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Dedication
For Lawrence
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to George Owers at Polity for first suggesting (in late 2015) that I write this book and for being – along with Julia Davies – supportive and patient as I followed the established academic convention of missing multiple agreed deadlines. I am not in the habit of missing more than one such deadline, but the last four years have been very hectic. Thanks are due to various colleagues and family members, but particularly to whomever developed the ‘out-of-office’ email message that helped me keep some time to myself during my tenure as head of department, enabling me to make (slow) progress on the manuscript.
Much of what I have learned about property over the years has come from conversations with other scholars. Many of these conversations were at stimulating workshops organised by Chris Pierson, through the Political Studies Association’s ‘Politics of Property’ specialist group that he led so brilliantly. The comments I received on the manuscript from the three anonymous referees (and from three others on the original proposal) were very useful, including objections from one overwrought libertarian critic, which helped persuade me that I was on broadly the right track. Ross Carroll provided valuable comments on the text towards the very end of its composition and I benefited from the excellent copy-editing of Tim Clark. While writing a book that is essentially an introduction to its subject, I have had in mind the two teachers who first introduced me to political philosophy as an undergraduate – Gabriella Slomp and Kevin Francis – with such infectious passion and enthusiasm. Most importantly, as well as providing her typically piercing thoughts on the manuscript, Sarah Drews Lucas helped keep me loved (and sane) as the last years have flown by. This book is dedicated to our son, who was born this week, amidst a global pandemic.
R. L.
Exeter, April 2020
Introduction: What is Property?
In his novel The Information, Martin Amis makes the following observations – via his hapless protagonist Richard Tull – about the worldview and attitudes of an artist:
He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this, had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars? This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles. (Amis 1995: 11)
Political philosophers are likely to recognise this way of looking at the world. Though political philosophy takes different forms, the perspective Amis ascribes to the artist – that of looking at the social world and asking why? – captures one of its most enduring modes. For a great many political philosophers, it is a concern with the justification of social and political norms, traditions, institutions, and practices that defines their field of scholarly inquiry. We see this concern with normative questions throughout the history of Western political thought, from the writings of Plato and Aristotle to those of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Political philosophy involves looking at the world and asking why it is organised the way it is and not some other way. It routinely subjects seemingly ordinary and everyday institutions to an intense level of scrutiny and its practitioners experience intense excitement and wonder, though it can occasionally feel like insanity or stupefaction.
In modern, Western liberal democracies, few social institutions are more ordinary and everyday than private property. The extent of its ordinariness is appreciable not only in the way in which people go about their daily business (how so much of our lives depends on the distinction between the things that are yours and mine), but also in the habitual assumptions of certain academic disciplines. Some scholars – in fields where there is a marked reluctance to acknowledge the inherent contingency and unpredictability in human affairs – accept the existence of exclusive ownership rights as an almost natural phenomenon. As such, they regard the institution as requiring only a descriptive and functional explanation rather than any critical interrogation or normative justification. The attitude of many economists towards property can seem, for instance, to parallel that of a doctor giving an account of a human heart to a layperson: they often appear interested in showing its purpose as a natural part within an organic whole, as though it were fulfilling a kind of evolutionary requirement. The hugely influential analysis of property by the economist Harold Demsetz (1967) typifies this naturalistic approach. Demsetz presents the institution of private ownership as an almost necessary feature of successful economic life, as a sophisticated system that requires an explanation only in terms of the efficient social function we can ascribe to it. For Demsetz, ‘a primary function of property rights is that of guiding incentives’ (1967: 348) to generate economic advantages from human behaviour. His is a descriptive cost-benefit account of private property deployed to vindicate its existence, so that economists can then more confidently embed it as a necessary feature of their analytic framework. Given his approach to the rationality of private property as he encountered it in the world, it is unsurprising that Demsetz elsewhere complains of a ‘nirvana fallacy’ within discussions of social institutions, wherein scholars seek to judge them against allegedly idealised standards. Although political philosophers often and increasingly seek to anchor their work in analyses of real world phenomena – eschewing explicit abstract utopianism in favour of addressing urgent social problems – they know that the very idea of a nirvana fallacy places undue restrictions on their theoretical imaginations. The notion of an unavailable nirvana encourages us to defer uncritically to the institutions that surround us and thus allows them to appear as natural features of the world rather than contingent human creations that we can reform, improve, or reject.
We can juxtapose a critical, historicised role for the normative political theorist to the naturalistic tendency we often find in much modern economics as well as other broadly positivistic social sciences. Political philosophy can acknowledge the contingency that characterises all social practices and institutions and invite us to interrogate the world around us in the manner of Amis’s artist: it provokes us to ask probing questions about the character of our civic life. In the case of this book, the question we will address is why private property? Asking such radical questions does not, of course, in any
