Property and Ownership

2017

In the Christian traditions private property rights are seen from a needs rather than a rights oriented perspective. The first part of the comment shows this starting with the biblical texts and their philosophical reformulation and adaptation in Thomas Aquinas, whose texts are at the basis of Catholic Social Teaching (CST). In the second part the positions of CST are presented which have been formulated as an answer to modern social philosophy and the doctrines of both liberal Capitalism and Marxism. Finally the position of Prof. Weissels paper is questioned that the solution may lie in a Cost-Benefit-Analysis alone, affirming that a more profound philosophical criticism of the concept of private property rights in liberal thinking is necessary, which takes into account that man is not only a homo oeconomicus, but also a homo socialis and religiosus and that justice in property distribution cannot be achieved by the mechanism of the market alone. Prof. Weissel gave in his paper a d...

2005

Interest in customary title has raised awareness of the cultural dependence of property and its relationship to spirituality. Western culture has a historical connection with Christian spirituality, yet its property institution is seldom related to it. Property is found within Christian thought from the very beginning of the Old Testament and shares several important commonalities with customary peoples. The notion of property is evident in the gospels along with repeated comments on the correct application of riches. Early Christianity can be viewed as a development of the Old Testament property institution consistent with other aspects of Christian moral thought. Changes in the institution of property through the Christian era can be seen to parallel changes in Christian thought eventually leading to present day property. Overall, property can be linked to the spiritual roots of Western culture in a manner that has the capacity to inform the development of dialogue with customary ...

This paper considers the theological and philosophical basis for private property (and the ethics of why and how it should exist and be used) in Scripture, Greek philosophy, medieval theology, and the thought of John Locke. Locke is specifically argued to be more of a Neo-medieval thinker than the modern figure he is usually portrayed as.

Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought (ed. Michael Gibbons), 2014

This article provides a concise introduction and brief guide to relevant sources on the concept of property in the history of political thought. The article traces continuities and discontinuities in political thinking on property since antiquity, encompassing classical, Christian, early modern, Enlightenment, Marxist, and anarchist thought. Special emphasis is given to the debates on the changing conceptions and normative valences of property at the interface between classical-Christian moral economies and modern-secular commercial economies.

I have recorded my thoughts in two major sections. The first section includes my thoughts on three minor issues that need to be considered. The second section includes two major issues without which we can no longer claim to be the Uniting Church. These issues are indigenous Australians and culturally diverse Australians. The Uniting Church since 1985 claims to be a multicultural church and to have a covenant with indigenous Australians. By ignoring the traditions and theologies of these people who constitute the majority of the Uniting Church on the pews but a minority in decision making bodies, we are ignoring the identity of the Uniting Church. Although in this section I have some suggestions, the most important issue is consulting with these people and empowering them to talk for themselves. We do not have the right to talk on behalf of anyone. So, I will not talk on behalf of anyone, but maintain that proper consultation processes be put into place to hear from these people.

The series at hand is a product of the German Research Foundation-sponsored Collaborative Research Centre TRR 294, "Structural Change of Property," based primarily at the Universities of Jena and Erfurt. This series is dedicated to the systematic, interdisciplinary study of the topics outlined above and features outstanding scholarly works on the past, present, and future of property. 6 Cf. Herrmann-Pillath 2023, 22: "Feudal land law is only one example for the universal phenomenon that possession of land was never strictly individualized before the emergence of capitalist property." 7 For Classical antiquity, and only in some specific cases for Late antiquity, the abbreviations of ancient authors and their works follow the fourth edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary, edited by Hornblower-Spawforth-Eidinow 2012. 8 For antiquity, see, for instance, Gai. Inst. 2.2-3, 5-6, 9. For modern times, the scholarly debate is extensive, so we will only mention a few important scholars who have evaluated earlier ideas and advanced the 'state of the art', such as Ramon 2016/2017; Lanfranchi 2017; Santi 2004. was modelled on the basis of it. While a res mancipi-namely land, just like enslaved people, cattle, and rights such as those of way, waterways, etc.-were not for sale or purchase, the mancipatio also made it possible to buy and sell, and through its model being adapted for the testamentum per aes et libram also to deviate such 'goods' from heirs. In the Jewish tradition, other workarounds existed, or older traditions were ignored. For the further development of the notion of property from divine ownership through economic property to possession, individual possession in particular, with a growing understanding of the full right over what is being possessed, this volume traces the first re-conceptualizations of ownership towards property and possession within Christian traditions from the second to the fourth centuries. It was within Christian philosophical and economically powerful circles that a full notion of human ownership of land, hence of landed property, was created. This was based on the theological construct of heritage and testament: As the divine owner had endowed all that he owned to the saving Messiah, Christ, his Son, and as this Son had made the 'sons of God' his heirs, humans were no longer lent that which belonged to the divine, but as God's heirs they were entitled to claim full ownership, property and possession of the land that was given to them. As a result, the Christian Emperor Justinian in the sixth century removed the older Roman workaround constructs and replaced them with the modern concepts of private legal procedures for selling and buying land. Land became a commodity, no longer only the basis for its owners belonging, but also ready to serve as transferable property and for individual's possession. Still, as the discussions of this period show, voices insisted on restrictions and limitations of human ownership with regards to communal grounds, common goods, and the needs of the poor, but a door had been opened widely for more rigorous claims and a further commodification of land that developed over the medieval period and was grasped in modern times. Enslavement (the Colonial/Racial/Capital) 11 One of the most important contributions of this volume is the way in which it addresses the significance of slavery to histories and theories of landed property. In coming together over the course of two years to discuss practices of relating to land in our various disciplines (religious studies, philosophy, history, legal studies, sociology, and Black studies), it became apparent that analyses of landed property tend to dismiss and discount both Indigenous and enslaved people's practices of relating to land. These analyses focus on Lockean theory, for example, without acknowledging John Locke's explicit dismissal of both enslaved people's humanity and Indigenous people's millennia of relating to land in the practice of agriculture. 12 Asking the question How did historical actors relate to land? presented a conundrum in disciplines that tend to discount the lived experience of relating to land(ed property) as an enslaved person. What happens to the history of Mancipatio, for example, when one of the alleged 'objects' of property upholding Anglo-European legal traditions is acknowledged as human, as in Lydia von der Werth's contribution in this volume? How does Lockean theory as propagated by Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur force into relief the violent contradiction of Western European 'locality' offering itself up as a liberatory, general theory of property while denying enslaved people's humanity, as Dirk Schuck elucidates in this volume? How does a history of relating to landed property highlight the limitations of Marxist thought for formerly enslaved Americans who, as William E. B. Du Bois argues, liberated themselves en masse via a 'general strike' known as the American Civil War, yet whose reparations claims, Packo writes in this volume, were systematically denied in favor of securing landed property for white Southern aristocrats? Scholars in the field of Black studies have spent decades decrying Western theory's commitment to delegitimizing and discounting enslaved and Indigenous people's experiences of relating to landed property. Following Cedric J. Robinson's profound critique of Marxism in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Fred Moten, for example, has explicated 11 This is a reference by Denise Ferreira da Silva to "the confluence of juridical, economic, symbolic and ethical histories that constitute the global present"; Afeworki

The notion that there is anything like ‗Christian law' in the way that there is Islamic law, Judaic law, or Hindu law is little understood. Yet, increasingly, scholars, both lawyers and theologians, tell us that one finds in the Western legal tradition itself a form of Christian law, at least in origin if not contemporary operation. Christianity and Law: An Introduction explores the notion of a Christian law, demonstrating the formative influence of Christianity on the Western legal tradition. In doing so, the collection of essays makes a valuable contribution to the canon of scholarship on religious legal systems. This review essay focuses on Frank S Alexander's ‗Property and Christian theology'. Whereas Alexander relies upon Western Christian theology, this essay offers some Eastern Christian reflections on the nature of the person and how that might alter the way in which the Western liberal concept of property is understood.

Review of Politics, 2011

John Locke's theory of property has been the subject of sustained contention between two major perspectives: a socioeconomic perspective, which conceives Locke's thought as an expression of the rising bourgeois sensibility and a defense of the nascent capitalist relations, and a theological perspective, which prioritizes his moral worldview grounded in the Christian natural law tradition. This essay argues that a closer analysis of Locke's theory of money in the Second Treatise can provide an alternative to this binary. It maintains that the notion of money comprises a conceptual area of indeterminacy in which the theological universals of the natural law and the historical fact of capital accumulation shade into each other. More specifically, the ambiguity of the status of money enables Locke to navigate an antinomy within the natural law such that he establishes a relation of necessity between the divine telos and accumulative practices.

… Tomista Internazionale [Online]. Available: http://e- …, 2003

Religious Studies Review, 2020