Property and Freedom.

• Author: MENTZEL, PETER
• Position: Review

Property and Freedom By Richard Pipes New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Pp. xvi, 328. $30.00 cloth, $15.00 paper.

Richard Pipes is best known as an important scholar of Russian and Soviet history. In Property and Freedom, he combines his mastery of Russian history with a much broader subject, the relationship between private property and liberty. Relying primarily on the histories of England and Russia, Pipes makes a compelling argument that freedom and private property are intimately linked. As he puts it, "While property in some form is possible without liberty, the contrary is inconceivable" (p. xiii). The close link between property and liberty has been noted before (as Pipes himself admits), but the connection has most often been explored by economists and philosophers rather than by historians. The real strength of Pipes's book, therefore, lies not so much in the originality of his thesis as in the force of his historical examples.

Pipes begins his investigation with a brief but useful survey of some of the common but frequently vague terms he uses in the book. The term property, he explains, has several levels of meaning, the broadest of which can "encompass everything that properly belongs to a person ... including life and liberty" (p. xv). It is this broad understanding of the term property that "provides the philosophical link between ownership and freedom" (p. xv).

Chapters 1 and 2 are entitled "The Idea of Property" and "The Institution of Property." The first is a kind of intellectual history of the development of the concept of property, and the second is a historical narrative of how the institution of property developed. Both chapters provide clear, concise reviews of the main points of each history, including well-chosen examples from the historical and anthropological literature. In the explication, Pipes employs a Lockean interpretation of the origin and relationship between property, the state, and society. The development of property, for example, preceded the state, which exists as the guarantor of private-property rights and hence (in a view bound to upset anarchists and many libertarians) the guarantor of individual liberty (p. 117).

Chapters 3 and 4 illustrate different ways in which two specific states, England and Russia, actually developed historically. These case studies are the strongest part of the book. Pipes marshals an impressive battery of evidence to demonstrate how in England the importance of private...