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Illiberal Liberalism: The New Property as Strategy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Michael B. Levy
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Extract

In the decade spanning 1968 to 1978, the Supreme Court cited the concept of the “new property” in over forty cases concerning the rights of clients in public sector relationships. The term new property first appeared in two law review articles written by Charles Reich in 1964 and 1965, and its primary points have since found favor with a number of political theorists. At the heart of the “new property” idea was the belief that a great many public sector benefits performed traditional functions of property and, therefore, ought to have been redefined as property in the law. Accordingly, Reich argued that public sector grants, including public assistance as well as unemployment compensation and Social Security, should lose their legal status as gratuities or charitable gifts and become instead “property” with all of the constitutional guarantees of due process that adhere to property in our system. This was a most egalitarian project indeed, with implications that went far beyond extending rights of due process. By transforming all men and women into property owners regardless of their private assets, the “new property” paved the way for a political vocabulary which wedded the particular and exclusive language of property with the universal, all-inclusive language of egalitarianism. In most respects this redefinition simply would have expanded the egalitarian direction implicit in past liberal functionalist theories of property, developments which many had already approved.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , October 1983 , pp. 576 - 594
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1983

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References

1 Donahue, Charles, “The Future of the Concept of Property Predicted from Its Past,” Property: Nomos, vol. XXII, ed. Pennock, J. Roland and Chapman, John W. (New York, 1980), fn. 6, p. 59Google Scholar. A few of the more prominent “new property” cases are Goldberg v. Kelly, 1970; Wheeler v. Montgomery, 1970; Perry v. Sidermann, 1972; Board of Regents v. Roth, 1972; Bishop v. Wood, 1976.

2 Reich, Charles, “The New Property,” Yale Law Journal, 73 (04 1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Individual Rights and Social Welfare: The Emerging Legal Issues,” Yale Law Journal, 74 (03, 1964)Google Scholar. The reader will note that I do not discuss Reich's later works such as The Greening of America and The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef because they have had no influence at all on constitutional theory. This essay concerns itself with Reich's “new property” theory and not his later intellectual odyssey.

3 Macpherson, C.B., “Human Rights as Property Rights,” Dissent, 24 (Winter 1977)Google Scholar; Bilski, Raphaella, “Basic Parameters of the Welfare State,” Social Indicators Research, 3 (1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. part 3, “The Right to Welfare.” For an attempt to explain this process rather than to legitimate it, see Friedman, Kathi V., Legitimation of Social Rights and the Western Welfare State: A Weberian Perspective (Chapel Hill, 1981).Google Scholar

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16 Reich, “The New Property,” pp. 771, 775, “A Construction designed to serve certain functions.”

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., p. 779.

20 Ibid., p. 785.

21 Reich, “Individual Rights and Social Welfare,” p. 1255.

22 van Alstyne, William, “Cracks in the New Property: Adjudicative Due Process in the Administrative State,” Cornell Law Review, 62 (1977), p. 484Google Scholar.

23 Ibid., p. 484–85.

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26 Reich, “Individual Rights and Social Welfare,” p. 1255.

27 Ibid.

28 Reich, “The New Property,” p. 771.

29 I do not mean to imply, as does Nozick, that voluntary exchange creates a full historical entitlement which can not in any way be violated, but rather that a somewhat independent origin for claims helps lay the foundation for property that remains distinct from grants.

30 Macpherson, “Human Rights as Property Rights,” p. 77.

31 Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York, 1974), pp. 178–182Google Scholar; Steiner, Hillel, “The Natural Right to the Means of Production,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 27 (1977), 45–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goldman, Alan, “The Entitlement Theory of Distributive Justice,” The Journal of Philosophy, 73 (1976), 824–834CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 For an attempt to ground rights in consequences see Scanlon, T.M., “Rights, Goals and Fairness,” in Public and Private Morality, ed. Hampshire, Stuart (Cambridge, 1978)Google Scholar.

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35 Michael B. Levy, “Liberal Equality and Inherited Wealth,” Political Theory, forthcoming.