Property E-Book

Robert Lamb

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Political Profiles Series
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 285

Beschreibung

Few political ideas are as divisive and controversial for some - and yet taken for granted by others - as the ownership of private property. For its defenders, private ownership is a fundamental right that protects individual freedom and ensures wider economic benefits for the community; for its critics, by contrast, property is institutionalised theft, responsible for lamentable levels of inequality and poverty. In this book, Robert Lamb explores philosophical arguments deployed to conceptualise, justify, and criticise private property ownership. He introduces the radical case against property advanced by anarchist and socialist writers, before analysing some of the most important and influential arguments in its favour. Lamb explains and assesses the various defences of property rights advanced by Locke, Hume, Hegel, J. S. Mill, and Nozick. He then shows how theorists such as John Rawls and his followers encourage us to rethink the very nature of ownership in a democratic society. This engaging synthesis of historical and contemporary theories of property will be essential reading for students and scholars of political philosophy.

Leseprobe

Contents

Series title

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction: What is Property?

Contesting concepts

An historical approach to the concept of property

Structure of the book

Notes

1 The Case against Private Property

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Proudhon and the anarchist case against property

Socialism and the idea of life without private ownership

Conclusion

Notes

2 Libertarianism and the Natural Right to Property

The inviolability of property rights

Property and freedom

The concept of self-ownership

The legacy of Locke

Notes

3 Natural Law and the Gnarled Roots of Self-Ownership

The role of theology in natural law theories of property

Back to Nozick

Redistributive libertarianism

Conclusion

Notes

4 Property for the Greater Good: Utilitarian Theories of Ownership

Utilitarianism as normative political theory

Hume and the emergence of property

The utilitarianisms of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill

Evaluating the utilitarian theories of property

Conclusion

Notes

5 Ownership as Will in the World: Hegel’s Account of Property

Property as freedom

Moments of ownership

Property and poverty: the problem of ‘the rabble’

Conclusion

Notes

6 Property within Justice: Rawls and Beyond

Rawls on the right to private property

Property and distributive justice

Property-owning democracy and the concept of predistribution

Conclusion

Notes

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

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1 The Case against Private Property

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Series title

Key Concepts in Political Theory

Charles Jones and Richard Vernon,

Patriotism

Roger Griffin,

Fascism

Peter J. Steinberger,

Political Judgment

Fabian Wendt,

Authority

Eric Mack,

Libertarianism

Elizabeth Cohen and Cyril Ghosh,

Citizenship

Peter Lamb,

Socialism

Benjamin Moffitt,

Populism

Mark Stephen Jendrysik,

Utopia

David D. Roberts,

Totalitarianism

Robert Lamb,

Property

Property

Robert Lamb

polity

Copyright page

Copyright © Robert Lamb 2021

The right of Robert Lamb to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2021 by Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1919-4

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1920-0 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Dedication

For Lawrence

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to George Owers at Polity for first suggesting (in late 2015) that I write this book and for being – along with Julia Davies – supportive and patient as I followed the established academic convention of missing multiple agreed deadlines. I am not in the habit of missing more than one such deadline, but the last four years have been very hectic. Thanks are due to various colleagues and family members, but particularly to whomever developed the ‘out-of-office’ email message that helped me keep some time to myself during my tenure as head of department, enabling me to make (slow) progress on the manuscript.

Much of what I have learned about property over the years has come from conversations with other scholars. Many of these conversations were at stimulating workshops organised by Chris Pierson, through the Political Studies Association’s ‘Politics of Property’ specialist group that he led so brilliantly. The comments I received on the manuscript from the three anonymous referees (and from three others on the original proposal) were very useful, including objections from one overwrought libertarian critic, which helped persuade me that I was on broadly the right track. Ross Carroll provided valuable comments on the text towards the very end of its composition and I benefited from the excellent copy-editing of Tim Clark. While writing a book that is essentially an introduction to its subject, I have had in mind the two teachers who first introduced me to political philosophy as an undergraduate – Gabriella Slomp and Kevin Francis – with such infectious passion and enthusiasm. Most importantly, as well as providing her typically piercing thoughts on the manuscript, Sarah Drews Lucas helped keep me loved (and sane) as the last years have flown by. This book is dedicated to our son, who was born this week, amidst a global pandemic.

R. L.

Exeter, April 2020

Introduction: What is Property?

In his novel The Information, Martin Amis makes the following observations – via his hapless protagonist Richard Tull – about the worldview and attitudes of an artist:

He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this, had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars? This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles. (Amis 1995: 11)

Political philosophers are likely to recognise this way of looking at the world. Though political philosophy takes different forms, the perspective Amis ascribes to the artist – that of looking at the social world and asking why? – captures one of its most enduring modes. For a great many political philosophers, it is a concern with the justification of social and political norms, traditions, institutions, and practices that defines their field of scholarly inquiry. We see this concern with normative questions throughout the history of Western political thought, from the writings of Plato and Aristotle to those of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Political philosophy involves looking at the world and asking why it is organised the way it is and not some other way. It routinely subjects seemingly ordinary and everyday institutions to an intense level of scrutiny and its practitioners experience intense excitement and wonder, though it can occasionally feel like insanity or stupefaction.

In modern, Western liberal democracies, few social institutions are more ordinary and everyday than private property. The extent of its ordinariness is appreciable not only in the way in which people go about their daily business (how so much of our lives depends on the distinction between the things that are yours and mine), but also in the habitual assumptions of certain academic disciplines. Some scholars – in fields where there is a marked reluctance to acknowledge the inherent contingency and unpredictability in human affairs – accept the existence of exclusive ownership rights as an almost natural phenomenon. As such, they regard the institution as requiring only a descriptive and functional explanation rather than any critical interrogation or normative justification. The attitude of many economists towards property can seem, for instance, to parallel that of a doctor giving an account of a human heart to a layperson: they often appear interested in showing its purpose as a natural part within an organic whole, as though it were fulfilling a kind of evolutionary requirement. The hugely influential analysis of property by the economist Harold Demsetz (1967) typifies this naturalistic approach. Demsetz presents the institution of private ownership as an almost necessary feature of successful economic life, as a sophisticated system that requires an explanation only in terms of the efficient social function we can ascribe to it. For Demsetz, ‘a primary function of property rights is that of guiding incentives’ (1967: 348) to generate economic advantages from human behaviour. His is a descriptive cost-benefit account of private property deployed to vindicate its existence, so that economists can then more confidently embed it as a necessary feature of their analytic framework. Given his approach to the rationality of private property as he encountered it in the world, it is unsurprising that Demsetz elsewhere complains of a ‘nirvana fallacy’ within discussions of social institutions, wherein scholars seek to judge them against allegedly idealised standards. Although political philosophers often and increasingly seek to anchor their work in analyses of real world phenomena – eschewing explicit abstract utopianism in favour of addressing urgent social problems – they know that the very idea of a nirvana fallacy places undue restrictions on their theoretical imaginations. The notion of an unavailable nirvana encourages us to defer uncritically to the institutions that surround us and thus allows them to appear as natural features of the world rather than contingent human creations that we can reform, improve, or reject.

We can juxtapose a critical, historicised role for the normative political theorist to the naturalistic tendency we often find in much modern economics as well as other broadly positivistic social sciences. Political philosophy can acknowledge the contingency that characterises all social practices and institutions and invite us to interrogate the world around us in the manner of Amis’s artist: it provokes us to ask probing questions about the character of our civic life. In the case of this book, the question we will address is why private property? Asking such radical questions does not, of course, in any way rule out conservative conclusions. It does not prevent a compelling justification of the status quo, whatever that may be. The only thing political philosophy really rules out is lazy thinking, which can be either radical or conservative. If the main route to lazy thinking is the denial of contingency in human affairs, then perhaps the best antidote is attention to history. Such attention reveals considerable disagreement about the justifiability of property. Indeed, while the mundane nature of private ownership might make its justification seem an almost self-evident matter for many economists – such that it requires only a cost-benefit analysis and a functional explanation – the history of ideas reveals it to be a perennially controversial idea that divides political opinion violently. On the one hand, many claim that private ownership is a fundamental right and have identified numerous grounds for its legitimacy, including its importance for individual freedom and the wider benefits its existence ensures for the community as a whole. On the other hand, perhaps as many have argued that property is responsible for lamentable levels of poverty and inequality and is therefore unjustifiable as an institution.

In this book, I provide an exposition and assessment of some of the most promising attempts to justify private property and overcome the criticisms levelled against it. Through a truncated and selective tour of historical and contemporary philosophical arguments, I explore some of the most significant theoretical accounts of ownership rights. The selection of theories discussed reflects my judgement about what constitute important and influential philosophical arguments. Constraints of space mean that I cannot cover several important writers who have had interesting things to say about property, but there is an abundance of further reading available for those who wish to explore the topic further.1

By the end of our exploration of theories of property, I conclude that private ownership can ultimately be justified, though not via the arguments pursued by many of its most ardent cheerleaders. As I present my assessment of the theories at hand, I will focus on their weaknesses as well as their strengths and be clear about which arguments are incapable of justifying private property. The explication of political concepts – the way in which they are organised and presented to the reader – inevitably involves the normative commitments of the author. The first step in responsible normative theorising is to realise and acknowledge that we all bring our identities and intellectual baggage on the journey with us. There is no position of pristine detachment from the world available to us and no real ivory tower to which to retreat, though the fantasy of such a possibility does remain a source of comfort to some. To pretend that political theorising is some kind of objective science seems to me, however, to be rather naive and perhaps a symptom of a misplaced scientism that tasks philosophy with more than it could (or should) ever hope to accomplish. It does not, of course, follow from this observation that normative political theory is nothing more than the expression of mere unfiltered opinion, and nor is this book the unfurling of mine. The point is rather that while I offer accurate and robust accounts of each of the theories I consider – and aim to approach them with the scholarly obligation of interpretive charity – it will be obvious that I regard some as superior to others. This acknowledgement should not worry anyone who is encountering political philosophy for the first time, because its mode of inquiry thrives on profound disagreement, often about the most basic theoretical commitments. When you do disagree with me, the best thing to do is therefore to think about why I am mistaken and where you think my various arguments and/or interpretations unravel, and to do this you will often need to turn to the primary texts themselves, for which there is never any substitute.

Contesting concepts

Before we attend to the arguments of either defenders or critics of property, the first and most basic step is to make clear our object of study. We need, in other words, to establish exactly what private property is. We need to get a proper grip on the meaning of this key concept before we can justify (or criticise) it. This task is not a straightforward one. The distinction between conceptual explication (what property is) and normative justification (why property is valuable) is a potentially slippery one. There is a danger that any account of the conceptual character of property – no matter how stark or ostensibly anodyne – may end up smuggling in features that are highly relevant to its justification. This danger is well worth highlighting from the outset.

Perhaps all concepts are potentially capable of having a politically controversial definition. From the sheer contingency of both conceptual meaning (that ideas are changed and developed over time and are open to differing cultural interpretations) and the apparently inexhaustible possibilities for political contestation, it would seem to follow that there are no politically neutral concepts. For example, gorgonzola is widely accepted to be a blue-veined cheese exclusively produced in an established number of Italian areas (in the regions of Lombardy and Piedmont). Its character and geographical identity are defined and policed by a supra-national quality assurance benchmark which is rooted in cultural practices, enshrined by rules, and protected by a legal apparatus. The definition of gorgonzola is nevertheless contingent. There could, in principle, be new provinces added to the list of legitimate producers, or (heaven forfend) the manufacturing process could be changed. Although there would seem to be nothing inherently political about the conceptual meaning of gorgonzola, we can easily see how its definition could become hotly disputed. We can appreciate that were gorgonzola to be conceptually redefined as a cheese designated as creatable in Lombardy but not in Piedmont, there would undoubtedly be considerable uproar. Such a redefinition is nevertheless possible and always has the potential to be politically controversial. What is at issue in the definition of such social concepts is not a matter of scientific fact, but of cultural interpretation. There is no such thing as a politically neutral definition of conceptual meaning: even the most ordinary concepts are ripe for politicisation.

Though the contingency of meaning obviously broadens the scope of conceptual contestability, some ideas are evidently prone to perennial politicisation. One of the most famous examples is the idea of freedom. There have been long-standing debates about whether freedom is conceivable only as the predicate of an action and therefore whether the relevant obstacles to its exercise must be solely physical in nature. Critics of this familiar, ‘negative’ understanding of freedom (associated with the political thought of Thomas Hobbes) argue that it has normative implications that belie its ostensible starkness and neutrality. Such a definition of freedom is, after all, incapable of ruling out the possibility of merely threatened interference as a source of infringement worth worrying about politically. We can imagine a scenario wherein an absolute ruler seeks to dominate and control the behaviour of their subjects through fear, without actually acting to reduce their physical freedom.2 According to this negative conception, if there is no physical interference, the tyrant in question – no matter what threats have been issued – has done nothing to limit or curtail the freedom of his subjects. As Hillel Steiner (1994: 23) observes in his defence of the negative account of freedom, the great irony of the line in The Godfather when Vito Corleone talks of making his enemy ‘an offer he can’t refuse’ (to comply or be killed) is that the victim of the threat could, in principle, refuse compliance. The fact that there could be such a refusal supposedly reveals the victim’s freedom to be technically unimpeded by the threat. Putting aside the issue of its practical, political entailments, the negative definition of freedom also has theoretical implications through its crowding out of alternative understandings. It rules out, for example, a more demanding conception of freedom as a kind of existential condition, which would imply the existence of – and therefore the need for political attention to – potentially mental or cultural as well as material obstacles to its exercise. As long as the negative definition is accepted, discussions about the protection or value of freedom within a community thus proceed without heed to such potential obstacles. The example of freedom indicates just how porous the boundary between conceptual and normative analysis can be. Even the barest conceptual definition can have considerable political resonance.

Philosophical analysis of property likewise disturbs the border between the conceptual and the normative in ways that can be quite glaring. The question what is property? cannot be approached innocently. It is practically impossible to define the concept in uncontroversial, apolitical terms, even when the discussion assumes (as ours does) that we are talking about private property specifically, rather than other forms. For example, the right to bequeath an owned holding to another person after death is very often included as a core part of the concept. Yet the ascription of this capacity as a definitive feature of property rights would seem to foreclose, or at the least limit, certain normative questions about the legitimacy of the state acting to tax or redistribute things that are owned. If having the right to bequeath my property is part of what it means to own something, then the case for taxing the transfer becomes a much harder sell. On the other hand, any decision to deny that the concept of property includes the power to bequeath – and instead assume that individuals do not have such rights to hold against the redistributive authority of the state – appears just as guilty of smuggling an equivalent normative claim into an austerely analytic definition. If the right to bequeath property is not part of what it means to own it, there seems no obvious argument against its taxation or even confiscation following the owner’s death.3 Questions about the meaning of private property thus inescapably intrude on questions about its fair distribution. In doing so, they invite consideration of other political concepts, such as freedom, justice, and equality, which will make various appearances during our subsequent discussions.

There is then no neat separation between conceptual definition and normative theorising, and this is particularly apparent when it comes to the most perennially contested ideas in political thought. We nevertheless do need to settle on some basic working definition of private property as a social institution, if only to distinguish it from other concepts, such as freedom (and gorgonzola). Merely pointing out the politically problematic nature of ascribing meaning to everyday concepts is surely not the only role that political theory can play in our discussions of them. While it cannot provide any detached or even final adjudication between rival contestations of the authoritative meanings of normative concepts, political theorising can point us towards grounds for endorsing some understandings over others, by interrogating both the premises such theories depend upon and the implications that they entail. The theories and arguments selected for discussion in this book represent a desire to both own up to the necessary mingling of conceptual analysis with the normative claims involved in substantive political theory, while also making the case for some accounts of property being more attractive than others. The material covered herein serves this dual function because it is, for the most part, historical in nature.

An historical approach to the concept of property

There are many good reasons to study the history of political ideas. Two of them are particularly germane to the discussion of key concepts. On the one hand, the history of ideas impresses the sheer contingency and contestability of our political inheritance upon us. It indicates that others have construed the concepts that define our civic debates as having different meanings and implications in divergent contexts. On the other hand, the history of ideas also reminds of us of the perennial nature of political debate. It reveals that conceptual contestations in alien historical contexts often concern the same ideas that animate our own political discussions. The upshot of these two contrasting but entwined phenomena (the contingent and the perennial) is that they provide the student of the history of ideas with a rich treasure of fascinating arguments – some familiar and some alien to our civic culture – about the concepts that we deploy in our contemporary political conversations.

An historical approach to property also, in my view, allows us to bypass a contemporary philosophical dispute concerning the nature of property as a concept. This dispute turns on whether the concept of property has any essential characteristics. Some theorists argue that there is a stable and definite conceptual core to the idea of property. James Penner, for instance, suggests that the idea of exclusive use provides the ‘formal essence of the right’ to own property. According to this understanding, ‘the right to property is a right to exclude others from things which is grounded by the interest we have in the use of things’ (Penner 1997: 71, emphasis suppressed). As Penner points out, the concepts of exclusion and use often come together through ownership rights: we are accustomed to thinking of private property as implying our legitimate need or desire to use a particular thing and, correspondingly, requiring that we are able to exclude others from doing so. This combination of exclusion and use does not mean that our ownership rights obtain only in our particular occasions of use – our furniture does not cease belonging to us when we are not immediately using it. The idea of exclusive use signals instead the connection between our rightfully owned property and our purposiveness and intentionality. It captures the fact that property is valuable to us because of the role it plays in our lives, as part of our long-term personal projects. On this construal, property confers a series of benefits on its owner through the exercise of certain liberties. She can, without interference, share, transfer, or derive benefit from, the property in question, as well as enter into various forms of contract concerning it.

We can immediately see that this account of the essential meaning of property is quite explicitly at once conceptual and normative: it makes plain that the view advanced about the nature of property (exclusion) derives from its justifiable purpose (the interests served by its use). The important point is, however, that property is understood here as a discernible and unified idea with a definitive conceptual core. This ‘unified thesis’, and the analysis that underpins it, has some clear intuitive purchase – it seems to describe successfully how we might think of property in our everyday lives, when we stop and consider it. It seems easy to get our heads around the notion that the right to a chair is explained via the benefits involved in being able to use it however we please and, furthermore, that the practical manifestation of this benefit is my entitlement to control the exclusion of others from interfering with it. Despite its intuitive pull, however, the view of property as having an essential conceptual core – whether defined by exclusive use or anything else – has fallen into some measure of scholarly disrepute in recent years.

The most influential way of thinking about property in contemporary legal philosophy instead abandons altogether the view of it as a singular concept, and understands it instead to be a ‘bundle’ of discrete and separable legal relations. There have been different ways of conceiving exactly what such a bundle entails, but the basic idea is that we can endeavour to separate the various sticks that comprise it and, in so doing, acquire a better understanding of the nature of the legal and social phenomena at issue. Proponents of the bundle approach claim that it clears away what they regard as a fog of conflation that blinds political and legal discussion of the subject. To appreciate the thinking behind the bundle theory, we need to step back a bit and go over some of the key features of rights themselves. Beyond their expressive, political purposes – which might include the recognition of our dignity or moral standing in a community – rights serve to enable and prohibit our freedoms, making some actions permissible and others impermissible. In the context of property, this function seems straightforward and relates back to our interest in having systematic and permanent protection for specific resources, which become our holdings rather than those of anyone else.

Perhaps even more fundamental to the understanding of rights is their relational nature. Rights delineate realms of permissible action between individuals and therefore make sense only in a social context: we hold rights against others. Property rights govern relations between persons (and corporations) rather than between persons (and corporations) and specific things. In a world with only one person (but lots of things) the idea of property rights would presumably be superfluous because the relevant relational context would not exist: there would be no other individual against whom to hold rights. This aspect of rights can help us be wary of some of the confusing language that we are prone to use when talking about ownership. We might talk of the right I have over my magnifying glass, but it is a mistake to believe that this right is somehow held against the inanimate object, rather than against the other agents within my socio-legal sphere.

Not all of the conventional legal relations traditionally associated with the concept of property ownership are, strictly speaking, rights. Philosophers generally follow Wesley Hohfeld’s (1919) understanding of rights as claims, which are characterised by their correlative concept, duties. Rights of this sort imply duties held by others. If the right I have over my teapot is a right in the sense of a claim, then it implies a correlative duty in others to respect – and forbear from interference with – my ownership of it. Put crudely, my property right means that, under most circumstances, you are obliged to keep your hands off my stuff and that the relevant legal authority, if required, can enforce this obligation. Not all rights are claims in this sense. It would be unusual to interpret the right to free speech, for example, as a claim that generates a corresponding duty for others. Such a right does not conventionally imply any corresponding obligation that prevents any person from interfering with its exercise, perhaps by talking over you, or otherwise distracting your audience as you address them. Rights to both engage in and disrupt free speech would seem to co-exist coherently, without duties of non-interference appearing on the scene. It arguably makes more sense to construe free speech as what Hohfeld terms a privilege (or liberty) right, which correlates not to obligations but merely to the privileges held by others. When a person has a privilege to undertake an action, what this means is that they are under no duty to refrain from it: privileges are essentially (negative) freedoms to undertake actions without fear of penalty, but they do not entail protective duties imposed on others to enable those actions.

While it might seem obviously true that property rights are claim rights with implied duties of non-interference held by others, thinking of ownership as a bundle of discrete legal relations complicates this view. My ownership of a teapot may customarily involve my right to exclusive use of it, but it may also include more than this, or it might come with certain conditions or limitations attached. In addition to my right to use, my ownership will likely also include any number of what Hohfeld refers to as powers. In the Hohfeldian framework, a power means the ability to transform legal relationships. My ownership right may incorporate, for example, the power of transmissibility, wherein I (as owner) can decide to give you my teapot – and the bundle of entitlements that come with it – through an exchange or, after I die, as a bequest.

In an influential essay on the meaning of property, A. M. Honoré lists eleven ‘standard ingredients of ownership’, and thus identifies some of the conceptual sticks that we might expect to find in our bundle of rights. According to him:

Ownership comprises the right to possess, the right to use, the right to manage, the right to the income of the thing, the right to the capital, the right to security, the rights or incidents of transmissibility and absence of term, the prohibition of harmful use, liability to execution, and the incident of residuarity. (Honoré 1993: 370)

One of Honoré’s key observations is that it is not necessary for all of these legal relations to be present for a status of ownership to obtain. Having a property right can mean different things in different contexts – we should not expect all bundles to look alike in terms of the particular sticks they contain. An implication of this observation is that several of the listed relations are sufficient conditions for the existence of ownership. We can, Honoré thinks, make sense of a person owning a plot of land without her having any corresponding power to bequeath it to whomever she pleases. His list of possible relations of ownership suggests some flexibility in its understanding and does much to help illustrate the bundle theory of property. The upshot of the bundle thesis is to shift our focus to the discrete sticks within it and expose each to its own analysis. What we might think of as ownership becomes reducible to its elemental parts, which may themselves have different moral, political, or legal justifications. A focus on the bundle of rights involved in a particular set of legal relations reveals the contingency of their relationship to each other: a person’s right to occupy a plot of land has no necessary connection with any coincident right to transfer it. Whether these individual relations happen to co-exist on a specific occasion arguably tells us nothing about any discernible idea of property as a unified whole. We can easily envisage situations of ownership existing with bundles of fewer or different entitlements.

An entailment of the bundle thesis – and perhaps one of the motivations driving its advocacy – is that the very notion of property as a singular object of study is a product of mistaken, mystified thought. Reference to an overarching concept of ownership would seem to posit an illusory unity to what is not actually one, but numerous legal relationships. We cannot consider such relationships as constituting any kind of singular entity without incurring important misunderstandings of their natures, justifications, and implications. On the bundle account, it makes no sense to analyse ownership as an institution and we should attend instead to specific practices like the right to use or the power to transfer. The concept of property thus vanishes out of sight, with the notion of an owner