The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages

Explores the history of property rights from ancient Greece through current times--examining the ideas of Plato, Adam Smith, and Marx on the topic, as well as the relationship of property rights to justice, liberty, prosperity, and civilization

Marx preached the abolition of private property; utopian William Godwin inveighed against property and marriage as evils; and British socialist Robert Owen, who subsidized a failed collectivist community in New Harmony, Ind., in the 1820s, taught that private property warped human character. In their wake, argues American Spectator Washington correspondent Bethell, the concept of private property has been tarnished. In a signal contribution to the debate over capitalism's future, he contends that economic prosperity and social justice are possible only when property rights are widespread?and protected by a legal system that holds all equal before the law. These factors, he maintains, explain the vast gulf separating the world's prosperous nations and underdeveloped economies. All over the Third World, he notes, most people are permanently at risk of eviction, seizure, squatters' or police-state depredations. It follows, he argues, that the solution to poverty is not expropriation of land and redistribution of wealth, but rather, creating an infrastructure that will secure title rights to land, homes and businesses, making private enterprise feasible. A shrewd analyst of the abortive Soviet experiment, Bethell offers a novel analysis of the mid-19th-century Irish famine, arguing that shortsighted Anglo-Irish landlords acted against their own best interests by denying tenant farmers long-term leases. Yet Bethell struggles unsuccessfully to fit undemocratic, economically booming China into his framework, and at times sounds like an apologist for China, disputing the U.S. State Department's designation of it as an authoritarian state.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Has there been a decade in the last two centuries when it was less necessary to write a defense of property rights? Bethell, Washington correspondent for the American Spectator, undertakes an aggressive campaign to prove the virtues of private property, despite the fact that his ideology has won the day and there are few genuine enemies left to vanquish. Historical, intellectual, and international analyses are brandished to prove that, without exception, suppressing property rights is disastrous and protecting them always produces prosperity. This discussion suffers from the absence of subtlety common to single-factor explanations. Examination of property and the environment, for example, proceeds from the bald assertion that ``private ownership is conducive to a more careful stewardship than public ownership,'' without considering externalities and whether regulations are needed to protect one property owner from another. But what is most striking is the paranoid perception of widespread threats to property rights despite living in an era of triumphant capitalism. One explanation is that Bethell, unlike many economists and all libertarians, recognizes that property rights are a function of political authority. This poses a dilemmagovernment is necessary but also can be a threat to propertythat could make the defender of private property permanently uneasy. A more likely explanation can be found, however, in the extremity of Bethell's expectations. For Bethell, its not enough just to accept that private property should exist and be protected; anything less than wholeheartedly embracing it as the most important thing in the world leaves one suspect. Adam Smith himself is criticized for beginning The Wealth of Nations with the division of labor rather than with property, and by this standard there are indeed few true believers in the sanctity of property. If this is the standard to be applied, however, it is not obvious that true believers should be taken seriously. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In this marvelous, wide-angled look at the concept of property rights, its historic roots, and its impact on life, liberty, justice, peace, and prosperity, the Washington correspondent for the American Spectator cites a broad range of illustrative examples. Among them are the failure of Robert Owen's New Harmony, IN, commune; what Boris Yeltsin described as the failure of the "Soviet experiment"; the legal and political factors that made England ripe for the Industrial Revolution; recent interest in intellectual property; the early communal failures at Jamestown and Plymouth; and the radical reforms that have brought economic growth to China. The author effectively integrates Marx, Engels, Locke, Rousseau, Plato, Malthus, Ricardo, Keynes, Hume, Roman civil law, and British common law while affirming that prosperity and civilization can arise only when property is securely held by the people. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries.?Norman B. Hutcherson, Kern Cty. Lib., Bakersfield, CA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Bethell asserts at the outset that "when property is privatized and the rule of law established . . . economies will prosper and civilization will blossom." Even though this might be a predictable conclusion coming from the Washington correspondent for the conservative American Spectator and a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Bethell nonetheless provides a much-needed general overview of the concept of property throughout history. As he notes, property as a subject crosses a dozen disciplines, and most books that examine the notion of property do so through the eyes of specialists. His own view is colored by the broader concerns of law and economics as he makes the connection between property and justice and liberty. Bethell considers how philosophers from Plato to Marx regarded the institution of property, he discusses communal property, and he examines contemporary problems related to the idea of intellectual property. He also contrasts the role of property in various societies and historical periods, including Ireland during the potato famine, Arab desert cultures, early American colonial settlements, and modern China. David Rouse