Introduction

Now, in the 1990s, America and Western Europe watch in astonishment as the peoples of the former Soviet Union move to reintroduce private property in land. In Poland and other Eastern European countries, Western economists offer advice about how to turn state enterprises into competitive private businesses. Considering the reunification of Germany, political experts and business people alike debate whether the East Germans, having lived for more than a generation under a communist regime, will emerge psychically incapable of entrepreneurship or even incapable of the disciplined hard work and craftsmanship formerly supposed to be characteristic of German workers. Every day, reading the newspapers, we are reminded in one way or another how profoundly particular property regimes are expressions of particular political ideologies and how even “personality” itself is constructed in relation to a particular regime of ownership.