Private Property

Private property rights in contemporary Europe and the Americas are rooted in ancient Roman law that recognized only the citizen patriarch as the subject of such rights and tangible goods, movable and immovable (especially land), as their objects. The standard private property rights recognized in this legal tradition are to control the use of the property, to benefit from the property, to transfer or sell the property, and to exclude others from the property.

With the development of capitalism, the subjects of private property rights become wider in scope, including women, foreigners, and depersonalized, quasi-eternal agencies like private corporations, banks, and nonprofit organizations. Its objects show a twofold tendency: (1) There is a decrease in the set of possible human objects of property—the ownership of slaves and of a man's children and wife is abolished—and (2) there is an increase in the abstraction of the objects of property: from instruments of commerce, like bills of exchange, stocks, bonds, and derivatives, to intellectual property, like the copyright of texts (from musical scores to software programs) and the patenting of inventions (including the DNA of plant and animal genes).

The rise of capitalism was premised on the large-scale transformation of common, church, and state property into private property. The struggles to resist this transformation characterized the first primitive accumulation phase of capitalism. In response to these struggles, the most astute philosophical minds of the modern era devised justifications of private property and the criminalization of resistance to its expansion.

The three most important were as follows:

• 1.
  Locke's labor justification of private property. John Locke argued that humans own themselves and their bodies; therefore, they own their labor and its results. Something becomes one's property if one's labor produces it. One's labor takes its product out of the realm of common objects that can be equally claimed by others, since this labor is one's property and no one else has the right to claim anything that has been produced by it. 2. Hume's utilitarian justification. Hume argued that private property is an institution that can be justified only on the basis of its utility to society. It is the product of a long history of precontractual conventional acts, since X's respect for Y's private property makes sense only if Y has a similar respect for X's. Hume believed that the utility of private property and of the stability of possession is self-evident and that once the institution is firmly established, there is not much more needed to achieve a harmonious and just society.
• 3.
  Hegel's ego development justification. Hegel argued that private property is needed for the full development of the human personality. When a human will takes control of an external, will-less thing, it simultaneously becomes private property and a moment of that person's self-understanding.

The standard critiques of private property include the following:

• 1.
  Reformist critiques of the justifications of private property: Reformist critics from Henry George to John Rawls have argued that private property distributions are the inverse of what one would expect from these justifying arguments, since they often violate evident principles of social justice. For example, private property distributions are usually unegalitarian. They create a large class of propertyless laborers who have no ownership rights over the products of their labor. The collective utility of this class could be increased if the rules of private property were bent or abolished. Since unjust results arise from the regular workings of the rules of private property, the justifying arguments must be unsound. The flagrant distance between justification and actuality has been the source of much reformist literature from the 19th century to the present that calls for limiting (not eliminating) private property accumulation and fixing fairer rules for the institution. For example, efforts to create more just property distributions through tax policies, for example, have motivated many reforms in taxation.
• 2.

  The Marxist critique: Karl Marx turned the philosophical justifications of private property on their heads. [Page 1168]He noted that the notion of self-ownership actually justifies the right to sell one's labor power to another who then appropriates the product of the resulting labor. Consequently, Locke actually justifies the expropriation of private property–creating labor.

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