Before Eminent Domain: Toward a History of Expropriation of Land for the Common Good

Chapter 5. Communities, Individuals, and Property

Chapter 5 N Communities, Individuals, and Property 5.1 The Problem In chapter 1 I remarked on an apparent lack of interest in expropriation for the common good on the part of historians of political thought, even those concerned with periods when the rights of property were much discussed.1 Most historians of expropriation have correspondingly had little to say about the political ideas and assumptions that are likely to have underlain the subjection of individual property to collective needs.2 The account I have given in chapters 2 and 3 of expropriation in practice, and in chapter 4 of the rather scanty and superficial justifications of it, suggest that its relation to ideas and assumptions about the nature of social and political structures, and their rights and wrongs, needs further investigation . This chapter is intended less to report the results of a full investigation, let alone draw conclusions from it, than to open the subject for further discussion. The later part of the story, after Grotius, is particularly puzzling. All I can do is suggest problems that those who know the period and the texts better than I do may be able to solve. 1. See chapter 1.2. 2. Ugo Nicolini, La proprietà, is a partial exception, but Feenstra’s essays on Grotius that I have cited, important and authoritative as they are, focus closely on the use of words. 112 Communities, Individuals, and Property I am not concerned primarily with the great texts of political theory: their authors have always tended to focus on problems, disputed points, and their own particular insights. Meanwhile the historians of political thought have naturally been most interested in those same aspects of the works they study, and sometimes especially in what seems to show the origin of modern ideas about politics and government. For any attempt to explain the acceptance of the principle of expropriation, the chief value of texts of political theory and legal doctrine is that they may reveal assumptions about their own societies and politics which even the most original thinkers share. Other texts, such as documents of government or law, or the writings of nonacademics who take their society ’s norms more for granted, may be equally or more revealing about such assumptions. 5.2.1 Before Grotius: Communities I should like to be able to argue that until the seventeenth century the ideas about society and government that were held and expressed in many societies, inside and outside Europe, were based on assumptions about the right structure of society that started from knowledge of the polities in which those who held the ideas lived. The chief subject of discussion would have been what was thought right and wrong within their own societies. I cannot do that: my knowledge, however far I stretch it, is totally inadequate. I can nevertheless suggest, however tentatively, that what I have read seems to suggest that people’s ideas about politics did not generally arise from the perspective of separate and equal individuals in anything like what in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was called the state of nature or from the universal, individual human rights of the twentieth and twenty-first. Instead people seem to have started with the way that they found their own societies and polities to be structured. For many societies we do not have texts of what historians of political thought consider political thought or political theory. The traditional way of tracing Communities, Individuals, and Property 113 the history of political theory used to be to start with the Greeks, pass to the Romans, and then jump to the Renaissance. Medieval political ideas now attract more attention, but it tends to be concentrated on academic treatises from the twelfth century on. Recent work by those who look outside the treatises has, however, shown how much about ideas and assumptions can be deduced from other texts, including chronicles and documents of government and law, from both before and after 1100.3 Whatever Greeks in general, including those living in less structured and less well-recorded polities than Athens, may have thought about the origin and nature of their communities, some of those whose works have been preserved certainly developed or alluded to ideas of natural equality and various kinds of golden age without government. Plato even envisaged something like a social contract when governments were first instituted.4 Even so, the city-state seems to...