Ownership as interpersonal dominance

Rudmin, Floyd W.

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Book

Document type:: Book

Collection:: POP - Possession, Ownership, Property

Title:: Ownership as interpersonal dominance: a history and three studies of the social psychology of property

Author:: Rudmin, Floyd W.

Year of publication:: 1988

Language:: English

Subject:: Besitz Eigentum Sozialpsychologie

Topic:: C - Psychology

Shelfmark:: C/R916 O9

Access:: Free access

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.48671/pop.AC14489044

sn - . social rules of ownership and to adjudication by civil authority which, however, was legitimized by reasonableness rather than by power, as with Hobbes. Locke similarly argued that property in the natural state was based on reason and not on power. He presented cognitive arguments and cited ethnographic evidence to support this. Locke's classic theory of property was an amalgamation from several sources. Grotius had been arguing that the natural state of man was the Garden of Eden, which he compared to the communal, simple conditions of the American Indians (Schlatter, 1951). By the seventeenth century, such theologically biased representations of American native peoples as idyllic “Noble Savages” had become widespread (Bidney, 1954; Bilodeau & Gagnon, 1986; Kennedy, 1950; Schlesinger & Stabler, 1987). There was no longer need to refer to a mythical or hypothetical natural state, when there existed real primitive societies in which resources were abundant, ownership was communal, and society was orderly without any civil power or monarch. The labour theory of property was also being revived, particularly in the writings of Overton, an English contemporary of Hobbes and a Puritan Leveller (Schlatter, 1951). He equated the self with the body: ...for anyone as he is himself hath a self propriety -else he could not be himself- and on this no second may presume without consent; and by natural birth all men are equal, and like born to like property and freedom. (Overton in Schlatter, 1951. p. 133) Locke was to take the labour theory expressed here by Overton and earlier by John of Paris and Fortescue, combined with the traditional Roman theory of appropriation from nature, combined with the emerging ethnographies of North American Indians, to present his classic argument that private property is natural and justified by reason: The fruit or venison which nourishes the wild Indian, who knows no enclosure and is still a tenant in common, must be his, and so his, i.e., a part of him, that-another can no longer have any right to it before it can do him any good for the support of life. Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person; this nobody has any right to but himseif. The labor of the body and the work of the hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature had provided and left in it, he has mixed his labor with, and joined it to something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. (Locke, 1690/1 952, p. 17) in psychological terms, private property is based on the active powers of a person joining the property to oneself. Milam (1967) has argued that Locke’s theory of property is apiece with his theory of perception. Just as the secondary perceptual properties belong to objects because they are caused by the powers of the objects, so too do economic properties belong to the person whose active powers appropriated them from nature:

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