ABSTRACT
Economic reasoning is fundamental to property. Even ancient and medieval natural law theorists thought this; while they pointed out that property had a variety of virtues, such as enabling owners to practice liberality, they also observed that a central function of property is to induce people to invest care and effort in the things that they own (Aristotle; Aquinas). The classical economists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries focused particularly on that central function, and generalized it to a single dominating object for property regimes: by rewarding effort, investment and careful management, property fosters the production of wealth, not simply for individuals but for society at large (Bentham 1802; Locke 1690). Modern neoclassical economists have added another point: property identifies who has what, and thus makes trade possible (Holderness 1985); trade in turn encourages specialization, rendering individual effort on one’s own property all the more valuable, and additively creating what Adam Smith called the “Wealth of Nations” (Smith 1776). Marxist and related economic critics, of course, have argued that property serves largely to reinforce class inequality. But for such critics as well as for proponents, property plays a central role in economic ordering, and hence has clear importance for government.
