Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. Thinking about Property
  • Cited by 72
      • Show more authors
      • You may already have access via personal or institutional login
    • Select format
    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      September 2009
      December 2007
      ISBN:
      9780511482786
      9780521876773
      9780521700238
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511482786
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.58kg, 288 Pages
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.39kg, 288 Pages
      • Subjects:
      Ancient History, Classical Studies, History of Ideas, Politics and International Relations
      Series:
      Ideas in Context (90)
    You may already have access via personal or institutional login
    • Selected: Digital
    Add to cart View cart Buy from Cambridge.org
    Subjects:
    Ancient History, Classical Studies, History of Ideas, Politics and International Relations
    Series:
    Ideas in Context (90)
    Information

    Book description

    This book explores ancient 'foundational' texts relating to property and their reception by later thinkers in their various contexts up to the early nineteenth century. The texts include Plato's vision of an ideal polity in the Republic, Jesus' teachings on renunciation and poverty, and Golden Age narratives and other evolutionary accounts of the transition of mankind from primeval communality to regimes of ownership. The issue of the legitimacy of private ownership exercises the minds of the major political thinkers as well as theologians and jurists throughout the ages. The book gives full consideration to the historical development of Rights Theory, with special reference to the right to property. It ends with a comparative study of the Declarations of Rights in the American and French Revolutions and seeks to explain, with reference to contemporary documents, why the French recognised an inalienable, human right to property whereas the Americans did not.

    Reviews

    ''This marvellous book combines very substantial and wide-ranging scholarship with great conceptual and analytic rigour to present a sophisticated, entirely original and highly compelling history of conceptions of property in the West from the Greeks to the 19th century.'

    Raymond Geuss - Professor in Philosophy, University of Cambridge

    'Garnsey’s meticulous and focused scholarship will fundamentally change our basic thinking about the origins and legitimation of property in the western tradition … I know of no other work that so accurately traces the genealogy of modern debts to ancient thought on this important subject.'

    Brent Shaw - Professor of Classics and Andrew Fleming West Professor of Classics, Princeton University

    '… this is a wide-ranging, learned and ambitious book that is intended to appeal to a wide audience. It should interest historians of ideas, students of political thought, scholars of religion, and anyone interested in the intellectual roots of rights theory. … Garnsey stakes out fruitful common ground for classical, Christian, and early modern legal and political texts.'

    Source: Bryn Mawr Classical Review

    Refine List

    Actions for selected content:

    Select all | Deselect all
    • View selected items
    • Export citations
    • Download PDF (zip)
    • Save to Kindle
    • Save to Dropbox
    • Save to Google Drive

    Save Search

    You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

    Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
    Cancel
    ×

    Contents

    Contents

    Metrics

    Altmetric attention score

    Full text views

    Total number of HTML views: 0
    Total number of PDF views: 0 *
    Loading metrics...

    Book summary page views

    Total views: 0 *
    Loading metrics...

    * Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

    Usage data cannot currently be displayed.

    Accessibility standard: Unknown

    Why this information is here

    This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.

    Accessibility Information

    Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.