ABSTRACT
Private property emerged from the rent bargain carried on collectively in terms of money between the supreme landlord, the King, and his tenants. “In medieval English one spoke of the lord of a beast or other chattel,” and Blackstone, in his day, could speak of property as “ the sole and despotic dominion which one man claims over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.” The grants of lands, markets and corporate franchises differed but little in the conditions on which they were granted. Each was sold or given to his subjects individually by a kind of private bargain. The collective rent-bargain in terms of money is the land-tax, private property is the residuum of power in terms of use-value or exchange-value left for the landlord after the tax is paid.
