THEORIES OF PROPERTY
PRIVATE PROPERTY, the History of an Idea, by Richard Schlatter; George Allen and Unwin. English price, 18/-. ONE HEKE summed up the Maori view on land and private property in his statement, "God made this country for us. It cannot be sliced; if it were a whale it might be sliced.’ Paul, in explaining the ideas on property of: the first Christians in Jerusalem wrote: "They had all things common . .. and the distribution was made unto every man according as he had need." In @ach of these examples the value of a society is described by its property relations. As. property relations change, so do theories about property. St. Augustine advised the early Christians not to own property and said there would be no private property in Paradise; but the Western church of the 13th Century existed in countries where it was the worldly authority. "Thus" it was," says the author of this book, "that St. Thomas Aquinas .. . came to think that property and the political authority that protected it were not necessary evils but natural and ‘good." Luther and other leaders of the Reformation condemned the monks, not for owning property, but for not using it in an economically productive way. They said property should not be used to relieve men of the necessity of working, but as a tool to make more goods. This is why economic historians have said that the Reformation gave the necessary theoretical (and religious) sanction to the development of a new form of society-Capitalism; and when, after the English Revolution by the 17th Century middle-class against feudal privilege, John Locke wrote that it was a man’s natural, right to own what he had made, the political: thinkers of the next century easily accepted it, as in fact did the socialists * later. 4c This beok is a short but skilled survey of the principal Western theories of private ownership from the Greeks’ onwards and should be read before there is any more discussion on the subject.
W. B.
Sutch
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 655, 25 January 1952, Page 16
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338THEORIES OF PROPERTY New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 655, 25 January 1952, Page 16
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