Michael,
If the Jevons' passage is finding its way into one of your book, maybe Veblen's
view would be an interesting contrast:
It is difficult to see how an institution of ownership could have arisen in the
early days of predatory life through the seizure of goods, but the case is
different with the seizure of persons. Captives are items that do not fit into the
scheme of communal consumption, and their appropriation by their individual captor
works no manifest detriment to the group. ... The captives taken under rude
conditions are chiefly women. ... They serve the purpose of trophies very
effectually, and it is therefore worth while for their captor to trace and keep in
evidence his relation to them as their captor. ...
When the practice hardens into custom, the captor comes to exercise a customary
right to exclusive use and abuse over the women he has seized; and this customary
right of use and abuse over an object which is obviously not an organic part of
his person constitutes the relation of ownership, as naively apprehended. After
this usage of capture has found its way into the habits of the community, the
women so held in constraint and in evidence will commonly fall into a
conventionally recognized marriage relation with their captor. The result is a new
form of marriage, in which the man is master. This ownership-marriage seems to be
the original both of private property and of the patriarchal household. Both of
these great institutions are, accordingly, of an emulative origin.
The Beginning of Ownership
by Thorstein Veblen
American Journal of Sociology, vol. 4 (1898-9)
http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/veblen/ownersh
michael perelman wrote:
In looking through William Stanley Jevons’ Principles of Economics,
mostly a collection of unpublished fragments, Jevons concluded a section
on negative value with a fascinating story from Herodotus on auctions in
the Babylonian marriage market. The story speaks for itself and requires
no commentary on my part.
137: “According to Herodotus the Babylonians managed to find husbands
for all their young women. They collected together whatever maidens
might be of marriageable years and sold them by auction, beginning with
those esteemed the most beautiful. They gradually proceeded downwards in
the scale of comeliness until some damsel equidistant between beauty and
plainness had to be given away gratis. Then the plain and the ugly and
the deformed were brought out by degrees, and the bidding went on; but
in the other way, the premiums obtained for beauty being spent as
dowries for the less favoured. All the women found husbands, and all the
husbands found what they desired.”
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