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A Great Exploitation: The True Legacy of Property—A Review Essay

Rafe Blaufarb: The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (Oxford University Press, 2016)

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Abstract

This review essay contains four parts. The first briefly recounts the contours of Rafe Blaufarb’s thesis in The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (Oxford University Press, New York, 2016). The review is not intended to be a full assessment of the book; rather, Blaufarb’s work sets the stage for the focus of my reflections, which begin in Part 3. Using Louis Althusser’s understanding of law, we can see how the demarcation identified by Blaufarb made possible a further deployment of bourgeois law, which perpetuates the dominant ideology ensuring the concentration of resources in a small number of people, seemingly without obligation to the great majority who hold no power in relation to any resources. Part 4 explains the true inequity which this demarcation has wrought, establishing and perpetuating deep divisions between those who hold the ‘social function’ inherent in property—the power unilaterally to alter social relationships—and those who do not—those who suffer the alteration of social relationships to their detriment. In short, property itself is an ideology of power, the legacy of which is not equality, but exploitation. Part 5 concludes that the great demarcation, which Blaufarb so skilfully explicates, turns out to be nothing in which humankind ought to take any pride. Rather, it has served and serves the purposes of the few to work untold misery and hardship upon the many.

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Notes

  1. See [33].

  2. The definitive account of the American origins is [1].

  3. The classic account of which is [9].

  4. See, e.g., [44].

  5. Mabo v Queensland [No. 2] (1992) 175 CLR 1, 47 (Brennan J).

  6. See [18].

  7. For an account of feudalism in relation to England, see [44].

  8. See [4].

  9. See [50].

  10. See Hohfeld’s publications in 1913 [22], 1917 [23], 1919 [24], and 1923 [25].

  11. Some 41% of those who hold more than a third of global assets live in the United States, with 10% in Japan and only 3% in China: [35]. Moreover, the global wealth pyramid has a very wide base and a sharp point: ‘The richest 1% of adults control 43% of the world’s assets; the wealthiest 10% have 83%. The bottom 50% have only 2%’: [20].

  12. As demonstrated by Piketty [42] and Dorling [14].

  13. The South Pacific comprises 22 island states, of which 15 are politically independent, four have a land area of less than 100 km2, and 11 have a land area between 100 and 1000 km2: [26, p. 342].

  14. Moore v The Regents of the University of California, 793 P 2d 479 (1990). And see [36].

  15. Association for Molecular Pathology v Myriad Genetics, 569 US 576 (2013).

  16. D’Arcy v Myriad Genetics & Anor (2015) 258 CLR 334.

  17. See Code civil [Civil Code] (France), Books III and IV.

  18. Not part of the codified law of property as found in the Code civil [Civil Code] (France), ‘the doctrine of ‘abuse of right’ was developed in France by the judiciary in the late nineteenth century’: [47, p. 391].

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Kyriaco Nikias (LLB Hons, 2018) for outstanding research assistance and intellectual insight into the development of this project.

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  1. Adelaide Law School, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia

    Paul Babie

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Babie, P. A Great Exploitation: The True Legacy of Property—A Review Essay. Int J Semiot Law 31, 977–992 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9579-4

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