Abstract

Property has always been thought to be central to politics. According to modern political and legal theory, property establishes zones of privacy that separate and protect members of a political community from one another, zones of control from which all others may be excluded and within which owners may do as they will with what is theirs. Modern property theory treats property as a means to the ends of persons and as a principle of exclusion. Treating property in this way obscures the relation of property to politics. To the degree to which politics depends on some kind of common will, property in use determined by the will of a private owner independent of the wills of others threatens politics. As that which separates persons and protects them from one another, property thwarts a people acting with one another in political community. ;Through a study of Aristotle this dissertation looks afresh at the connection between property and politics. In the Politics, Aristotle says that the good polity must be a unified plurality and that this unity of the different requires "idias ktesis, chresis koinas, holding as one's own for common use." This explanation of property may be counterposed both to modern private ownership that threatens unity and to common ownership that threatens plurality. Holding as one's own for common use supposes a plurality and the relation of its members with one another that allows for political unity. For it is a mode of individual ownership that allows the mutual giving by which the bonds of community are preserved