Thorstein Veblen: The Origins of Private Property
Channel: Center for Popular Economics
Date: 2021-07-16

In his well-known book The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen traces the anthropological origins of private property and the social themes that arise conterminously with it in order to justify its existence. The advent of private property ushers in a predatory and combative approach to social relations, in which individuals begin to compete to establish their importance and superiority over others. This competition is primarily waged through violence and the ostentatious display of goods forcefully appropriated from others. So killing, stealing, and fighting become the primary vehicles to establish a human being’s worth or honor, with social esteem being accorded based on the varying abilities of individuals to acquire property and wealth by forcibly usurping it from others. At the same time, the work performed by the bottom echelons of society—useful, productive, manual labor—was derided as a marker of low social status. Those who led a relatively peaceful and productive lifestyle were assumed to embody personal defects that prevented them from rising to a level of wealth made possible by conquest.

For Veblen, the origins of private property are not, as mainstream economists might argue, the desire to be productive or industrious or to serve one’s own self-interest, but rather are surrounded in force and violence, and a parasitic usurping of wealth from the lower classes.