September 9th, 2010 
hookah_for_sale 
In five chapters, Richard Pipes brilliantly argues that property rights lie as the foundation of all our freeedom.
Pipes begins by establishing that we and many other animals have an instinctive urge to possess and to mark territory. He goes on to describe how the institution of property arose and debunks the myth of a “propertyless Eden”, a Utopian ideal to which some dreamers would want Man to return. He follows with a description of how property rights protected the freedoms of the people in England from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and how badly instituted property rights in Russia failed to protect even a minority of nobles from the whims of the Czar. Pipes then analyzes how in the 20th century property rights fared under Nazi and Communist rule in Germany and Russia.
Up until this point Pipes’s analysis is faultless, bold, original, and convincing. However he fails to convince when he begins examining property rights in the United States in the second half of the 20th century. He doesn’t like paying taxes, which hardly surprises anyone familiar with Pipes’s very conservative political views. But, complex tax codes notwithstanding, taxes redistribute wealth in a transparent and well ordered manner.
People don’t live in isolation; people live and work in society. Property is only one of the institutions that make up our world, albeit an absolutely necessary one as Pipes argues. But when wealth is created and becomes the creator’s property, society has a duty through its institution to take a share. Call it a royalty or a rent.
Pipes is understandably frustrated by the sense of entitlement created by an overstretched meaning of rights (e.g. abuse of rent controls) and by government overactivity (e.g. busing) but is the solution to the abuses found in stronger property rights and in voluntary charity? Pipes did not convince me it did.
Vincent Poirier, Tokyo
where can i find a stinger exhaust for a vintage 1973 Arctic Cat el tigre 400 air cooled?
I have a 1973 arctic cat el tigre 400 air cooled and the sled is in mint condition. Vintage Pipe I am looking for a stinger exhaust for it but i cant find anything on the internet. The sled is in mint condition and only has 1300 miles on it and the stock exhaust is fine. I guess when it comes down to it i really like the sound of these old stinger pipes on these sleds and the little bit of power gain is always a plus.
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Richard Pipes’s Property and Freedom, offered by him as the work of a “dilettante”, is professor emeritus of Russian and Soviet history at Harvard. He is the author of at least twelve other books, including A Concise History of the Russian Revolution (1995) and The Unknown Lenin (1996). His books are written in an agreeable prose, a passport across any boundary, but one. In conscience, Property and Freedom cannot be recommended except, perhaps, to someone who is dying of incurable boredom and needs a dose of it to go over the side, for rare is the person who can read this book without slumping over it, and wise is the person who does not read it in front of an open fire. As the great 19th century historian Jacob Burckhardt wrote, it is good for a specialist to be a dilettante in other fields, but he should be one “privately” (Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (Munich, 1978), 16). Pipes instead chose to write a book.
Pipes wrote Poverty and Freedom to prove that liberty and the right to property are “connected”, an idea that emerged in the seventeenth century and that no one contests. He claims, however, that though the idea is old, the historical evidence for this uncontested idea has not been gathered, and hence his book. It is doubtful that, after reading it, the reader will learn what he did not know at the beginning, and that is that rights have not “evolved” in a Darwinian garden, they are not sociobiological specimens, and they are not the result of theological epiphanies. They are powers that have been granted or seized because those who would deny them would suffer. All else – tracts, scrolls, philosophies, testaments, beliefs religious or pagan, all of the scenery and scripts that we call history, are as nothing compared with the central fact of power and its location. Magna Carta, for example, benefitted English barons, not Englishmen at large, and freedom of speech originated not in the mouth of an English divine or philosopher but in the grant of the English crown driven by the need of money to grant them to the House of Commons.
For the history of the idea of property, Pipes recounts the thinking of Western philosophers, theologians, and political theorists. We are treated to the differing views of Plato and Aristotle, the influence of Stoicism on Christianity, the immense contribution of Roman jurists, the radical opinions of St Thomas Aquinas, the inspiriting of capitalism by Calvin, the derisable ideas of the “noble savage” and “Utopia”, and on and on through the Law of Nature, Grotius, Hobbes, Harrington, Locke, Rousseau, and the calling in, of all people, Wordsworth and Coleridge, all of this and one has reached only page 49, with last-page 328 a rumored oasis in the distance, reachable after one has run barefoot over 907 footnotes in which one’s closing eyes may find six languages to feast upon. If this book has one constant flaw, it is its daunting incantation of facts and opinions that fly by like freight trains, all to prove that the right to property is essential to liberty. The flaw may be forgivable on the ground that Pipes, a Polish Jew who fled Poland in 1940 at the age of ten, has for decades lived intellectually with the murderous sweep of Marxist Communism, fixed at 20,000,000 under Stalin, and 120,000,000 throughout the earth (See, Stephane Courtois et al., Le livre noir du communisme (Paris: Laffont, 1997)).
For property as an institution, Pipes examines history, psychology, anthropology, and sociobiology, to prove to us, a people consecrated to materialism, that acquisitiveness is universal among humans as well as animals. He covers
possessiveness in animals, including insects, from protozoa to primates, careful to include dragonflies and the beloved three-spined stickleback. At one point he writes, “Such examples can be multiplied ad infinitum”, causing this reviewer to reflexively drop his book. Nor does the acquisitive behavior of children escape Pipes’s cascade of what must be thousands of 4 by 6 index cards. Following children, presumably in logical progression, are “possession among primitive peoples” and “societies of hunters and gatherers”. The myth of a primitive communism is bound and taken to the scaffold, while private property in antiquity, feudal and mediaeval times, is reported, together with the creation of the state as the guarantor of ownership.
Pipe points to England as the classic illustration of how private wealth came to restrain public authority. Parliament, the servant of the crown from the 11th to the 15th century, then its partner from the 16th to the early 17th century, became the crown’s master in the 1640’s. The secret, described by Pipe in habitual detail, was simple. The crown needed money. The “people” had it or controlled it and demanded freedoms and reforms for it. He traces English history from pre-Norman times through the development of the common law, the crucial history of English taxation, the history of the Tudors, Stuarts, the Commonwealth, and the Revolution of 1688.
By way of comparison to England’s history, the story of patrimonial Russia, including two and a half centuries of serfdom and seventy years of Communist rule during the latter of which Russians were deprived of liberties to a degree hitherto unknown on earth, is painstakingly set forth in proof of how the absence of the right of property makes tyrannical government possible. Like its predecessors, this chapter sorely needed surgery. It is overloaded with historical material that satisfies only a narrow scholarly interest. Still, there are matters that might engage the reader, particularly Pipes’s development of the idea that Russians historically saw sovereign power as the source out of which property issued, and the fact that Russian liberals under the Tsar saw law as the cornerstone of liberty but did not see the connection between law and private property.
In Pipes’s last chapter, he tours our welfare capitalist state, complaining that entitlements create dependence, environmental laws are oppressive, minimum wage laws interfere with freedom of contract, banks are pressured into minority loans, rent control is bad economics, administrative agencies are governmental islands broken away from the continental shelf, taxation of personal income unjustly redistributes wealth, affirmative action in employment is the most egregious form of governmental interference, the government takes property by regulating its use, and so on, providing a communal table at which readers of this review at this moment are selecting their favorite complaints.
Pipes’s book invites criticism, but there is in this his last chapter a sudden, disarming admission. A way, he writes, must be found to preserve property as a fundamental human right while, at the same time, “ensuring fundamental social justice”. Had Pipes but written a slim, creative volume on social justice in a capitalist state, he might have given us something worth fifty books on the connection between property and freedom. The way to preserve the right to property and to assure social justice, he argues, is mainly “by attitudes which determine how laws and institutions are employed.” This reviewer would put it another way. On the one hand, welfare capitalism offers the best opportunity for realizing freedom and achieving productivity while assuring minimum benefits to those least fortunate. On the other hand, working and middle class majorities may demand too much equality with the rich, thus impairing the prospect of long term economic productivity and giving too little equality to the
underprivileged to satisfy their right to human development. Thus, the justice of welfare capitalism depends on the virtue of moderation by all classes for the sake of the common good. Imperfect as the analogy may be, it is somewhat like one ship towing another at sea. The knack is to keep both ships “in step” by using a tow line of such a length that the ships meet the waves and ride over them together, otherwise one vessel might be in a trough while the other is on a crest, causing the line to slacken and then tauten with sudden violence, doing neither much good. So too in welfare capitalism. The expectations of the classes must be such that one does not destroy the other, otherwise they will all go down.
Instead of being titled “property and freedom,” it should be titled “property and power.” Pipes was a prominent old cold-war apologist for American capitalism, and you can tell that he is still trapped in his little world of false-dichotomy.
Pipes overall argument is contrived, and with the exception of his knowledge of Russian history, superficial. Most of his time is spent criticizing the Stalinist Soviet Union, while at the same time lacking any thoughtful rebuttal to Marx’s critique of capitalism.
His title claim, that freedom cannot exist without private property, is weak philosophically and logically. He has poor insight into the nature of freedom and presonal responsibilty. He would really benefit by reading some Sartre or Nietzche, before trying to describe his own made up idea freedom. His attempts to link economic thought with philosophy and history fail miserably. He barely exposes the actual writings of Marx. This is incredibly unfortuante since most “real-world” capitalists, such as wealthy Wall street brokers, know that Marx understood capitalism better than any of its supporters. His philosophical support is all anecdotal with no real thoughtful analysis. His historical summary, although detailed with Russia, leaves much to be desired. He fails to discuss slavery, prostitution, or even slumlords, all which flourish under American capitalism.
Although some might find his credentials enough to accept his flimsy argument, I for one was greatly disappointed. I realize that property is linked to power, but freedom is something completely different.
I’m sure many right-wing folks will look past all of this flaws in this books and embrace it. I’m sure the paternalistic allure of an established Harvard professor will cause some to avoid challenging the views in his book.
But I’m not trying to convince those people. Look past the credentials, the excessive use of footnotes to appear more “academic” ( a clear sign of a writer who is insecure of his own beliefs!), and the comfort of someone who agrees with your agenda, and you will discover shallow puerile nonsense.
In this book, Richard Pipes examines the role of property in the cause of human freedom from every angle. One, Pipes discusses ideologies of property: what classical thinkers thought about property, what later Europeans thought, especially the philosophes and utopians of the early modern era, and so on.
Two, Pipes discusses the anthropology of property. I consider this chapter to be the most valuable in the book because I’ve never seen a discussion like this anywhere as it relates to property rights and political theory. I have studied anthropology and sociobiology, so the terminology and the science is familiar, but the application is different. Pipes notes that property is universal; land is not always considered property, but all peoples have things which are considered such, and even when communist regimes outlawed property, theft became rampant. This was human nature revolting against ideology. He notes that human beings know property intrinsically; parents have to teach their children to share, not to covet. He notes that other primates, and many nonprimates, have property, and that across species females tend to find propertyless males unattractive. There has never been a society without property, and the contrast between reality and the mythical visions of propertyless societies is clear.
Three, Pipes discusses and compares the historical development of property rights in England and Russia, the latter being his field of expertise. Whereas secure property rights gave English landowners leverage against the monarchy, in patrimonial Russia there was nothing to check Tsarist absolutism. The submission of the country to Soviet totalitarianism and the current move toward “managed democracy” in Vladimir Putin’s Russia have been natural consequences of Russia’s heritage. (Pipes has an article in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs about popular acceptance of authoritarianism in modern Russia that is very insightful as to the current situation.)
Four, Pipes discusses the politics of property. He argues that, while property rights were essential to the foundation of democracy, democracy can become a threat to property rights as people begin to realize that they can regulate the property of others and redistribute some of it to themselves through the electoral system. Unfortunately, the last few decades of Western history seem to bear this out.
Overall, I would suggest this book for anyone seeking to understand the role and importance of property in the development and freedom of human societies.
Pipe’s thesis on freedom and property is an in-depth evaluation of the effect that individual freedom to own private property has on the history, wealth and type of government of a country. Pipes relates a thorough and interesting concept that supports his opinion that the most desirable type government is brought about by freedom to own property.
The comparison of societies in England versus communist Russia and Nazi Germany supports a convincing theory within the premises of truth and logic. He shows examples that support his theory that freedom to own property in England gave rise to political and legal institutions. On the other hand, Russian czars ruled by decree and required obligatory payments from estate holders who were not allowed to own their own property. His theory suggests that because Russia did not respect freedom to own property they did not respect human life.
The freedom to acquire and own private property gives individuals the reason to thrive and accumulate personal wealth. This ambition and desire to achieve property requires a legal system that results in a capitalist democracy. On the other hand, if the government owns all the property such as the comparison with Russia and Germany, the citizens are slightly more than slaves. They have no reason to work because they will not share in the profit nor ever be able to own their own property – sort of like the “haves and have nots” of our society. Thousands of immigrants come to America each week in search of “The American Dream” which means that anyone can work hard and accumulate wealth and property. Pipes suggested that various social movements could place checks on owning personal property even in a free nation. Possibly he was talking of some of the social service programs that provide money for the poor but if they have too much money or own property, they are in danger of losing their payments which seems to discourage wanting the freedom to own private property. A law that seems to contradict freedom of property is the law of “eminent domain” which allows the government to seize property if it is for the benefit of the majority which seems like an infringement on our freedom for personal property – why have it if the government can take it away? In the words of Pipes, “We must have to be.”
In this book, Richard Pipes examines the role of property in the cause of human freedom from every angle. One, Pipes discusses ideologies of property: what classical thinkers thought about property, what later Europeans thought, especially the philosophes and utopians of the early modern era, and so on.
Two, Pipes discusses the anthropology of property. I consider this chapter to be the most valuable in the book because I’ve never seen a discussion like this anywhere as it relates to property rights and political theory. I have studied anthropology and sociobiology, so the terminology and the science is familiar, but the application is different. Pipes notes that property is universal; land is not always considered property, but all peoples have things which are considered such, and even when communist regimes outlawed property, theft became rampant. This was human nature revolting against ideology. He notes that human beings know property intrinsically; parents have to teach their children to share, not to covet. He notes that other primates, and many nonprimates, have property, and that across species females tend to find propertyless males unattractive. There has never been a society without property, and the contrast between reality and the mythical visions of propertyless societies is clear.
Three, Pipes discusses and compares the historical development of property rights in England and Russia, the latter being his field of expertise. Whereas secure property rights gave English landowners leverage against the monarchy, in patrimonial Russia there was nothing to check Tsarist absolutism. The submission of the country to Soviet totalitarianism and the current move toward “managed democracy” in Vladimir Putin’s Russia have been natural consequences of Russia’s heritage. (Pipes has an article in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs about popular acceptance of authoritarianism in modern Russia that is very insightful as to the current situation.)
Four, Pipes discusses the politics of property. He argues that, while property rights were essential to the foundation of democracy, democracy can become a threat to property rights as people begin to realize that they can regulate the property of others and redistribute some of it to themselves through the electoral system. Unfortunately, the last few decades of Western history seem to bear this out.
Overall, I would suggest this book for anyone seeking to understand the role and importance of property in the development and freedom of human societies.
Richard Pipes’s Property and Freedom, offered by him as the work of a “dilettante”, is professor emeritus of Russian and Soviet history at Harvard. He is the author of at least twelve other books, including A Concise History of the Russian Revolution (1995) and The Unknown Lenin (1996). His books are written in an agreeable prose, a passport across any boundary, but one. In conscience, Property and Freedom cannot be recommended except, perhaps, to someone who is dying of incurable boredom and needs a dose of it to go over the side, for rare is the person who can read this book without slumping over it, and wise is the person who does not read it in front of an open fire. As the great 19th century historian Jacob Burckhardt wrote, it is good for a specialist to be a dilettante in other fields, but he should be one “privately” (Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (Munich, 1978), 16). Pipes instead chose to write a book.
Pipes wrote Poverty and Freedom to prove that liberty and the right to property are “connected”, an idea that emerged in the seventeenth century and that no one contests. He claims, however, that though the idea is old, the historical evidence for this uncontested idea has not been gathered, and hence his book. It is doubtful that, after reading it, the reader will learn what he did not know at the beginning, and that is that rights have not “evolved” in a Darwinian garden, they are not sociobiological specimens, and they are not the result of theological epiphanies. They are powers that have been granted or seized because those who would deny them would suffer. All else – tracts, scrolls, philosophies, testaments, beliefs religious or pagan, all of the scenery and scripts that we call history, are as nothing compared with the central fact of power and its location. Magna Carta, for example, benefitted English barons, not Englishmen at large, and freedom of speech originated not in the mouth of an English divine or philosopher but in the grant of the English crown driven by the need of money to grant them to the House of Commons.
For the history of the idea of property, Pipes recounts the thinking of Western philosophers, theologians, and political theorists. We are treated to the differing views of Plato and Aristotle, the influence of Stoicism on Christianity, the immense contribution of Roman jurists, the radical opinions of St Thomas Aquinas, the inspiriting of capitalism by Calvin, the derisable ideas of the “noble savage” and “Utopia”, and on and on through the Law of Nature, Grotius, Hobbes, Harrington, Locke, Rousseau, and the calling in, of all people, Wordsworth and Coleridge, all of this and one has reached only page 49, with last-page 328 a rumored oasis in the distance, reachable after one has run barefoot over 907 footnotes in which one’s closing eyes may find six languages to feast upon. If this book has one constant flaw, it is its daunting incantation of facts and opinions that fly by like freight trains, all to prove that the right to property is essential to liberty. The flaw may be forgivable on the ground that Pipes, a Polish Jew who fled Poland in 1940 at the age of ten, has for decades lived intellectually with the murderous sweep of Marxist Communism, fixed at 20,000,000 under Stalin, and 120,000,000 throughout the earth (See, Stephane Courtois et al., Le livre noir du communisme (Paris: Laffont, 1997)).
For property as an institution, Pipes examines history, psychology, anthropology, and sociobiology, to prove to us, a people consecrated to materialism, that acquisitiveness is universal among humans as well as animals. He covers
possessiveness in animals, including insects, from protozoa to primates, careful to include dragonflies and the beloved three-spined stickleback. At one point he writes, “Such examples can be multiplied ad infinitum”, causing this reviewer to reflexively drop his book. Nor does the acquisitive behavior of children escape Pipes’s cascade of what must be thousands of 4 by 6 index cards. Following children, presumably in logical progression, are “possession among primitive peoples” and “societies of hunters and gatherers”. The myth of a primitive communism is bound and taken to the scaffold, while private property in antiquity, feudal and mediaeval times, is reported, together with the creation of the state as the guarantor of ownership.
Pipe points to England as the classic illustration of how private wealth came to restrain public authority. Parliament, the servant of the crown from the 11th to the 15th century, then its partner from the 16th to the early 17th century, became the crown’s master in the 1640’s. The secret, described by Pipe in habitual detail, was simple. The crown needed money. The “people” had it or controlled it and demanded freedoms and reforms for it. He traces English history from pre-Norman times through the development of the common law, the crucial history of English taxation, the history of the Tudors, Stuarts, the Commonwealth, and the Revolution of 1688.
By way of comparison to England’s history, the story of patrimonial Russia, including two and a half centuries of serfdom and seventy years of Communist rule during the latter of which Russians were deprived of liberties to a degree hitherto unknown on earth, is painstakingly set forth in proof of how the absence of the right of property makes tyrannical government possible. Like its predecessors, this chapter sorely needed surgery. It is overloaded with historical material that satisfies only a narrow scholarly interest. Still, there are matters that might engage the reader, particularly Pipes’s development of the idea that Russians historically saw sovereign power as the source out of which property issued, and the fact that Russian liberals under the Tsar saw law as the cornerstone of liberty but did not see the connection between law and private property.
In Pipes’s last chapter, he tours our welfare capitalist state, complaining that entitlements create dependence, environmental laws are oppressive, minimum wage laws interfere with freedom of contract, banks are pressured into minority loans, rent control is bad economics, administrative agencies are governmental islands broken away from the continental shelf, taxation of personal income unjustly redistributes wealth, affirmative action in employment is the most egregious form of governmental interference, the government takes property by regulating its use, and so on, providing a communal table at which readers of this review at this moment are selecting their favorite complaints.
Pipes’s book invites criticism, but there is in this his last chapter a sudden, disarming admission. A way, he writes, must be found to preserve property as a fundamental human right while, at the same time, “ensuring fundamental social justice”. Had Pipes but written a slim, creative volume on social justice in a capitalist state, he might have given us something worth fifty books on the connection between property and freedom. The way to preserve the right to property and to assure social justice, he argues, is mainly “by attitudes which determine how laws and institutions are employed.” This reviewer would put it another way. On the one hand, welfare capitalism offers the best opportunity for realizing freedom and achieving productivity while assuring minimum benefits to those least fortunate. On the other hand, working and middle class majorities may demand too much equality with the rich, thus impairing the prospect of long term economic productivity and giving too little equality to the
underprivileged to satisfy their right to human development. Thus, the justice of welfare capitalism depends on the virtue of moderation by all classes for the sake of the common good. Imperfect as the analogy may be, it is somewhat like one ship towing another at sea. The knack is to keep both ships “in step” by using a tow line of such a length that the ships meet the waves and ride over them together, otherwise one vessel might be in a trough while the other is on a crest, causing the line to slacken and then tauten with sudden violence, doing neither much good. So too in welfare capitalism. The expectations of the classes must be such that one does not destroy the other, otherwise they will all go down.
Pipe’s thesis on freedom and property is an in-depth evaluation of the effect that individual freedom to own private property has on the history, wealth and type of government of a country. Pipes relates a thorough and interesting concept that supports his opinion that the most desirable type government is brought about by freedom to own property.
The comparison of societies in England versus communist Russia and Nazi Germany supports a convincing theory within the premises of truth and logic. He shows examples that support his theory that freedom to own property in England gave rise to political and legal institutions. On the other hand, Russian czars ruled by decree and required obligatory payments from estate holders who were not allowed to own their own property. His theory suggests that because Russia did not respect freedom to own property they did not respect human life.
The freedom to acquire and own private property gives individuals the reason to thrive and accumulate personal wealth. This ambition and desire to achieve property requires a legal system that results in a capitalist democracy. On the other hand, if the government owns all the property such as the comparison with Russia and Germany, the citizens are slightly more than slaves. They have no reason to work because they will not share in the profit nor ever be able to own their own property – sort of like the “haves and have nots” of our society. Thousands of immigrants come to America each week in search of “The American Dream” which means that anyone can work hard and accumulate wealth and property. Pipes suggested that various social movements could place checks on owning personal property even in a free nation. Possibly he was talking of some of the social service programs that provide money for the poor but if they have too much money or own property, they are in danger of losing their payments which seems to discourage wanting the freedom to own private property. A law that seems to contradict freedom of property is the law of “eminent domain” which allows the government to seize property if it is for the benefit of the majority which seems like an infringement on our freedom for personal property – why have it if the government can take it away? In the words of Pipes, “We must have to be.”
Instead of being titled “property and freedom,” it should be titled “property and power.” Pipes was a prominent old cold-war apologist for American capitalism, and you can tell that he is still trapped in his little world of false-dichotomy.
Pipes overall argument is contrived, and with the exception of his knowledge of Russian history, superficial. Most of his time is spent criticizing the Stalinist Soviet Union, while at the same time lacking any thoughtful rebuttal to Marx’s critique of capitalism.
His title claim, that freedom cannot exist without private property, is weak philosophically and logically. He has poor insight into the nature of freedom and presonal responsibilty. He would really benefit by reading some Sartre or Nietzche, before trying to describe his own made up idea freedom. His attempts to link economic thought with philosophy and history fail miserably. He barely exposes the actual writings of Marx. This is incredibly unfortuante since most “real-world” capitalists, such as wealthy Wall street brokers, know that Marx understood capitalism better than any of its supporters. His philosophical support is all anecdotal with no real thoughtful analysis. His historical summary, although detailed with Russia, leaves much to be desired. He fails to discuss slavery, prostitution, or even slumlords, all which flourish under American capitalism.
Although some might find his credentials enough to accept his flimsy argument, I for one was greatly disappointed. I realize that property is linked to power, but freedom is something completely different.
I’m sure many right-wing folks will look past all of this flaws in this books and embrace it. I’m sure the paternalistic allure of an established Harvard professor will cause some to avoid challenging the views in his book.
But I’m not trying to convince those people. Look past the credentials, the excessive use of footnotes to appear more “academic” ( a clear sign of a writer who is insecure of his own beliefs!), and the comfort of someone who agrees with your agenda, and you will discover shallow puerile nonsense.