Property

Robert Lamb

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509519231
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía política

Few political ideas are as divisive and controversial for some – and yet taken for granted by others – as the ownership of private property. For its defenders, private ownership is a fundamental right that protects individual freedom and ensures wider economic benefits for the community; for its critics, by contrast, property is institutionalised theft, responsible for lamentable levels of inequality and poverty.

In this book, Robert Lamb explores philosophical arguments deployed to conceptualise, justify, and criticise private property ownership. He introduces the radical case against property advanced by anarchist and socialist writers, before analysing some of the most important and influential arguments in its favour. Lamb explains and assesses the various defences of property rights advanced by Locke, Hume, Hegel, J. S. Mill, and Nozick. He then shows how theorists such as John Rawls and his followers encourage us to rethink the very nature of ownership in a democratic society.

This engaging synthesis of historical and contemporary theories of property will be essential reading for students and scholars of political philosophy.

1
The Case against Private Property

The bulk of this book will be devoted to discussion of the case for property rights, put forward as part of different political theories. We will focus on various arguments that try to justify private property as a social institution, and examine theories that seek to explain the purpose and value of a world of yours and mine. Before we discuss the various philosophical arguments advanced in defence of private ownership, however, we will first consider its critics. This might seem like a backwards approach to the matter at hand, but my intention is to heighten the interest of the topic by bringing its controversial status into sharp relief. Though property may seem like an ordinary and everyday concept – one that we often take for granted as a mundane fact of our existence in Western societies living with advanced capitalism – its justification is both important and urgent. We can get a sense of the need for a compelling justification for property – beyond the compulsion of the political philosopher to subject all aspects of social life to critical interrogation – by taking a brief look at some of the most provocative arguments against its very existence. Some political thinkers have found property to be, at best, without convincing justification and, at worst, a force for evil in the world. Private ownership has long been an object of critique, damned as a source of injustice and misery by a number of writers in the modern anarchist and socialist traditions. That said, we have only limited space, so I will focus on just three modern political writers who offer stinging critiques of property rights: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and William Morris.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Worries about the legitimacy of private ownership pre-date the rise of industrial capitalism. The emergence of commercial society in the eighteenth century saw critics of private property advance arguments that remain prescient. In his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality (1754), Jean-Jacques Rousseau assembles one of the most strident and influential philosophical broadsides against private property and the form of society that its existence begets. The tremendous force of Rousseau’s critique lies in its weaving together of two distinct and powerful claims: his analysis points, on the one hand, to the unwanted consequences caused by the existence of property and, on the other, to the highly dubious origins of the institution.¹ Apologists for commercial society, he thinks, ignore both of these truths. Rousseau’s starting point is the phenomenon of inequality, which is, for him, an obvious fact about the world, and is lamentable because of how it has thwarted human freedom and well-being. His task in the Discourse is to identify the factors that cause this inequality and perpetuate the radical material and cultural differences of wealth and poverty that pervade modernity. One of Rousseau’s most innovative claims is that these inequalities have no natural basis. On the contrary, for him, the emergence of inequality is an inescapably social problem: it is a product of society and not a natural fact. The phenomenon of inequality as we encounter it in civil society is absent from what Rousseau sees as the pre-modern, ‘savage’ state, where notions of ‘need, greed, oppression, desires, and pride’ cannot be found (Rousseau 1997a: 132). Contrary to philosophers like Hobbes – who view life without political authority as extremely dangerous because of our innate egoism – Rousseau suggests that the state of human existence that precedes socialisation is mostly peaceful.

In his examination of ‘natural man’, Rousseau seems to indicate that it is not so much what the savage state had, as what it lacked, that explains the absence of inequality. And one of the things it lacked was private property. Rousseau insists that the very establishment of individuated, private ownership as an institution helped create, and then nurture, an inequality of materials, status, and spirit. In a famous passage of the Discourse, he makes the following declaration:

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say, this is mine, and found people sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors Mankind would have been spared by him who, pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had cried out to his kind: Beware of listening to this impostor; You are lost if you forget that the fruits are everyone’s and the Earth no one’s. (Rousseau 1997a: 161)

Rousseau immediately acknowledges that the impulse towards private acquisition did not come out of nowhere but required the existence of ‘prior ideas’ that were friendly to selfishness and corruption. The institutional manifestation of the privatisation of ownership nevertheless marks a crucial point of degradation in modernity. The acceptance of the legitimacy of private ownership is, he thinks, the harbinger of a distinct stage in the securement of inequality and, correspondingly, of human misery, and a welcoming invitation to the ‘crimes, wars, murders’ that have come to characterise our social lives.

For Rousseau, it is not the mere fact that one person encloses land to the exclusion of someone else that is at issue. Indeed, material inequality is only one part of his story. Rousseau’s thesis is ultimately about the transformative psychological development undergone by humans with the emergence of commercial society. As well as legitimising quantitative differences in owned possessions, the establishment of private property cements an ethos of inequality in society. An inequality of natural resources mutates quickly into a more insidious inequality of status and power. Social relations become characterised by the dominance of the wealthy over the destitute and needy, who lack moral dignity and struggle for economic subsistence. The rich are, however, not really much better off, as their luxurious desires render them corrupt, and their pride and social mores enslave them. The spirit of inequality ultimately perpetuates itself through the legal and political apparatus. The wealthy, devoid of genuine virtue, become selfishly motivated to establish laws of justice that serve their interests and protect their ownership. They know that ‘since [their property rights] had been acquired solely by force, force could deprive them of them without their having reason for complaint’ (Rousseau 1997a: 172), and so a robust punitive system is required to secure their holdings and maintain their status.

The other powerful Rousseauian contention is that the initial act of acquisition was itself thievery and therefore the whole institution of private ownership – continued through property transfer, inheritance, and so on – has no legitimate foundation. If Rousseau’s historical argument about unjustified appropriation is correct, then this would surely have ramifications that go far beyond his eighteenth-century context. After all, if the first instance of ownership was an illegitimate acquisition and amounted to institutionalised theft, then all transactions that stem from this initial violation are perhaps likewise tainted. Although the connection between that very first act of enclosure and my exclusive rights over the coffee table that I have purchased seems at first to be non-existent, the legitimacy of the latter might actually hinge on that of the former. It is troubling to think that the rights we assume and rely on during our daily lives might be the latest link in a chain of historical wrongs.

Is Rousseau correct in his assertion about the ignominious origins of property ownership? In many respects, the answer must be that we simply do not know the true story behind the earliest of all property acquisitions. We do know enough about the nature of colonial expansion, however, to be able to assert with confidence that, at the time at which settlers forced various indigenous peoples off their land, huge parts of the world were essentially stolen. When, in the late seventeenth century, John Locke writes ‘in the beginning all the World was America’ (1988: 301), he refers to what he regards as its unspoilt nature. In the context of his theory of property – which we will discuss further in subsequent chapters – he means that at one point in time, the whole world had not been subject to private enclosure, and so was not yet a site of ownership rights. America was, for Locke, unused and unclaimed, and therefore available for appropriation and the establishment of property rights. We know now, of course, that Locke’s perspective on the virginal status of America was a colonial one, which denied relevant moral standing – and corresponding political legitimacy – to its indigenous people, whose conceptions of property did not cohere with his own worldview.² Modern colonialism – not just in America, but in Africa, Australasia, and elsewhere – demonstrates how many examples there are throughout the world of chains of established property ownership beginning with not merely theft, but also the accompanying mass killing or violent displacement of indigenous peoples. The fact of colonialism, however, does not yet necessarily render illegitimate the property rights that have passed through several generations since its violence. We still need to undertake an assessment of the justifications canvassed in the history of political ideas before we could reach such a conclusion. Nevertheless, the undeniable reality of colonialism does very much underscore why the justificatory burden falls on the defender of private ownership, as well as why such a burden is a sizeable and politically urgent one.

The challenge that Rousseau sets out in the Discourse is stark: how can property be justified when its existence is responsible for subsequent ‘miseries and horrors’? The implication of his analysis – especially given the pure fiat that he thinks underpins its initial establishment – would seem to be that property is nothing more than institutionalised robbery. Rousseau asks the proprietor in modernity, ‘Do you know that a great many of your brothers perish or suffer from need of what you have in excess, and that you required the express and unanimous consent of Humankind to appropriate for yourself anything from the common subsistence above and beyond your own?’ (1997a: 172). If modernity emerges as corrupt and miserable because of the privatisation of ownership, the corresponding entailment would seem to be towards the rightness of a kind of communist society in which the fruits of the earth belong to everyone, and where any one of whom can draw upon them when necessary. As we will see later, this is not actually the conclusion Rousseau himself reaches, but his analysis did inspire other political writers towards it.

Proudhon and the anarchist case against property

Rousseau’s political philosophy had a profound influence on subsequent writers in the anarchist and socialist traditions, many of whom were even more radical in their diagnoses of, and remedies for, the economic ills that they ascribed to private property. The French nineteenth-century anarchist writer Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is one such figure whose work further develops Rousseau’s social criticism.³ Although he embraced various political positions throughout his life, Proudhon’s perhaps most iconic text, What is Property? (1840), offers a relentless critique of private ownership, rejecting a large number of argumentative strategies traditionally invoked in its justification. For Proudhon, property and poverty are, at once, opposites in their nature, and yet also mutually dependent on each other for their existence: the presence of one implies that of the other. Much of Proudhon’s key text is devoted to criticising numerous popular accounts of the origin of private ownership, each of which he regards as bogus. He rejects as implausible a variety of arguments that attempt to explain the emergence of legitimate acquisition through reference to rights gained either by first occupancy, or through the universal consent of humankind. He shares with later post-colonial critics the view that such narratives are nothing more than offensive fictions. There are, for Proudhon, no grounds for ascribing ownership of a particular portion of land to a person simply because they were its first occupant, and he thinks there is no way universal consent was ever sought – let alone secured – by proprietors at any stage in history.

The origins of the institution of private property are, according to Proudhon, not ancient or pre-historical, but assuredly modern. Furthermore, he thinks that the political validation of property takes place significantly later than Rousseau claimed. Private ownership becomes a fundamental right only with the French Revolution. The Revolutionary spirit – with its well-known commitment to the political trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity – is, for him, imbued with a fundamental individualism that explicitly accommodates the privatisation of property rights, and the exclusion of the many from ownership. Thus, although the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen venerated equality as a moral axiom, in reality such professions masked a hypocrisy. That document and its constitutional successors failed completely to explain what the professed ‘equality before the law’ amounted to, and within such an abstract idea lay possibilities for substantive inequalities. For Proudhon, these egalitarian constitutional documents ‘assume an inequality in fortune and status incompatible with even a shadow of equality in rights’ (1994: 29). The collective ‘people’ – who were the supposed subjects of what he saw as an empty, ineffective constitutional egalitarianism – ended up falling back into the unequal states of ‘privilege and servitude’ that they held prior to the fall of the Ancien Régime (30). A genuinely substantive commitment to equality demands not the affirmation but the rejection of private ownership. Proudhon thus not only rejects the legitimacy of property because of its undesirable consequences – that its existence produces demonstrably terrible hardship, poverty, and inequality – but also because its justification relies on a premise that contains within it an egalitarian principle that actually demands its abolition and in its place the secured freedom of the individual. The existence of ...