were entitled to the products of their own labour, but rather that

they should be free to sell their labour to any employer they chose. If Smith occasionally

acknowledged that his thinking implied that government existed to protect the rich and

propertied against the poor, he usually offered a more optimistic picture in which it

appeared that the property thus protected was the result of natural developments, and so

just, and served a common interest, if not a common good. Later utilitarian thinkers from

Bentham to James Mill were more sanguine, contenting themselves with the claim that on

balance there was more utility in allowing people to have rights to what they had

produced than not (which again presupposed that rights were privileges granted by


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government).

Marx

Karl Marx disputed the conclusions of both these lines of thinking. Against the

first he argued that, so far from conditioning private property, the state was conditioned

by it. Against the second, he argued that in labouring under the conditions hymned by

Smith and Ricardo people did not extend their rights over themselves into things but

imported the characteristics of what they laboured upon into themselves, becoming in

effect servants of the property their own labour had created, a process he famously

described as the fetishism of commodities. Marx projected an image of a future society

in which this process had been reversed. First, private property would be abolished and

everyone would become an employee of society in a strict equality of wages. Then,

people would be free to develop a new kind of appropriation in which they were no

longer alienated from their own labour and no longer regarded the world as something

there to be utilised. The world would be something to be enjoyed together, a world of

potentialities to be realised and possibilities to be explored. These potentialities would be

liberated once private ownership ceded to collective ownership and thence to common

ownership, and the interests of abstract individuals ceded to the good of all.

Marxs vision of the common ownership of the goods of nature has exerted a

persistent imaginative force. His idea that every human being was entitled to a just share

of the opportunities open to him, and that society should be refashioned so that he could

secure this share, inspired many socialist and egalitarian thinkers in the twentieth century.

It continues to inspire today, notwithstanding the hideous failure to implement it in

practice by regimes purporting to do so. By the same token the idea that individuals have

rights to the fruits of their labour that, other things equal, no other human being can


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gainsay, has its own moral force. Aristotles questionwhat are the best arrangements to

make about property if a state is to be as well constituted as it can bethus remains a

central question in modern politics, for every society to confront, theoretically and

practically, within a set of wider economic structures that no one society controls.

Timothy Stanton

See alsoGrotius, Hugo;Hobbes, Thomas; Locke, John; Marxism; Natural Rights;

Rights; Roman Law.

FURTHERREADINGS

Aristotle. (1988). The Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Locke, J. (1988). Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Ryan, A. (1984).Property and Political Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Schlatter, R. (1951).Private Property. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Tully, J. (1980).A Discourse of Property. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Waldron, J. (1988). The Right to Private Property. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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