Commodity and Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776-1970.

• Author: ZYWICKI, TODD J.
• Position: Review

Commodity and Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776-1970 By Gregory S. Alexander Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Pp 486. $39.95 cloth.

At the outset of his book Commodity and Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776-1970, Gregory S. Alexander defines the goal of the work: "The aim of this book is to correct a widely shared misconception about the historical meaning and role of property in American law" (p. 1). In particular, Alexander wants to debunk the standard view that property law in America is dominated by a vision of "property as commodity" and to establish a long-running and continuing "dialectic" between this view and an alternative view of "property as propriety." If this is his goal, the book fails miserably.

Alexander bemoans that "for too long now, legal scholars, judges, historians, and political theorists have tended to accept uncritically the claim that there has been a single tradition of property throughout American history" (p. 1). This dominant and "mistaken" view understands property as an economic and market commodity that enables individuals to satisfy their "own private agendas and satisfy their own preferences, free from governmental coercion or other forms of external interference. Property, according to this understanding, is the foundation for the categorical separation of the realms of the private and public, individual and collectivity, the market and the polity" (p. 1).

In contrast to this "property as commodity" tradition, Alexander argues for a competing view of property in the American legal tradition that he labels "property as propriety." "The basic argument of this book," he writes, "is that this commodity theory of property is only half right. Property-as-commodity is one-half of a dialectic that American legal writing has continuously expressed from the nation's beginning to the recent past. The other half of the dialectic is a conception ... that I will call `property as propriety'" (p. 1). Under the latter view, "property is the material foundation for creating and maintaining the proper social order, the private basis for the public good" (p. 1). And although the understanding of the "public good" has changed over time, all of these "property as propriety" views "share ... a commitment to the basic idea that the core purpose of property is not to satisfy individual preferences or to increase wealth but to fulfill some...