Having laid out the broad intellectual groundwork for a bold new conception of private property in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the unfinished business of filling in both the substance and details of the modern notion of ownership was taken up in the seventeenth century by the political philosopher John Locke and later by a succession of theorists including Adam Smith, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
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Locke’s theory of property was published in 1690 in
Two Treatises on Civil Government.
His treatises quickly became the secular bible for a middle class that was beginning to climb onto the political stage in England. His writings served as a rationale for parliamentary reforms in England and, later, provided the philosophical foundation for the French and American revolutions.
Like many of his predecessors, Locke argued that private property is a natural right and unalterable. Locke’s reasoning, however, is what distinguishes his theory from those who came before him. He argued that each man creates his own property by adding his labor to the raw stuff of nature, transforming it into things of value. While Locke acknowledged that the Earth and all of its creatures were common to all men in the state of nature, he was quick to add that each man, in turn, “has a property in his own person . . . and this no one has any right to but himself.” Locke goes on to assert that “the labor of his body and work of his hands . . . are properly his.” That being so, Locke concluded that
whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it in, it hath by this labor something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this “labor” being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.
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As to the question of how much property a person might legitimately claim for himself, Locke said, “as much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates and can use the product of, so much is his property.”
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Locke’s natural-right theory of property was wildly popular with the new generation of independent farmers, merchants, shopkeepers, and small capitalists who were transforming English life and ridding the country of the last vestiges of feudal privilege. His treatises offered more than a mere explanation of the natural right of property. He elevated human labor and glorified acquisition as the crowning achievement of human existence. Unlike medieval churchmen, who thought of human labor as a set of necessary obligations to fulfill, Locke saw in it opportunities for which every man ought to strive.
David Hume (and, later, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) added the notion of utility value to the ownership of property. Hume argued that the justification for private ownership lies in the idea of utility: “Examine the writers of the laws of nature,” writes Hume,
and you will always find that whatever principle they set out with, they are sure to terminate here at last, and to assign, as the ultimate reason for every rule which they establish, the convenience and the necessities of mankind. What other reason, indeed, would writers ever give, why this must be mine and that yours.
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The utility theory of property provided yet another rationale that could be used by the new class of merchants and traders to advance their personal and political agenda. The utility theory softened the edges of Locke’s labor theory, making property not just an end in itself but rather an instrument for advancing human happiness. Philosophers of the period were in agreement that “the greatest possible happiness of society is attained by ensuring to every man the greatest possible quantity of the produce of his labor.”
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The utilitarians were among the first of the modern theorists to make the clear distinction between ownership as a thing in and of itself, that one possessed, and ownership as an instrument to advance human happiness. Georg Friedrich Hegel, the German philosopher, picked up this distinction in a slightly different way. His theory of property—which some call the personality theory—has become as important as Locke’s labor theory of ownership in establishing the notion of private property in the modern world.
Hegel argued that property plays a far more important role than most philosophers had heretofore been willing to acknowledge. Beyond its material and utilitarian value, said Hegel, property has a deeper function. According to Hegel, “property enables an individual to put his will into a ‘thing.’”
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One expresses his or her sense of personality by imprinting it into possessions. It is by way of fixing one’s will onto objects in the external world that each person projects his being and creates a presence among men. Work, in Hegel’s cosmology, is a creative expression rather than just an exercise of labor, and the product of that work represents an expropriation of the world and its incorporation into the projected personality of the owner. He writes:
Personality is that which struggles to . . . give itself reality, or in other words to claim that external world as its own. To claim that external world as its own personality requires the institution of property.
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As one’s personality is always present in the owned object, property becomes an extension of one’s personality. Others, in turn, come to know and recognize one’s personality through the objects one owns. Hegel, then, viewed property as more than just a way to satisfy needs. On a more profound level, property is an expression of personal freedom. By surrounding oneself with property, a person inflates his or her personality in space and time, creating a sphere of personal influence. In short, he or she creates an expanded presence in the world.
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Property and personhood become nearly synonymous in Hegel’s mind. Each becomes an expression of the other. Nearly a century after Hegel first advanced his personality theory of property, William James lent his support to the theory in terms readily recognizable to a generation becoming comfortable with psychological notions of projection. James writes:
It is clear that between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine, the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves. Our fame, our children, the work of our hands may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked. . . . In its oldest possible sense, however, a man’s self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body, and his psychic powers, but his clothes and house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and work, his land and houses and yacht and bank account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax or prosper, he feels triumphant, if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down . . . a great part of our feelings about what is ours is due to the fact that we live closer to our own things and so feel them more thoroughly and deeply.
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James goes on to observe that when something that belongs to us is stolen or destroyed or simply lost, we feel “a sense of the shrinkage of our personality” because the things we come to possess are an extension of who we are.
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If Hegel’s theory of property seems more contemporary than Locke’s, perhaps it is because the emphasis of the capitalist system has shifted substantially over the years, from a production to a consumption orientation. The labor theory of property provided an ideal philosophical backdrop for an era where the attention was focused narrowly on hard work, industrious behavior, savings, and capital accumulation. Merchants, shopkeepers, and an emerging bourgeois class looked to the labor theory of property as a justification for their own behavior. Locke’s ideas became values to live by as much as explanatory theories of the nature of property relations. Today, consumption and the commodification of personal experience are far more important factors in the commercial equation. It’s no wonder, then, that the notion of property as an extension of one’s personality and a mark of selfhood has greater social currency. Marketing professionals have long understood the close connection between personhood and property, and have habituated several generations of consumers to the idea that who we are is a direct reflection of what we have.
Mine vs. Thine
The metamorphosis in thinking about the nature of property paralleled the many other changes that were transforming a continent from a feudal economy to a market economy and from dynastic rule to nation-state governance. The new concept of property was a way for Europeans to reorder their relationship to space and time. The new technologies opened the door to vast new spaces and dramatically quickened the human tempo. Space that had for so long been conceived of as cloistered and vertical was suddenly horizontal and wide open to the vanishing point of the horizon. Time, which for aeons had been experienced as cyclical and relatively closed, was suddenly experienced as linear and expansive. The old feudal institutions, with their spatial walls and temporal boundaries, simply collapsed in the wake of what appeared to be an endless frontier running alongside an infinite future. The development of a private property perspective was the critical mental tool for domesticating the new spatial and temporal frontier.
The whole of earthly reality was reconfigured into a single formula—“mine vs. thine.” And with this formulation, Europeans set out to enclose the whole of space and time. In the new future being born, every person would become his or her own private god whose divinity lay in amassing property, inflating his or her being, and casting an ever larger shadow over existence and duration. More mine, less thine. Those who could, by talent and cunning, acquire the most property could transform it into capital and use that capital to control not only nature but the lives of other people as well. They were called “capitalists.”
The modern market economy and the nation-state, in turn, became the institutional mechanisms to speed along this new reorganization of the world. The market would serve as the impartial arena where each capitalist would lock in battle against his fellow warriors in the struggle to capture space and sequester time in the form of private property. The infant nation-state, in turn, was to be the protector of every person’s property by establishing legal codes and enforcement mechanisms—and, by so doing, guarantee his or her freedom.
The concept of a society based on the sanctity of private property rights is a uniquely European idea. Its champions saw private property as the one and only mechanism that could ensure individual freedom. Later, its Marxist detractors would claim that private property, far from being the guarantor of personal freedom is, in fact, the single greatest obstacle to achieving it.
For the Enlightenment philosophers and the jurists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, freedom was defined in negative terms as the right to exclude others. The early modern era was a time of differentiation—the separation of the individual from the cloak of the Church, the yoke of the feudal estate, the constraints of the craft guilds, and the many other obligations and indentures that were an integral part of a dynastic order based on status and rank.
Private property was viewed as a ticket of sorts to personal liberation. To be free, in the sense that it was used at the time, was to be autonomous and mobile—to not be dependent on or beholden to others or held hostage to circumstances. The more propertied one was, the more autonomous and mobile one could be. Greater autonomy and mobility meant greater freedom. Property, then, was a border between the self and the other. Property means “mine not thine.” The greater the accumulation of property and wealth, the larger the extension of one’s domain and sphere of influence in the world. If one were secure in one’s property, then all of the other rights would be guaranteed—the right to privacy, the right to be free of coercion, and so forth. Property rights, protected by law, ensured that no man could be bullied, oppressed, or made subject to another man’s will.
An eighteenth-century Virginian, Arthur Lee, captured the high regard in which property was held on both sides of the Atlantic, declaring, “The right of property is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive a people of this is in fact to deprive them of their liberty.”
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John Locke asked, rhetorically, What was the true purpose of governments? They are instituted, said Locke, “for the mutual preservation of [our] Lives, Liberties, and Estates, which I call by the general name, Property.” When one reflects on the real reason “men” unite into commonwealths, Locke mused, it is to ensure “the preservation of their property.”
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Today, we have come to take for granted the dense legal codes and statutes, the common law, the legislative oversight, and the judicial review that enshrine private property at the very center of modern social life. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the idea of a private property regime was still novel, and the subject of great public discussion. Kings and queens and the nobility and aristocracy of virtually every European kingdom still ruled by divine right, backed by the threat of force and coercion. The very idea that the only legitimate function of the state is to protect everyone’s claim to property, equally and impartially, by rule of law, was incendiary. Thomas Paine and Alexis de Tocqueville went so far as to claim that the American and French revolutions were the product rather than the source of property relations.
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The central role of the sovereign state in a post-dynastic era, then, becomes one of protecting private property relations and allowing the accumulation and exchange of property to flourish. It becomes clear that this new kind of state exists primarily to ease the workings of a nascent capitalist economy. Jean-Baptiste Say, the French classical economist, made the point that if government “either practices robbery itself, or is impotent to repress it in others, or where possession is rendered perpetually insecure, by the intricacies of legislative enactments,” the market can’t function. It is only when property rights are secured by law and enforced by the state that “the sources of production, namely land, capital and industry [labor], attain their utmost degree of fecundity.”
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