>From: "Alex Robson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Are you (and North?) saying that socialism (whose defining feature is the >absence of private property rights) has been the �natural� state of >affairs, >and that private property rights are �unnatural�? > >If so, you might be interested to know that is a fallacy (initiated and >perpetuated by - you guessed it � modern socialists!) which has been >refuted >by several scholars. See, for example: > >1. Pipes, Richard (2000) Property and Freedom, New York: >Vintage Books.
I haven't read the Pipes book. He's a neoconservative, isn't he? >2. Bethell, Tom (1999) The Noblest Triumph: Property and >Prosperity Through the Ages, St. Martin's Press. I've read Bethell's book in parts, and skimmed through most of it. It strikes me as a very ahistoric view of property: taking the contemporary, Lockean/capitalist model of private property as some kind of Platonic ideal, and then judging history as it progressively approximated that ideal over time. Kind of like the Whig view of history, in which the civil tumults in Livy were viewed as blind gropings toward nineteenth century Liberal England. As far as I could see, the only reference to Proudhon was to his dictum "Property is theft," taken entirely out of any historical context. So Bethell certaintly isn't doing justice to the many possible variants of the idea of property itself, or the way the idea evolved as a product of history. _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com
