Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas

Introduction

2024-01-06T09:25:48+01:00

The essays presented in this section start with an essential premise: the ideas we employ to characterize our interactions with the outside world are not neutral. Since ‘nature’ and ‘property’ are abstract concepts and mental constructions, every attempt at individualization should consider historical and geographical factors. Through a combination of empirical, historical, and theoretical approaches, the authors of this special issue examine the differing ideas of how ‘nature’ informs property rights, and the impact that legal, economic, or political choices have on the ethics of nature. Bringing together a diverse spectrum of disciplinary, geographic, and ideological perspectives, this special issue seeks to provide a sophisticated, interdisciplinary analysis of the rules that govern people’s access to and control over land and its natural resources to confront governance today in addressing unprecedented global crises related to climate change.

Keywords: Property, Nature, Modernity, Historicity, Western Law

On Universalising ‘Nature’ and ‘Property’: the Unravelling of a Master Narrative

2024-04-25T14:43:41+02:00

In this paper I will show why the master narrative that leading thinkers in the West have forged to justify property as an engine of progress is unravelling, and why the future will never be the same, as far as the relationship between property and nature is concerned. Property and markets will remain important to our existence, but a healthy dose of realism and political wisdom by now defeats any narrative that extols the supposed superior virtues of property and markets in regulating human interactions with nature. It is time to look elsewhere to find solutions to have a more sustainable relationship with nature; it is necessary to recognise that there are other ways to think to these problems and to our future.

Keywords: Rights of Nature, Financialisation of Nature, Property Law, Decarbonisation, Subject-Object Dualism

A Kaleidoscopic Reflection on Territory and Property

2024-01-06T09:25:53+01:00

The multiple meanings of Indigenous territory and property are explored here by means of a multidisciplinary lens. An ethnological journey through different geographies and times is undertaken to explain some property formation processes and illuminate how they unfold in the Andean region and, particularly, in Peru. Based on four core notions of anthropology—time, space, culture and power—Indigenous territory and property are described showing how land commodification has imposed detrimental effects on indigenous peoples.

Keywords: Indigenous Territory, History of Property, Time and Space, Culture, Power

Nature, Bodies, and Land

2024-01-06T09:25:57+01:00

Rooted in medieval juridical thinking, early modern legal culture saw community’s law as the expression of an underlying order of things, something defined not by the willing agreement of the parts that constituted the community, but rather by nature and nurture. For the Iberian world, this belief was expressed in the idea of the ‘señorío natural’, which according to legal doctrine was a bond that linked subjects to the land where they were born and subjected them to a common jurisdiction (Hespanha, Uncommon Laws). Communities and all kinds of corporate bodies thus also had a natural origin, which points to an intertwinement, and not a contradiction, between nature and different kinds of collective bodies. These bodies—corporations, guilds, communities, families, and so on—were the basis for the assignment of rights, obligations, privileges, and duties, but also for the distribution of access to land. This article seeks to reframe ownership and property within this framework as a way of rethinking the ways in which communities defined their relations to land.

Keywords: Physiocracy, 18th-Century Francophone Encyclopedism, State Knowledge, Pierre-Nicolas Gautier, René-Louis de Girardin

Les vagabonds

2024-01-06T09:25:51+01:00

While vagrants enjoyed a place in society in the early Middle Ages, they lost it in modern times, and never regained it after the French Revolution. The institution of the offence of vagrancy accompanied the rise of industrial society, the development of capitalism and the adoption of a bourgeois conception of property. Although this offence disappeared at the end of the last century, the prohibition on the straying of domestic animals, and the separation of wild and domestic animals it represents—also at the basis of our modern law—remains. However, it may fade with the rise of ecological concerns and the emergence of environmental law, heralding a departure from the modern legal paradigm.

English title: Vagrants: Between Humans, Dogs, and Wolves

Keywords: Vagrants and Vagrancy; Human and Animal; Domestic and Wild; Bourgeois Property; Emergence of Environmental Law

Propriétarisation : la voie pour une gestion raisonnable et durable de la nature ?

2024-01-06T09:25:54+01:00

In the second half of the twentieth century, theories were developed which asserted that property rights and the markets that develop thanks to them are the best way to manage natural resources in a reasonable and sustainable way. This tradition is in particular opposed to the idea of the economist Pigou, who considered that the only way to deal with the environmental issue was to regulate property rights and government intervention through taxes. In this article, we begin by outlining the arguments of the main economic articles that have been used as a basis for this approach, and then go on to suggest a number of theoretical critical arguments to these theses.

English title: Proprietarization: The Way for a Reasonable and Durable Management of Nature?

Keywords: Property, Commons, Co-Ownership, Environmental Philosophy, Economic Philosophy

Inappropriate Nature

2024-01-06T09:25:55+01:00

This paper seeks to examine from a philosophical perspective the relationship between nature and property (whether public, private or communal). The way our fossil-based societies inhabit the world clashes with the biophysical limits of the planet, which has led to the current socioecological crisis. Against this background, it is essential to rethink some classic problems also in the field of humanities. First, we outline the notion of nature as biosphere. Second, we identify some milestones in the discussion on common goods in the Western tradition. Finally, we review different approaches to the ownership of natural resources or goods (understood as the basis for human life) and highlight the importance of treating them as commons—especially in the context of the Anthropocene.

Keywords: Nature as Biosphere; Property; History of the Commons; Common Goods; Anthropocene

History, Interests, and Groups: Some Remarks on Two Recent Books on Adam Smith

2024-01-06T09:25:49+01:00

An essay-reviews on Rosolino, Countervailing Powers: The Political Economy of Market, Before and After Adam Smith, Palgrave Macmillan 2020; Glory M. Liu’s Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism, Princeton UP 2022.

Keywords: Adam Smith, Adam-Smith-Problem, Sympathy and Self-Interest, Rosolino, Glory Liu

Book Reviews

2024-01-06T09:25:50+01:00

Reviews of Menin, Il sole nero dei lumi. Sade filosofo, Carocci 2023; Despoix, K. B. W.: La Bibliothèque Warburg, laboratoire de pensée intermédiale, Les presses du réel 2023; Caleb Clanton & Goode, eds., Great Ideas in History, Politics, and Philosophy, Baylor UP 2021; Brzezinski Prestes, ed., Understanding Evolution in Darwin’s “Origin”: The Emerging Context of Evolutionary Thinking, Springer 2023.