When the Earth Belonged to All: The Land Question in Eighteenth-Century Justifications of Private Property

Liberal conceptions of property rights are commonly associated with the idea of absolute, exclusive individual ownership. This article aims to show that, and why land constituted a special problem for eighteenth-century justifications of private property. Kant and Adam Smith are taken as the major exponents of eighteenth-century liberalism—of its natural-rights basis and its utilitarian orientation respectively. Their arguments against the still-existing feudal encumbrances, that is, ‘collective’ forms of landownership, reveal a fundamental tension between libertarian and egalitarian premisses in liberal theory. The vindication of full individual ownership rests crucially upon the right to equal liberty—to an initial equality of starting chances. Yet this assumption of a substantive equality becomes an empty phrase to the extent that the idea of society's original common entitlement to natural resources loses all practical, political meaning.