Table Of ContentJUST PROPERTY
Just Property
Volume Three: Property in an Age of Ideologies
CHRISTOPHER PIERSON
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Acknowledgements
In working on the three volumes of Just Property over nearly twenty years,
Ihaveincurredaterrifyingweightofintellectualdebts.Iacknowledgedmany
oftheseintheopeningtwovolumes.Manyofthosewhohelpedmewiththe
firsttwovolumeshavealsoprovidedtheirsupportthistimearound.Iremain
very grateful for all their time and advice. I have had continuing excellent
institutionalsupportfromtheSchoolofPoliticsandInternationalRelationsat
the University of Nottingham and from the Hansewissenschaftskolleg in
Germany. I am grateful to everyone who has participated in the Politics of
Property Specialist Group of the UK PSA over the past decade. Special
mention and thanks go to Tony Burns, Patrick Cockburn, Hugo Drochon,
Nick Ellison, Michael Freeden, Ben Holland, Jakob Huber, Richard Lamb,
Nick Manning, Johan Olsthoorn, Helen McCabe, James Penner, Vanessa
Pupavac,JohnSalter,EricShaw,andColinTyler.LucySargissonreadevery-
thingverycarefully,andoverandoveragain.Thanks!
Iclaimsoleownershipofalltheremainingerrorsoffactorjudgement.
I am grateful to all the brilliant people at Oxford University Press, but
especially Dominic Byatt who has supported the project for more than a
decade.
Thankstothewonderful,funnyfolkofKingstonCourtwhohavelivedwith
the book almost as long as I have. As ever, Meridee, Lewis, and Ailsa made
lifegood.
Very sadly, my dear friend and colleague Professor Stephan Leibfried died
inthespringof2018.Stephanwasaone-mantourdeforce,andtheverynicest
enforcer you could ever hope to meet. I dedicate this third volume to his
memory.
Introduction
Thisisalongbook,withashortintroduction.Itistheclosingpartofawork
which stretches to three volumes and it brings the story of thinking about
propertyrightuptothepresent.WhatIwroteintheIntroductiontothefirst
volume still applies here. I am not attempting to write a continuous history
of institutions and practices of property. I do not claim that my account of
thinking about property at the Western end of the Eurasian land mass is
comprehensive—or that no-one is left out. In the Introduction to the first
volume,Iidentifiedonekeyquestionthatunderpinsmysurvey:howcouldwe
have come to believe that the present drastically unequal distribution of
property is justified? As we have seen in the previous two volumes, some
peoplethoughtthatitcouldbe,andjustaboutasmanythoughtthatitcould
not.Theargumentsmadeonbothsidesarediverse,thoughtful,oftenstrange
(for us), and sometimes brilliant. They are quite often not what we would
expect,andtheyareveryoftennotwhatwecollectivelyremember.
The closing chapters of Volume Two dealt with the ideas of nineteenth-
centurysocialists(including,butnotconfinedto,Marx)andarangeofclassical
anarchists.Inthisfinalvolume,Icarryforwardthisreadingofpropertythought
inanageofideologiesdowntothenear-present.Thekeychallengeindoingso
is the exponential increase in the body of material that might be thought
relevantand,correspondingly,thenecessitytochoose,repeatedlyandruthlessly.
My approach has been to continue to focus on particular thinkers, as I have
done throughout, but to organize these (loosely) in terms of ideological ap-
proaches.Thisisnotan(attempted)historyofwhatvariousideologieshavesaid
aboutproperty.Thisisreflectedinmychoosingtotitlemychapters‘Liberals’,
‘SocialDemocrats’,andsoon,not‘Liberalism’and‘SocialDemocracy’.Thisis
justaswell—becauseIdonotbelievethatanyoftheideologiesweassociatewith
modernitycanreallybesaidtohaveasingleviewofpropertyrelations.Atthe
sametime,IdobelievethatthethinkerswhoseworkIhavechosentoexploredo
tell us something revealing about the ideological approaches within which
Ilocatethem—andaboutpropertymoregenerally.
The book consists of five pairs of chapters, devoted to ‘liberals’ (1 and 2),
‘libertarians’ (3 and 4), ‘social democrats’ (5 and 6), ‘radical conservatives’
JustProperty:VolumeThree:PropertyinanAgeofIdeologies.ChristopherPierson,OxfordUniversityPress(2020).
©ChristopherPierson.
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198787105.001.0001
2 JustPropertyVolumeIII
(7and8),and‘feminists’(9and10).Ineachcase,Ibeginbygivingasenseof
what each of these approaches stands for, in general, before giving some
indicationofhowpropertyfitsintothataccount.Ineachcase,theremaining
spaceisgivenovertoadetailedinterrogationofparticularthinkers,followed
byaconclusionwhichseekstorelatethisbodyofworktothevariouswaysin
which propertyclaims arejustified. Inevery instance, myauthors arechosen
becausetheyareinteresting,ratherthanbecausetheyarerepresentative.
Thechaptersonliberalsperhapscomeclosesttorepresentinganideological
stance and I consider figures who would be key to any history of modern
liberalism—includingJohnStuartMillandJohnRawlsamongstmanyothers.
The journalist Henry George gets plenty of space because his thinking about
property (especially property in land) has been so influential. Although
liberalism covers a lot of ideational space—and is often ‘divided’—its most
prominentthinkers(whowouldincludeMillandRawls)takeareallyradical
stanceonprivateproperty,aradicalismwhichisquiteofteneitherforgottenor
ignored.Thechaptersonlibertarians,forwhomprivatepropertyreallyisthe
central idea, are designed to be more comprehensive while covering a much
smaller conceptual space. The chapters on social democracy try to capture
something which I think is important in this most practice-oriented of
ideologies: that is, a belief that social democrats once gave a very central
place to property; that they then sidelined this concern, above all because
theythoughttherewasanelectorallymoreviablealternative,andthatthiswas
a ‘mistake’ which some recent social democrats (thinkers rather than politi-
cians)havesoughttoreverse.
The chapters devoted to the ‘radical conservatives’ have a rather eccentric
cast,reflectingthequirkytitle.Tocqueville,forexample,wouldnothavebeen
outofplaceinachapterdevotedtoliberalthinkers.Mychoiceofchaptertitle
reflects two things, First, I wanted to consider thinkers who have something
interesting and distinctive to say—and it might be thought that a really
conservative position on property would be one that said nothing. It is not
thatconservativesaregenerallystupidbutratherthatagenuinelyconservative
position is one that stands for an unquestioning acceptance of (whatever
happenstobe)thestatusquo.¹Thesecondreasonisthat,asbothHuntington
(1957)andLilla(2016)makeclear,realreactionariesarereallyradical—thatis
theywantchange,buttheywantchangethattakesusbacktothegoodworld
wehavelost.ManyofthoseIconsiderinthesechapters—Cobbett,Chesterton,
andBelloc,forexample—arebothveryconservativeandveryradical.Along-
sideitsprofoundcontingency(followingHume),thiscapturessomethingvery
¹ Thedefinitiveandmuchmisquotedsourceonconservatismandstupidityis,ofcourse,John
StuartMill(citedinCourtney1889:147).Foranexemplarofthereallyconservativeapproach,
seetheverysmartGeorgeSantayana(1922).
Introduction 3
importantandperhapsneglectedaboutwhatIamcallingconservativethink-
ingonproperty.
Feminist writers on property open up a quite distinctive conceptual and
politicalspace.Pioneersoftheeighteenthandnineteenthcenturieswereoften
engaged,aboveall,inholding‘malestream’defencesofpropertytoaccount.In
short, whatever it is that men are entitled to, women are entitled to as well.
Andyetprevailingpracticesandideasandlawsalldeniedthis.Enslavementis
a frequently deployed motif in these accounts, especially in relation to mar-
riage.Ihavegenerallyavoideddiscussionofslaveryinthisbook,becausethere
issomuchthatisspecialaboutitasacategoryofproperty(andintermsofthe
arguments taken either to justify it or to rule it out). But in working with
feminist approaches, this just is not possible—because women’s status as
‘enslaved’ is so important. I have also largely avoided detailed discussions of
empiricalevidenceontheallocationofdifferingformsofpropertyintimeand
space. But in Chapter9, I give considerable space to such an assessment
becausethisisoftenquitecentraltothewaysinwhichcontemporaryfeminist
analysis understands women’s continuing disadvantage in terms of owner-
ship.Thisworkisnotsolelyconcernedwithreportingcomparativedisadvan-
tage,itisalsodesignedtoshowhowthisdisadvantageisconstructedthrough
unequalintra-householddistributionofproperty,differentialpensionentitle-
ments,andthecumulativeeffectsoftypicallydifferentworkinglives.
Feministthinkingalsoopensupsomeverydifferentwaysofthinkingabout
whatpropertyis.Inpart,thisisbecauseofageneralwillingnesstodissolvethe
divisionbetweenpublicandprivate,butitalsoinvolvesimaginingowningin
distinctiveways.ContemporaryfeministslikeCarolePateman,AnnePhillips,
andDonnaDickensonexplorenewwaysofimaginingwhatitistoown,what
we can own—and, also, what it is that we should never own. A key site for
much of this thinking is the body. The body has always been special for
feminist politics—in the face of a tradition that holds that it is just the place
thatourmindshappento beresidingfornow.The bodyisalsothesitefora
number of practices of owning which are especially important for women—
including pornography, prostitution, and surrogacy. I explore these ideas in
somedetailinChapter10.Someoftheseideasandvalueslookquiteconven-
tional. Others, like Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now, take us off in a very
radicaldirection,whichpotentiallymeanstheendofbothbodiesandproperty
(atleast,aswehavecometoknowbothofthese).Idevoteagooddealoftime
and attention to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Although it is not
usually read in quite this way, I think de Beauvoir’s book is above all a book
about gendered property relations. It affords an understanding of property
thatgoesallthewaydownandallthewayback.Itispossiblythesinglemost
insightfulbookaboutpropertywritteninthetwentiethcentury.
Chapter11istheconclusiontothethreevolumesofJustProperty.Accord-
ingly,I tieit to thequestions that wereraised in theIntroduction to Volume
4 JustPropertyVolumeIII
One.ThemostimportantofthesewasthechallengeraisedbyWilliamPaley.
Paleysawthatthecontemporarydistributionofproperty(inEnglandin1785)
was skewed in such a way that many were abjectly poor and a few were very
rich—and that the poor for the most part supported the social and political
orderwhichmaintainedthisveryunequaldistribution.Thisseemingparadox
must be explicable, Paley thought, in terms of the unintended benefits (for
overall economic growth and well-being) that flowed from inequality.
IwonderedwhatwemightthinkifPaleywaswrong.Asecondquestionraised
in the Introduction to Volume One concerned property claims under condi-
tions of radical scarcity. Can we (ever) make an exclusive claim to natural
resourceswherethesearefiniteandwhenit’sclearthattheyarerunningout?
IntheConclusion,Ireviewtheevidenceontheunequalholdingofproperty
which (within affluent countries at least) has intensified over the past thirty
years.Isuggestthatthiscannotbejustifiedonquasi-utilitariangroundsorby
positing some sort of ‘natural right’ to own which makes distribution irrele-
vant. I consider ‘no property’ alternatives and argue that these don’t really
work either. At this point, I issue a reminder that property is above all an
aspectofthelaw,anddrawontheworkofcriticallegaltheoristsintheUSto
show that we do best to think of the property order as a social system—and
one that is enforced by the state. As such, we have to evaluate our property
orderintermsofwhetheritisonethatwecanall(reasonably)accept.Joseph
Singer’sshorthandforthisisthatpropertyis‘thelawofdemocracy’.Ithinkit
is clear that our democratic institutions as they actually exist do not redeem
thisclaim.Butperhaps,suitablyreformed,theycould.
In the Conclusion, I also address the second question raised at the very
beginningoftheproject:howshouldpropertyclaimsbequalifiedbythefinitude
ofmaterialresources?Undertherubricof‘greenproperty’,Iconsiderarangeof
institutional alternatives, all of which involve either more consumption in
common or else a very differentaccountof whatwe can own and how. I also
assess whether we are already halfway to a solution with the invention of the
‘sharingeconomy’.Sadly,myansweristhatwearenot.
In an attempt to end on a positive note, I outline three practical reforms
whichmighttakeusintherightdirection:auniversalbasicincome,landvalue
taxation, and an expansion and redirection of Sovereign Wealth Funds. All
three reforms are anticipated somewhere earlier in the book—going back to
Adam Smith, Tom Paine, and Henry George amongst others. These are
reformswhichareall‘do-able’andcapableofbeingintroducedincrementally.
Butthatdoesn’tmeanthattheywillbe.Overall,itisnoteasytobehopeful.But
Ihavetriedveryhardnottobehopeless.
