PROPERTY
pp. 25-26
Sometime during the period in European history vaguely
labeled “early modern,” there occurred a major break in the attitude toward
property. It was the consequence of a
remarkable expansion of commerce which began in the late Middle Ages and
accelerated following the discovery of the New World. Prior to that time, “property” essentially
meant land; and since land was inextricably bound up with the powers of
sovereignty, discussions of property raised questions of royal (or papal)
authority. With the surge of commerce,
however, property in some parts of Europe came also to mean capital; and
capital was free of association with politics, being treated as a personal
asset and, as such, owned without qualifications. A change of attitude followed: whereas in theoretical
discussions of the preceding millennium property had been treated as an
unavoidable evil, it now could be regarded as a positive good. This attitude prevailed until the second half
of the eighteenth century, when egalitarian sentiments led to a renewed assault
on the institution of property, this time in an uncompromising manner for which
there was no precedent.
Two further factors contributed to the ascendancy of
property. One was the rise of
individualism. Increasingly the
community came to be viewed as an abstraction made up of individuals, and
communal well-being as the sum total of individual prosperity. Individual prosperity, in turn, came to be
seen as the reward of a rational life.
The early Florentine humanist Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370-1444) praised
riches as indispensible to an active public life, which alone deserved to be
called “virtuous.” “All in all,” he
wrote, “we need many material goods in order to accomplish deeds, and the
greater and more excellent our acts of virtue, the more we depend on those
means.” Leon Battista Alberti
(1404-1472), an even more prominent Italian humanist of the Renaissance,
preached a “bourgeois” morality very much like the one that would be propounded
by Benjamin Franklin three hundred years later.
PROPERTY2
selected excerpts from ch. 2 (pp 29-37) of The Fatal Conceit by F.A. Hayek (full pdf)
If morals and tradition, rather than intelligence and
calculating reason, lifted men above the savages, the distinctive foundations
of modern civilisation were laid in antiquity in the region surrounding the
Mediterranean Sea. There, possibilities of long-distance trade gave, to those
communities whose individuals were allowed to make free use of their individual
knowledge, an advantage over those in which common local knowledge or that of a
ruler determined the activities of all. So far as we know, the Mediterranean
region was the first to see the acceptance of a person's right to dispose over
a recognised private domain, thus allowing individuals to develop a dense
network of commercial relations among different communities. Such a network
worked independently of the views and desires of local chiefs, for the
movements of naval traders could hardly be centrally directed in those days. If
we may accept the account of a highly respected authority (and one certainly
not biased in favour of the market order), `the Graeco-Roman world was
essentially and precisely one of private ownership, whether of a few acres or
of the enormous domains of Roman senators and emperors, a world of private
trade and manufacture' (Finley, 1973:29).

Such an order serving a multiplicity of private purposes
could in fact have been formed only on the basis of what I prefer to call
several property, which is H. S. Maine's more precise term for what is usually
described as private property. If several property is the heart of the morals
of any advanced civilisation, the ancient Greeks seem to have been the first to
see that it is also inseparable from individual freedom.
…
The crucial point is that the prior development of several
property is indispensable for the development of trading, and thereby for the
formation of larger coherent and cooperating structures, and for the appearance
of those signals we call prices.
…
Similarly, of the revival of European civilisation during
the later Middle Ages it could be said that the expansion of capitalism - and European civilisation - owes its origins and raison d'etre
to political anarchy (Baechler, 1975:77). It was not under the more powerful governments,
but in the towns of the Italian Renaissance, of South Germany and of the Low
Countries, and finally in lightly-governed England, i.e., under the rule of the
bourgeoisie rather than of warriors, that modern industrialism grew. Protection
of several property, not the direction of its use by government, laid the
foundations for the growth of the dense network of exchange of services that
shaped the extended order.
Nothing is more misleading, then, than the conventional
formulae of historians who represent the achievement of a powerful state as the
culmination of cultural evolution: it as often marked its end.
…
The institutions of property, as they exist at present, are
hardly perfect; indeed, we can hardly yet say in what such perfection might consist.
Cultural and moral evolution do require further steps if the institution of
several property is in fact to be as beneficial as it can be. For example, we
need the general practice of competition to prevent abuse of property. This in
turn requires further restraint on the innate feelings of the micro-order, the
small group discussed earlier (see chapter one above, and Schoeck, 1966/69),
for these instinctual feelings are often threatened not only by several
property but sometimes even more so by competition, and this leads people to
long doubly for non-competitive `solidarity'.
While property is initially a product of custom, and
jurisdiction and legislation have merely developed it in the course of
millennia, there is then no reason to suppose that the particular forms it has
assumed in the contemporary world are final. Traditional concepts of property
rights have in recent times been recognised as a modifiable and very complex
bundle whose most effective combinations have not yet been discovered in all
areas.
…
Just to illustrate how great our ignorance of the optimum
forms of delimitation of various rights remains - despite our confidence in the
indispensability of the general institution of several property - a few remarks
about one particular form of property may be made.
The slow selection by trial and error of a system of rules
delimiting individual ranges of control over different resources has created a
curious position. Those very intellectuals who are generally inclined to
question those forms of material property which are indispensable for the
efficient organisation of the material means of production have become the most
enthusiastic supporters of certain immaterial property rights invented only
relatively recently, having to do, for example, with literary productions and
technological inventions (i.e., copyrights and patents).
…
Yet it is not obvious that such forced scarcity is the most
effective way to stimulate the human creative process.
…
Similarly, recurrent re-examinations of the problem have not
demonstrated that the obtainability of patents of invention actually enhances
the flow of new technical knowledge rather than leading to wasteful
concentration of research on problems whose solution in the near future can be
foreseen and where, in consequence of the law, anyone who hits upon a solution
a moment before the next gains the right to its exclusive use for a prolonged
period (Machlup, 1962).
…
Another, related, matter could also mislead. Earlier we
mentioned the growing differentiation of various kinds of property rights in a
vertical or hierarchical dimension. If, elsewhere in this book, we occasionally
speak about the rules of several property as if the contents of individual property
were uniform and constant, this should be seen as a simplification that could
mislead if understood without the qualifi- cations already stated. This is in
fact a field in which the greatest advances in the governmental framework of
the spontaneous order may be expected, but which we cannot consider further
here.
