The Moral Subject of Property

I ain't the woman in red, I ain't the girl next door But if somewhere in the middle's what you're lookin' for I'm that kind of girl.... MATRACA BERG/RONNIE SAMOSET, I'm That Kind of Girl, sung by Patty Loveless on ON DOWN THE LINE (MCA Records 1990). I. INTRODUCTION: THAT KIND OF GIRL Utopians do not like private property. In one of the most notorious incidents of the Reformation era, militant Anabaptist preachers called for their followers to establish a Kingdom of the Saints in the town of Muenster in western Germany, gathering supporters in the early 1530s and finally taking over the town from the ruling Prince-Bishop in 1534. (1) The supposedly saintly Kingdom followed, in which a key element, though not an uncontroversial one, was the abolition of private property. (2) According to these Anabaptist leaders, their new converts were without sin. For these earthly saints, the self-regarding payoffs of "Mine" and the discipline of "Thine" were, as one leader said, "abominations." (3) Love and the spirit of community would induce the Saints to work and share selflessly, free from the grubby hoarding, hawking, and wage counting that accompany property rights. (4) As a matter of fact, they were not supposed to need conventional marriage either, a doctrine that worked out quite conveniently for at least one of the Anabaptist leaders, Jan Bockelson, who ditched an old wife and acquired fifteen new ones. (5) But the community of property--and the almost-community of spouses--was not to last. The Prince-Bishop returned with an army, assisted by a number of other alarmed German princes and the townspeople themselves, who had become dismayed at their increasingly tyrannical leaders. (6) The besiegers turned out the Anabaptists in mid-1535, executing Bockelson and a number of other Saints with the exquisitely painful means and public drama reserved for sixteenth-century revolutionaries. (7) Along with the bishop's restoration came the return of laws, marriage, and property--constraining institutions that were thought more compatible with the human state of fallenness--while the Anabaptists eventually retreated to more quietist versions of their faith. (8) Their descendants now reside in Pennsylvania and other places as Mennonites and Hutterites. (9) More modern Utopians have not always been quite so confident about their own salvation as Bockelson and his followers, but they too have tended to find private property distasteful and an impediment to perfectionist aspirations. Nineteenth century American utopian communities typically restrained private ownership in various ways, in the expectation that the community members would share at least with one another, although perhaps not with the world at large. (10) Property, it seems, concedes too much to self interest, or perhaps just to old-fashioned sinfulness, to have a good reputation among perfectionists. On the other hand, property also presents some problems to those who ascribe too thoroughly to the idea that human beings are merely self-interested--or sinful. William Blackstone famously noted how the imagination and affections of mankind are stirred by the right of property--that "dominion" over things that "one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe." (11) But what is so remarkable about that? If one believes in the dominance of self-interest, what is to wonder that each person might claim to exclude all others from something he or she wants? Hoggishness is to be expected from sinners, is it not? No, what should truly strike the imagination is the fact that others--presumably equally hoggish others--pay the slightest attention to any such claims. A right of property would be no dominion at all unless those other persons backed off--playing the "chicken" role to the owner's '"hawk," as the game theoretical language puts it. (12) This relieves the owner of the enervating requirement to guard her property all the time, so that she can actually improve and use it. …