دانلود کتاب از اربابان بردگان تا اربابان سرزمین ها – دگرگونی مالکیت در دنیای غرب

“There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind,” wrote William Blackstone, eminent author of the Commentaries on the Laws of England, in 1765, “as the right of property.” This line, one of the most quoted in the literature of the law, states a familiar truth about human psychology: The thought of property kindles desire; we like to imagine ourselves as owners. But what sorts of objects “engage our affections”? When property “strikes our imagination,” what is it that we imagine? For Blackstone himself, there was one answer first and foremost: land. He famously celebrated the right of property as “that sole and despotic dominion over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe” – and then went on to explain that by “the external things of world” he had in mind in particular “the dominion of land,” of “a determinate spot of ground” or “a particular field.” Only as a sort of afterthought did he add “or . . . a jewel.” When the right of property struck the imagination of William Blackstone, what sprang to his mind first was the thought of an eighteenth-century Englishman as “sole and despotic” proprietor of real estate. In this, he was a typical representative of the common law tradition, a legacy of a centuries-old feudal order in which there was no condition more socially desirable than being the lord of lands. Two and half centuries later, land still reigns at the center of the property law imagination in common-law America. The word “property,” as the Merriam-Webster dictionary reports, signifies “something owned or possessed: specifically: a piece of real estate.” When speakers of American English describe themselves as owning “property,” what they mean is that they own land. There is something paradoxical about this, since land is by no means as economically or socially important in modern America as it was in the England of Blackstone.5 Today, people’s fortunes depend at least as much on their pension funds as on their real estate, and American social status no longer derives from being baronial lord of a manor. Nevertheless, when Americans hear the word “property,” what springs to their minds first is still what sprang to the mind of Blackstone: the image of acreage. As Carol Rose, the most insightful of property scholars, suggests, when we think about property, we begin by “picturing” it; and in America what we picture first is land.