Peter Garnsey, Thinking about Property (2007)

Full Title: Thinking about Property: From Antiquity to the Age of Revolution.

As a book in the series “Ideas in Context,” Thinking about Property traces the fate of great texts: the concepts invented, their interpretation and re-interpretation by individuals in their own unique historical situation, and in turn their employment by different social and political interests. Its task has the following in mind: “What has this text meant to others, reading it then and subsequently, and why has it meant that and not something else?”—a question that, in John Dunn’s formulation, appropriately arises in the study of the history of political theory. And it is with great detail answered. From Plato’s Kalipolis and Aristotle’s (mis-) interpretation, the Christian communality on the ground of ecclesia primitiva, countered by a more extreme, an altogether renunciation of property justified by the poverty of Christ, to the medieval canon lawyers, jurists, and humanist lawyers, Garnsey writes a rich history of ideas regarding the legitimacy of private property and contextualizes the development of the Subject Rights Theory. An interesting argument in the end of the project—the tracing of lineages of different ideas more familiar to the modern audience—is the reason for the difference between the American Declaration of Independence (natural right of “pursuit of happiness”) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man (natural right of “property”).