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I came across this fascinating argument from William of Ockham in the deliciously named On The Tyrannical Ascendancy of the Pope (early 1340s):

“But after sin, because among men there grew up avarice and the desire to possess and use temporal things wrongly, it was useful and expedient that temporal things should be appropriated and not all be common, to restrain the immoderate appetite of the wicked for possessing temporal things and to drive out neglect of the proper management and administration of temporal things, since common affairs are commonly neglected by bad men.”

The argument (more extensive than this single quote), is that “temporal things” were held in common pre-Fall (i.e., common ownership), which worked because without sin, property was used wisely and according to need. This of course makes common ownership the state of perfection in a pre-Fall world.

Preventing Sin

Interestingly, private ownership (putting this in modern language) arises as a consequence of the Fall, but not because it is intrinsically sinful, but because it is a necessary way of addressing sin lest the common property be misused (by the greedy) and/or neglected (by freeloaders).

Thus, while private ownership was not a part of the good creation, it is a “good”, after a kind, designed to adapt to the emergence of avarice and neglect.

He obtained the neglect argument from Aristotle’s famous critique of Plato’s common property argument (all the way down to wives and children) for the guardian class in The Republic based on the insight that people do not value, and therefore care for, things which they do not own as much as they do for the things they do own (still one of the best arguments for private property ever advanced).

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Originally published on Dr Jonathan Cole’s page.

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Photo by Zen Chung.