The Prehistory of Private Property: Implications for Modern Political Theory

by Karl Widerquist, Grant McCall

Examining the origin and development of the private property rights system from prehistory to the present day This book debunks three false claims commonly accepted by contemporary political philosophers regarding property that inequality is natural, inevitable, or incompatible with freedom; that capitalism is more consistent with negative freedom than any other conceivable economic system; and that the normative principles of appropriation and voluntary transfer applied in the world in which we live support a capitalist system with strong, individualist and unequal private property rights. The authors review the history of the use and importance of these claims in philosophy, and use thorough anthropological and historical evidence to refute them. They show that societies with common-property systems maintaining strong equality and extensive freedom were initially nearly ubiquitous around the world, and that the private property rights system was established through a long series of violent state-sponsored aggressions.

Genres: History, Anthropology, Politics

288 pages, Hardcover

Published February 23, 2021

About the author

Karl Widerquist is a Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University-Qatar. He specializes in distributive justice: the ethics of who has what. He is an interdisciplinary scholar who holds two doctorates, one in Normative Political Theory (Oxford University 2006) and one in Economics (the City University of New York 1996). His writing and research cross the disciplines of philosophy, politics, economics, anthropology, and the philosophy of social science. He has published dozens of scholarly articles and eleven books including Universal Basic Income: Essential Knowledge, the Problem of Property, the Prehistory of Private Property, A Critical Analysis of Basic Income Experiments; Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy; and Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No. Much of his writing is about Universal Basic Income. He was a founding editor of the journal Basic Income Studies, cofounder of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network, and cochair of the Basic Income Earth Network. The Atlantic Monthly called him “a leader of the worldwide Basic Income movement.”
Website: www.widerquist.com
Twitter: @KarlWiderquist
Email: Karl@widerquist.com

Reviews

[Kevin Carson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Classical liberal and right-libertarian literature of the past few centuries, both academic and polemical, is full of folk history, nursery fables, robinsonades, and just-so stories about how the central institutions of modern capitalism came about naturally and spontaneously. Right-libertarian political and economic writers to this day continue to repeat them, with no supporting evidence, as if they were actual history. An economy dominated by cash nexus exchange is the result of an innate "tendency to truck and barter." The emergence of specie money was a response to the "problem of mutual coincidence of wants." And of course, the biggie: Individual, fee-simple private property in land came about through people in a state of nature appropriating land from the common by mixing their labor in it. David Graeber already demolished the first two in Debt, with recourse to actual historical and anthropological data. Now Widerquist and McCall do the same for the third.

For the overwhelming bulk of human history, right up into early modern times, human appropriation of land was by collective labor and property claims were collective, on the model of the English open-fields, the Russian Mir, the Israelite Jubilee system, what Marx rather problematically called the "Asiatic Mode," etc. And the kind of "private property" that right-libertarians consider engraved in human nature, going back to Fred and Wilma's stone bungalow on a quarter acre lot in Bedrock -- individual, fee simple, transferrable, alienable, commodity -- has virtually never been established as the norm except through massive state violence (e.g. enclosure and colonial conquest).