Universalising capitalism

In naturalising generalised private property – private property in the means of production as well as in personal possessions – much property theory tends also to naturalise capitalism. The emergence of private property and capitalism tends to be portrayed as not only progressive but more or less inevitable. In this respect, it is at one with the inclination – common since the eighteenth century and running through the work of Hume and Smith, as well as through the work of Blackstone and anthropologists like Morgan – to see history as passing through various stages in which communal property is gradually displaced by private property. In these ‘staged’ (or stadial) versions of history, private property is commonly seen as both the driving force and endpoint of evolution and as a hallmark of civilisation, its emergence marking the transition from an inferior/ lower to a superior/ higher culture. Drawing on Smith, Marx also adopted a ‘staged’ account of history, at least until his later works, but he depicted the bourgeois (or capitalist) mode of production as marking not the end of history but merely a staging post on the road to communism. In recent decades, staged accounts of history have become popular once more. In 1992, Francis Fukuyama boldly, but somewhat prematurely, announced the end of history, proclaiming the triumph of liberal democracy and free market capitalism. Shortly after, in similar vein, Hansmann and Kraakman announced the end of history for corporate law.

In these accounts, private property rights are depicted as ‘the basic foundation of capitalism and modernity’, as emblematic of progress, and as the key engines of economic development and efficiency. The rise of generalised private property and, therefore, of capitalism as an economic system tend implicitly to be portrayed as the ‘logical’ and natural realisations of ever- present tendencies inscribed in human nature. They are treated as though they are present in some way, even if only in the interstices, in all forms of society and somehow prefigured in earlier social arrangements lower down the ownership (and social order) spectrum. The underlying suggestion is that we have always been heading to where we are now and that earlier societies with non- private- property- based regimes were (or are) mere stepping- stones on a (progressive) journey towards full- blooded private property and capitalism.