The right of an owner of property to exclude all others from his property is one of the most prized—and most feared—rights any civilization can confer on its members. From one point of view, a system that creates this right also allows individuals to harness their talents and to develop natural resources under their control, both to their maximum extent But from another vantage point, the right to exclude is condemned as snobbish or nettlesome behaviour that inconveniences or harms people left on the outside looking in. (Epstein,
1998:187)
Private property ownership is seen as a sign of economic stability and even wealth, which, as Arendt reminds us (1958:64), Proudhon associated with theft. Before the modern age, however, property was a condition for the membership of a free society. It provided a root, a location from which a person could enter the public realm. Unlike the modern form of property, which is easily exchanged in the market-place, the ancient property was a precondition for the elite’s membership of the community. To own property then meant ‘to be master over one’s own necessities of life and therefore potentially to be a free person, free to transcend his own life and enter the world all have in common’ (Arendt, 1958:65).
The classic discussions of private property go back to the disagreement between Plato and Aristotle. Plato raised the position of property to that of the body and mind, to form a triad. For each, there was a pernicious state and a branch of expertise to deal with it. For mind it was immorality, which needed administration of justice; for body it was sickness, which needed medicine; and for property it was poverty, which needed commerce (Plato, 1994:55–7). Plato’s utopian republic was to be run by an elite group of propertyless guardians (Plato, 1993, Chapter 5). None of these rulers, who had to go through vigorous training and to live a puritan life, was allowed to have any private property, ‘except what is absolutely indispensable’ (p. 121). This would mean that their living quarters and their property in general would not interfere with their ability to carry out their duties. Plato’s fear was that,
If they do come to own their own land and home and money, they will be estatemanagers and farmers instead of guardians; they will become despots, and enemies rather than allies of the inhabitants of the community…With private property, they will be racing ever closer to the ruin of themselves and the whole community. (p. 122)
This denial of property ownership, however, was limited to the ruling guardians and did not extend to the rest of the community, who could own estates and enjoy the benefits of private property (p. 122). Morality in this utopian community, Plato argued, was ‘keeping one’s own property and keeping to one’s own occupation (p. 142).
Aristotle, in his Politics (II v), objected to this scheme as unrealistic, arguing that ‘the general principle should be that of private ownership’, which would ensure increased effort in looking after property (Aristotle, 1992:114) and would give ‘an immense amount of pleasure’ both in enjoying its benefits and in helping friends, strangers and associates (p. 115). Without private property, he argued, ‘no man will be seen to be liberal and no man will ever do any act of liberality; for it is in the use of articles of property that liberality is practised (p. 115).
Aristotle (1992) argued against seeking excessive unity and emphasized the need for private property and for acknowledging the difference among citizens. He suggested that
‘the greater the number of owners, the less respect for common property’ (p. 108). As if describing a public housing estate in the second half of the twentieth century, Aristotle wrote: ‘People are much more careful of their personal possessions than those owned
communally;…the thought that someone else is looking after (common property) for them tends to make them careless of it’ (ibid.). He therefore defended the private ownership of property, but held that its use could be communal (pp. 113ff).
In the modern period, the debate starts in the seventeenth century with John Locke, who argued for a natural right of property ownership, which lies outside social contract and cannot be negotiated. He held nature to be common and private property to be a consequence of investing human labour on the common property.
Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person; this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of this body and the work of his hands 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 joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. (Locke, 1976:15)
The difference of value on everything, then, was the result of human labour. Without human labour, the value of land ‘would scarcely be worth anything’ (p. 23). This principle may apply to the sparsely populated countries and the frontier lands. But what about the highly populated countries where people are engaged in trade and commerce and live under a government? The appropriation of common land by individuals, Locke believed, was not jeopardizing the right of others, as the wealth of all increased by such appropriations: ‘he who appropriates land to himself by his labour, does not lessen but increase the common stock of mankind’ (p. 20). Furthermore, the limit to this appropriation of nature and the common property was to be set by the needs of the individual and the consent of the others. Here the principle was that ‘no one can enclose or appropriate any part without the consent of all his fellow-commoners’ (p. 18).
Locke’s belief in the natural right to property was rejected by Rousseau, who saw property ownership as a legal right. Rousseau saw private property as the source of inequality and war (Rousseau, 1968:56), which needed to be brought under the control of a legal framework set by society. For him, ‘all legitimate authority among men must be based on covenants’ (p. 53). Individuals convert their independence into political and legal freedom by entering a social contract. The core of this contract is the notion that,
Each one of us puts into the community his person and all his powers under the supreme direction of the general will; and as a body, we incorporate every member as an indivisible part of the whole. (p. 61)
The property rights of individuals, therefore, became ‘always subordinate to the right of the community over everything’ (p. 68). Without this subordination, Rousseau argued,
‘there would be neither strength in the social bond nor effective force in the exercise of sovereignty’ (p. 68). In this way, the lands of the private individuals are united and contiguous to become public territory. By this he did not mean to leave private property under the control of the sovereign or deprive the individual of them. ‘[O]n the contrary’, he argued (p. 67), ‘it simply assures him of their lawful possession.’
For Hegel, protection of private property through the administration of justice was one
of the main ‘moments’ of civil society (Hegel, 1967:126). He associated private property closely with personal freedom, believing that ‘in the last resort no community has so good a right to property as a person has’ (p. 236). Property ownership allowed a person to translate his/her freedom into an external sphere, in the realm of ‘things’ over which humans have ‘the absolute right of appropriation’ (pp. 40–1). Beyond catering for our needs, private property is an essential part of an individual’s freedom,
If emphasis is placed on my needs, then the possession of property appears as a mean to their satisfaction, but the true position is that, from the standpoint of freedom, property is the first embodiment of freedom and so is in itself a substantive end. (p. 42)
Indeed property for Hegel is the ‘means through which I give my will an embodiment’ (p.
236). As the embodiment of personality, property, therefore, has a central place for the sense of the self, where the individual’s will is related to the objects of the world (pp. 45–
6). This relation takes place in three stages: taking possession of the thing (which can be directly grasping it, by forming it, and by marking it as ours), using it, and alienating it (p. 46). Through our control over private property, then, we find an outlet for our will to relate to the world and, as a result, find an expressive satisfaction and a sense of personal freedom and development. Hegel, therefore, argued in favour of the institution of private property as an expression of individual self. This was criticized by Karl Marx as causing alienation rather than realizing the individual self (Scruton, 1996:434–5).
Marx’s formulation was completely opposite of Hegel’s. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels (1930:25) argued that ‘The history of all human society, past and present, has been the history of class struggle.’ In the contemporary period, it was a struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, i.e. between capital and wage labour. The antagonism between capital and labour revolved around property. Labour created capital, which was the property that in turn exploited labour (p. 44). For in the bourgeois society, ‘those who work do not acquire property and those who acquire property do not work’ (p. 46). Capital was ‘a collective product’, ‘a social force’, which was only possible to result from the joint activities of all the members of society (p. 44).
But it was owned by a minority, who thus deprived and alienated the workers from the outcome of their own labour. The result has been a society in which private property has already been abolished for nine-tenths of the population (p. 46). The communist answer to this problem was to dismantle the private ownership of property: ‘Communists sum up their theory in the pithy phrase: the abolition of private property’ (p. 43).
Through their choice of words, from the very beginning of their communist manifesto (‘A spectre haunts Europe, the spectre of communism.’) to the phrases where they spelt out their vision of utopia, Marx and Engels were in a combative mode, wishing to frighten their opponents. This is particularly acute when private property is addressed: ‘In a word, you accuse us of wanting to abolish your property. Well we do!’ (Marx and Engels, 1930:46). They were engaged in a war, mainly fought over private property. All arguments against such abolition were rejected on the basis that these arguments (such as those in favour of individuality, liberty, culture, right etc.) were themselves the outcome of bourgeois property relations (p. 47). ‘When you speak of individuals you are thinking
solely of bourgeois, of the owners of bourgeois property. Certainly we wish to abolish individuals of that kind!’ (p. 46).
Marx (1974, originally 1859) analysed the historical processes of property transformation. At the stage of primitive accumulation of capital, the individual private property that is based on the labour of its owners (which was the foundation of petty industry) is dissolved. A process of centralization ensures that capital is accumulated in the hands of a few. Here, private property is capitalistic, ‘which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labour of others, i.e. on wage-labour’ (p. 714). Labourers are thus turned into proletarians, while their means of labour is transformed into capital. The next phase comes when this centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour become incompatible with their capitalist framework. ‘The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated’ (p. 715). Rather than re-establishing private property for the producer, a ‘socialized property’ is created (p. 715).
The outcome of this explosion is ‘individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: i.e. on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production’ (p. 715).
The heated debates and class wars of the nineteenth century continued to dominate the twentieth century, in the form of the Soviet experiment and the wars and tensions that it caused, and also in the general improvement in the working conditions of the workers in the West. But, with the collapse of the Soviet empire and its rapid and troubled return to private ownership, has the debate on private property ownership disappeared? Maybe it was a leftwing preoccupation that has subsided with the failure of communism to materialize? With the economic restructuring in the West and the privatization of government assets in many parts of the world, the debate indeed has entered a new phase.
The balance between public and private ownership continues to form a central part of the quest for social justice and ideal forms of government.
According to Jeremy Waldron, one of the key themes of liberal thought in the twentieth century has been ‘whether it is possible really to enjoy civil liberties and political freedoms as they are traditionally understood, without also enjoying a fair degree of material security’ (Waldron, 1993:5). It is not, therefore, as the libertarian Nozick (1974) had suggested, to hold that private property ownership has an unquestionable priority over the material needs of the large number of the poor. The case that Waldron puts forward is to argue for welfare rights in connection with the more traditional rights of human beings. For him, ‘the logic of welfare rights is not “Please let me sleep on your land”, but rather “How dare you erect fences around land that people may need to sleep on?”’(Waldron, 1993:20).
Even those who promote the idea of limited government and the reduction of controls on private property accept that there is a need for a limit also on the individual’s control of resources. Even those who promote laissez-faire, with its rejection of constraints on individual liberty, private property and free contract, seem to agree on the necessity of a mixture of public and private engagement in social life, searching for appropriate roles for markets and governments (Epstein, 1998:3–8). The fault lines between these different shades of opinion, however, appear when the optimum balance between the two is sought, where the boundaries between the public and private are to be drawn. As ever,
this line is a contested and hotly debated boundary.