Russell Kirk's Concise Guide to Conservatism by Russell Kirk

Author:Russell Kirk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gateway Editions

CHAPTER VIII

Conservatives and Private Property

Perhaps no facile political slogan has done more mischief in our time than the pretense that there is a conflict between “human rights and property rights”: a notion popularized in this country by Franklin Roosevelt. All rights are human rights. Both in point of law and in ethical theory, beasts, plants, and inanimate objects have no rights. Only men and women have rights. “Property,” as such, enjoys no rights or privileges; for property is not human. What we mean by the phrase “property rights” is really the rights of human beings to possess and acquire property. Property rights are human rights. They are, indeed, among the most important of human rights. There is no opposition between human rights and property rights; if ever a conflict arises, it is between the human right of owning and acquiring property, and some other real or pretended human right.

No principle in English and American politics is better established than respect for the rights of holding and acquiring private property. Representative government arose out of the claim of the owners of property that they had a right to be consulted by the political authority, if their property were to be taxed: this was the origin of popular representation throughout Europe, and the English House of Commons is only the best example of the development of such rights. In America, the principal claim of the Patriots, on the eve of the War of Independence, was that their property was taxed without representation. In America, as in England, nearly everyone was agreed that men and women have three fundamental rights: the right to life, the right to liberty, and the right to property. These three rights were understood to be coordinate and interdependent; for liberty, and even life, could not be secure unless private property was secure. In the Declaration of Independence, the original draft of that document proclaimed that mankind had been endowed naturally with the rights of life, liberty, and property; the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” was substituted for “property” only in Jefferson’s revision of the, Declaration, and was meant to broaden, rather than to deny, the prescriptive rights of property-holding.

So, the rights of property are ancient and essential human rights. Unless property is secure, there can be no civilized life; for without the right to keep what is one’s own, and to add to that if possible, there can be no leisure, no material improvement, no culture worthy of the name. In a condition of anarchy, when every person’s property is at the mercy of any strong and ruthless depredator, men and women become so many Cains, their hands against every man’s, and every man’s against theirs. Bare life, and even a rude form of liberty, may sometimes be possible in a state of anarchy; but they are possible only while men and women live in a savage state. The existence of property, above the most meagre personal possessions, is possible only when some form of political order ensures that a man may keep what is his own.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.