Assess the significance of right to property in political theory. (2020, 15 Marks)
How a society distributes and regulates property reveals its structure of power, which is why theorists from Aristotle to John Stuart Mill engaged it. Property is the hinge between liberty and equality: defended as the ground of freedom, attacked as the root of domination.
The case for property
- John Locke (Second Treatise, 1689): each person owns himself, and labour mixed with nature creates title, within the enough-and-as-good and spoilage provisos. Government, existing to preserve property, is limited.
- Thomas Hobbes held that without a sovereign there is no mine and thine; property is the state’s creation.
- G. W. F. Hegel (Philosophy of Right, 1821) called property the first embodiment of freedom: persons realise their will in things, so everyone needs some.
- Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974) held holdings just if justly acquired or transferred; redistributive taxation violates rights.
- Adam Smith and later liberals made it the base of the market economy.
The critiques
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau was divided: The Social Contract (1762) turns possession into proprietorship, but in the Discourse on Inequality (1755) the man who first fenced land and said This is mine founded civil society and inequality together.
- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (What Is Property?, 1840): property is theft.
- Karl Marx: private ownership of the means of production is the core of class power; the Communist Manifesto (1848) demands the abolition of bourgeois property.
- C. B. Macpherson (1962) exposed Locke’s possessive individualism: money dissolves the provisos and licenses unlimited accumulation.
- T. H. Green, L. T. Hobhouse, R. H. Tawney (The Acquisitive Society, 1920) and Harold J. Laski (A Grammar of Politics, 1925) held property to be socially created. Society’s force protects every title, so ownership owes society; functionless property has no claim.
The Indian trajectory
- Property began as a Fundamental Right under Articles 19(1)(f) and 31, and collided with land reform.
- The 44th Amendment (1978) moved it to Article 300A: no deprivation save by authority of law.
- Kolkata Municipal Corporation v. Bimal Kumar Shah (May 2024) read seven procedural sub-rights into Article 300A. A nine-judge bench in Property Owners Association v. State of Maharashtra (November 2024) held that not every private resource is a “material resource of the community” under Article 39(b), rejecting V. R. Krishna Iyer‘s expansive reading.
- The SVAMITVA scheme (2020) gives rural households property cards, treating secure title as empowerment.
Assessment
Property is a regime set by law and custom, so its terms are always political. Absolutism naturalises inequality and cannot rectify historic dispossession. Abolition, in practice, concentrated power in the state. The defensible position lies between: property is a socially conditioned right, needed by all for autonomy, as Hegel and Green saw, but limited by its social function.
Conclusion
Property is significant because every theory of the state must decide whose freedom it secures. India’s shift from fundamental right to a due-process-protected constitutional right strikes that balance: security of holding without sanctity of hoarding.