What is Property?
Proudhon, Musil, Rousseau
“Property is theft”—Proudhon
“Property is theft” is one of those sayings that sounds like it makes sense, but, upon closer scrutiny, is just as inscrutable as the more obvious claim it comes to challenge. The concept of theft presupposes that of property and vice versa, so the anarchistic motto is more of paradoxical koan than a persuasive argument against property rights.
How we come to own anything is, indeed, a mystery. Even if property is a fiction—or a “supreme fiction” (to use Wallace Stevens’s phrase), it’s a fiction nearly as intractable and basic as the fiction of the self, of identity.
In fact, the philosophical meaning of property is “quality.” A thing’s properties are those things that make it what it is and not something else. Property, ontologically speaking, is distinction. Does the hairy man “own” his hairiness, or his two- leggedness, or his inner thoughts, in the same way that he owns his house?
In German, the word for “authenticity” is eigentlichkeit, literally “own-mostness.” To be an authentic self is to own oneself (as opposed to what? to borrow oneself? to steal oneself? to rent oneself? to inherit oneself dubiously? to have oneself contested in the court of public opinion?) The Musil novel The Man Without Qualities is Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften in the original. To be without qualities is to be without (self-)ownership.
Rousseau distinguishes between two kinds of self love, amour de soi and amour propre. The first is our natural self-regard, independent of the gaze and judgment of others; while the latter is a purely social form of self-love, the competitive kind that is rooted in zero-sum status games. What is “proper” to us, ironically, is what places us, in an arena improper to us. To own is already to be alienated. The pure, original self, in Rousseau’s romantic account has no need for ownership, no concept of it. For Rousseau, we might say, property is theft in some mystical sense—it robs us of our sense of self. But what is the self without its properties?
Is the original self, assuming there were one, a self without qualities?
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