Contrary to stereotypes about enlightenment texts, the Treatise of Human Nature is thoroughly inegalitarian. This inegalitarianism is descriptive, not normative: Hume builds a tendency to create inequities into his theory of human nature, and he describes humans as continually and inevitably ranking one another and themselves as superior or inferior. I begin by showing the pervasiveness of inegalitarianism in Book 2’s theory of the passions—in the analysis of pride and the influence of property on pride, in the way that human commonality intensifies power imbalances, and in the influence of comparison on our sympathy with those judged superior or inferior. I then explain how Book 3’s analyses of natural abilities and justice reinforce the inegalitarianism of our passions. In other writings, Hume seems more aware of and concerned with questions of equality, but the Treatise offers few resources for criticizing the inequality that seems to result from our nature.

Chapter 5 considers the legal definition of ownership and possession and how they were acquired and protected. Possession was important in that someone who had physical control of something, for example, a farm, could use the land and enjoy its fruits even though the property was formally owned by another. Having possession of an object brought significant benefits since it was an important step to proving and acquiring ownership by usucapio (that is, having it in your possession for at least two years in the case of immovables, one year for movables). The acquisition and distribution of land was part of the history of the republic, and the management of land, the designation of boundaries, the establishment of jurisdiction, and the resolution of disputes through the legal process remained important. We then consider the role of law in arranging farm tenancy and negotiating leases, and the position of urban landlords and tenants.

This chapter examines the economic resources to which local priests had access, drawing in particular from evidence from the region around Trier in the Moselle valley and Freising in Bavaria. It traces the sources of income available to these priests, including tithes and oblations, and investigates how these revenues changed in the course of the tenth and early eleventh centuries. On the one hand, the scope for action that priests themselves had at their disposal becomes clear; at the same time, however, the chapter also shows how the various sources of income that existed at a local church were formalised during the period under investigation and could become the subject of increasingly complex transactions.

Chapter 3 examines the origins of modern territoriality in settler colonies, centring on the English colonies of North America. A range of existing accounts view property as important in the history of sovereignty. This chapter engages with them, offering an account of how property surveying drove the emergence of modern territoriality in North America. A host of settler colonial conditions, ranging from cultural understandings of property to non-recognition of Native American boundaries, resulted in the use of geometric surveying techniques in the creation of private property becoming central to colonial life. Territorial disputes between colonies were then addressed using boundary-making techniques of delimitation and demarcation already familiar from the resolution of property disputes. After US independence, these techniques were used to create interimperial boundaries. Comparisons between different types of settler colonialisms globally are used to add weight to this explanation and to justify the focus on English North American colonies.

This chapter examines the development of an ideology of middle-class behaviour based on the ability to save and to maintain enough capital to prevent a cash flow crisis that would result in being arrested or imprisoned. This led to a new type of class-based thinking about society that was closely linked to the security that new forms of capital provided to successful savers. Such individuals were those who were able to accumulate large amounts of capital through entrepreneurship or inheritance, and not dissipate it though overspending. This was a small elite group who gradually came to be termed the middle class, to differentiate themselves from the middling sort of smaller traders. They also increasingly thought of their capital as a form of property created out of righteousness, and that the role of the law was to protect it from those who were less able.

The chapter examines the relatively underexplored relations of property, sovereignty, and security underlying transitional justice by focusing on the national and “European” legal space of Polish lustration and postsocialist Eastern European transitional justice more generally from a critical legal and social-materialist perspective. The chapter offers an analysis of the key European resolutions, the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights, the legal doctrine of “militant democracy,” and the landmark verdicts of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal concerning lustration. In particular, this analysis critically interrogates the public–private distribution of responsibility, the problem of corporate sovereignty and immunity, and the authoritarian logic of security underpinning neoliberal and liberal capitalist citizenship. While highlighting the importance of the interdependence of legal rights and struggles, the chapter urges us to go beyond the binary of liberalism and authoritarianism and attend to the ways in which rightwing authoritarian populism grows out of liberal legal and capitalist institutions and frameworks.

This chapter examines the distinctive hardheadedness of the Bloomsbury group’s famous devotion to the life of the mind. While Bloomsbury is virtually synonymous with the prizing of aesthetic appreciation, emotional intensity, and intellectual reflection, many of the group’s members were equally concerned with the inextricability of such rarefied states from very material sources of maintenance, support, and security. The chapter foregrounds the inseparable connection between economics and aesthetics in the thought and practice of the Bloomsbury group, identifying a concern with this connection as one of the key preoccupations stemming from the influence of G. E. Moore’s philosophy, and tracing its significance in a range of economic, artistic and literary works.

I begin by highlighting three characteristics that ancient elites imagined that enslaved persons ought to have: usefulness, loyalty, and property. I start by noting how discourses of enslavement and utility are intertwined. The Shepherd’s concern for utility is most clearly expressed in its two visions of a tower under construction, in which enslaved believers are represented as stones who will be useful (or not) for the construction of the tower before the eschaton. Second, I turn to the concept of loyalty (pistis), suggesting that the Shepherd uses such language in a way that encourages God’s enslaved persons to exhibit loyalty to God at all costs. Finally, I point to how enslaved persons in antiquity were often characterized as commodified by placing the Shepherd alongside inscriptions about enslaved people from Delphi and documentary correspondence. Not only does the Shepherd portray its protagonist Hermas as lacking bodily autonomy while being exchanged between divine actors, but the text also calls on God’s enslaved persons to purchase other enslaved people who are imagined to be their physical property (e.g., as houses, fields) when they arrive in God’s city.

The late twentieth-century recognition of indigenous peoples as collective subjects of human rights represents a case of “iconic indexicality,” as international human rights instruments held out promises of recognizing difference, repairing colonial harms, and reckoning with the slow violence of genocide. During the first decades of the twenty-first century, indigenous peoples in Guatemala mobilized human rights through legal actions to defend their ancestral territories and ways of being, mirroring similar processes occurring across Latin America. Yet at the same time the intensification of extractive industries deepened processes of capture of state apparatus by corrupt elites and criminal networks, leading to backlash and the stalling or reversal of earlier legal victories. Today indigenous communities and their allies are subject to systematic criminalization and renewed processes of legalized violent dispossession. This chapter argues that the current “juristocratic reckoning” with the promise of indigenous rights must be viewed in the longue durée. Indigenous people have engaged with hegemonic forms of law since conquest, and although these engagements acquired new dimensions and intensity during the twentieth century’s “age of human rights” (Goodale 2022), they were accompanied by a keen awareness of the historical role of law in old and new forms of colonial violence and dispossession. This is because colonial legal orderings of land and territorial resources are always racially constituted. As Nichols (2020), Di Giminiani (2018) and others have shown, the laws of the colonizers remade indigenous worlds by constituting land as an alienable object (“property”), displacing alternative “land ontologies” to justify racialized inequalities grounded in systemic violence. The late twentieth-century turn to law by indigenous peoples never supplanted other horizons of justice premised on alternative lifeworlds; indeed, the juristocratic shift and its centering of “self-determination” served to amplify claims and histories conceived prior to and beyond human rights law. As this chapter shows, through processes of judicialization indigenous lawyers’ collectives in Guatemala have meticulously documented long-run theft of indigenous lands and appealed to less individually centered and proprietary understandings of land to stake decolonial claims to self-determination. Various mechanisms have been deployed; for example, special expert witness reports or different forms of indigenous self-representation in court to amplify alternative ontologies within the public sphere. This strategic, discursive, and affective engagement with the law is just one part of ongoing processes to strengthen autonomous self-governance.

This chapter charts how, from the early eighteenth century, imperial elites projected visions of improvement and abundance onto Russia’s wetlands, reimagining them as fuel deposits. The prospect of substituting peat for timber motivated state officials, landowners, scientists, and later the directors of industrial companies to explore ways to convert peat into heat energy. The chapter argues that the appropriation of wetlands for fuel generation was, by and large, an elite project that imposed the developmentalist visions of the imperial state and industrial elites on peatlands and the people living with them. While most peasants continued valuing peatlands for what they offered above ground, elite groups conceptualized peat as a substance on its own rather than a component of a larger web of relationships co-created by living organisms, water, abiotic matter, and the climate. This reductive understanding of peatlands would underpin the history of peat extraction in central Russia until the end of the Soviet period.

This introduction establishes the overarching claim of this book: that Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists consistently focus on the disastrous consequences of willing and will-making, while simultaneously emphasizing the vital role that wills played in defining one’s sense of identity and self-worth. English Renaissance drama can be understood, in one way, to be preoccupied with considering the influence that wills exert over human life.

Here, I provide an overview of how both the faculty of the will and the last will and testament were conceived of in the period. The will was primarily thought to be an unruly part of the soul that hinders our ability to achieve what we desire, though the performance of the will was not merely localized to the body or psyche. One way of enacting one’s will upon the world was achieved for some through the production of a last will and testament. Last wills acted as tools for testators to impose their will upon the living, dictating who will, and who will not, benefit from their death. In their immaterial and material forms, wills shaped the quality and conditions of one’s life and afterlife.

Article 1 of the First Protocol (A1P1) to the ECHR states that every natural and legal person has a right to enjoyment of their possessions. The meaning of the text is anything but straightforward. There is no mention of companies but in common and civil law jurisdictions there is no doubt that companies are ‘legal persons’ (‘personnes morales’). Neither is the term ‘property’ used. Instead, the French version uses the term ‘biens’ whilst the English version uses the word ‘possessions’. Nor does the English text proclaim a right to own property but mentions instead enjoyment of possessions. Yet it is well established in the jurisprudence of the ECtHR that A1P1 protects property rights and that companies have standing to launch claims as victims of violations of their right to property. Why was this not made unambiguously clear by the drafters? And why would a human rights treaty include companies as victims of violations of human rights?The drafting history reveals that the wording of A1P1 was a political compromise,obfuscating the legal reach of protection of A1P1 andits dissonance with the moral foundations of universal human rights.

Kant’s Naturrecht Feyerabend lectures are contemporaneous to his Groundwork, which first sketches some key features of his Critical moral philosophy. Evidence of Kant’s Groundwork stands out when his lectures are compared to Achenwall’s Prolegomena and to Kant’s assigned text, Achenwall’s Ius naturae. Kant’s own Critical Rechtslehre, including his theory of property, develops much later, yet these lectures reveal several of Kant’s key issues and problems, his profound disagreements with traditional and contemporaneous natural law, some of his critical resources for radically improving philosophy of law. This chapter focuses on how Kant’s Critical issues and innovations pertain to individual rights to property.

Private law theory is pulled in opposite directions: internal and external perspectives on law; holistic and reductionist methodologies; conceptualist and nominalist views; and deontological and consequentialist approaches. Relatedly, theories tend to focus on the micro or the macro scales – interpersonal relations or societal effects – but face difficulties in connecting them. In this paper, we examine these problems in private law theory through the lens of the legal phenomenology of Adolf Reinach. According to Reinach, the law presupposes a realm of real, timeless entitles and their workings that are synthetic a priori: they are neither conventional nor contingent. Nor are they inherently moral or customary. We argue that regardless of the ontological status of what Reinach identifies as a priori, it points toward something more robust than most current theories would countenance. We illustrate the usefulness of this perspective through Reinach’s analysis of property, transfer, and representation. Reinach captures features and generalizations that have eluded analysis, as, for example, when he treats the principle of nemo dat quod non habet (‘one cannot transfer what one does not own’) as underlying all transfer even if displaced by positive rules such as good faith purchase. His views also point toward the importance of accessibility for legal concepts, including cases of tacit knowledge. Whatever its exact source, this “deep structure” of the law has the potential to partially reconcile some of the fissures in private law theory and to connect the micro and the macro through a better understanding of system in law.

The state of nature in social contract theories tells us two stories, one about who the main political actors are, and another one about the supra-juridical normativity and principles those actors use to judge and act politically once they are in the civil state. In my chapter I focus on the latter matter by contrasting Kant’s approach to the state of nature and its role in his social contract theory as given in the Feyerabend lectures with the conceptions of the state of nature in Hobbes, Locke, Achenwall, and Rousseau. Following the thesis that pre-juridical normativity functions as supra-juridical normativity once in the state, my main question is: how is "natural", in the sense of "pre-political", normativity generated? With this I am referring not only to the source of normativity, but mainly to how pretensions of normativity arise when people interact in the state of nature, and if these are or are not regulated by a moral-legal order independent from that interaction.

This paper examines what Kant says about the economy in Feyerabend’s notes of Kant’s lectures on natural right. While Feyerabend does not report Kant having a systematic discussion of the economy as a topic in its own right the text is interesting in what it shows about the context and the development of Kant’s thought on issues to do with political economy. I look at the Feyerabend lecture notes in relation to things said about the economy in Achenwall’s Natural Law, Kant’s text book, as well as in Kant’s Doctrine of Right. Looking at the three texts in relation to each other illuminates the development of Kant’s thinking and the paper focuses on tracing the relations between ideas to do with the economy in the three texts. I look at Kant’s developing thoughts on the economy in relation to the following ideas: an account of money; an account of value and price; the theorization of labor; taxation; property and the commons.

The textbook Immanuel Kant assigned for his course on Naturrecht was Gottfried Achenwall’s Natural Law. In the Feyerabend transcript of his course (1784), Kant not only explains Achenwall’s text but also criticizes him and expounds his own alternative theory. Since it is not always obvious from the lecture notes whether Kant is explaining Achenwall, criticizing him, or presenting his own theory, one must know the basics about Achenwall’s positions when reading Kant’s Feyerabend lectures. In this essay, we introduce Achenwall and his handbook to readers of Kant’s Feyerabend lectures. We start with some background information and then discuss Achenwall’s position on freedom and obligation, natural law and right, and his theory of property and the state. We end by pointing out a few of the main points of disagreement between Kant and Achenwall that emerge from the Feyerabend lectures.