Remember property?

It used to be that we took property in land seriously. Many scholars, from diverse backgrounds, placed it at the core of their inquiry. 'How did property work? , they asked. How was private property, in particular, to be treated? How was property made, and with what effects? This included reflections on the ethics of property. Locke's story of the privatization of the divine commons, in which an alchemical mixing of human labor with the soil created private property, was equally descriptive and prescriptive. Enclosure was not simply inevitable: as a realization ofdivine will, he said, it was also normatively good. Marx's story ofprivatization offered, not surprisingly, a very different moral inflection. The history ofenclosure was written in blood and fire, he raged. Any justifications, such as Locke's, were no more than an obfuscation of class dominance. The sanctity of private property under capitalism, he argued, was clearly compromised by its history: shameless violations of the rights of property was accepted when they were necessary to lay the foundations of capitalism. Similarly, the politics of property used to be a subject of considerable scrutiny. For Locke, property was prepolitical, given its supposed origins in a world before the state. Necessity begat property, he argued, and in order to protect that property the state was formed. As such, it was defined as a zone of individual autonomy, removed from the realm ofthe political: politics (that is, the state) was that which threatened property. For the legal realist Robert Hale, conversely, private property depended crucially on public power. Private property, he argued, was a form of delegated sovereignty and, to that extent, deeply political, both in its origins and its effects. Now, however, most ofus seem much less interested in property. Property becomes simply (and, I argue here, frighteningly) taken for granted. This oversight is to be found not only inside the academy. Judges, policy-makers and others routinely sideline property and its workings. Thus it is, for example, that informed academics are obliged to note its importance to homelessness, as if this were a revelation. Perhaps this is because property appears (though this is surely mistaken) no longer to be changing in a way that it so obviously was for earlier thinkers. Enclosure, on this account, is complete. But perhaps we seem less interested because property seems to be more definitionally certain. Property used to be a commodious category, that included related ideas of propriety, acknowledged a complex array of estates and interests, and enrolled a rich dramatis personae, ranging from Locke's yeoman farmer to Proudhon's murderous landlord. Now, however, property seems to signify something a lot smaller, familiar and frankly uninteresting. This reflects, I think, the dominance within liberal societies of a particularly restricted model of property. Termed variously the ownership, Blackstonian or classical model, it exerts a powerful imaginative hold, shaping our understandings of the possibilities of social life, the ethics of human relations and the ordering of economic life. Felix Cohen neatly summarized this model thus: 'That is property to which the following can be