ABSTRACT
Private property is widely understood as having contributed to the economic, social, political and technological transformation – progress – of the West from the eighteenth century to the present. For some, this experience strongly suggests the continued appropriateness of private property for this modern era. For others, a question is whether eighteenth-century private property needs to undergo radical change for the twenty-first-century conditions.
A version of this question has been posed since the mid-nineteenth century, prompted by many factors, including changing technologies and changing social values. With the birth of the modern environmental movement in the latter part of the twentieth century, green advocates began a specific questioning of whether an essentially eighteenth-century property rights regime was compatible with achieving long-term environmental sustainability.
This chapter examines the political and economic rationales for private property, the arguments of its advocates for its continuing relevance, private property’s historical and contemporary critics, and the paths forward that could help to realize alternative property forms compatible with changing environmental conditions.
