On the Blinding Clarity of Property Rights: Seven Fragments of Reductionism in the Theory of Property
Keywords:
property, economic development, exclusion, rightsAbstract
This paper presents a historical commentary on arguments in theory of property that reinforce the vision of strong and clear property rights dominant in developmental policy today. Building upon the article from
Duncan Kennedy in 2013 that analyses this vision, this paper tackles additional issues in emergence of the vision. In doing that the paper relies on broadly genealogical approach to focus on a binary opposition that
has been present in the theory of property almost since its historical establishment in Western thought. This methodology allows us to conceptualize the problem in more substantive terms than Kennedy does
and show how radical shift is necessary to overcome the problems that the vision entails.
References
Alchian, Armen A. (1965), “Some Economics of Property Rights”, Il Politico 30: 816–829.
Alchian, Armen A. (1977), “Some Implications of Recognition of Property Right Transaction Costs”, in Karl Brunner (ed.), Economics and Social Institutions: Insights from the Conferences on Analysis and Ideology, Boston, MA: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 234–255.
Alchian, Armen A., and Harold Demsetz (1973), “The Property Rights Paradigm”, Journal of Economic History 33 (1): 16–27.
Allen, Douglas W. (2014), “The Coase Theorem: Coherent, Logical, and Not Disproved”, Journal of Institutional Economics: 1–12.
Allen, Douglas W. (2015), “On Hodgson on Property Rights”, Journal of Institutional Economics 11 (4): 711–17.
Allen, Douglas W., and Dean Lueck (1995), “Risk Preferences and the Economics of Contracts”, The American Economic Review 85 (2): 447–451.
Arruñada, Benito (2012), “Property as an Economic Concept: Reconciling Legal and Economic Conceptions of Property Rights in a Coasean Framework”, International Review of Economics 59 (2): 121–44.
Arruñada, Benito (2017), “Property as Sequential Exchange: The Forgotten Limits of Private Contract”, Journal of Institutional Economics 13: 753–783.
Arruñada, Benito (forthcoming), “The Institutions of Roman Markets”, Roman Law and Economics 2.
Barzel, Yoram (1997), Economic Analysis of Property Rights, Cambridge University Press.
Barzel, Yoram (2015), “What are ‘Property Rights’ and Why do they Matter? A Comment on Hodgson’s Article”, Journal of Institutional Economics 11 (4): 719–23.
Berlin, Isaiah (1969), “Two Concepts of Liberty”, in Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, London: Oxford University Press.
Benkler, Yochai (2002), “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and” The Nature of the Firm””, The Yale Law Journal: 369–446.
Blackstone, William (1830), Commentaries on the Laws of England, Volume 2, Collins & Hannay.
Boettke, Peter J. (1998), “Economic Calculation: The Austrian Contribution to Political Economy”.
Bromley, Daniel W. (1986), “Closing Comments at the Conference on Common Property Resource Management”, Proceedings of the Conference on Common Property Resource Management, Washington, DC: National Academies Press, pp. 591–598.
Buchanan, James M., and Gordon Tullock (1962), The Calculus of Consent, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Calabresi, Guido (1961), “Some Thoughts on Risk Distribution and the Law of Torts”, The Yale Law Journal 70 (4): 499–553.
Calabresi, Guido, and A. Douglas Melamed (1972), “Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral”, Harvard Law Review: 1089–1128.
Capra, Fritjof, and Ugo Mattei (2015), The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community, Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Coase, Ronald Harry (1937), “The Nature of the Firm”, Economica 4: 386–405.
Coase, Ronald Harry (2013), “The Problem of Social Cost”, The Journal of Law and Economics 56 (4): 837–877.
Commons, John R. (1924), Legal Foundations of Capitalism, New York: Macmillan.
Cole, Daniel H., and Peter Z. Grossman (2002), “The Meaning of Property Rights: Law versus Economics?”, Land Economics 78 (3): 317–330.
Cole, Daniel H. (2015), “‘Economic Property Rights’ as ‘Nonsense upon Stilts’: A Comment on Hodgson”, Journal of Institutional Economics 11 (4): 725–730.
Cooter, Robert, and Thomas Ulen (2012), Law & Economics, Addison-Wesley.
Deakin, Simon, David Gindis, Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Kainan Huang, and Katharina Pistor (2017), “Legal Institutionalism: Capitalism and the Constitutive Role of Law”, Journal of Comparative Economics 45 (1): 188–200.
Demsetz, Harold (1974), “Toward a Theory of Property Rights”, in Chennat Gopalakrishnan (ed.), Classic Papers in Natural Resource Economics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 163–177.
Derrida, Jacques (1976), Of Grammatology, Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
De Soto, Hernando (2000), The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, Basic Civitas Books.
Faysse, Nicolas (2005), “Coping with the Tragedy of the Commons: Game Structure and Design of Rules”, Journal of Economic Surveys 19 (2): 239–267.
Fitzpatrick, Daniel (2006), “Evolution and Chaos in Property Rights Systems: The Third World Tragedy of Contested Access”, The Yale Law Journal: 996–1048.
Furubotn, Eirik G., and Svetozar Pejovich (1972), “Property Rights and Economic Theory: A Survey of Recent Literature”, Journal of Economic Literature 10 (4): 1137–62.
Grotius, Hugo, and Archibald Colin Campbell (1901), The rights of war and peace.
Hardin, Garrett (2009), “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research 1 (3): 243–253.
Heyne, Paul (2000), The Economic Way of Thinking, 9th ed., Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Hodgson, Geoffrey M. (2014), “The Evolution of Morality and the End of Economic Man”, Journal of Evolutionary Economics 24 (1): 83–106.
Hodgson, Geoffrey M. (2015a), “Much of the ‘Economics of Property Rights’ Devalues Property and Legal Rights”, Journal of Institutional Economics 11 (4): 683–709.
Hodgson, Geoffrey M. (2015b), “What Humpty Dumpty Might Have Said About Property Rights – And the Need to Put Them Back Together Again: A Response to Critics”, Journal of Institutional Economics 11 (4): 731–747.
Hodgson, Geoffrey M. (2016), “Some Limitations of the Socialist Calculation Debate”, Schmollers Jahrbuch 136: 33–58.
Hohfeld, Wesley Newcomb (1913), “Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning”, The Yale Law Journal 23 (1): 16–59.
Hohfeld, Wesley Newcomb (1917), “Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning”, The Yale Law Journal 26 (8): 710–770.
Honoré, Antony M. (1961), “Ownership”, in Anthony G. Guest (ed.), Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 107–47. Reprinted in the Journal of Institutional Economics 9 (2): 227–55.
Kennedy, Duncan (1998), “Law and Economics from the Perspective of Critical Legal Studies”, in Peter Newman (ed.), The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law, Macmillan Reference Limited, p. 465.
Kennedy, Duncan (2011), “Some Caution about Property Rights as a Recipe for Economic Development”, Accounting, Economics, and Law 1 (1).
Laffont, Jean-Jacques (1987), “Externalities”, in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, London: Macmillan.
Lange, Oskar (1936), “On the Economic Theory of Socialism: Part One”, The Review of Economic Studies 4 (1): 53–71.
Lange, Oskar (1937), “On the Economic Theory of Socialism: Part Two”, The Review of Economic Studies 4 (2): 123–142.
Locke, John (2014), Second Treatise of Government: An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government, John Wiley & Sons.
Macsey, Richard, and Eugenio Donato (eds.) (1970), The Languages of Criticism and The Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Merrill, Thomas W., and Henry E. Smith (2000), “Optimal Standardization in the Law of Property: The Numerus Clausus Principle”, The Yale Law Journal 110 (1): 1–70.
Merrill, Thomas W., and Henry E. Smith (2001a), “The Property/Contract Interface”, Columbia Law Review: 773–852.
Merrill, Thomas W., and Henry E. Smith (2001b), “What Happened to Property in Law and Economics?”, The Yale Law Journal 111 (2): 357–398.
Ostrom, Elinor (1990), Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ostrom, Elinor (1999), “Coping with Tragedies of the Commons”, Annual Review of Political Science 2 (1): 493–535.
Ostrom, Elinor (2010), “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems”, Transnational Corporations Review 2 (2): 1–12.
di Robilant, Anna, and Talha Syed (forthcoming), “Hohfeld in Europe and Beyond: The Fundamental Building Blocks of Social Relations Regarding Resources”, in Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Ted Sichelman and Henry E. Smith (eds.), The Legacy of Wesley Hohfeld: Edited Major Works, Select Personal Papers, and Original Commentaries, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rose, Carol M. (1998), “Canons of Property Talk, or, Blackstone’s Anxiety”, The Yale Law Journal 108 (3): 601–632.
Royle, Nicholas (2000), Deconstructions: A User’s Guide, Palgrave Macmillan.
Smith, Adam (1827), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, No. 25202, Printed at the University Press for T. Nelson and P. Brown.
Smith, Adam (1896), Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms: Delivered in the University of Glasgow, Clarendon Press.
Smith, Henry E. (2002), “Exclusion Versus Governance: Two Strategies for Delineating Property Rights”, The Journal of Legal Studies 31 (S2): S453–S487.
Stigler, George J. (1987), Theory of Price, 4th Edition, Prentice Hall College Div.
Von Hayek, Friedrich A. (1935), “The Present State of the Debate”, in Friedrich A. von Hayek (ed.), Collectivist economic planning, pp. 201–243.
Von Hayek, Friedrich A. (1937), The Nature and History of the Problem, Routledge.
Von Hayek, Friedrich A. (1944), The Road to Serfdom, London: George Routledge.
Von Hayek, Friedrich A. (1948), Individualism and Economic Order, London, Chicago: George Routledge, University of Chicago Press.
Von Mises, Ludwig (1949), Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, London, New Haven: William Hodge, Yale University Press.
Von Mises, Ludwig (2015), Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, Lulu Press, Inc.
Von Pufendorf, Samuel Freiherr (1991), On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law, Cambridge University Press.
Internet sources:
“Doing Business”, (internet) available at: http://www.doingbusiness.org/reports/ (viewed October 20, 2017).
Hayek, Friedrich August, “The Importance of Private Property”, (internet) available at: http://www.slobodaiprosperitet.tv/en/node/1225 (viewed October 20, 2017).
“International Property Rights Index”, (internet) available at:
https://internationalpropertyrightsindex.org/full-report (viewed October 20, 2017).
Alchian, Armen A. (1977), “Some Implications of Recognition of Property Right Transaction Costs”, in Karl Brunner (ed.), Economics and Social Institutions: Insights from the Conferences on Analysis and Ideology, Boston, MA: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 234–255.
Alchian, Armen A., and Harold Demsetz (1973), “The Property Rights Paradigm”, Journal of Economic History 33 (1): 16–27.
Allen, Douglas W. (2014), “The Coase Theorem: Coherent, Logical, and Not Disproved”, Journal of Institutional Economics: 1–12.
Allen, Douglas W. (2015), “On Hodgson on Property Rights”, Journal of Institutional Economics 11 (4): 711–17.
Allen, Douglas W., and Dean Lueck (1995), “Risk Preferences and the Economics of Contracts”, The American Economic Review 85 (2): 447–451.
Arruñada, Benito (2012), “Property as an Economic Concept: Reconciling Legal and Economic Conceptions of Property Rights in a Coasean Framework”, International Review of Economics 59 (2): 121–44.
Arruñada, Benito (2017), “Property as Sequential Exchange: The Forgotten Limits of Private Contract”, Journal of Institutional Economics 13: 753–783.
Arruñada, Benito (forthcoming), “The Institutions of Roman Markets”, Roman Law and Economics 2.
Barzel, Yoram (1997), Economic Analysis of Property Rights, Cambridge University Press.
Barzel, Yoram (2015), “What are ‘Property Rights’ and Why do they Matter? A Comment on Hodgson’s Article”, Journal of Institutional Economics 11 (4): 719–23.
Berlin, Isaiah (1969), “Two Concepts of Liberty”, in Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, London: Oxford University Press.
Benkler, Yochai (2002), “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and” The Nature of the Firm””, The Yale Law Journal: 369–446.
Blackstone, William (1830), Commentaries on the Laws of England, Volume 2, Collins & Hannay.
Boettke, Peter J. (1998), “Economic Calculation: The Austrian Contribution to Political Economy”.
Bromley, Daniel W. (1986), “Closing Comments at the Conference on Common Property Resource Management”, Proceedings of the Conference on Common Property Resource Management, Washington, DC: National Academies Press, pp. 591–598.
Buchanan, James M., and Gordon Tullock (1962), The Calculus of Consent, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Calabresi, Guido (1961), “Some Thoughts on Risk Distribution and the Law of Torts”, The Yale Law Journal 70 (4): 499–553.
Calabresi, Guido, and A. Douglas Melamed (1972), “Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral”, Harvard Law Review: 1089–1128.
Capra, Fritjof, and Ugo Mattei (2015), The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community, Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Coase, Ronald Harry (1937), “The Nature of the Firm”, Economica 4: 386–405.
Coase, Ronald Harry (2013), “The Problem of Social Cost”, The Journal of Law and Economics 56 (4): 837–877.
Commons, John R. (1924), Legal Foundations of Capitalism, New York: Macmillan.
Cole, Daniel H., and Peter Z. Grossman (2002), “The Meaning of Property Rights: Law versus Economics?”, Land Economics 78 (3): 317–330.
Cole, Daniel H. (2015), “‘Economic Property Rights’ as ‘Nonsense upon Stilts’: A Comment on Hodgson”, Journal of Institutional Economics 11 (4): 725–730.
Cooter, Robert, and Thomas Ulen (2012), Law & Economics, Addison-Wesley.
Deakin, Simon, David Gindis, Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Kainan Huang, and Katharina Pistor (2017), “Legal Institutionalism: Capitalism and the Constitutive Role of Law”, Journal of Comparative Economics 45 (1): 188–200.
Demsetz, Harold (1974), “Toward a Theory of Property Rights”, in Chennat Gopalakrishnan (ed.), Classic Papers in Natural Resource Economics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 163–177.
Derrida, Jacques (1976), Of Grammatology, Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
De Soto, Hernando (2000), The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, Basic Civitas Books.
Faysse, Nicolas (2005), “Coping with the Tragedy of the Commons: Game Structure and Design of Rules”, Journal of Economic Surveys 19 (2): 239–267.
Fitzpatrick, Daniel (2006), “Evolution and Chaos in Property Rights Systems: The Third World Tragedy of Contested Access”, The Yale Law Journal: 996–1048.
Furubotn, Eirik G., and Svetozar Pejovich (1972), “Property Rights and Economic Theory: A Survey of Recent Literature”, Journal of Economic Literature 10 (4): 1137–62.
Grotius, Hugo, and Archibald Colin Campbell (1901), The rights of war and peace.
Hardin, Garrett (2009), “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research 1 (3): 243–253.
Heyne, Paul (2000), The Economic Way of Thinking, 9th ed., Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Hodgson, Geoffrey M. (2014), “The Evolution of Morality and the End of Economic Man”, Journal of Evolutionary Economics 24 (1): 83–106.
Hodgson, Geoffrey M. (2015a), “Much of the ‘Economics of Property Rights’ Devalues Property and Legal Rights”, Journal of Institutional Economics 11 (4): 683–709.
Hodgson, Geoffrey M. (2015b), “What Humpty Dumpty Might Have Said About Property Rights – And the Need to Put Them Back Together Again: A Response to Critics”, Journal of Institutional Economics 11 (4): 731–747.
Hodgson, Geoffrey M. (2016), “Some Limitations of the Socialist Calculation Debate”, Schmollers Jahrbuch 136: 33–58.
Hohfeld, Wesley Newcomb (1913), “Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning”, The Yale Law Journal 23 (1): 16–59.
Hohfeld, Wesley Newcomb (1917), “Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning”, The Yale Law Journal 26 (8): 710–770.
Honoré, Antony M. (1961), “Ownership”, in Anthony G. Guest (ed.), Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 107–47. Reprinted in the Journal of Institutional Economics 9 (2): 227–55.
Kennedy, Duncan (1998), “Law and Economics from the Perspective of Critical Legal Studies”, in Peter Newman (ed.), The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law, Macmillan Reference Limited, p. 465.
Kennedy, Duncan (2011), “Some Caution about Property Rights as a Recipe for Economic Development”, Accounting, Economics, and Law 1 (1).
Laffont, Jean-Jacques (1987), “Externalities”, in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, London: Macmillan.
Lange, Oskar (1936), “On the Economic Theory of Socialism: Part One”, The Review of Economic Studies 4 (1): 53–71.
Lange, Oskar (1937), “On the Economic Theory of Socialism: Part Two”, The Review of Economic Studies 4 (2): 123–142.
Locke, John (2014), Second Treatise of Government: An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government, John Wiley & Sons.
Macsey, Richard, and Eugenio Donato (eds.) (1970), The Languages of Criticism and The Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Merrill, Thomas W., and Henry E. Smith (2000), “Optimal Standardization in the Law of Property: The Numerus Clausus Principle”, The Yale Law Journal 110 (1): 1–70.
Merrill, Thomas W., and Henry E. Smith (2001a), “The Property/Contract Interface”, Columbia Law Review: 773–852.
Merrill, Thomas W., and Henry E. Smith (2001b), “What Happened to Property in Law and Economics?”, The Yale Law Journal 111 (2): 357–398.
Ostrom, Elinor (1990), Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ostrom, Elinor (1999), “Coping with Tragedies of the Commons”, Annual Review of Political Science 2 (1): 493–535.
Ostrom, Elinor (2010), “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems”, Transnational Corporations Review 2 (2): 1–12.
di Robilant, Anna, and Talha Syed (forthcoming), “Hohfeld in Europe and Beyond: The Fundamental Building Blocks of Social Relations Regarding Resources”, in Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Ted Sichelman and Henry E. Smith (eds.), The Legacy of Wesley Hohfeld: Edited Major Works, Select Personal Papers, and Original Commentaries, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rose, Carol M. (1998), “Canons of Property Talk, or, Blackstone’s Anxiety”, The Yale Law Journal 108 (3): 601–632.
Royle, Nicholas (2000), Deconstructions: A User’s Guide, Palgrave Macmillan.
Smith, Adam (1827), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, No. 25202, Printed at the University Press for T. Nelson and P. Brown.
Smith, Adam (1896), Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms: Delivered in the University of Glasgow, Clarendon Press.
Smith, Henry E. (2002), “Exclusion Versus Governance: Two Strategies for Delineating Property Rights”, The Journal of Legal Studies 31 (S2): S453–S487.
Stigler, George J. (1987), Theory of Price, 4th Edition, Prentice Hall College Div.
Von Hayek, Friedrich A. (1935), “The Present State of the Debate”, in Friedrich A. von Hayek (ed.), Collectivist economic planning, pp. 201–243.
Von Hayek, Friedrich A. (1937), The Nature and History of the Problem, Routledge.
Von Hayek, Friedrich A. (1944), The Road to Serfdom, London: George Routledge.
Von Hayek, Friedrich A. (1948), Individualism and Economic Order, London, Chicago: George Routledge, University of Chicago Press.
Von Mises, Ludwig (1949), Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, London, New Haven: William Hodge, Yale University Press.
Von Mises, Ludwig (2015), Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, Lulu Press, Inc.
Von Pufendorf, Samuel Freiherr (1991), On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law, Cambridge University Press.
Internet sources:
“Doing Business”, (internet) available at: http://www.doingbusiness.org/reports/ (viewed October 20, 2017).
Hayek, Friedrich August, “The Importance of Private Property”, (internet) available at: http://www.slobodaiprosperitet.tv/en/node/1225 (viewed October 20, 2017).
“International Property Rights Index”, (internet) available at:
https://internationalpropertyrightsindex.org/full-report (viewed October 20, 2017).
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Published
27.06.2018
How to Cite
Stojanović, A. (2018) “On the Blinding Clarity of Property Rights: Seven Fragments of Reductionism in the Theory of Property”, Filozofija i društvo/Philosophy and Society. Belgrade, Serbia, 29(2), pp. 219–238. Available at: https://journal.ifdt.bg.ac.rs/fid/article/view/657 (Accessed: 13 April 2025).
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THE COMMONS
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Articles published in Philosophy and Society are open-access in accordance with the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.
