ABSTRACT
Property ownership has always been considered a touchstone for the development of democratic citizenship. From the city-states in Ancient Greece to the American and French Revolutions, from republicanism, liberalism to Marxism, the right to own private property is a sine qua non precondition of citizenship. It claims a pride of place in the most foundational treatises on this topic. John Locke wrote that every man has the right to preserve ‘his life, liberty, and estate,’ and the French Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) enshrined the sacrosanctity of ‘liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.’ Arguments have been made that ‘a man without property would have no leisure to involve himself in public affairs; a man with property was less likely than the man without to succumb to bribery; and the ownership of property was taken as a mark of virtue in the sense of having vigorous ability’ (Heater 2004: 67). Karl Marx, of course, famously criticized this bourgeois vision of formal rights as rights of the ‘egoistic man separated from his fellow men and from the community.’ Making a distinction between political emancipation and human emancipation, Marx cautioned that the liberal notion of rights separates human beings from each other and reduces people to abstract individuals endowed with unreal universality. He disparaged the right of property as ‘the right to enjoy one’s fortune and to dispose of it as one will; without regard for other men and independently of society. It is the right of self-interest.… It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty.’ (Tucker 1978: 42).
