Property And Community

From the bestselling author of For Common Things, a brilliant and ambitious rethinking of the meaning of property in democratic society In his latest book, Jedediah Purdy takes up a question of deep and lasting importance: why is property ownership a value to society? His answer returns us to the foundations of American society and enables us to interpret the writings of the patron saint of liberal economics, Adam Smith, in a wholly new light. Unlike Milton Friedman and other free-market scholars, who consider property a key to efficient markets, Purdy draws upon Smith’s theories to argue that the virtues of wealth are social rather than economic. In Purdy’s view, ownership does much more than shield one from government interference. Property shapes social life in ways that bring us closer to, or take us farther from, the ideal of a community of free and equal members. This view of property is neither libertarian nor communitarian but treats the community as the precondition of individual freedom. This view informed U.S. law in the early days of the republic, Purdy writes, and it is one that we need to restore today. Touching upon some of the most charged issues in American politics and law, including slavery, inheritance, international development, and climate change, The Meaning of Property offers a compelling new view of property and freedom and enriches our understanding of democratic society.

Property and Community fills a major gap in the legal literature on property and its relationship to community. The essays included differ from past discussions, including those provided by law-and-economics, by providing richer accounts of community. By and large, prior discussions by property theorists treat communities as agglomerations of individuals and eschew substantive accounts of justice, favoring what Charles Taylor has called "procedural" conceptions. These perspectives on ownership obscure the possibility that the "community" might have a moral status that differs from neighboring owners or from non-owning individuals. This book examines a variety of social practices that implicate community in its relationship to property. These practices range from more obvious property-based communities like Israeli kibbutzim to surprising examples such as queues. Aspects of law and community in relationship to legal and social institutions both inside and outside of the United States are discussed. Alexander and Peñalver seek to mediate the distance between abstract theory and mundane features of daily life to provide a rich, textured treatment of the relationship between law and community. Instead of defining community in abstractly theoretical terms, they approach the subject through the lens of concrete institutions and social practices. In doing so, they not only enrich our empirical understanding of the relationship between property and community but also provide important insights into the concept of community itself.

This book focuses on the fraught relationship between cultural heritage and intellectual property, in their common concern with the creative arts. The competing discourses in international legal instruments around copyright and intangible cultural heritage are the most obvious manifestation of this troubled encounter. However, this characterization of the relationship between intellectual and cultural property is in itself problematic, not least because it reflects a fossilized concept of heritage, divided between things that are fixed and moveable, tangible and intangible. Instead the book maintains that heritage should be conceived as part of a dynamic and mutually constitutive process of community formation. It argues, therefore, for a critically important distinction between the fundamentally different concepts of not only intellectual and cultural heritage/property, but also of the market and the community. For while copyright as a private property right locates all relationships in the context of the market, the context of cultural heritage relationships is the community, of which the market forms a part but does not – and, indeed, should not – control the whole. The concept of cultural property/heritage, then, is a way of resisting the reduction of everything to its value in the market, a way of resisting the commodification, and creeping propertization, of everything. And, as such, the book proposes an alternative basis for expressing and controlling value according to the norms and identity of a community, and not according to the market value of private property rights. An important and original intervention, this book will appeal to academics and practitioners in both intellectual property and the arts, as well as legal and cultural theorists with interests in this area.