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‘Economic property rights’ as ‘nonsense upon stilts’: a comment on Hodgson

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2015

DANIEL H. COLE
DANIEL H. COLE*
Affiliation:
Indiana University Maurer School of Law, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Bloomington, IN, USA.
*
*Email: dancole@indiana.edu.
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Abstract

Hodgson's (2015) critique of extra-legal ‘property rights’ – in this case, so-called ‘economic property rights’ – is right on target. This Comment contributes two further points to his critique. First, the notion of ‘economic property rights’ is based on what Gilbert Ryle (1949) referred to as a ‘category mistake’, conflating physical possession, which is a brute fact about the world, with the right or entitlement to possession, which is a social or institutional fact that cannot exist in the absence of some social contract, convention, covenant, or agreement. The very notion of a non-institutional ‘right’ is oxymoronic. Second, the fact that property is an institutional fact does not mean it must exist with the structure of a ‘state’ (as Bentham suggested). Rather, institutions like ‘property rights’ only require some community, however large or small, operating with what Searle (1995; 2005) calls collective intentionality and collective acceptance, according to shared ‘rules of recognition’ (Hart, 1997).

Type
Comment
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 725 - 730
Copyright
Copyright © Millennium Economics Ltd 2015 

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