In the latest issue of The Objective Standard, I have a review of Bart Wilson's The Property Species, which offers an important new look at the institution of private property and its roots in human nature. Although I have some disagreements with Wilson's approach, he offers some really important insights into the institution of private property. Here's an excerpt:
Wilson examines property as a moral practice involving a cognitive—one might even say, imaginative—process. It’s imaginative in the sense that property consists not merely of asserting control over things to the exclusion of one’s rivals—something all animals do to some degree—but, in the distinct case of humans, of a sense of personal identification with the objects one owns. Human beings, as Wilson puts it, “pour [them]selves into” their belongings “and assimilate them as part of [their] own existence.” This is a psychological phenomenon, hinted at in the language of pre-20th century lawyers and philosophers who spoke of people having “property in things,” instead of “property rights.” This also differentiates the human institution of property from the mere territorial instincts of other animals—a distinction revealed by another unique aspect of the human practice of property, namely, that human beings are “the only species to teach their progeny how not to acquire things.” “Mine” is commonplace in the animal kingdom, but “not mine” is almost exclusively human.
Read the rest...
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