摘要：Depending upon which department you visit at your favorite university, you will hear some rather different perspectives on property. The common view in humanities departments is that property is a modern, Western European, hegemonic construction, the cause of all wars and quarrels in the world. This is not hyperbole. One of its patron philosophers from the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, imagined “what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared…” had we not “forg[otten] that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one.” In the 19th century, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon declared, with clever moral inversion, what many still believe: “Property is theft.
