Editing Property (section)

==== Charles Comte: legitimate origin of property ====

[[Charles Comte]], in "Traité de la propriété" (1834), attempted to justify the legitimacy of private property in response to the [[Bourbon Restoration in France|Bourbon Restoration]]. According to David Hart, Comte had three main points: "firstly, that interference by the state over the centuries in property ownership has had dire consequences for justice as well as for economic productivity; secondly, that property is legitimate when it emerges in such a way as not to harm anyone; and thirdly, that historically some, but by no means all, property which has evolved has done so legitimately, with the implication that the present distribution of property is a complex mixture of legitimately and illegitimately held titles."<ref>[http://homepage.mac.com/dmhart/ComteDunoyer/Ch6.html#RTFToC4 ''The Radical Liberalism of Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer''] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060130070015/http://homepage.mac.com/dmhart/ComteDunoyer/Ch6.html |date=2006-01-30 }}</ref>

Comte, as Proudhon later did, rejected [[Roman law|Roman legal tradition]] with its toleration of slavery. Instead, he posited a communal "national" property consisting of non-scarce goods, such as land in ancient hunter-gatherer societies. Since agriculture was so much more efficient than hunting and gathering, private property appropriated by someone for farming left remaining hunter-gatherers with more land per person and hence did not harm them. Thus this type of land appropriation did not violate the [[Lockean proviso]] – there was "still enough, and as good left." Later theorists would use Comte's analysis in response to the socialist critique of property.