“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/

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Richard Pipes 46

American historian 1923–2018

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“[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 (1923–2018) American historian

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

“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 (1923–2018) American historian

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

“Since the management of industry by individuals necessarily implies private property, and since competition is in reality merely the manner and form in which the control of industry by private property owners expresses itself, it follows that private property cannot be separated from competition and the individual management of industry. Private property must, therefore, be abolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production and the distribution of all products according to common agreement – in a word, what is called the communal ownership of goods.”

Friedrich Engels book Principles of Communism

Principles of Communism (1847)

“Sufficient private property in users' commodities is dependent upon the abolition of private property in primary means of production and distribution.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Property (1935)
Context: Sufficient private property in users' commodities is dependent upon the abolition of private property in primary means of production and distribution. With less private property, we may have more private property and make available plenty for everyone.

“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 (1923–2018) American historian

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

“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 (1923–2018) American historian

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

“Every change in the social order, every revolution in property relations, is the necessary consequence of the creation of new forces of production which no longer fit into the old property relations. Private property has not always existed. When, towards the end of the Middle Ages, there arose a new mode of production which could not be carried on under the then existing feudal and guild forms of property, this manufacture, which had outgrown the old property relations, created a new property form, private property. And for manufacture and the earliest stage of development of big industry, private property was the only possible property form; the social order based on it was the only possible social order.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

“While the outward form of the Western world remained Greco-Roman, its content became gradually Judeo-Christian.”

Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian
Context: For the most part, in the union of Greco-Roman with Judeo-Christian, the Greco-Roman turn of mind combined with Judeo-Christian values. While the outward form of the Western world remained Greco-Roman, its content became gradually Judeo-Christian.

“In civil law the existing property relationships are declared to be the result of the general will. The jus utendi et abutendi itself asserts on the one hand the fact that private property has become entirely independent of the community, and on the other the illusion that private property itself is based solely on the private will, the arbitrary disposal.”

Karl Marx book The German Ideology

Source: The German Ideology (1845/46), pp. 188

“And so, the idea of slave property contradicts the idea of private property, and the Southerners taking their stand on their property rights and their slaves were, in fact, taking their stand on a principle which was incompatible with the idea of constitutional government.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A

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