Property

Ancient Greek (Peripatetic)

Against Plato's communism of the guardians, Aristotle defended private ownership joined to common use: what is held privately is better cared for and gives scope for the virtues of generosity and friendship. Property should be private in possession but common in enjoyment, moderate in extent, and directed to the good life rather than boundless accumulation. He condemned unnatural chrematistics — the pursuit of money for its own sake — as a corruption of household management.

Politics, Books I–II.

Scholasticism

By natural law all things are ordered to the common good, but human reason rightly adds private ownership as a device that promotes order, industry, and peace. Yet ownership concerns management and disposition, not use: in their use, external goods remain in a sense common, so the owner is a steward bound to share superfluous wealth. In dire necessity, taking another's goods to survive is not theft, for the deeper claim of common destination reasserts itself.

Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 66.

Classical liberalism

Every man has a property in his own person, so when he mixes his labour with the unowned things of nature he makes them his own. This appropriation is legitimate so long as it leaves 'enough, and as good' for others and nothing spoils — provisos that the invention of money, by consent, allows to be transcended. Property thus predates and limits government, whose central purpose is precisely the preservation of property in the wide sense of 'lives, liberties and estates'.

Second Treatise of Government (1689), ch. 5.

Empiricism

Property is not a natural quality of objects but an 'artificial' convention that arises because goods are scarce and human generosity limited. The stability of possession, its transfer by consent, and the keeping of promises are rules that everyone comes to see as serving the general interest, and justice consists in observing them. Their authority rests on utility and habit, not on any prior natural right; particular allocations are settled by convention, occupation, and prescription.

A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Book III.

Social contract / republicanism

'The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.' Private property is the origin of inequality, dependence, and the ills of civilization, born of usurpation dressed up as right. Yet within a legitimate state property becomes a genuine civil right, redefined and limited by the general will, and gross extremes of wealth and poverty must be prevented.

Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755); The Social Contract.

English common law

Property is 'that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.' Blackstone traced ownership from occupancy of the earth's commons to the settled system of English land law, treating it as the great bulwark of liberty. His systematic account of estates, tenures, and conveyance fixed the classic picture of property as near-absolute individual dominion.

Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69), Book II.

German idealism

Property is the first embodiment of freedom: the person makes his abstract will actual by placing it into an external thing, and ownership is thus essential to becoming a self. Because it is grounded in personality, property is rightly private, and its recognition by others through contract is a step toward ethical life. This 'personality theory' justifies ownership not by labour or utility but by the free will's need to give itself external, recognized existence.

Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), §§ 41–71.

Anarchism / mutualism

'Property is theft!' — the income drawn by an owner merely from owning, such as rent and interest, is an unearned levy on the labour of others. Yet Proudhon distinguished this exploitative property from mere possession, the honest use of what one works, which he defended as a guarantee of independence. His mutualism sought a society of free producers exchanging goods at cost through people's banks and free credit, abolishing the parasitic power of capital without abolishing possession.

What Is Property? (1840).

Historical materialism

Modern private property is not eternal but a historical form: bourgeois property rests on the expropriation of the many by the few and on the wage labourer's separation from the means of production. Marx targeted not personal possessions but private ownership of the means of production, which lets capital appropriate the surplus value created by workers. Communism's aim is to abolish this class property, so that the conditions of production become social, ending exploitation and alienation.

The Communist Manifesto (1848); Capital, vol. I (1867).

Liberal utilitarianism

The principle of private property is that people should enjoy the fruits of their own labour and abstinence, but this does not sanction the vast inheritances and land monopolies of existing societies. Mill sharply separated the laws of production, which are fixed, from the distribution of wealth, which is a matter of human institutions open to reform. He favoured limiting inheritance, taxing the unearned 'increment' of rising land values, and encouraging worker cooperatives to reconcile property with justice.

Principles of Political Economy (1848), Book II.

Political economy / Georgism

People rightly own what they produce, but land, which no one made, belongs in common to all — so the rent of land, not labour or capital, is the proper fund for public revenue. As society advances, landowners reap an unearned windfall from rising land values, and this monopoly is the deep cause of poverty amid progress. A 'single tax' capturing the full rental value of land would end speculation, free labour and capital from other taxes, and reconcile private industry with common right in the earth.

Progress and Poverty (1879).

Libertarianism

Holdings are just if they arise from just acquisition and just transfer; distribution is a matter of history, not of fitting any preferred pattern. Redistributive taxation to achieve equality or need violates rights, for 'taxation of earnings from labour is on a par with forced labour'. Nozick reworked the Lockean proviso to require only that appropriation not worsen others' position, defending a strongly protected right to property against patterned theories of justice.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974).