Private Property in the Context of Community

• Published date: 01 January 2018
• Date: 01 January 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12214
• Author: Matthew Hoffman

Private Property in the Context

of Community

By MATTHEW HOFFMAN*

ABSTRACT. The dominant philosophy of private land ownership—

that private property exists for the benefit of its owner and that use

and ownership should be determined by market forces—is not the

only philosophy in the American tradition. Classical republicanism’s

proprietarian perspective was equally in favor of private property,

but held that private property exists for the benefit of society. This

article begins by presenting the proprietarian view of private

property rights, drawing on the legal scholarship where this

perspective has been revived. Next, I use the case of contemporary

land reform in Scotland to exemplify the rationale for this

perspective. Lastly, I attempt to import the lessons of Scottish land

reformers without importing their model, instead considering ways in

which private land ownership might be embedded in non-market

institutions in the United States.

Introduction

In the introduction to A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold (1949:

viii) says that “we abuse land because we regard it as a commodity.”

We know what a commodity is—something that is bought and sold

in the marketplace and valued in terms of the price it fetches there—

but what is wrong with seeing land as a commodity? And what else

might it be? Many Americans who, like Aldo Leopold, are concerned

about the stewardship of land, are also strong believers in private

*Assistant Professor, Dept. of Sociology and Economics, University of Southern

Maine. Guest Researcher, RURALIS—Institute for Rural and Regional Research, Norwe-

gian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. Education: MS and

PhD in Rural Sociology from Cornell University. Current research focus: property

rights, natural resource governance, and institutions for collaborative decision making

in landscapes fragmented by private property. Email: matthew.hoffman@fulbrightmail.

org

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 77, No. 1 (January, 2018).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12214

V

C2018 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

property. Wendell Berry (1995: 49), for example, asserts that land

“should be divided into small parcels among a lot of small owners.”

But does being private property necessarily mean that land needs to

be a commodity?

There are many kinds of property other than public and private, and

even the distinction between these two categories can be blurry (Geisler

2000). Private property itself can also take different forms, reflecting dif-

ferent ideas about what the institution of property is for. While private

property was central to the classical republicanism of the American rev-

olutionary period, the reasons for its importance were very different

than those that undergird the commodity perspective tod ay.

The “proprietarian” perspective of classical republicanism, in which

property rights are expected to enable good citizenship, has experi-

enced a revival in American jurisprudence, raising the question of how

it might be enacted in practice (Simon 1991; Rose 1994; Alexander

1997, 1998; Singer 2000a; Freyfogle 2003, 2011; Blomley 2005). The

institutional context in which the vision of property as a commodity

finds its fullest expression is the free market. In what institutional con-

text would the proprietarian visionbe expressed?

This article begins by first summarizing criticism of the commodity

perspective of land ownership and then presenting the proprietarian

perspective. Next, I use the example of Scotland’s recent land reform

to illustrate the community development rationale for decommodify-

ing land, as well as one institutional mechanism for doing so. Lastly,

I open the question of how the proprietarian model of private prop-

erty might be enacted in the United States today.

The Commodity View of Property

“It’s my property, and I can do whatever I want with it!” This popular

view of ownership has its roots in a conception of property that tends

to assume one easily identifiable person having complete control over

a well-defined material sphere. While many variations on this situation

are readily accepted, this is still the ideal to which we default in the

absence of any further specification. Such a person is said to have title,

and the establishment or identification of clear title is thought to be a

useful way of organizing and adjudicating conflict regarding property.

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology126