New York: Oxford University Press, 2020
230 pp. $35 (paperback)

Bart Wilson’s The Property Species is a witty, thought-provoking, sometimes frustrating book that offers what one might call an anthropology of private property. It’s not a book about “property rights,” Wilson insists, but about the origins of property as a cultural institution. Drawing on history, language, biology, and his own empirical research, Wilson seeks to correct some of the flaws of contemporary social science, one of which is the tendency of today’s academics to speak of “property rights” as synonymous with government-conferred privileges—a habit that, Wilson observes, “sucks out” the moral quality of these rights (61).

To avoid that error, 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” (45). 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” (11). “Mine” is commonplace in the animal kingdom, but “not mine” is almost exclusively human.

What is the source of these distinctions or their ethical significance? At this point, Wilson’s book begins to break down. Offering a wealth of interesting, often amusing information about history, law, and even grammar, he presents only rough sketches of answers. Chapter 5, for example, goes into detail about the use of the preposition “in” when speaking of property “in” things, as opposed to today’s tendency to speak of rights “to” things. But Wilson does not plausibly explain how this distinction reveals a profound, overlooked truth about the nature of property, especially given that he fails to discuss the fact that English speakers often speak of rights “over” things, as well.

Likewise, chapters 4 and 8 describe elaborate simulations Wilson performed in his university-based “experimental economics” laboratory, but it’s unclear what these experiments prove. In fact, they suggest a major flaw in his approach. Like other “experimental economists,” he tries to examine questions of morality by testing how people respond when presented with hypothetical dilemmas or computer simulations—showing, for instance, that in experimental conditions, people figure out ways to cooperate, or penalize other participants they think are cheating. But although this might help demonstrate how cultural institutions originate, it’s fallacious to conclude, as Wilson seems to, that these reactions constitute morality. To do that is like observing a poorly tended garden and drawing the conclusion that weeds, rotting leaves, and pest infestations are features of proper horticulture. The fact that people penalize one another for what they think is unfairness does not prove that these penalties are morally appropriate.

Wilson, however, repeatedly commits this fallacy—for example, in a passage describing the results of an experiment in which volunteers were asked to play a game with the goal of accumulating the most wealth. Some players discovered a strategy that enriched themselves at others’ expense. The victims “call[ed] out [the opportunists] as callous and morally perverse,” which, Wilson concludes, revealed “a rule of property [beginning to] emerge” (81–82). It surely did, but to conclude that this was a moral rule would first require resolving ethical questions (such as “what is morality?”) that cannot be answered by such experiments. Wilson seems to recognize this when he writes that “the rule of property is moral, not merely because the community is in fact committed to the rule, but because the community feels compelled through (morally justified) resentment to commit to the rule” (85). However, he makes no effort to elaborate on the phrase “morally justified,” leaving the reader with the implication that this justification is somehow embedded in the community’s “feelings,” which it certainly is not. Wilson concludes that rules of property “arise from our knowledge of what is right” but shines little light on where that knowledge comes from (91).

Shortfalls such as these are vexing because Wilson emphasizes throughout the book that property is not a mere social construct and that its fundamentally moral character is rooted in “justice for the individual” (18). But when he turns to the question of “what makes a rule of property moral,” he offers a strangely jumbled answer:

The morality of property is built upon valuations of the basic claim “This thing is mine.” The valuation of such a normative speech act is secondary to the comprehension of it. I do something in the physical world when I say, “This is mine,” and other people then judge the claim-act to be good or bad (as well as true or not true). We, in the full jointly attending meaning of the word, superimpose the abstract concepts good or bad on the idea of the act itself. (125–26)

What does this mean? Why is it relevant that we “do something in the physical world” (as opposed to what?) by asserting ownership? Why does morality build upon valuations, rather than valuations upon morality? If others “superimpose” morality on one’s claims, then what is the moral status of claims before that superimposition?—and on what grounds are some claims entitled, and others not, to superimposition? Is it just whatever “the community feels”? Wilson doesn’t explain.

Yet answers to these questions are necessary for a proper understanding of how property works in practice. In her classic book, The Discovery of Freedom, Rose Wilder Lane recounted an incident she witnessed on a trip to Albania, when she encountered some Muslim tribesmen evicting an elderly widow from the house in which she lived. The “obstinately antisocial” woman, wrote Lane, “doggedly repeated, ‘With these hands, my hands, I built up the walls. I laid the roof-stones with my hands. It is my house. I want my house.’”1 But the tribesmen were unimpressed; the idea of a woman owning a house was absurd, they said, and they turned her out. It’s hard to see how Wilson would evaluate this; he maintains throughout the book that property is an institution grounded in “justice for the individual,” but given his equivocation about its moral underpinnings, it seems likely that he would side with the tribesmen. They were, after all, “jointly attending” the widow’s pleas and “superimposing the abstract concept bad” upon them.

Scattered throughout The Property Species, however, are intriguing hints at better answers. For example, when discussing the grammar with which we speak of property, Wilson writes that people “resist referring to people as ‘mine’” (121)—but this is not true, and it suggests an important point. We often use the language of ownership in connection with people with whom we are on the most intimate terms—as in the valentines that urge the beloved to “be mine.” Property, Wilson might have said, is a relationship profoundly marked by familiarity—not mere utility—and this is a vestige of the way we “pour ourselves” into possessions. That is just what it means to value something, and because it is morally right to pursue and obtain one’s life-serving values, the morality of ownership itself is defensible without regard to how the community feels.

This thought raises an intriguing possibility that Wilson could have profitably explored: Ownership is an experience fascinatingly akin to love. The qualities of intimacy and spiritual power that generate the phenomenon of “pouring oneself” are at the heart of both practices, both of which are found in virtually all human societies. Love involves a self-generated sense of identification with another person—something experienced on both an emotional and intellectual level—just as property involves a self-generated feeling of identification with objects. Both practices express a desire (in the words of traditional marriage vows) “to have and to hold.”

Of course, love, like property, generates passions powerful enough to sometimes lead to violent conflict, which has led humanity to surround it with countless traditions and conventions—wedding ceremonies, special holidays, special poetic and linguistic practices—that differ from society to society. In the same way, people’s experience with property differs from one society to the next, which is one reason the property laws of different states vary. These variations do not prove, as some suggest, that property is merely a social construct, however. It obviously would be foolish to assert that love must be a collective fiction because Greek wedding traditions differ from those in Ghana. Yet many of today’s lawyers, political philosophers, and economists make just this argument with regard to private property. This, as Wilson indicates, is misguided and misleading. “If every human community recognizes property in tools, utensils, and ornaments, and if someone in every human community can say ‘This is mine!’ about something, then it would appear that property is a human universal” (12).

If ownership is like love, it would be natural for primitive man to develop a taboo against taking someone else’s things for reasons similar to those against rape, or seducing another person’s spouse. Stealing is wrong not merely because it likely will incur retaliation, but because it represents a self-destructive attempt to fake reality—like trying to force another person to love you. Wilson certainly is correct that property “is much more than an external check on aberrant, antisocial thievery. It comes from within as much as from without” (177), and the intimacy and naturalness of our relationships with the things we own likely is the foundation of the unique practice with which Wilson begins his book: our recognition of the fact that there are illicit ways to obtain things.

Unfortunately, Wilson also fails to delve into this insight, devoting only about two pages (133–35) to the way adults teach children not to snatch up objects merely because they want them. Mankind’s unique capacity to recognize the concept of “not mine” is far more significant than a mere cultural tradition—in fact, its origin probably is related to the “pouring oneself” phenomenon.

Many premodern tribes—from the Polynesians to the Sioux—thought that by stealing or touching another person’s possessions, one took away a kind of energy from that person. In the most extreme example, this manifested in ritual cannibalism, when victorious warriors would consume their fallen enemies to acquire their “spiritual power.” If the crucial step in humanity’s evolution occurred when the mind became capable of thinking in concepts, and thereby of imagining a hypothetical state of affairs, then it’s plausible that Homo sapiens’ maturation began with feelings of sympathy for victims of theft or murder—feelings that early humans regarded as the sense that objects or people possessed spiritual energies depending on whose they were. Over time, they learned to conceptualize these impulses in terms of morality and the idea of individual rights. “Property is more than an external dichotomous mapping of things into one of two sets, ‘my property’ and ‘not my property,’” writes Wilson. It is a mechanism whereby the owner “takes the concept I in [his] body and places it in an object as the moral concept mine” (119). And the ability to do that is likely as old as humanity’s capacity to think.

Wilson is at his best in defending the idea that property is, in part, a psychological phenomenon and not the collective fiction envisioned by so many other scholars. And with its multidisciplinary approach to the question of property’s naturalness, The Property Species offers hints at a moral defense of that proposition, suggesting fruitful speculations to demonstrate that property is a truly universal manifestation of human rationality and of man’s needs, not only to survive, but also thrive. When complete, such a theory would vindicate the idea of property as a genuinely human right.

#ThePropertySpecies suggests fruitful speculations to demonstrate that property is a truly universal manifestation of human rationality and of man’s needs, not only to survive, but also thrive.
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Endnotes

1. Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery of Freedom (New York: John Day, 1943), 7.

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