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From Subsistence to Property: Traces of a Fundamental Change in Early Modern Bavaria

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Renate Blickle
Renate Blickle
Affiliation:
Bern, Switzerland
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Extract

Subsistence and property. ”This paper looks at an enduring subject from a Central European perspective. It is an historiographical variation of an old matter of dispute: to whom do the goods of the world legitimately belong, to those who need them, or to those who possess them legally, but do not need them? In this paper “subsistence” stands for the legitimizing power of the idea of “need,” and “property” for justification through an appeal to freedom. In theory more than two thousand years ago the question was already answered in favor of the primacy of property.

Type
Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , December 1992 , pp. 377 - 385
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1992

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References

1. Xenophon, Cyropaedia, ed. A. Goodwin (1879), 1:3.

2. Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962).Google Scholar

3. Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation (New York/Toronto, 1944).Google Scholar

4. Sombart, Werner, Der modeme Kapitalismits (Munich/Leipzig, 1928), vol. 1, 2d ed., Die vorkapitalistische Wirtschaft.Google Scholar

5. Thompson, E. P., “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century, ” Past and Present 1 (1971): 76–131.CrossRefGoogle Scholaridem, “The Moral Economy Reviewed, ” idem, Customs in Common (London, 1991): 259–351.

6. For more detailed references see Blickle, Renate, “Hausnotdurft. Ein Fundamental rccht in dcr altstandischen Ordnung Baycrns, ” in Grund- und Freiheitsrechte von der ständischen zur spätburgerlichen Gesellschaft, ed. Birtsch, Günter (Göttingen, 1987), 42–62Google Scholar, and Blickle, Renate, “Nahrung und Eigentum als Kategorien in der ständischen Gesellschaft, ” in Ständische Gesellschaft und soziale Mobilität, ed. Schulze, Winfried (Munich, 1988), 73–93.Google Scholar

7. Basic law for the Federal Republic of Germany of 23 May 1949, article 14, paragraph 2: “Eigentum verpflichtet. Sein Gebrauch soil zugleich dem Wohle der Allgemeinheit dienen.”