Property: Re‐appropriating Hegel
| Published date | 01 March 1990 |
| Date | 01 March 1990 |
| Author | Alain Pottage |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1990.tb01811.x |
REVIEW ARTICLE
Property
:
Re-appropriating Hegel
Alain
Pottage
*
Jeremy Waldron,
The Right to Private Property, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1988,
470
pp, hb
f40.00.
The question of property is, of course, an eminently ‘socio-political’ one.
In
the first place,
it is important to appreciate that (in terms of Hannah Arendt’s distinction)] the question
concerns
wealth
rather than
property.
What is at issue is not a prerequisite of participation
in public life
-
in the sense of the
polis
of
Greek antiquity2
-
but, rather, the much
more modem problem of the accumulation and regulation of private and social wealth,
or the political ordering of the social. In the world of which (to borrow from Arendt once
more) one might say that the fields of the ‘social’ and the ‘political’ are more or less co-
extensive, there is nothing ‘private’ about the necessities of life.’ It is equally important
to measure one’s distance from the more recently abandoned perception of property as
a qualification for political personality: it would scarcely do now to adopt the eighteenth
century view of what it meant to be a man of property. In the modem world there is,
then, neither anything particularly private, nor anything particularly personal about the
question of property. Instead, the problem is almost exclusively one of general ‘social
technology.
’
In
the context of ‘liberal’ thought, this is reflected
in
the fact that the question of property
is treated as but one facet of a wider debate about ‘justice.’ Given that this wider problem
is essentially concerned with principles or meta-principles of liberty, no argument about
private property can be free-standing. As Alan Ryan points out: ‘[Plroperty rights are
nowadays important because they are
rights
rather than because they are
property
rights.
In
the past a good deal now achieved by quite other means than the creation of property
rights was necessarily achieved differently.’4 Even from the point of view of a Nozick,
for whom there are rather obvious strategic reasons for referring the conditions
of
the
ethical good life to a right to accumulate private wealth, there is the problem not only
of specifying the
content
of that right but also of assuring the political recognition and
protection of this ordering of the social.
Viewed from this perspective, Jeremy Waldron’s
The Right to Private Property
might
seem just
a
little odd. There is, of course, nothing eccentric about the business of arguing
for or against the institution of private property: what does at first sight appear slightly
outdated about Waldron’s account
is
that, in contrast to other contemporary liberal
discussions, there is no attempt to attend to those issues which necessarily impinge upon
the modem question of property. There
is,
for example, no discussion of the content which
*King’s College, London.
1
2
See
The Human Condition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
hid.
p
30:
‘What prevented the
polis
from violating the private lives of its citizens and made it hold
sacred the boundaries surrounding each property was not respect for private property as we understand
it, but the fact that without owning a house a
man
could not participate in the affairs of the world because
he had no location in it which was properly his own.’ The importance of property was that it defined
a realm of privacy: ‘Privacy was like the other, the
dark
and hidden side
of
the public realm, and while
to be political meant to attain the highest possibility of human existence,
to
have no private place of one’s
own (like a slave) meant to be no longer human.’ (At p
64.)
This, admittedly, is a rather crude expression of Arendt’s distinction.
In
Properry
and
Poliricul Theory,
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984) at p
192.
3
4
The Modem Law Review
53:2
March
1990
0026-7961
259
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