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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2015
The contemporary turmoil in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union reflects acceptance by their populations that collectivism has failed them and that they have more to hope for from the property rights systems of the West. In economic terms, indeed, Western culture has depended fundamentally on these rights, and in recent years economic historians have been paying increasing attention to them. In doing so, however, they have encountered a problem which they are unable to solve within the terms of their own discipline: economics relies on the concept of agents who act only according to rational self-interest, but property rights as they can actually be found in history have often reflected forces that can only be described as altruism. Economics is now therefore having to take account of cultural factors in the formation of property rights, and the deeper these are studied the clearer the religious influence on them appears to be.
The earliest type of property must have been in the form of “exclusive communal” rights which, by establishing some form of defence against “outsiders,” prevented the latter from sharing in a resource which a tribe considered to belong to it. It is plausible that the historical shift from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture depended on the development of such rights. However, the extent to which they can lead to prosperity on their own is quite limited.
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