Spinoza clearly did not say much about the problem of property, quantitatively speaking: a few allusions in the Ethics, some lines in the TTP concerning the Hebrew State, and five paragraphs in the TP. But it is also clear that, each time he speaks of it, it is always at decisive strategic points, and that, consequently, he accords great importance to it. Why is this? What is at stake here? In order to understand this, we must first ask ourselves what exactly are, for Spinoza, the basic elements of the problem. After which we will be able to try to reconstruct the internal logic of the solutions that Spinoza proposes.

The point of departure here clearly consists in a certain conception of property that is already entirely spelled out in Grotius, with which Spinoza’s readers would have been familiar, and which Spinoza himself seems to consider as self-evident. Property is a right, in the subjective sense that the word ‘right’ had just taken on at the time, and which was entirely recent: it is a faculty, or a moral power. This right is a real right: it is the faculty of having a thing at one's disposal, in opposition to rights that we can have over people (personal rights), like the right a creditor has over a debtor, and, in particular, that a tenant has over their landlord. Finally, this real right is distinguished from other real rights by two specific characteristics. On the one hand, it is exclusive, in opposition to the rights that we have over things that we all can access freely: air, the water in rivers, the sea, etc. On the other hand, it is absolute. It is true that there are degrees in the absolute, since Grotius associates the right to property not only with full property (the right to have things at one's disposal in ‘the most absolute’ manner, as it says in Article 544 of the French Civil Code), but also with perpetual usufruct and temporary usufruct; but these three rights, in spite of everything, are indeed absolute with respect to those other real rights, servitudes: the former allow us to do anything we wish with a thing within certain limits, that is, to use it for an infinite number of things, whereas a servitude only grants us this or that perfectly determined usage (the right to pass through someone else's land, etc.).