Product Description

Richard Pipes, Harvard scholar and historian of the Russian Revolution, brings his remarkable erudition to an exploration of a wide range of national and political systems to demonstrate persuasively that private ownership has served over the centuries to limit the power of the state and enable democratic institutions to evolve and thrive in the Western world.

Beginning with Greece and Rome, where the concept of private property as we understand it first developed, Pipes then shows us how, in the late medieval period, the idea matured with the expansion of commerce and the rise of cities. He contrasts England, a country where property rights and parliamentary government advanced hand-in-hand, with Russia, where restrictions on ownership have for centuries consistently abetted authoritarian regimes; finally he provides reflections on current and future trends in the United States. Property and Freedom is a brilliant contribution to political thought and an essential work on a subject of vital importance.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #366976 in Books
• Published on: 2000-06-13
• Released on: 2000-06-13
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 7.98" h x .81" w x 5.17" l, .63 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From Amazon.com
Richard Pipes offers a vigorous defense of a fundamental freedom--private property--in this engaging mix of history, economics, and political theory. Western historians "take property for granted," complains the acclaimed scholar of Russian history (and author of the masterful The Russian Revolution). Pipes argues that a greater appreciation for this institution is necessary if liberty is to survive in the 21st century. "While property in some form is possible without liberty, the contrary is inconceivable," he says. Property rights give rise to the political and legal institutions that secure freedom. Their absence practically invites atrocity. The sinister regimes of Communist Russia and Nazi Germany were fiercely opposed to private property. Those regimes' "simultaneous violation of property rights and destruction of human lives," he emphasizes, "were not mere coincidences."

While the bulk of the book compares England and Russia, showing how varying attitudes toward private property led these two nations in totally different directions, the final section examines the broad theme of property rights in the late 20th century--a period when they have come under assault, and have been made increasingly conditional, by the growing strength of the welfare state. Pipes concludes with a broadside against New Deal and Great Society programs. Although liberal readers may bristle, none can deny that Property and Freedom is the product of a great mind tackling a big theme with great enthusiasm. --John J. Miller

From Publishers Weekly
Renowned Sovietologist Pipes (The Russian Revolution, etc.) offers a powerfully argued coda to the Cold War triumph of capitalism. Private property, his thesis runs, is a prerequisite for the development of liberal, democratic legal and political systems. The books central comparison of 17th-century England with patrimonial Russia provides a potent argument in support of this assertion. The emergence of private estates in England required a legal system, while the czars ruled by decree; dependent on estate holders for revenue, the English Crown convened parliaments, while the czars required obligatory state service from Russian landowners. British citizens ability to accumulate wealth, backed by common law, resulted in modern capitalist democracies. Not surprisingly, Pipes has little patience with socialist ideals and with what he sees as their penchant for artificially imposed equality. He explicitly states that what a man is, what he does, and what he owns are of a piece, so that an assault on his belongings is an assault also on his individuality and his right to life. As Pipes takes Rousseau and Marx to task for their attacks on property, some readers will be put off by his untempered vehemence. While Pipes begrudgingly concedes that the reformist demands of various social movements have placed valuable checks on the unfettered accumulation of property, his message is most clear when he states human beings must have in order to be.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
A concept as old as political philosophy but as new as today's headlines, property excites a gamut of positive and negative emotions, and hence a farrago of schemes to acquire or control it. Having devoted his highly respected scholarly career to the study of Russia, a country with a tenuous tradition of establishing property rights and a history of despotic political institutions to match, Pipes sensed an explanation of Russia's fate in the demands made on private property by czars and commissars. That intuition inspired this survey of the Western philosophical stance toward property, primarily concerning its origins, justification of possession, and wisdom of redistribution. Of pro-property disposition, Pipes understands that property's critics, from Plato to Marx to New Dealers, need to be engaged intellectually, and for assistance he calls on the arguments of property supporters from Aristotle to Hayek. After rendering compact constitutional histories of England and Russia, Pipes usefully provides concrete, rather than theoretical, illustrations of the liberty-property nexus in action. An incisive essay on political fundamentals. Gilbert Taylor