Civic property

This article explores an old question in what, hopefully, is a new way The old question concerns the relationship between property and democracy: are individual property rights consistent with or do they undermine democracy? The relationship between property rights and democracy has long been a controversial topic between the political Left and Right. Theorists on the Right, like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, have considered the existence of strong private property rights absolutely indispensable to democracy. On the other end of the political spectrum, critics of capitalism have often condemned property rights as the basis of economic privilege which itself is undemocratic. My aim is to avoid both of these extreme positions. Both of these responses make the same mistake of supposing that there is a necessary, even a priori, relationship between property and democracy, either mutually compatible or mutually antagonistic, depending on which side of the political fence the speaker occupies. Rather than abstractly asking what relationship democracy has with the very concept of private property tout court, I suggest that a more fruitful path would be to revise the question, to ask instead whether any particular sorts of property institutions might contribute to revitalizing civic life and what the characteristics of those institutions would be.