To Each His Own - Review

National Review, May 31, 1999 by Charles Murray

Property and Freedom, by Richard Pipes (Knopf, 352 pp., $30)

If a common passion can be said to unite America's Right, it is probably property rights. One seldom meets a libertarian, social conservative, neoconservative, or paleoconservative who does not have a highly developed sense that anything he owns is his, dammit, and the government has no business interfering. But for more than a century now, property rights has been the passion that dare not speak its name- at least if one wishes to be thought cosmopolitan and large-minded. The Left has quite successfully associated the advocacy of property rights with rich people who are trying to get away with something.

It is inspiriting then that not one but two principled defenses of property rights have emerged within the last year-Tom Bethell's Noblest Triumph (reviewed Aug. 17, 1998) and now Richard Pipes's Property and Freedom. Pipes, one of the world's leading scholars of Russian history, set himself an ambitious agenda. He observes that library shelves are filled with explications of freedom, and economic and legal analyses of property, but "we lack an explanation, based on concrete historical material, of just how property gives rise to freedom and how its absence makes possible arbitrary authority. It is this gap I thought of filling."

The result is a surprising and splendid book. It is surprising because Pipes has done something that eminent scholars rarely do: move outside his specialty and tackle a topic that is both sprawling and politically charged. Pipes acknowledges his trepidation-it is daunting for a scholar to leave behind the security blanket of mastery. Coming out of the political closet must also have been a big step. It is one thing to have advised Ronald Reagan about Russia and Eastern Europe, as Pipes did. It is another to abandon the apolitical persona that many academics publicly assume when it comes to domestic politics. But abandon it Pipes has, exposing himself as something akin to a Hayekian.

Property and Freedom is splendid because it retains the perspective and sweep of great historical scholarship. Too often, books making political cases are long on argumentation and short on evidence. In contrast, Property and Freedom is so packed with historical meat and potatoes that it will be used as a sourcebook for years to come. When it comes to everything European-and Europe is where most of the modern philosophical and institutional story of property has played out-the reader has the sense of reading not a brief for a case, but a measured account written by a man intimately familiar with his sources. When Pipes comes to fields not his own, his "derivative knowledge" (his own dismissive phrase) is at a level that most people would mistake for expertise.

Perhaps the most satisfying part of the book is its response to a key argument in the assault on property-that the very concept of property is artificial. From Rousseau to the New Left, it was said that human beings who have been left uncorrupted-or who have been properly trained-do not think in terms of "mine" and "thine," but happily acquiesce in the common ownership of things. Early-20th- century anthropologists and psychologists lent their prestige to this view. Man is culturally conditioned, Franz Boas and the cultural relativists told us. Man is the product of reinforcement schedules, said John Watson and the behaviorists. Human nature is a fraud, said just about everyone during the first seven decades of the century.

Pipes launches a devastating empirical assault on this set of positions. Let us look at our evolutionary roots in the form of territoriality and possessiveness among animals, says Pipes, and then he leads us through a concise review of the findings of sociobiology. If property is an artificial invention of modernity, let us look at possessiveness among primitive cultures and early agricultural societies, permeated with concepts of ownership that antedate political organization. Or if we think that the urge toward property must be taught, let us look at the behavior of small children.

In each case, there is really only one empirical case to be made: The instinct to possess, to demarcate territory, to own, seems to be among the most hard-wired of human instincts. The evidence to the contrary relies on anomalies, experimentally discredited theories, and, in the case of the anthropological record, occasional fabrication of data. Of course, in the case of children the scholarly record is nearly superfluous. What parent of a small child does not understand that the instinct to possess is primal and the concept of sharing must be taught?

Pipes then turns to post-medieval Europe, using as centerpieces long case studies of England, the classical liberal model of property rights, and Russia, the archetype of the patrimonial state in which property rights never gain more than a precarious foothold. His historical survey concludes with a discussion of the assault on property that has characterized the 20th century. Part of the story is simple and savage, as Communism and fascism demonstrated what monstrosities may be committed when the state either destroys property rights (as in Communism) or holds them hostage to the whim of a dictator (as in fascism). The other part of the story is the subtle but pervasive degradation of property rights in the Western democracies.