Which is logically prior? Property or society? Is there such a thing as property rights, and then we can form society, or must society be formed in order to recognize property rights? I think it is clear that property rights precede society, and that they are a precondition of society. For, if society is prior to property, then there could be society without property, but then in what does that society subsist?
Society is the widespread respect of property rights. At leas, that is how I would understand it. If people do not have a respect for property rights (and such could conceivably be the case if society is somehow prior to property), then how do people cooperate? What forms the basis of that cooperation? Cooperation assumes each individual has something of their own to bring forward, namely, their own participation, their own labor, their own consent, and so on. Cooperation assumes, in other words, a kind of property or ownership, namely the ownership of the immediate products of the self, such as labor, consent, opinions, and so on.
One might object that this kind of ownership does not make sense, since ownership must be of tangible things. I can own a hammer, I cannot own my labor. However, this doesn’t seem to make much sense. How can I acquire except with that which is my own? If I do not put my labor into it, I shall fail to acquire the hammer. It doesn’t make much sense to say I gift myself the hammer, as though the labor comes not from me but somewhere else. I think this is why it makes sense to say we own the immediate products of our self. While it may not make sense to say we “own our selves” in a literal sense, since one must be a self in order to own at all, I’m certain this is what “self-ownership” means; the immediate products of the self, i.e. the body, the labor, the opinions. I am representing, after all, opinions that I lay claim to, and I can’t present something as my opinion unless I lay claim to it in some sense. This is a kind of ownership, an ownership of consent to ideas. (Note: Not the ownership of ideas. Ideas are abstractions. Consent or agreement with them is concrete, an activity of the self.)
What of Crusoe? On his island by himself, it wouldn’t make sense to ascribe property to him. There is no one from whom he would need to protect or assert his property rights against. This might be the case, but I don’t see why that is a problem, since we clearly still recognize that what is Crusoe’s is Crusoe’s, and that property represents a limitation on the actions others might have on his island. What this means is that property is something that prepares us for society. There is a use to marking out what is and isn’t Crusoe’s even if he is by himself, since that would mark out what he can offer to others and what others can do, assuming he would meet other people. This is to say that property is a precondition of society; even if we are by ourselves, we mark out what is ours in order that, if we can, we can interact with others with equal respect to what is each our own.
This illustrates an important point. Property is not merely a precondition of society, but its purpose is the facilitation of society. Property has a social telos. Since property is intrinsic to human action and life, human action has its end in social activity, such as the development of rich and meaningful relations with other people. If we try to put it the other way, then one ironically defeats the point of coming together. Why should we come together? To acquire more? What is better about acquiring more for ourselves or others, unless it was something we valued before we came together? What’s the purpose of coming together? It must ultimately be because we acquire more than we would if we remained apart, and this not just to acquire more material goods, but intellectual, aesthetic, and social goods. I can get sustenance by myself without others, but I cannot get these important human goods without society.
Someone might object that, while this is all well and good, it seems that there are examples of propertyless societies. What of tribes? Everything in the tribe is held in common. Yes, that is the case, but I would note that holding everything “in common” is still an ownership. After all, when you have two tribes meet, each tribe recognizes what is its own. Further, there are still tasks delegated to individual members of the tribe, and this because of what that person happens to own that they can contribute, such as their own labor, their own wisdom, their own guidance, and so on.
This would ultimately explain why the degree to which society respects property is how well off that society will be. A society is ill to the degree it does not recognize what is another’s own. A people who are ready to expropriate the property of another, who are given to voicing their envy and disreputable claims against others for their productiveness, inevitably leads to a society that looks suspiciously upon those who would act to accumulate to their property by the honest means of trade and exchange. This ultimately leads to the breakdown of cooperation and the breakdown of society. If you take away respect for property, you cannot keep society in place, because there is nothing for society to be centered around. There is no reason to come together if it profits no one.
I am not the owner of myself. Either sin, death, and the devil are my master or God is my master. I’ve been bought with a price, I am not my own independent owner of myself. As such I have no rights over myself. My master does. Since I have chosen (that choice being perhaps the only thing I “own”) God as master, then I (however imperfectly) function as a steward of all that is His. One part of all that is His is this planet and all that fills it. It is His creation. As such I am a steward of anything He has given me. You spoke of working to earn the hammer. I see the hammer as a gift from my Creator, as is my ability “to work to earn it.”
Since all property is His property and I am a steward of it only, it is yes in my care, but it is not my own. Someone certainly could steal what He has entrusted to me (indeed, He commands against such actions) or I could sinfully steal that which is entrusted to another, for the Owner of all things does not wish for His stewards to steal from one another.
Switching gears… if property precedes society, then Robinson Crusoe was a fool to settle for an island. He should have claimed the continent of Asia. Or heck, the whole earth. You spoke of working to earn the hammer, but this implies someone else owned the hammer and you bought it from them. OK, who owned the iron and wood that gave that person the raw materials necessary to make the hammer? Is ownership merely the territory in which one lives? And who marks and makes those boundaries? And is that just the physical land or what’s under it? If I tunnel under your property, could that stuff underneath be my property? Is it verbal only? WIthout society and law it seems that the idea of personal property becomes absurd after a while.
You used Crusoe as an example. So lets say some business dudes came to his island and laid claim to it, since it appeared to be unihabited. Then Robinson showed up one day and said, “hey, this is my island!” “Really?” they respond, “prove it!” He has no laws, no government (he’s an anarchist after all), no legal papers to “prove” he owns the land. It comes down to his word vs. theirs. They thought it was unihabited, so they claimed it. Just has he had thought years earlier that it was unihabited, so he had claimed it. So….??? Who owns the island? Without law and society the question seems pointless to me.
As I see it Bryce the two things grow up together. If there is one, there is the other, just as in your tribal example, for though there’s no personal property, there’s tribal property. And – to go back to my first point – the tribe doesn’t even “own” it all. It belongs to their Master and Creator. They are stewards of it. Your reactions?
Well Josh, I’m speaking of property in the social sense, and this as inherent to the nature of man. Unless you want to ascribe this nature to God the Father, then I don’t think it makes sense to say that God “owns” things in the sense I’m talking about here. So I’ve got nothing to say about that. (It also seems open to abuse. “You might say this is your land, but everything is God’s, and this is why I’m expropriating it from you for my own use.”)
As to Crusoe laying claim to something, you’re just bringing up how we come to own things which aren’t previously owned. My post on the Orders of Property deals with this. In short, we come to own things by mixing what is our own (e.g. labor) with what isn’t previously anyone’s.
As to your business dudes, I don’t see what’s so problematic with just saying “Yes, they were mistaken, it was Crusoe’s island all along.” If we need government in order to say that there is such a thing as property, then you run into the problems I just elucidated in this post explaining why it’s actually, if anything, the other way around. Property is prior to society, including its institutions, such as government.
> As to your business dudes, I don’t see what’s so problematic with just saying “Yes, they were mistaken, it was Crusoe’s island all along.”
Who says this? What authority? Two competing claims to ownership. No laws exist, no government, no deeds, no titles… just word against word. (Or sure, their lawyers can each draw up deeds and titles if we want to get into a real peeing contest). But basically it comes down to word against word. So why would these businessmen suddenly say, “oh, we were mistaken, sorry Robinson Crusoe, this really is your island!” Where does this widespread morality come from? how did they learn it? if not enforced by a governmental authority, then who? or from where?
If your answer is, “their parents,” as you suggested in a previous post, that parents raise their children to be moral and respect property and so forth, OK, then what morality? whose church? or what if these are some social darwinist materialist types that raised these businessmen? their home’s morality WAS “take” and “grab” and “survival of the fittest” – what restrains them? I still don’t understand who speaks the words you suggest, “yes, they were mistaken…”
I think you’re confusing theory with actual practice. In theory, the island is Crusoe’s. In practice, his rights to that island might not actually be respected. If Crusoe could, he might hire a security agency to protect his rights to that island, or he might try and fend off the “businessmen” if he could. Inability to protect his rights doesn’t mean he doesn’t have them. If there is a government involved, historically it seems like the businessmen would’ve been given a charter by their government to “ownership of that land, and screw whoever was living there first.” That’s what the Europeans did to the Native Americans. In that case, Crusoe will have a problem, and the government is an additional problem. So why is adding government the solution, in practice?
So that someone can protect Crusoe’s property rights! And do so not just with a security team – if he can afford one – but actually thru law and deeds and titles and so forth. I still don’t see how anyone respects anyone else’s property rights in an anarchical free-for-all without some basic agreed-upon internal morality of such a society.
As for theory, yes, I understand you’re kicking theories around. Just like the playground story, but I keep coming back to the real world, ’cause thats where I work and live. Some people are moral (and probably would be so without a government over them) but a whole ton of others aren’t (and they DO have a moral/legal restraint over them – imagine if they didn’t! YIKES!). So until you present your blog posts on how law and property rights can be gauranteed and enforced in anarchyland, I will remain a skeptic of your theories.
Bismarck said “politics is the art of the possible.” Yes, it is. Theories are wonderful, but at the end of the day they’re just theories if they don’t actually translate to real life. Any practical theory must be (a) objectively clear/understandable enough for the bulk majority to buy in and (b) motivational enough to result in action. Marxism had (b) going for it in the revolutions, but failed to sustain motivation over time and in (a) and it was never really understood by much of anyone and completely crumbled. Interesting theory, Karl, but it doesn’t work in reality. Thats the brink that I stand on and gaze out and the landscape of anarchyland, Bryce, I see a lot of theory, but I don’t see a lot of examples of who’s actually living this way now – except for examples like Somalia that I bring up, but then you dismiss those. I’m still not sold that a long term anarchy is sustainable (nor do I understand how one enforces that it remain an anarchy and not wind up being some state that arises because enough people with power demand such – what’s the restraining force?)
I agree that society will need to widely respect property, otherwise things won’t work. But you can’t make that happen by adding government if society didn’t already respect property. So government is superfluous to that.
Great! Then we’re agreed on that. Super. Now I await your blog post on your proposal for how to create a widespread respect for property (and persons – with social/moral issues) in an anarchy. What is that mechanism? that authority? I await.