Richard Pipes: Property

“The main Roman contribution to the idea of property lay in the realm of law. Roman jurists were the first to formulate the concept of absolute private ownership, which they called dominium… Roman jurisprudence went to great lengths to stipulate every conceivable nuance of property rights: how acquired and how lost, how transferred, how sold. The rights implicit in dominium were so absolute that ancient Rome knew nothing of eminent domain.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p. 11

Law , Idea

“Within a month of taking control of the German government, the Nazis suspended constitutional guarantees of the inviolability of private property. Property was to be respected, but only as long as the owner used it for the benefit of the nation and state: in the words of a Nazi theorist, ‘[P]roperty was... no longer a private affair but a kind of State concession, limited by the condition that it be put to ‘correct’ use.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p. 221

“We need to keep a very keen eye on our own government. It's getting too rich and redistributing wealth is a sure way of robbing us of our private property rights and other rights along with them.”

Richard Pipes

“Property and Freedom: The Inseparable Connection,” speech at an “Evenings at FEE” event, October 2004. https://fee.org/resources/property-and-freedom-the-inseparable-connection/

Way , Wealth

“Aristotle argues, possessions enable men to rise to a higher ethical level by giving them the opportunity to be generous: ‘liberality consists in the use which is made of property’—an argument which would greatly appeal to Christian theologians of the Middle Ages. Aristotle’s preferred regime was one founded on a middle class, with an equitable distribution of assets.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p. 8

Men , Age

“Nothing contributed more to the emergence of private property in the West and the rights associated with ownership than the appearance in the late Middle Ages of urban communities.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p. 107

Age , Communication , Appearance

“The three totalitarian regimes differed in several respects… What joined them, however, was much more important than what separated them. First and foremost it was the common enemy: liberal democracy with its multiparty system, its respect for law and property, its ideal of peace and stability. Lenin’s, Mussolini’s and Hitler’s fulminations against ‘bourgeois democracy’ and the Social Democrats are entirely interchangeable.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 262

Peace , Law , Democracy

“A theoretical defense of private property as a feature of Natural Law, however, was not fully made until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the age of Jean Bodin and Hugo Grotius. But that the idea occurred to Romans is evident from Cicero’s argument that government could not interfere with private property because it had been created in order to protect it.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), pp. 12-13

Age , Law , Idea , Nature

“Both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany did indeed allow—or, more accurately, tolerate—private property. However, it was ‘property’ in a peculiar and very restricted sense—not the virtually untrammeled private ownership of Roman law and nineteenth–century Europe, but rather conditional possession, under which the state, the owner of last resort, reserved to itself the right to interfere with and even confiscate assets which in its judgment were unsatisfactorily used.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p. 218

Law , Sense

“[For the Romans] an essential element of the Law of Nature is the equality of man, specifically, equality before the law, and the principle of human rights, including the rights to property, which antedated the state, and thus are independent of it. Fifteen hundred years later these ideas would furnish the philosophical cornerstone of Western democracy.”

Richard Pipes

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p.12

Law , Democracy , Idea , Nature

“In Western Europe since Roman times, private property was considered sacrosanct. The principle enunciated by the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca that kings rule by the will of the people became fundamental to Western civilization, together with private property, which was the main source of productive wealth.”

Richard Pipes

“Property and Freedom: The Inseparable Connection,” speech at an “Evenings at FEE” event, October 2004. https://fee.org/resources/property-and-freedom-the-inseparable-connection/

People , Time , Wealth