property and freedomby richard pipes

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Property and Freedom by Richard Pipes Review by: Jane S. Shaw Public Choice, Vol. 104, No. 3/4 (2000), pp. 398-400 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30026437 . Accessed: 16/06/2014 05:27 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Public Choice. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 91.229.229.13 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 05:27:28 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Property and Freedomby Richard Pipes

Property and Freedom by Richard PipesReview by: Jane S. ShawPublic Choice, Vol. 104, No. 3/4 (2000), pp. 398-400Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30026437 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 05:27

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Public Choice.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.13 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 05:27:28 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Property and Freedomby Richard Pipes

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Public Choice 104: 398-400, 2000.

Richard Pipes, Property and freedom. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. 328 pages. $30.00.

Future historians will remember the late 20th century for its rediscovery of

property rights, which intellectuals have neglected for more than a hundred

years. Richard Pipes' Property and freedom is one of a flurry of recent books

(others include Tom Bethell's The noblest triumph, David Landes' The wealth and poverty of nations, and several by Richard Epstein) that probe the social benefits of private property rights.

Pipes, a respected historian of Russia, long ago learned that the crit- ical difference between the history of Western Europe and Russia was the "weak development of property" in the East. Realizing that property rights are the "key to the emergence of political and legal institutions that guarantee liberty", he decided to explore the history undergirding that fact.

Pipes casts a wide net in his effort to understand and illustrate the role of property in spurring and maintaining freedom. He examines the shifting attitudes toward property over the past few centuries, looks at the evidence of property rights in primitive societies, and covers their development in Western history (Greece, Rome, medieval Europe). In some detail, he re- counts the history of property in three contexts: England from pre-Norman times to the triumph of democracy at the end of the 17th century; in Russia from pre-Muscovite times to the threshold of the Russian Revolution; and in the modern United States. In an effort to point out that property rights are "natural", he even touches on topics such as animals' territoriality and

acquisitiveness in children.

Every reader will get something valuable from this book. The chapter on Russia is particularly illuminating. Since the Middle Ages, Russian nobles and peasants alike have had, at best, only conditional rights to land. Peter the Great, often viewed as having "Westernized" Russia, did not enhance

private property; rather, he seized landed estates with abandon. Serfdom, which developed in Russia in the sixteenth century (about the time it was

disappearing in the West), tied peasants both to the estates of nobles and to the state. "... The soil they tilled belonged to the crown either directly or indirectly", says Pipes. "And it was controlled, in most regions, by the commune". Communism is more easily understood with this background.

Beyond this, it is refreshing to observe an accomplished historian looking at periods of history through a property-rights lens. Because much of this

history is outside Pipes' area of expertise (nearly every other book he has written is about Russia), he takes up the task in a spirit of inquiry and strives

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Page 3: Property and Freedomby Richard Pipes

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for objectivity. His reading ranges over an impressive array of disciplines and authors.

In spite of these great strengths, however, Property and freedom is likely to

disappoint readers of Public Choice. Pipes reflects the view, commonly held by historians, that democracy is the touchstone of freedom and that political history is the chief framework for assessing freedom. He champions property as "traditionally the most effective bulwark of freedom", whose existence allowed England to become a parliamentary democracy and whose absence kept Russia from developing freedom and the rule of law.

While he is undoubtedly right about this, his emphasis makes it difficult for him to see private property rights as a bulwark against all arbitrary power - as a right as fundamental and important as what he calls "civil rights" and "social justice" (goals that he sometimes views as antithetical to private property rights).

The weakness of Pipes' treatment becomes clear in his discussion of prop- erty in the 20th century. To him, the modern welfare state poses a "novel and paradoxical situation". Private property rights have been eroded by a democratic government pursuing the public good. This is paradoxical because

Pipes believes that major state intervention is necessary in modem times.

Specifically, he states that the government must protect the public good by monitoring pollution, protecting against racial or religious discrimination, ensuring air safety, licensing physicians, and providing medical care for the

elderly and the poor. These all restrict property rights, yet Pipes appears to view them as justified. Since the people in a modem democracy elect the

legislators, "whatever they legislate implies popular consent", he says. It appears that Pipes (whose reading is remarkably broad in many areas) is

not very familiar with the public choice literature, or else he fails to see its rel- evance. This blinds him to problems of majoritarian rule such as the rational ignorance of the voter and the power of special interests in a democracy.

Gradually, however, as Pipes reviews the steps of the modem U.S. govem- ment that damage property rights, from minimum wage laws to forfeitures of property for violating drug laws, he recognizes that something vital is being lost. At the very end of the book he states that the right to property is "arguably more important than the right to vote". This seems to be an opinion attained at the end of his inquiry, not one that informs the book as a whole.

What Pipes does not recognize, at least when he starts out, is that private property rights, which include the rights to protection of one's person, do not just lead to freedom; they are the essence of freedom. When well-protected by the rule of law (a critical caveat), they are the underpinning of a peaceful society because they allow people to engage in trade, which is a productive alternative to competition through physical power. England was strong, pros-

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Page 4: Property and Freedomby Richard Pipes

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perous, and largely free because English citizens had control over their lives and their property. Russia was weak, poor, and enslaved by its own leaders because few Russians had anything they could call their own.

Had Pipes viewed property rights this way at the beginning of his project, the book might have been somewhat different. He might have sought the origins of property less through understanding territoriality or acquisitiveness and more through the social benefits it offers. However, what he has done is impressive. Property and freedom will be a rich resource for future writers who, thanks to Pipes and others, will be much more attuned to the value of property rights than is this generation.

JANE S. SHAW, Political Economy Research Center (PERC), 502 S. 19th Avenue, Suite 211, Bozeman, MT 59718-6827, U.S.A.; e-mail shaw @perc.org

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