Abstract

Property institutions are a constitutive part of our social reality. The nature of ownership conventions also shapes and defines our relations to other societies and to the natural world. Philosophical reflections on property often attempt to explain how our property institutions can or should enable us to achieve valued goals, such as the goal of maximizing the ability of individuals to satisfy their preferences. Many philosophers assume that the normative conclusions of property theory are universally valid, that their premises are universal, not particular or regime specific. I argue that this assumption is mistaken. Through a critical reabstraction of property I find that the meaning and nature of property institutions and modalities of ownership are internally related to the property regime of the society in which they are found. Liberal philosophical justifications of private property are based on values and intuitions that are created and understood within the context of private property-based societies. I attempt to illustrate this through an analysis of the relationship between freedom and property. I also argue that our relations to the natural world, which are often assumed to be only mediated by property, are in fact determined and limited by the "nature" of our property regime. As a result of the expansion of private property regimes, the ownership conventions of many native peoples have been and continue to be overlooked and/or destroyed. If my hypothesis is correct that the normative conclusions of property theory are not universally valid, then property theory can never be used to justify the imposition of Western-style ownership conventions onto native societies. Moreover, liberal property theory cannot provide an adequate philosophical base for resolving environmental controversies. I conclude by suggesting that property theory should be guided by the knowledge that liberal philosophical analysis and justification of private property is regime-based. Instead of seeking continually the "right" philosophical fine-tunings within this regime, we should create broader perspectives on it, by investigating the phenomenology and genealogy of property