-Caveat Lector-
CHAPTER ONE
Property and Freedom
By RICHARD PIPES
Alfred A. Knopf
THE IDEA OF PROPERTY
Property can be studied from two distinct points of view: as a
concept and as an institution. The two approaches yield very
different results. Throughout the history of thought, property has
enjoyed a mixed reputation, being identified sometimes with
prosperity and freedom, sometimes with moral corruption, social
injustice, and war. Utopian fantasies, as a rule, place the
abolition of the distinction between "mine" and "thine" at the
center of their vision. Even many thinkers favoring property view
it as, at best, an unavoidable evil. The history of all societies,
on the other hand, from the most primitive to the most advanced,
reveals the universality of property claims and the failure of
every attempt to found a propertyless community, whether
voluntarily or by force. In this instance, therefore, there is an
unusually wide disparity between what mankind thinks it wants and
what, judging by its actions, it really prefers. Lewis Mumford
explained this disparity by suggesting that man lives in two
worlds-the world within and the world without, the first being the
realm of ideas, wishes, and images, the latter that of harsh,
inescapable reality. "If the physical environment is the earth, the
world of ideas corresponds to the heavens."
We shall, accordingly, divide our discussion into two parts.
The present chapter will deal with the attitudes toward property of
Western philosophers, theologians, and political theorists. The
chapter that follows will be devoted to the institution of property
as revealed by history, psychology, anthropology, and sociobiology.
The distinction, of course, is artificial and is introduced only
for the sake of clarity of exposition; in actuality, ideas and
events have constantly interacted. As we shall point out, every
change in attitude toward property can be explained by political or
economic developments.
Discussions of property from the time of Plato and Aristotle to
the present have revolved around four principal themes: its
relation to politics, ethics, economics, and psychology.
1. The political argument in favor of property holds that
(unless distributed in a grossly unfair manner) it promotes
stability and constrains the power of government. Against property
it is claimed that the inequality which necessarily accompanies it
generates social unrest.
2. From the moral point of view, it is said that property is
legitimate because everyone is entitled to the fruits of his labor.
To which critics respond that many owners exert no effort to
acquire what they own and that the same logic requires everyone to
have an equal opportunity to acquire property.
3. The economic line of reasoning for property holds that it is
the most efficient means of producing wealth, whereas opponents
hold that economic activity driven by the pursuit of private gain
leads to wasteful competition.
4. The psychological defense of property maintains that it
enhances the individual's sense of identity and self-esteem. Others
assert that it corrupts the personality by infecting it with greed.
These four approaches fairly exhaust the range of arguments for
and against property articulated during the past three thousand
years. At its most fundamental, the controversy pits the moral
approach against the pragmatic.
1. Classical antiquity
The ethical treatment of property, which has dominated the
discussion until modern times, has evolved against the background
of a pervasive belief in the existence of a "Golden Age." In its
most familiar guise, the Golden Age is the Jewish, Christian, and
Islamic Paradise (Garden of Eden), but in one form or another it is
common to all civilizations. The outstanding quality of this
mythical past is the absence of private ownership: in the Golden
Age everything is said to have been held in common and the words
"mine" and "thine" were unknown. Since, as we shall show in the
chapter that follows, no society has ever existed without some kind
of property, the vision of an ideal propertyless world must be
grounded not in collective memory but in collective longing. It is
inspired by the belief that inequalities of status and wealth are
"unnatural." They have to be man-made, not God-made: for are not
all beings born equal and, upon death, do they not turn alike to
dust?
The earliest known depiction of the Golden Age occurs in a work
by Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer, called Works and Days. The
Greek poet of the early seventh century B.C.E. speaks of four
"metallic" ages of mankind-the Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron,
each latter age marked by progressive moral decline. In the
earliest, Golden age, when the world was ruled by the Titan Cronus,
all goods were available in abundance and peace prevailed. But in
his own time, which he labeled the Age of Iron, Hesiod saw violence
and the "shameful lust for gain" prevail over justice. This image
of the blissful infancy of humanity entered the mainstream of Greek
and Roman literature. As we shall see, the idea of the Golden Age
exerted great influence on European thought of the Renaissance
period, stimulating the voyages of discovery and influencing how
the discoveries were perceived.
The earliest theoretical assault on property is to be found in
Plato's Republic, a work which has exerted influence on all
subsequent utopias. The Republic and its successor, the Laws, were
not the first works to seek ways of eliminating property as the
cause of social strife, but the writings of Plato's predecessors
have not survived and are known only from hearsay. Plato wrote at a
time when Greece was in turmoil from social conflicts within the
city-states and wars among them. He is said to have been inspired
by the example of Sparta, a highly centralized state in which the
government prevented the concentration of wealth in the hands of
the elite, and which in the drawn-out Peloponnesian war ultimately
defeated and subjugated Athens. Sparta's triumph was widely
attributed to her constitution, said to have been drawn up by
Lycurgus, her legendary founder, which outlawed trade and industry
in order to free the citizens for war. Spartans were forbidden to
own not only material goods but even their wives and children:
wives they were expected to share with other men, likely to breed
healthier and stronger offspring, and children they had to turn
over to the state at the age of seven for martial training.
Plutarch, who summarized the views of Greek historians on the
subject, wrote that Lycurgus had ordered the notables of Sparta to
renounce their properties. He also commanded all gold and silver to
be surrendered and replaced with iron coinage. As a result, luxury,
theft, bribery, and lawsuits disappeared. Disparities of wealth and
poverty gave way to equality. An egalitarian society devoted
entirely to the needs of the state must have seemed highly
attractive to an Athenian who witnessed his own city-state
destroyed by ambition and greed. As we shall note in the following
chapter, Athens had a highly developed system of private property,
which explains the attention paid to it by her philosophers.
Plato outlined his utopian communism through the mouth of
Socrates in Books 5-7 of the Republic. His objective was to devise
a social order in which the ruling elite would not be driven by
selfishness but dedicate itself wholly to the public good. To this
end, it was divested of belongings. Referring to contemporary
political upheavals, Socrates says:
Such differences commonly originate in a disagreement about the use
of the terms "mine" and "not mine," "his" and "not his." ... And is
not that the best-ordered State in which the greatest number of
persons apply the terms "mine" and "not mine" in the same way to
the same thing?
The ideal Platonic state consisted of two castes: the rulers,
called "Guardians," made up of the oldest and wisest members of the
community, and the rest. The Guardians, who ran the state, acquired
their status after passing rigorous tests. They owned no
property-neither houses nor land-so that they would not "tear the
city in pieces by differing about `mine' and `not mine.'" Plato saw
property and virtue as incompatible: "For are not money and virtue
like the two scales of a balance: as one goes up the other goes
down?" The Guardians lived communally, like the Spartans, holding
wives and children in common; their basic material needs were
provided for by the commoners, whose status Plato left vague, but
who seem to have been allowed to have families and to own property.
As a consequence, rivalries within the ruling class ceased: there
was no more cause for violence, quarrels, or flattery. This ideal
of a selfless caste of the select, totally devoted to the state,
would be realized (in theory, at any rate) 2,500 years later in the
Communist and Nazi parties.
In the Laws, a later work, Plato attempted to design a state
that would conform more closely to reality, and hence he abandoned
the insistence on abolishing the family and having the state assume
responsibility for the education of children. But his earlier
egalitarian utopianism survived. He now allowed private property
but wanted the state to ensure that it did not lead to extremes of
wealth and poverty, especially in the distribution of land. The
ideal of a propertyless world remained:
The first and highest form of the State and of the government and
of the law is that in which there prevails most widely the ancient
saying, that "Friends have all things in common." Whether there is
anywhere now, or will ever be, this communion of women and children
and of property, in which the private and individual is altogether
banished from life, and things which are by nature private, such as
eyes and ears and hands, have become common, and in some way see
and hear and act in common, and all men express praise and blame
and feel joy and sorrow on the same occasions, and whatever laws
there are unite the city to the utmost-whether this is possible or
not, I say that no man, acting upon any other principle, will ever
constitute a state which will be truer or better or more exalted in
virtue.
Plato's vision of the ideal society was challenged by Aristotle
in the Politics. Aristotle shared his teacher's belief that extreme
inequalities in the distribution of wealth lead to social strife.
But he regarded the institution of property as indestructible and
ultimately a positive force. Plato, in Aristotle's judgment,
confused and treated as one the diverse elements that make up the
body politic-household, community (village), and state. His error
lay in treating the state as if it were a household and hence
assigning it control of wealth. Property, in fact, is an attribute
of the household and not of the community or the state: "states
require property, but property ... is no part of a state."
Aristotle based his opposition to common ownership not only on
logical but also, and principally, on utilitarian grounds. It is
impractical because no one takes proper care of objects that are
not his: "How immeasurably greater is the pleasure, when a man
feels a thing to be his own; for surely the love of self is a
feeling implanted by nature...." Gratification of self-love is thus
the basis of a good society. Aristotle rejects Plato's argument
that common ownership does away with social discord, arguing that,
on the contrary, people who hold things in common tend to quarrel
more than those who own them personally. He sees the cause of
social discord not in the striving for property but in human
nature-"it is not possessions but the desires of mankind which
require to be equalized"-from which it follows that dissension is
best eliminated by enlightenment rather than the abolition of
private ownership. Furthermore, Aristotle argues, possessions
enable men to rise to a higher ethical level by giving them the
opportunity to be generous: "liberality consists in the use which
is made of property"-an argument which would greatly appeal to
Christian theologians of the Middle Ages. Aristotle's preferred
regime was one founded on a middle class, with an equitable
distribution of assets.
The differences between the two Athenian philosophers
foreshadow the course of thought on the subject for the next 2,500
years: the continuing controversy between ethical idealism and
utilitarian realism. Throughout the history of Western thought,
writers on property will align themselves, broadly speaking, either
with Plato or with Aristotle, stressing either the potential
benefits of its abolition or the tangible rewards of its
acceptance.
In the fourth century B.C.E., after the death of Plato and
Aristotle, the discussion of property was raised to a higher, more
abstract level through the introduction of the Stoic principle of
Natural Law. Stoicism's contribution to the shaping of the Western
intellectual tradition is probably second only to that of Jewish
monotheism. If monotheism advanced the revolutionary concept of an
all-powerful and all-pervasive but non-material God ruling the
universe, the theory of Natural Law posited that God's universe was
rational and capable of being grasped by human intelligence.
Although, like so much else, the concept of the Law of Nature was
already incipient in Aristotle, it matured only after he had passed
from the scene, first in Greece under Macedonian rule and then in
Rome.
Plato and Aristotle thought exclusively in terms of
city-states, small communities of citizens of the same ethnic
origin, religion, and culture. Politics was for them largely a
matter of custom, not of laws-hence for Plato the ideal society had
no statutes. (According to Plutarch, Lycurgus would not permit the
rules he had laid down for Sparta to be committed to writing.) But
the problem of laws arose in an acute form in the fourth century
when Philip of Macedon and his son, Alexander the Great, liquidated
the polis in favor first of the national state and then of the
multinational empire. The Macedonian Empire at its height extended
from the Aegean Sea to the Indus River and the Arabian peninsula.
Subject to Macedonian authority, in addition to the Greeks, were
Armenians, Bactrians, Jews, Egyptians, Indians, Parthians,
Sogdians, and a host of other nationalities speaking different
languages and professing different faiths. And applying different
laws. These legal disparities the Macedonian statesmen had somehow
to reconcile for the sake of imperial unity and administrative
efficiency. But their existence also raised a fundamental
philosophical question: were there as many conceptions of justice
as there were nations-in other words, was there no universal
standard of right and wrong-or were the diverse legal canons and
procedures merely adaptations of the same universal law to local
conditions?
The answer was supplied by the Stoic school, which emerged
concurrently with the Macedonian Empire. Its central notion of a
rational world order was already incipient in early Greek science,
which differentiated between the infinite variety of discrete
natural phenomena and the underlying unity of the laws governing
Nature. This idea was in time applied to human affairs. It can be
discerned in casual passages of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
which speak of justice as existing in two forms: "legal"
(conventional) and "natural." The former finds expression in
positive law, adapted to the particular needs of a given society,
and hence differing from nation to nation, whereas the latter is
uniform for all mankind.
Aristotle had no need to develop this idea further, since he
dealt with homogeneous societies. This was done by Zeno, the
founder of the Stoic school: "The fundamental principle of the
Stoic ethics and politics is the existence of a universal and
world-wide law, which is one with reason both in nature and in
human nature...." Just as the physical world has its universal and
eternal laws, so does humanity. The revolutionary element implicit
in Stoic philosophy was the contention that the fundamental
principles of the social order are not subject to change because
they are embedded in the natural order. At the core of this order
is the equality of men and women, freemen and slaves. Freedom
consists of living according to the laws of nature.
During the three centuries that separated Aristotle from Cicero
the idea of the Law of Nature gained wide acceptance in the
Mediterranean world, although its apogee lay still far ahead, in
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, where it would help
jurists and political theorists emancipate their disciplines from
theology. It has been said that since Plato and Aristotle no one
has been able to write about private property without asking
whether or not it is "natural." Indeed, until the late eighteenth
century, and in some respects until today, the discussion about
property has revolved around the question whether it belongs to the
"natural" or the "conventional" order of things. This issue lies at
the heart of the dispute between the moral and pragmatic
approaches: for if property is a matter of convention it can be
done away with, but if it belongs to the realm of nature, it is an
unalterable fact of life.
Stoic philosophy and the concept of Natural Law had greater
influence in Rome than in Greece, its country of origin. The
ancient Romans were not given to abstract speculation, and they
neither debated the advantages and drawbacks of private ownership
nor thought up imaginary ideal communities. But men who take pride
in their pragmatism often follow trails cleared by idealists. Roman
poets adopted the Greek notion of the Golden Age when all goods
were held in common and which came to an end with the triumph of
avarice and the resultant reign of injustice and strife. Virgil
wrote of the Golden Age as a time when
no tenants mastered holdings,
Even to mark the land with private bounds
Was wrong: men worked for the common store, and earth
Herself, unbidden, yielded all more fully.
Ovid portrayed the Iron Age as one in which
The earth itself, which before had been, like air and sunshine, A
treasure for all to share, was now crisscrossed with lines men
measured and marked with boundary posts and fences.
Seneca, the leading Stoic in Rome, who has been called "a
millionaire with a guilty conscience," never tired of extolling
poverty. "He who has made a fair compact with poverty is rich," he
taught his friend Lucilius.
The social virtues had remained pure and inviolate before
covetousness distracted society and introduced poverty, for men
ceased to possess all things when they began to call anything their
own.... How happy was the primitive age when the bounties of nature
lay in common and were used promiscuously [indiscriminately]; nor
had avarice and luxury disunited mortals and made them prey upon
one another. They enjoyed all nature in common, which thus gave
them secure possession of the public wealth. Why should I not think
them the richest of all people, among whom there was not to be
found one poor man?
This praise of social equality in Stoicism made it a kind of
religion and enabled it to exert influence on Christianity in its
formative phase.
The main Roman contribution to the idea of property lay in the
realm of law. Roman jurists were the first to formulate the concept
of absolute private ownership, which they called dominium and
applied to real estate and slaves-a concept lacking in the Greek
vocabulary. For an object to qualify as dominium, it had to satisfy
four criteria: it had to be lawfully obtained, exclusive, absolute,
and permanent. The best-known Roman law definition described
dominium as "the right to use and consume one's thing as allowed by
law" (jus utendi et abutendi re sua quatenus iuris ratio patitur).
Roman jurisprudence went to great lengths to stipulate every
conceivable nuance of property rights: how acquired and how lost,
how transferred, how sold. The fights implicit in dominium were so
absolute that ancient Rome knew nothing of eminent domain.
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For all their pragmatism, Roman jurists were compelled to seek
a philosophic basis to law because, like the Macedonians, as their
domain expanded from a city-state first into a nation-state and
then into an empire, they confronted a bewildering variety of legal
norms and procedures that differed from their own as well as from
each other. The problem arose even before Rome had become mistress
of the Italian peninsula, for from early on Roman courts had to
deal with foreigners who came on business or who married Romans.
The local law, jus civile, did not apply to them, as it was
restricted to Roman citizens. Roman jurists had to seek, therefore,
common principles underlying the diverse legal systems with which
they came in contact. As Rome's territory expanded around the
Mediterranean basin, they formulated a Law of Nations (jus gentium)
which synthesized the rules shared by all nations known to them.
Under the influence of Stoic philosophy, the Law of Nations
gradually fused with the Law of Nature (jus naturale); the process
was completed in the early third century C.E., when Roman
citizenship was extended to all the subjects of the empire. Thus
came into being a fundamental postulate of Western thought: that
right and wrong are not arbitrary concepts but norms rooted in
nature and therefore binding on all mankind; ethical problems are
to be solved with reference to the Law of Nature, which is rational
and supersedes the positive law (jus civile) of individual
societies. An essential element of the Law of Nature is the
equality of man, specifically, equality before the law, and the
principle of human rights, including the rights to property, which
antedate the state, and thus are independent of it. Fifteen hundred
years later these ideas would furnish the philosophical cornerstone
of Western democracy.
Initially, Roman philosophers and jurists treated private
property as part not of the Law of Nature but of the Law of
Nations. In time, however, as the two concepts fused, they came to
view it as grounded in Natural Law. A theoretical defense of
private property as a feature of Natural Law, however, was not
fully made until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the age
of Jean Bodin and Hugo Grotius. But that the idea occurred to
Romans is evident from Cicero's argument that government could not
interfere with private property because it had been created in
order to protect it.
2. The Middle Ages
The church fathers faced serious difficulty in confronting the
subject of private property. According to the Gospels, Jesus urged
the rich to turn their belongings over to the poor because wealth
was an obstacle to salvation. He rejected possessions for himself
and his disciples. The Gospels and other parts of the Christian
Bible are filled with censure of riches and exhortations to
renounce them, as in the familiar aphorism "It is easier for a
camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to
enter the kingdom of God." At the same time, in his personal life
Jesus was not an ascetic: he did not spurn property or even wealth
but visited the houses of the rich and allowed himself to be
entertained by them. Because of the expectation of the imminence of
the Kingdom of God, the Christian Bible "does not seem to contain
any definite theory of property."
Some historians question whether Jesus really propounded a
program of social reform: according to a leading specialist on the
subject, his was rather "the summons to prepare for the coming of
the Kingdom of God" to take place "within the framework of the
present world order." In any event, the early Christians applied
the teachings of Jesus to themselves only:
The new social order ... was confined to the Christian community;
it was not a popular program of social reform in general. Within
the Church itself ... the only communism which was possible was one
which differed from all other forms of communism and can only be
described as the religious Communism of Love. That is to say, it
was a communism which regarded the pooling of possession as a proof
of love and of the religious spirit of sacrifice. It was a
communism composed solely of consumers, a communism based on the
assumption that its members will continue to earn their living by
private enterprise, in order to be able to practice generosity and
sacrifice. Above all, it had no theory of equality at all, whether
it be the absolute equality of sharing possessions, or the relative
equality of the contribution of the various members to the life of
the whole according to merit and service.... Finally ... there was
no hostility to that which forms the real hindrance to a true
communism-opposition to the institution of the family, which is so
closely connected with private enterprise.
The early Christian church accepted private property as a fact of
life and concentrated on exhorting the faithful to engage to the
maximum extent possible in charity. Belongings were considered evil
only if selfishly used.
Yet a church based on the advocacy of self-denial grew before
long into a huge temporal power with vast landed possessions and
other forms of wealth which it needed to carry out its religious
and secular responsibilities. It also faced the reality, tacitly
assumed by Jesus but often misunderstood by more devout Christians,
that for the millions of its adherents material goods were a
necessity: clearly, not everyone could take the vows of poverty and
devote his or her entire life to Christian piety as a priest, monk,
or nun, any more than everyone could practice celibacy.
A compromise thus had to be found between the Christian ideal
and the mundane reality.
It was found, and proved eminently satisfactory. The basic
premise of Christian theologians held that property derived not
from the Law of Nature but from conventional (positive) law and as
such had to be respected. It was potentially an evil capable of
corrupting the soul and leading to sin. But, in the words of
Augustine, a propertyless society was possible only in Paradise,
because it demanded perfection-the kind of perfection that since
the Fall was beyond the reach of most of humanity. Furthermore,
possessions were ethically neutral and became evil only if they
gave rise to avarice. Augustine wrote that a thing ought not to be
condemned because it lent itself to abuse: "Is gold not good?" he
asked, responding: "Yes, it is good. But the evil use good gold for
evil, and the good use good gold for good." According to Augustine,
Jesus' admonitions to give up one's fortune were counsel, not
command. In the world as we know it, it could be followed only by a
chosen few. Augustine viewed property as a responsibility rather
than a warrant for license-a kind of "trust" held by individuals
for the public good.
In support of their tolerance of property, Christian
theologians could point to passages in the Hebrew Bible that
indicated it enjoyed divine sanction. The Eighth Commandment,
prohibiting theft, clearly implies the sanctity of property; the
same holds true of the Tenth Commandment, which proscribes coveting
"anything that is your neighbor's." Then there is the story of
Abraham and Lot, who separated their pastures in order to put an
end to disputes among their herdsmen and in this manner established
their respective claims to a share of the land (Genesis 13).
Reference was made also to the story of King Ahab (1 Kings 21), who
coveted a vineyard of one Naboth and offered either to exchange it
for another vineyard or to buy it. When Naboth refused to part with
his land, Jezebel, Ahab's wife, concocted against him false
accusations of blasphemy, which led to Naboth's being stoned to
death, following which Ahab took possession of the vineyard. For
this crime, God through the Prophet Elijah, threatened him and his
wife with an ignominious death. The story provided an example of
greed leading to sin, but it also affirmed the inviolability of
property.
In the Jewish legal tradition, wealth honestly acquired was
considered a blessing: the rabbis forbade people to give away their
wealth, or to engage in excessive alms-giving, so as not to become
themselves a burden to the community. In contrast to the Christian
Gospels, the Hebrew Bible extols neither poverty nor the poor. At
the same time, it is filled with condemnations of injustice by the
rich and injunctions of charity and assistance not only to those of
one's own community but also to strangers and even animals. In
fulfillment of these injunctions, Jewish communities developed a
system of welfare that was probably unique in antiquity: its basis
was the tithe for "the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow" as
called for in the Hebrew Bible.
The Catholic view of property was codified by Thomas Aquinas in
the Summa Theologica. Aquinas approached the subject in the context
of justice, which he defined as the "perpetual and constant will to
render to each one that which is his." He conceded that in a
certain sense it was "not natural for man to possess external
things," because all goods belong to God and are the common
property of God's children. However, drawing on Aristotle's
Politics, he argued that common ownership promoted neither
efficiency nor harmony but discord. To perfect himself spiritually,
man had to have the kind of security that only ownership provided.
Aquinas also adopted from Aristotle the idea that possessions
enabled a person to engage in charity, a Christian obligation:
almsgiving was an essential corollary of ownership, and the rich
were morally bound to give to the poor all their superfluous
wealth. Any excesses to which wealth gives rise have to be
restrained by society.
The general view of the patristic writers on this subject has
been summarized as follows. The early church theoreticians
recognized
that human life, as it actually is, needs discipline, needs an
order enforced by coercion. And thus they came to make a
distinction between an ideal, which they think of as also the
primitive condition of man, and the actual. Ideally, man, following
his truest nature, obeying the laws of reason and justice ... would
have needed no such coercive discipline. But, being what he is, a
creature whose true instincts and nature are constantly overpowered
by his lower nature, it is only by means of hard discipline that he
can be kept from anarchy and disorder.... Private property ... with
its enormous inequalities, they could not accept as a primitive and
natural institution. In a primitive or natural state the rights of
property could have been nothing more than the right to use that
which a man required. But again, in face of the actual condition of
human nature as it actually is, they found that a formal regulation
of the exercise of the right to use was necessary. Private property
is really another disciplinary institution intended to check and
counteract the vicious disposition of men.
Contrary to a widely held misconception, the church did not
condone, let alone propagate, communism, for which reason the
church fathers cannot be cited as authorities for it. As the
Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev observed a century ago,
Christians exhort their followers to give away their own wealth,
whereas socialists call for the seizure and distribution of the
wealth of others. The economic doctrines of the Christian churches
did not go beyond the voluntary renunciation of one's own wealth.
It was, therefore, not inconsistent that the church treated as
heretics those groups, such as the twelfth-century Waldensians, who
preached poverty and, later, the Anabaptists, who sought to impose
communism. Generally speaking, "veneration of poverty" was one of
the hallmarks of heretical movements, not of the established
church. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries a
fierce controversy broke out in the Franciscan Order between the
"Spirituals," who advocated the renunciation of all possessions,
and the "Conventuals," who wished to hold on to the sizable
properties that the order had acquired. During the papacy of John
XXII, the church crushed the Spirituals, over one hundred of whom
it condemned to be burned at the stake. In a bull issued in 1323,
this pope declared it a heresy to deny that Christ and the Apostles
had had possessions. Six years later, in another bull, John XXII
asserted that the property (dominium) of man over his possessions
does not differ from the property asserted by God over the
universe, which He bestowed on man created in His image. It is
therefore a natural right which predates human law.
The founders of Protestantism went beyond the Catholic Church's
tolerance of property: both Luther and Calvin emphatically endorsed
it, linking it with labor, which they regarded as a Christian duty.
Luther condemned the rebellious peasants of Germany as "mad dogs"
for seizing estates, saying that the Gospels did not call for
making the goods of others common property and holding on to one's
own but urged Christians of their free will to give up what they
had. The Calvinists held even more positive views of property.
Calvin wrote approvingly of industry and trade and the great
profits they brought to some, rejecting the medieval prohibitions
on usury and acknowledging the benefits of money and credit. It is
widely recognized by historians that Calvinism did a great deal to
foster the capitalist spirit.
In the later Middle Ages the Catholic Church turned from
defending property as a regrettable but unavoidable reality to
defending it on principle. The shift occurred in reaction to
assaults on the church's wealth by the secular authorities. The
issue arose in an acute form at the beginning of the fourteenth
century when Philip IV (Philip the Fair) of France, in need of
money to finance his war with England, imposed a tax on the clergy
and forbade the export of precious metals, including papal
revenues. To protect clerical holdings from seizures by the crown,
theologians now referred to property as an inalienable
right-primarily church property, but by inference property in
general. In the course of this polemic, clerical theorists
formulated the doctrine, later adopted by such prominent secular
writers as Bodin and Grotius, that the authority of the state,
however absolute in other respects, did not extend to the property
of its subjects. The argument was buttressed with references to
Roman law, which was rediscovered and taught in Italian
universities beginning in the early twelfth century.
A prominent exponent of this new clerical theory of property
was Aegidius Romanus (Colonna), a pupil of Thomas Aquinas, who
argued that Philip IV did not have it in his power to appropriate
the church's possessions because the rights of property antedated
and transcended those of the state. The church and the supreme
pontiff had lordship over all temporal things and were the ultimate
owner of the world's assets. Employing feudal terminology, he
asserted that kings had "superior dominion" but not the ownership
of their vassals' holdings.
Aegidius Romanus's opponent John of Paris maintained in defense
of Philip IV that private property derived from princely grants and
that the church, too, held its estates by virtue of these grants.
But he concurred that property rights could not be violated,
whether by the king or the pope. In these debates the influence of
Roman law was clearly evident. John of Paris held that
individual persons, in their individual capacities, have in
themselves the right, power, and true lordship, and anyone can
order, dispose, dispense, retain, alienate his property at pleasure
without injury to another, since he is lord.... And, therefore,
neither prince nor pope has lordship or dispensation in such
things....
The dispute between the papacy and secular authorities of the
late Middle Ages had the effect of firming the status of private
property in that both parties to the controversy, while tracing the
legal justification of ownership to different sources, agreed that
it was sacrosanct, protected from the encroachments alike of the
Holy See and the royal court.
(Continues...)
(C) 1999 Richard Pipes All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-375-40498-8
----------------------------------------------------------------------
New York Times
May 9, 1999
Nine-Tenths of the Law
______________________________________________________________
Richard Pipes on the link between property rights and rule of law.
By CHARLES R. MORRIS
PROPERTY AND FREEDOM
By Richard Pipes.
328 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $30.
Richard Pipes, a longtime professor of Russian history at Harvard,
has had the satisfaction, rare among academics, of seeing his once
unpopular views adopted as American policy. During the early days
of Soviet-American arms limitation talks, Pipes was one of a
handful of academics who continued to insist on the criminal nature
of the Soviet regime. His 1977 Commentary magazine article, ''Why
the Soviet Union Thinks It Can Fight and Win a Nuclear War,'' was
one of the half-dozen or so most influential articles in the entire
period of the cold war, and his many books on Soviet and Russian
history are standards in the field.
Pipes is now retired from Harvard, and his latest book is his first
not specifically in his discipline. ''Property and Freedom'' is a
meditation on the close connection between property rights and the
development of law and individual liberty throughout the history of
civilization. Pipes is massively erudite -- his source notes
contain references in at least six languages -- and he has
assembled a vast amount of material. But aside from a fascinating
chapter on the sources of the perverse attitudes toward property
and liberty in modern Russia, the book is a considerable
disappointment, especially the querulous broadside against the
modern welfare state with which it concludes.
In Pipes's view, despite the vanquishing of Communism, ''liberty's
future . . . is still at peril, although from a different and novel
source. The main threat to freedom today comes not from tyranny but
from equality.''
Pipes links the ''modern habit of thinking in terms of group rights
rather than individual rights'' with ''Stalin's program of
'liquidating,' i.e., murdering 'kulaks,' for example, and Hitler's
genocide of Jews and gypsies,'' both of which ''were justified by
the notion that people are to be judged and treated on the basis
not of their personal behavior but of their membership in a
designated group.'' Affirmative action, it seems, is but a step
toward the gulag. The modern threat to liberty, Pipes goes on,
comes ''from below, from one's fellow citizens who . . . care more
about their personal security than about general freedom.''
Does Pipes read newspapers? Raising a clamor that the Morlocks are
taking over, in a country that has just severely limited public
assistance and one in which economic inequality is increasing
rapidly, seems like piling on, if not actually paranoid. The book's
characteristic rhetorical device is to make an extreme statement,
then immediately back off it, as if Pipes were afraid to stand up
for how he really feels. So, ''abolishing welfare with its sundry
'entitlements' and spurious 'rights' . . . would go a long way''
toward resolving the social predicament, is immediately qualified
by ''but such a solution is not feasible.''
More seriously, there are real holes in Pipes's argument. The
proposition that property rights usually reinforce the development
of a rule of law is so unexceptionable as to be platitudinous. But
Pipes seems to be making a stronger argument, that absolute respect
for property rights is a precondition for maintenance of liberty.
He admits a number of exceptions to that rule, but does so
grudgingly, as he must, for they add up to a rather different
argument from the one he would like to make.
The Slavic rulers of medieval Russia, most notably Ivan the
Terrible, held their positions by grace of their Mongol conquerors,
but only so long as they ruthlessly collected huge amounts of
tribute. Over three centuries, the institutionalization of the
czar's role as surrogate Robber in Chief fatally retarded the
development of a nobility as a countervailing economic interest
group. Russia never had a class of powerful barons like the ones
who wrung Magna Carta out of King John in 1215. The consequence was
the Russian ''patrimonial'' state, in which the czar could, and
actually did, dispose of anyone's property virtually at whim.
Catherine the Great finally granted her nobles legal rights in
their property by a 1785 charter that Pipes extols as ''a
revolutionary measure in the fullest and most constructive sense of
the word.'' Although Catherine's reforms benefited only a tiny
minority of the population, Pipes says that minority privileges are
''the most reliable way of implanting freedom and rights, because
it gives rise to social groups interested in protecting their
advantages.''
In the Russian case, however, there was a catch. The ''introduction
of landed property,'' Pipes concedes, ''was a mixed blessing''
because it enslaved privately held serfs, or about one-third of the
population. Before Catherine's reform, the serfs had accumulated
real, if limited, traditional privileges, which were summarily
swept away when they were made the personal property of their
landlords. That seems a rather large qualification to Pipes's
argument. Limited freedom for serfs was restored in the next
century by reforming czars, but only by trampling on the property
rights of the gentry.
Pipes also conveniently ignores the case of modern Western slavery.
Dred Scott surely didn't feel liberated by the Supreme Court
decision that upheld his master's property rights. Nor does Pipes
make any mention of the latifundista tradition in Spanish America
that kept the great mass of peasantry in a state of virtual
serfdom, or the destruction of Ireland in the service of the
property rights of absentee British landlords.
At the conclusion of an extended chapter on the development of
property and freedom in England, Pipes speculates on why similar
traditions did not arise throughout Europe, even though formal
legal protections were roughly similar. Dutch burghers and Polish
nobles, for example, enjoyed almost identical protections for
property, but the Netherlands became a thriving middle-class
republic, while Poland stayed sunk in the Dark Ages.
Pipes never entertains the possibility that the distribution of
property may be a far more important condition of freedom than the
protection of property per se. Absolute deference to the property
rights of the few can create private despotisms as surely as
attempts to enforce absolute equality from the top can create
despotisms of the state. The challenge is to tease out the balance
between insuring a broad distribution of economic stakes and
limiting intrusive state power. ''Property and Freedom,'' however,
is an exercise in dyspepsia that is not interested in such
difficult questions.
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