Book Review: Christopher Pierson, Just Property. Volume Two: Enlightenment, Revolution, and History
| Author | Patrick JL Cockburn |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929917712912 |
| Subject Matter | Book ReviewsPolitical Theory |
602 Political Studies Review 15(4)
category, which includes economic migrants,
Miller claims that citizens of democratic states
have the right to control their borders in order
to protect their national identity. Furthermore,
he argues, fairness demands that those immi-
grants who are allowed to enter a state’s terri-
tory should be assigned both rights and
responsibilities, including the responsibility to
integrate into the national culture.
The importance of social, civic and cultural
integration is central to Miller’s argument, since a
shared national identity, he claims, is crucial for
preserving the social trust and solidarity on which
democracy and social justice depend, and which
ethnocultural diversity, especially when it results
in the presence of ‘parallel societies’ (p. 68), risks
threatening.
While the book is clearly written, well-
argued and accessible to a broad readership,
some of its key claims are not entirely persua-
sive. First, as some authors have recently
pointed out, the causal link between ethnocul-
tural diversity and lower levels of social trust
and solidarity highlighted by Miller is far from
obvious, since the available empirical evidence
is inconclusive. Second, the explicitly ‘com-
munitarian’ (p. 161) position endorsed by
Miller and his view of ‘a nation that thinks of
itself as a collectivity that endures over time’
(pp. 154–155) seem overly demanding in view
of the growing and complex diversity of con-
temporary democratic societies.
Miller also fails to explain persuasively why
we should reject a more civic form of national-
ism and the kind of immigration policy that this
would warrant. Finally, it is not clear that the
responsibility to integrate should be ascribed to
all immigrants in a uniform way. Whether
someone has been admitted as a refugee or an
economic migrant, for example, should affect
the degree of their responsibility to integrate.
Matteo Bonotti
(Cardiff University)
© The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1478929917716897
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Just Property. Volume Two: Enlightenment,
Revolution, and History by Christopher
Pierson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
248pp., £55.00 (h/b), ISBN 9780199673292
Just Property condenses an enormous intellec-
tual history of political thinking about property
into a form that combines the encyclopaedic
with the historical: on the one hand, it cata-
logues the views of major political theorists
grouped by national context and political
views, and on the other hand, it provides an
overview of the developments and continuities
that make up the broader history of property
thinking in the ‘Latin West’. The result is an
enormously useful and accessible resource for
scholars of property from intellectual history,
philosophy and political theory.
Roman law and Christian theology served
as the principal backdrop to the first volume of
Just Property, which culminated in John
Locke’s myth of the origin of property. In this
second volume, the story is framed by
Enlightenment and revolution: from the
Scottish, French and German Enlightenments
to revolutionary France and the nineteenth-
century socialists and anarchists. Of the argu-
ments reviewed, some are apologetic, some
reformist and others revolutionary, but what
property theorists of this period shared was the
attempt to grasp the rights and wrongs of prop-
erty in a world of ever more complex com-
merce and industry: a world that remained
divided between haves and have-nots, sepa-
rated by the institution of property.
Pierson’s ‘immanent critique’ of these argu-
ments is charitable and even-handed – but in
the end, almost all are presented as failures:
they fail to work out what a ‘natural right’ to
property entails (the French revolutionaries);
they fail to reconcile individual liberty with the
demands of economic justice (the anarchists);
they fail to decide on whether property is cor-
rupting or the foundation to peace (Rousseau);
and they fail to present tenable alternatives to
capitalist private property (the socialists). The
important point, however, is that these failures
show us how central property has been to the
search for a just social order that somehow
ranks or reconciles the plural goods of free-
dom, security, utility, equality and justice. Just
Property amply illustrates, by historical exam-
ple, why property should be at the core of polit-
ical theory.
Those looking for an intellectual history
that reconstructs a detailed social and intellec-
tual context will not find it in Just Property,
neither will political philosophers find a
To continue reading
Request your trial