Property. Robert Lamb A.. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Robert Lamb A.
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Афоризмы и цитаты
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509519231
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attend instead to specific practices like the right to use or the power to transfer. The concept of property thus vanishes out of sight, with the notion of an owner a misleading oversimplification, perhaps even a category error, with no possible basis in reality.4 It emerges as a fiction, a weirdly inaccurate kind of shorthand device that encourages the reification of a popular idea that blinds us to a proper understanding of social and legal phenomena.

      In this book, I highlight important parts of the tradition of thinking and arguing about property. I examine and assess conceptions and normative contestations of property advanced by different individuals, who are often in direct conversation with each other. We will consider each of these theories on their own terms, insofar as the discussion will not assume an established definition of property to compare against their individual understandings. Such an author-centred analysis avoids cementing intellectual traditions into rigid ideologies. Although I will regularly invoke political or theoretical traditions – libertarianism, utilitarianism, anarchism, and so on – I use these labels loosely; as I will make clear, Nozick’s theory does not exhaust the libertarian theory of property and Bentham’s does not define the utilitarian alternative. No individual theory of property is reducible to the intellectual tradition of which it is part or the political ideology it is supposed to represent.5

      The structure of the rest of the book is as follows. In the first chapter, I consider why we might think that private property stands in need of a compelling justification. To explain the urgency of this undertaking – beyond the aforementioned habit of political philosophers surveying the world and asking why it is the way it is – I introduce some of the most radical dismissals of the legitimacy of property ownership in Western political thought. After outlining the dramatic critique advanced in the eighteenth century by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, I briefly consider the case against property put forward by writers in the anarchist and socialist traditions, focusing on the thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and William Morris. Much of the case against private property concerns the severe poverty and inequalities that are associated with a world of yours and mine, as well as the claimed appeal of the radically different world that we can imagine without it.

      In the fourth and fifth chapters, I consider alternative justifications for property ownership that do not try to defend the institution through reference to natural rights. I look first at the consequentialist accounts of the institution we find in the utilitarian tradition, in the writings of David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, and J. S. Mill. Each uses the idea of utility in a different way to justify the institution of property ownership and its associated legal conventions. After a discussion of the logics that drive them, I conclude that these three different justifications – though they are arresting and again have some intuitive pull – seem likewise incapable of providing a solid foundation for the existence of private property, their vulnerability traceable to the empirical claims upon which they must rely. I then move on, in the fifth chapter, to outline what might be the most compelling justification of private property in modern political thought. This justification, which can be found in the political writing of nineteenth-century German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, is one that takes seriously the meaning and purpose of property in both its individual and social dimensions. The attraction of the Hegelian justification is, I suggest, that it can account for both the individualistic nature of the institution of private ownership and its ultimately social justification, while being unaffected by the vagaries that would threaten any consequentialist version.