Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Property
    Property
    Property
    Ebook124 pages1 hour

    Property

    By Wolfgang Grassl

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Property is an institution fundamental to civilization. What is a Christian perspective on the subject? Is the Catholic Church a stalwart defender of private property or a proponent of common ownership? The answers to these questions are not always simple and straightforward. In these pages, Professor Wolfgang Grassl examines Scripture, the Church’s social tradition, philosophy, and economics to arrive at a balanced and informed presentation of Christian social thought’s view of property, one that shatters conventional categories of thinking on property. His findings are relevant to a wide variety of policy questions, including eminent domain and copyright and patent law, as well as practical matters such as business management.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherActon Institute
    Release dateDec 15, 2012
    ISBN9781938948466
    Property

    Related to Property

    Related ebooks

    Christianity For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Matzneff Flap A Cautionary Tale For Cultural Aristocrats

      Jan 10, 2020

      Gabriel Matzneff is not a good man, but it's taken France a long time to realize it. Norimitsu Onishi of The New York Times reported an astonishing story this week. It begins: "The French writer Gabriel Matzneff never hid the fact that he engaged in

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Lesson of Virtue

      Jul 21, 2022

      A Lesson of Virtue
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Return Of The Pagans

      Dec 25, 2023

      The Return Of The Pagans
      7 min read

    • Article

      We Need To Reframe The Way We Thinkabout “Free Speech”

      Jun 29, 2023

      NO IDEA IS MORE LOATHED TODAY, especially on the Right (how times change), than censorship. Nothing is worse, we are told, than being “censorious”, and seeking to end “vigorous debate” in the “marketplace of ideas”. But what exactly ensures that a de

      11 min read

    • Article

      Rome Vs. Chicago

      Jan 31, 2019

      Rome Vs. Chicago
      3 min read

    • Article

      Varieties of Experience

      Sep 1, 2020

      THERE IS A PUZZLE at the heart of my academic work. I am an anthropologist, and among other things, I study the voices (or auditory hallucinations) of people in different countries who have schizophrenia. Their voices are clearly shaped by local cult

      4 min read

    • Article

      Usurpers Of The World

      Mar 17, 2021

      Usurpers Of The World
      5 min read

    • Article

      Reason, Faith, And The Struggle For Western Civilization

      Jul 1, 2020

      By Samuel Gregg Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2019. Pp. xv, 192. $28 hardcover. Ongoing conflict with and within the Middle East has spawned a significant literature regarding the “clash of civilizations” between Western liberal democracies and Islamic

      6 min read

    • Article

      Why History Must Take A Stance

      Feb 18, 2021

      Why History Must Take A Stance
      9 min read

    • Article

      Michael Wood On…

      Sep 1, 2022

      In my job, travelling the world making films on history and culture, I’ve spent a lot of time exploring religion in its many manifestations. Religion, after all, is a gift for the camera: full of colour, action and often moving rituals. It’s also a c

      3 min read

    • Article

      America On Trial

      Oct 23, 2020

      America On Trial
      1 min read

    • Article

      The Last Victorian Sage

      Jan 2, 2020

      The Last Victorian Sage
      6 min read

    • Article

      Christians To The Lions?

      Apr 7, 2023

      Christians To The Lions?
      9 min read

    • Article

      Blame It All On John Locke?

      Jul 17, 2020

      Blame It All On John Locke?
      14 min read

    • Article

      A Lesson of Virtue

      Jul 28, 2022

      Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule recently launched his new book Common Good Constitutionalism. In last week’s edition of Beijing Review, Vermeule and John Pang, Malaysian senior fellow at Bard College in New York, described the shared cla

      4 min read

    • Article

      We Are Already Indivisible

      Jul 6, 2021

      We Are Already Indivisible
      3 min read

    • Article

      Who Owns My Body?

      Sep 5, 2022

      Who Owns My Body?
      4 min read

    • Article

      We’re Naturally Supernatural

      Jan 5, 2023

      Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities Jeffrey J Kripal University of Chicago Press 2022 Hb, 256p, £28, ISBN 9780226820248 As a young Catholic, Jeffrey Kripal visited some Protestant churches in his American Mid-West town. He was baff

      11 min read

    • Article

      The Common Genius of Lincoln and Einstein: The president and the physicist teach us a lesson about moral genius.

      Oct 30, 2014

      Abraham Lincoln would still be remembered today as a self-taught prairie prodigy and an astute political operator who crushed the Confederate uprising, even without the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the end of slavery. Albert

      6 min read

    • Article

      Promised Lands

      Jun 3, 2021

      Promised Lands
      16 min read

    • Article

      Nasty, Brutish, And Short

      Sep 25, 2023

      Nasty, Brutish, And Short
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Property

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Property - Wolfgang Grassl

      Property

      Wolfgang Grassl

      Christian Social Thought Series

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright © 2012 by Acton Institute

      An imprint of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty

      Edition License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

      Contents

      Foreword

      I. The Essential Questions

      II. Scripture on Property

      III. Philosophers and Theologians on Property

      IV. Economists on Property

      V. The Church on Property

      VI. A Christian View of Property

      VII. Applications

      References

      About the Author

      Foreword

      Essentially, Christianity is the same as communism. I was shocked the first time I heard that statement in conversation about the Catholic Church’s social teaching, though I have heard and read many similar statements in the years since. My surprise stemmed from the fact that I knew well the arguments of Rerum Novarum and other papal encyclicals, where socialism is condemned in no uncertain terms. Claims about the compatibility of Christianity and communism contradict the centuries-long defense of private property that runs from Thomas Aquinas to Leo XIII, with many antecedents and heirs besides.

      Yet such claims are not utterly without foundation. Those who study Scripture and the early Church know that Jesus urged the rich man to sell all he had, that some of the first Christians did hold property in common, and that the Church Fathers heaped much scorn on the acquisition of wealth. Those who study modern history know that, to put it mildly, the mind of the Church was not always in harmony with the liberalism that arose in Europe during the Enlightenment and that influenced current notions of property decisively. It is inaccurate, then, to say that the Church favors private property and to leave it at that.

      The seemingly straightforward matter of private versus common property with respect to the Church’s social tradition is therefore more complicated than it first appears. To appreciate it fully requires a knowledgeable analysis of Scripture, the Fathers, the Scholastic natural-law tradition, and, of course, modern Catholic social teaching. In the following pages, Professor Wolfgang Grassl provides just such an analysis. Recovering a genuinely Christian view of property requires extracting what is consistent with the gospel from the various ideologies that have grown up around and within Western civilization’s political and cultural institutions over time. Professor Grassl performs this delicate surgery skillfully. Because our view of property lies at the foundation of so many practical issues and policy questions—a selection of which the author briefly highlights in the closing sections of this book—it is imperative that we consider carefully the wisdom contained in the Church’s teaching on this subject. This teaching shows the path to a more just and genuinely prosperous society.

      –Kevin Schmiesing

      Acton Institute

      I

      The Essential Questions

      Few issues are as central to Christian social thought, and indeed to Western civilization, as is property. What is mine and what is thine, when we can legitimately regard it as such, and how we can protect our claims are issues that are as old as humankind. Already in the Hebrew Scriptures, property played an important role in the bonds among the Jews and in their individual and collective relationships to God. Property was considered to be a divine reward within revelation. Greek philosophers changed the emphasis by reflecting on the nature and justification of property, and Roman authors and statesmen cast them into law. The well-developed Roman law on property has become the basis of jurisprudence, legislation, and jurisdiction worldwide.

      Property is crucial for an understanding of the human person. Where the Latin proprietas originally only meant nature or quality, it later also came to mean possession. However, the meaning of a special character (as a loan translation of the Greek idioma) has been dominant, and at its root is proprium (Greek idion) as an adjective meaning one’s own or peculiar to itself. The adjective is itself derived from pro privo, meaning for the person. Different from objects, the properties of which are their characteristics, persons have not only intrinsic properties such as a particular height, eye color, or character, but also extrinsic (and alienable) property. However the legal status of property may be understood, persons have always some number of possessions over which they objectively have or over which they at least subjectively claim exclusive use. Property has therefore often been regarded as a cultural universal.¹ As an institution, it somehow belongs to being human although attitudes toward it may change.

      Property has been understood either as part of human nature or as a social institution.² Philosophers and social scientists have been split on the issue, and their positions have been aligned along the nature-nurture divide. In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754), the French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously argued that property was not a natural but a cultural and artificial institution that put an end to a blissful state of natural communism.³ The original claim to real property was the beginning of evil, which Rousseau identified with civil society. Although he acknowledged the sanctity of the institution of property and that government should be created to protect it, property nonetheless established divisions in the natural world from which all further inequality followed. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were so fascinated with this idea of original appropriation that they saw the entire history of capitalism unfold from it. Consequently, in the Communist Manifesto (1848), they wrote that the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.⁴ Much of social science (and especially cultural anthropology) has followed Rousseau’s lead in regarding property as a social creation that may then be regulated by the political will. The contrary position has been taken by those who see property as an ingredient of human nature. Historians have indeed shown that the idea of a golden age of communal ownership may be found in epic poetry but not in human history.⁵ For Christians, this history starts with Adam’s fall, which pushed humans into what Marx called the realm of necessity. The fall damaged all relationships and upset the natural balance of the garden of Eden; it created scarcity and made property necessary (Gen. 3), but the recognition of property as an anthropological given also allows for different forms of social institutions.

      Attitudes toward property have always reflected the type of society in which people lived. In 1857, the US Supreme Court found in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford that slave owners had constitutionally protected property rights in their slaves. In South Africa today, traditional practices such as dowry payments to all intents still make women men’s property. In recent years, some European countries have given animals a special legal status, which means that humans have limited property rights over them. Furthermore, because wealth entails the possession of property whereas ownership occurs at all levels of wealth, attitudes toward wealth and property will overlap but not be identical. For a long time, property was essentially land and buildings, then herds of husbandable animals, then precious metals, and only later consumables. The social institution of property has coevolved with theories about it. What can be property? How much importance is given to the acquisition of real or of personal property? What is the relationship between public and private property? Should the inheritance of property be taxed so as to create incentives for every generation to build up its own stock of property? Should a distinction be drawn between property in capital goods and in consumer goods? Is property restricted to tangible assets? How much control should people have over their property? Does property imply other rights or duties? May the state infringe on the property rights of individuals? Can there be freedom without private property? Answers to these and other questions reflect not only the social and legal thinking of societies but also their attitudes to the relationship

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1