Early Modern Conceptions of Property.

• Author: Fender, Ann Harper

The preface to this volume explains that its twenty-six essays were given as papers during a three year research project of the Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies and the Clark Library at the University of California, Los Angeles. Most of the essays stem from larger research projects. The studies consider social, legal, political, and cultural developments in England, with a few essays about France, a section on the British colonies, and an outlier essay on colonial Paraguay. Although the topic of the volume and of the research project and series with which it is associated are pertinent to economists, few of the essays have analytical frameworks sympathetic to an economist's approach. For example, Margaret Somers's essay concludes that the challenge to the "economistic fallacy" must reject the notion that the state, culture and ideas are driven by the logic of the economy and must ". . . challenge the idea that there can exist a 'logic' of the economy that is not itself institutionally and culturally constituted" [p. 83]. Despite the tone, the sometimes alien approach taken by the authors gives an alternate perspective for economists that makes for interesting, if not necessarily comfortable, reading.

In their useful introduction the editors summarize what follows and attempt connections among the essays with the overarching theme of property. They divide the essays into seven parts: property and political theory, property and legal ideology, property and the family, property and the construction of a self, literary property, reification (the invention and institution of special forms of property), and the property of empire.

Several economic themes emerge from these essays suggesting other ways of dividing them. One division centers on property and poverty. The early theoretical essays compare the rights of the individual to property and the source of those rights with the obligation of the community to care for the impoverished and the interdependence of all individuals in society. Donna Andrews's essay on female charity in the eighteenth century as reflecting both power and responsibility, a kind of rent upon property, links property to poverty; it also hints at the development of societies for charitable giving that seek to distinguish the deserving from the undeserving poor.

Another implicit theme that leaps out to the economist is the emerging importance of information and human capital. Margaret Somers examines...