Property and Freedom

by Richard Pipes

"A superb book about a topic that should be front and center in the American political debate" ( National Review ), from the acclaimed Harvard scholar and historian of the Russian Revolution

An exploration of a wide range of national and political systems to demonstrate persuasively that private ownership has served over the centuries to limit the power of the state and enable democratic institutions to evolve and thrive in the Western world.

Beginning with Greece and Rome, where the concept of private property as we understand it first developed, Richard Pipes then shows us how, in the late medieval period, the idea matured with the expansion of commerce and the rise of cities. He contrasts England, a country where property rights and parliamentary government advanced hand-in-hand, with Russia, where restrictions on ownership have for centuries consistently abetted authoritarian regimes; finally he provides reflections on current and future trends in the United States.

Property and Freedom is a brilliant contribution to political thought and an essential work on a subject of vital importance.

Genres: History, Economics, Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Born in Poland, Richard Pipes fled the country with his family when Germany invaded it in 1939. After reaching the United States a year later, Pipes began his education at Muskingum College, which was interrupted in 1943 when he was drafted into the Army Air Corps and sent to Cornell to study Russian. He completed his bachelor's degree at Cornell in 1946 and earned his doctorate at Harvard University four years later.

Pipes taught at Harvard from 1950 until his retirement in 1996, and was director of Harvard's Russian Research Center from 1968-1973. A campaigner for a tougher foreign policy towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War, in 1976, he led a group of analysts in a reassessment of Soviet foreign policy and military power. He served as director of Eastern European and Soviet affairs at the National Security Council from 1981 until 1983, after which he returned to Harvard, where he finished his career as Baird Professor Emeritus of History.

Reviews

[Анна · Rating 1 out of 5]

uuuggggggghhhh shut the fuck up you beseiged fucking gargoyle

[tJacksonrichards · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pipes concludes his brief preface - where he has supplied definitions (and some etymology) for the words possession, property and freedom - with this paragraph:

"Freedom does not include the so-called 'right' to public security and support (such as implied in the slogan phrases "freedom from want" and "the right to housing") which infringe on the rights of others since it is they who have to pay for them. Such 'rights' are at best a moral claim, and at worst, if enforced by public authority, an unearned privilege."

This egregious ideological bias is unfortunately characteristic of the general project and readers are cautioned to grease their eyes for much rolling. The work is not without merit but it is rather telling that while he has named it 'Property and Freedom' - and certainly made a convincing case for their sympathetic historical relationship - Pipes makes an irresponsible presumption of both his reader and his thesis by omitting any real analysis of 'freedom' or political liberty whatsoever beyond that aforementioned opening preface—such content being almost wholly implied (ie. despots and fascists are bad guys here, of course, but Pipes fails to address anything even approaching de Tocqueville's concerns about radical individualism, etc). In that sense I think this book might more appropriately be titled 'Property and Prosperity'. (2.5)

[Fred Kohn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very unbalanced book. As long as Pipes keeps his historian's hat on, everything is right as rain (even if the rain is a bit acid at times). In general, this means chapters 3 through the first half or so of 5. It is when Pipes tries to be an anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist, or political scientist that he often goes seriously off the rails. Even in these sections, generally meaning chapters 2 and the last half of 5, there are diamonds in the dung if one is willing to dig for them. Certainly the book succeeds in its main goal of showing an inextricable relationship between freedom and property rights—an insight that I'm not sure I would have come to on my own.

[JoséMaría BlancoWhite · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best books I read in quite some time. Readers will get the big scope of history in regards to the role played by property in different types of societies and at different times. There are lots of interesting things to learn and the book never seems heavy. Deep but accessible to all readers.

[Max Nova · Rating 4 out of 5]

The professor for my "Real Estate in the Economy and Society" class assigned several chapters of "Property and Freedom" to give us some political philosophy background on conceptions of property. I finally got around to reading the rest of the book and am glad I did - it's certainly an interesting book to follow Atlas Shrugged.

The author is a retired Harvard professor who specialized in Russian history and served on a Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. He was pretty controversial in his own time (as a major critic of détente) and from what I can tell, has pretty extreme libertarian leanings. 

The book begins with a history of the philosophy of property - from Ancient Greece up to modern times. A good chunk of this section of the book revolves around the question of whether property rights belong to legal/conventional law or to natural law.

A major section of the book is devoted to a comparative analysis of the development of property rights in England and Russia. Pipes contends that in Russia, the establishment sovereignty before property rights as well as the period of Mongol rule were instrumental in setting Russia on a different property-rights path than that of Western Europe. He claims that the differing evolution of property rights is the single most important factor in explaining the divergence between Russia and the West.

The final section of the book deals with the evolution (and diminution) of property rights in modern Western democracies. This is the most controversial part of Pipe's book, as he rails against the modern welfare state and its redistributionist nature. Pipes claims that the state has gone too far in allowing peoples' "needs" to become "rights" at the expense of individuals' property rights. He thinks we need a return to a much more conservative interpretation of property rights and roll back much of the welfare redistribution that has occurred since the New Deal.

Some of my favorite quotes below:

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# Philosophy of Property #
################

Discussions of property from the time of Plato and Aristotle to the present have revolved around four principal themes: its relation to politics, ethics, economics, and psychology.

Aristotle rejects Plato’s argument that common ownership does away with social discord, arguing that, on the contrary, people who hold things in common tend to quarrel more than those who own them personally. He sees the cause of social discord not in the striving for property but in human nature

The revolutionary element implicit in Stoic philosophy was the contention that the fundamental principles of the social order are not subject to change because they are embedded in the natural order

This issue lies at the heart of the dispute between the moral and pragmatic approaches: for if property is a matter of convention it can be done away with, but if it belongs to the realm of nature, it is an unalterable fact of life.

Thus came into being a fundamental postulate of Western thought: that right and wrong are not arbitrary concepts but norms rooted in nature and therefore binding on all mankind; ethical problems are to be solved with reference to the Law of Nature, which is rational and supersedes the positive law (jus civile) of individual societies. An essential element of the Law of Nature is the equality of man, specifically, equality before the law, and the principle of human rights, including the rights to property, which antedate the state, and thus are independent of it. Fifteen hundred years later these ideas would furnish the philosophical cornerstone of Western democracy.

Individual property and family disappear. To promote virtue, all utopias eliminate choice. As we shall show later by citing Frederick Hayek, this is bound to happen because individuals can agree on very little and any attempt to have them agree on more than the minimum requires coercion.

His thesis was as simple as it was innovative: he who controls the country’s wealth controls its politics, in large measure because political power rests on military might and the armed forces must be paid.

Thus one critic of sociobiology says that the views of Lorenz on the sources of human aggression must be rejected not only because they are scientifically unsound but also because of their “policy implications.” It is a cardinal tenet of liberalism, socialism, and communism that human beings are infinitely malleable creatures who, through legislation and education (and indoctrination), can be purged of their socially undesirable attributes—acquisitiveness and aggressiveness, above all—and transformed into congenial beings happy to live among equals. The “perfectibility” of man has been declared by a prominent American liberal to be a prerequisite of democracy; the premise is even more essential to the ambitions of socialists and communists. This vision is tenable only if human behavior is interpreted to be exclusively or almost exclusively conditioned by the environment (“culture”). If it is rooted in biology, then the possibilities of altering it are necessarily limited

...These results suggest that rather than being culturally inspired, acquisitive behavior is instinctive and attenuates under cultural influence

Altogether, the majority of the people, notably in Athens, whether residing on the land or in the city, were self-employed

Jeremy Bentham’s dictum “Property and law are born and must die together. Before the laws there was no property; take away the laws, all property ceases.”

Hence, “it is almost impossible to conceive of a society in which private property is recognized and permitted, but is not protected by the law.”

###############
# Property in England #
###############

Indeed, as James Harrington wisely observed three and a half centuries ago, it was the people’s growing wealth and the king’s increasing dependence on it that compelled the crown to grant its subjects rights and freedoms. England’s constitutional evolution may thus be said to march to the drum-beat of her financial history. It provides a classic illustration of how private wealth restrains public authority

Government by consent can emerge under various conditions as long as the politically active population is economically independent and thus, in a sense, co-sovereign.

The extraordinary prominence of law and lawyers in England and the entire English-speaking world is in good measure explainable by the early development of property, for inasmuch as property means ownership claims enforceable by legal means, law is its indispensable adjunct.

The originality of the English parliament, therefore, lies not in its antiquity and function but in its longevity, for it went from strength to strength, whereas its continental counterparts, with a few exceptions (notably Poland, Sweden, and the Netherlands), did not survive the era of royal absolutism

One factor that bolsters parliamentarism is territorial smallness. As a rule, the smaller the country and its population the easier it is to forge effective democratic institutions, because they represent manageable communities with shared interests and capable of concerted action: conversely, the larger a country the greater is the diversity of social and regional interests, which impedes unity

A decisive factor in the decline of continental parliaments was the revolution in warfare which began in the late Middle Ages with the introduction of gunpowder and culminated in the seventeenth century with the creation of modern national armies. National armies required national governments with strong authority, and that spelled the doom of medieval estates which had given rise to parliaments

##############
# Property in Russia #
##############

It is the author’s contention that the critical factor in the failure of Russia to develop rights and liberties was the liquidation of landed property in the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the principality which in time conquered all Russia and imposed on her a regime under which the monarch not only ruled the realm and its inhabitants but literally owned them. The fusion of sovereignty and ownership, a type of government known as “patrimonial,” vested all titles to the land in the hands of the monarch and allowed him to claim unlimited services from his subjects, noble and commoner alike. In marked contrast to the rest of Western Europe, where the authority of kings stopped at the boundary of private property, in Russia (until the end of the eighteenth century, at any rate) such constraint on royal power was unknown and, indeed, unthinkable.

The essential fact to bear in mind is that being a military-commercial ruling caste, the early Vikings in Russia neither pursued agriculture nor acquired landed properties—this in striking contrast to England, where the Norman conquerors claimed title to all the land. One consequence of this fact was that the founders of the first Russian state developed no clear distinction between their public and private functions: they ruled their realm and disposed of its wealth without distinguishing the one activity from the other.

The concept of sovereignty in Russia thus antedated that of private property—a fact that was to have momentous consequences for that country’s historical evolution.

It is not unreasonable to assume, therefore, that in the natural course of events, Russian cities might have evolved, like their Western counterparts, into centers of self-government and guarantors of civil rights for their residents. The Mongols prevented such an evolution. They had no use for the veche, since it was the fulcrum of resistance to their exactions. Russian princes charged with collecting the Mongol tribute had no more reason to favor popular assemblies which hindered them in the execution of their duties on behalf of the Mongol overlords.

Russia’s experience indicates that freedom cannot be legislated: it has to grow gradually, in close association with property and law. For while acquisitiveness is natural, respect for the property—and the liberty—of others is not.

#########################
# Property in the Modern Welfare State #
#########################

Democracy calls for government ruled by the people and subject to laws: in reality, however, democratic regimes are dominated by elites who devise ways of shaping and bending the law in their favor.

In a democracy, property does not effectively limit political power, because the proprietors, as it were, sit on both sides of the bargaining table and tax themselves through their representatives. These representatives, dependent as they are on an electorate which has more poor than rich voters, “foster electoral support by concentrating the benefits and dispersing the costs of specific policy initiatives.” Such practices, adopted by nearly all industrial democracies in the course of the twentieth century, have significantly altered the status of private property: One of the most important developments in the United States during the past decade has been the emergence of government as a major source of wealth. Government is a gigantic syphon. It draws in revenue and power, and pours forth wealth: money, benefits, services, contracts, franchises, and licenses. Government has always had this function. But while in early times it was minor, today’s function of largess is on a vast, imperial scale. The valuables dispensed by the government take many forms, but they all share one characteristic. They are steadily taking the place of traditional forms of wealth—forms which are held as private property. Social insurance substitutes for savings; a government contract replaces a businessman’s customers and goodwill. The wealth of more and more Americans depends on a relationship to government. Increasingly, Americans live on government largess—allocated by government on its own terms, and held by recipients subject to conditions which express “the public interest.” The growth of government largess, accompanied by a distinctive system of law, is having profound consequences. It affects the underpinnings of individualism and independence. It influences the workings of the Bill of Rights

Administrative agencies combine all the features of the legislative, executive and judiciary branches in one body. . . . Agencies promulgate regulations (a legislative function), interpreting statutes in the process (a judicial function). They enforce statutes and their own regulations (an executive function), determine whether regulations have been violated, and assess sanctions against the purportedly offending party (judicial functions). . . . If, as is now often the case, the courts abandon their constitutional role as guardians of rights and defer to the judgment of regulatory agencies in all their various functions, then the constitutional system as originally devised is radically altered

Thus, because of a “massive collectivization of property devoted to production,” corporations have established control over productive wealth while individuals have been left holding consumption assets: they have become “passive” owners. This theory served as the premise of the predictions, popular during the Cold War, that communism and capitalism were destined to “converge.”

The lacerating struggle over the validity of the New Deal Program engendered lasting hostility to the judicial protection of property rights. . . . Once the Supreme Court accepted the New Deal, the justices abruptly withdrew from the field of economic regulation. This reflected a monumental change in the Court’s attitude toward property rights and entrepreneurial liberty. From its inception, one scholar noted, “the Court deemed its mission to be the protection of property against depredations by the people and their legislatures. After 1937 it gave up this mission.” A sharply limited concept of property rights thus operated for the next generation. . . . Consequently, the Court gave great latitude to Congress and state legislatures to fashion economic policy, while expressing only perfunctory concern for the rights of individual property owners

Their day dawned in the 1940s. An early appeal for the creation of the welfare state in the United States was made by President Roosevelt in his State of the Union address to Congress in January 1941 in which he referred to the “Four Freedoms” as a peace objective. Two of these “freedoms” were traditional and guaranteed by the Constitution: freedom of speech and freedom of religion. But the other two—freedom from want and from fear—were novel and raised questions that Roosevelt did not address. Setting aside the nebulous and rather meaningless slogan “freedom from fear,” “freedom from want” meant really not a freedom but a right—the right to the necessities of life at public expense, i.e., the right to something that was not one’s own. It committed the government to assure every citizen of the satisfaction of his needs—a term which by its very nature cannot be precisely defined and hence is capable of infinite expansion as society grows richer and each particular need is satisfied, giving rise to fresh needs. Enforcing true freedoms—free speech, practice of the religion of one’s choice, access to the ballot box—costs nothing or next to nothing. Enforcing special rights, by contrast, requires large outlays. Since the democratic government has no money of its own, any demand for government money, however justified, is in effect a demand for the money of one’s fellow citizens, a process in which the government acts merely as a transfer agent. It entails the shift, by the device of taxation, of assets from the wealthier citizens to the poorer—a responsibility and a function which governments had never previously assumed

The notion that every need creates a “right” has acquired a quasi-religious status in modern America, inhibiting rational discussion -- [this is Pipes in full-on rampage mode]

Since the War on Poverty began in 1965, federal, state, and local governments have spent more than $5.4 trillion fighting poverty in this country. How much money is $5.4 trillion? It is 70 percent more than it cost to fight World War II. For $5.4 trillion you could purchase the assets of all the Fortune 500 corporations and all the farmland in the United States. Yet . . . the poverty rate is actually higher today [1996] than it was in 1965 -- [Pipes rampage continues...]

The entire concept of the welfare state as it has evolved in the second half of the twentieth century is incompatible with individual liberty, for it allows various groups with common needs to combine and claim the right to satisfy them at the expense of society at large, in the process steadily enhancing the power of the state which acts on their behalf. This reality is currently masked by the immense wealth generated by the industrial economies, operating on a global scale in time of peace. It could become painfully apparent, however, should the economic situation drastically deteriorate and the controls established by the state in time of prosperity enable it to restore social stability at the cost of freedom

The balance between “civil” and “property” rights has to be redressed if we care about freedom. Property rights, which increasingly have come to mean exclusive possession rather than unconstrained use, should be restored to the maximum degree possible to their original, comprehensive meaning. Similarly, the whole concept of civil rights requires reexamination. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the government no license to set quotas for hiring personnel by private enterprise or admitting students to institutions of higher learning, and yet the federal bureaucracy acts as if it had. Even less did the act authorize interference with freedom of speech in the workplace. Just as property rights have been steadily narrowed in application, so the category of “civil rights” has been broadened to include the claims of any group to goods and services which fellow citizens must pay for either by sacrificing some of their own rights or else footing the bill. Citing a catalog of what she calls “printing-press rights” from the Democratic Party platform of 1960, Ayn Rand asks “at whose expense” are these “rights” to be secured? She answers that since jobs, food, clothing, recreation, homes, medical care, education, etc. “do not grow in nature,” they can only be provided by others. This being the case, they are not “rights” -- [Pipes citing Ayn Rand... pretty clear evidence that he's in the hardcore libertarian camp]

Rights, in any meaningful sense, are natural rights, not those bestowed by legislative fiat. The so-called “social rights” of today are not “rights” and certainly not “entitlements,” since no one is entitled to anything at someone else’s expense; they are rather claims on society which it may or may not grant. And yet in modern industrial democracies a large number of citizens are required to work for the support of others: in Sweden, the most retrograde state in this respect, for each citizen who earns his own living, 1.8 are fully or partially maintained by taxes which he is required to pay; in Germany and Great Britain the ratio is 1:1, and in the United States 1:0.76 -- [This is the abbreviated version of Atlas Shrugged]

“Experience,” wrote Justice Brandeis, should teach us, to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachments by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

[Rhuff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Give the Devil his due for effort, but it's a rehashed one-dimensional neo-liberal ideological polemic. Using Pipes' logic, democracy is not possible ("all men are created equal") because it would sacrifice liberty. Thus we see libertarians justifying oligarchy, racial domination, gender domination, class domination - the rule over the untermenschen - all in the name of freedom for the chosen few, and their right to own. They may be total afterbirths in character, morals, or ability, but because they "own," they are the highest expressions of humanity. Garbage to anyone with a sense of decency or experience among real people in the real world.

Pipes demonstrates, if there was any doubt, the interconnection between old school anti-democratic elitism - degenerating into Eurofascm by the 1920s - and the Von Mises/Hayek school of libertarianism. To wit: "Liberty is by its nature inegalitarian, because living creatures differ in strength, intelligence, ambition, courage, perseverance, and all else that makes for success. . . . Since this kind of equality exists neither in the animal kingdom nor among primitive peoples, it must be regarded as unnatural, and hence attainable only by coercion, which is why all utopian schemes presuppose despotic authority and all despots insist on the equality of their subjects.’’

Really? I never heard of Hitler - the ultimate despot of the past century - insisting on the equality of *his* subjects. His inequity, based on the same biological determinism as above, required massive despotic authority to prevent the natural tolerance and mingling of peoples in his kingdom of primitive passions. "National Socialism" was in fact highly compatible with private property, hence outside Pipes' carefully-fenced perimeters.

This book has "value" only as a regurgitated attack on social democracy; and ultimately political democracy too. In the neo-liberal world of Pipes and Milton Friedman, one deserves only the freedom he can pay for. Yet who needs freedom in his pitiful possessions more than the poor man? In Pipes' world the biggest fish "deserves" to make meals of the smaller in the name of "freedom to eat" while gutting the SNAP program.

Now you know why the US stands to lose liberty, property, and democracy. Enjoy.

[PyranopterinMo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Should absolutely be required reading all democratic countries, preferably before elections and other votes. If you need a more detailed review you can find one. Basically it explains where personal freedom comes from by comparing its historical developments in well known countries including England and Russia. There is a 3 part video lecture by Richard Pipes on this book from Dec 26 2010.

[Phoebe · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was okay, I was glad Pipes put a lot of examples of the historical significance of property as a foundation for liberty, but I wish he would have elaborated on why each of those events were significant in history.

I understand the way he formatted the book, but I don't think it was appropriate for this type of topic. I think writing in a strictly chronological style would've been better for the reader than separating each topic into subtopics. When the goal is to have the reader understand the development of property rights through history, then the best way to write the book is in order of when these events happened. That just made me irate at Pipes through most of the book and because of that it was hard to focus on the actual topic.

[Edisom Rogerio A Hott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Publicado originalmente em 1999. No Brasil em 2001 recebeu o título "Propriedade e Liberdade". O autor defende a importância do conceito de propriedade como chave para o surgimento das instituições políticas e legais que garantem a liberdade nos diversos países. Analisa o conceito de propriedade e o seu surgimento e contrapõe a experiência inglesa à experiência russa.

[Rhesa]

I just bought this book 2 days ago, the moment I read it's title, I was instantly hooked up, it's what I say "pregnant title", title that invokes ideas, imagination & demands elaborative interpretation. The literature on each of these subjects is immense: there are hundreds if not thousands of works on property and as many as liberty. they proceed, however, on separate tracks. but the author makes it clear that there is an intimate connection between public guarantees of ownership and individual liberty.

As a history book, it begins with Greece and Rome, where the concept of private property as we understand it first developed, Pipes then shows us how, in the late medieval period, the idea matured with the expansion of commerce and the rise of cities. He contrasts England, a country where property rights and parliamentary government advanced hand-in-hand, with Russia, where restrictions on ownership have for centuries consistently abetted authoritarian regimes; finally he provides reflections on current and future trends in the United States.

[Ramón Cárdenas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gran investigación histórica, y es notable el conocimiento del autor sobre el contexto ideológico y la repercusión del concepto de libertad sobre las sociedades. Su posición contraria a todo socialismo y su elogio de la propiedad privada ilimitada son cuestionables, si bien tiene derecho a una posición y la defiende con talento.