A few years ago some friends and I decided to read the opening chapters of Locke’s Second Treatise of Government together, though I can’t remember exactly why. I had read Locke as an undergraduate in a political theory class on the foundations of American institutions. While the outlines of his labour theory of property were familiar enough to me, I soon realized, on looking freshly at the text, that I had failed to recall the theological dimensions of his view. Perhaps these were blotted out by time or simply by disciplinary inclination. Fortunately, there was an academically trained theologian in our group, who drew Locke’s emphasis to our shared attention. 

The moral justification of private property in the Second Treatise depends on the idea that individual initiative can legitimately make something one’s own despite the original commonality of the whole earth and all that is therein. Taking such initiative not only expresses virtues of industry that Locke finds commendable but also responds to the divine command in Genesis to be fruitful and to have dominion over the earth. The original situation of shared ownership—or rather stewardship—derives from the same divine ordinance, which applies to Adam and to all his descendants equally, rather than, as Locke’s target Robert Filmer had held, descending on a chosen few of these descendants who enjoy the divine right of kings. 

Locke’s arguments about private property reverberate in the subsequent history of political thought. The most strident defence in recent political philosophy of the necessity of private property is essentially Lockean—namely, the one Robert Nozick offers in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Yet the theological dimension of Locke’s views—and the temporal and conceptual primacy of common ownership—has almost entirely dropped out of view in the predominantly secular and anti-religious worldview of academic political philosophy. 

What I want to explore here is how the idea of the primacy of the commons might shape the way we think about private property in the ordinary circumstances of our lives. 

Private property is not merely an abstract political concept but rather reflects a set of facts that most of us confront daily, facts that lie at the heart of the ethical ideal of bourgeois life in the United States. This is the kind of life that I—and most of the people I know intimately—lead. 

I wake up each day surrounded by possessions that are mine, though virtually all of them are fungible—that is, substitutable for equivalents. I then usually venture out into a world that is not mine in this sense, though I am related to and even attached to it all the same. On a typical day, I walk down streets that fall under the care of my city, use public transportation that is likewise arranged collectively, and go to a workplace where the tools of my trade—ranging from stationery to books to the computer on which I am composing this essay—are the property of my employer, who delegates control over them to me. 

How different is the part of my life that I spend at home amid my things from the part of my life that I lead when I am out and about? The key difference lies in what I will call the discretion that is accorded to me with regard to my own possessions, including my right to alienate these possessions, to alter them, and generally to arrange them as I want. I do not myself own land or a house, so these rearrangements must take place against the background of property rights that belong to someone else, specifically my landlord. Still, my landlord is bound by the regulations of the city and the state to treat not only me and my possessions but also the building in which I live in circumscribed ways. 

Generally speaking, property rights are not rights to do anything I might want with what lies under my control. Rather, they are rights to forgo consultation of others in deciding how to treat certain possessions within agreed-on limits and rights to exclude others from doing as they wish. For instance, I have the discretion to decorate the interior of my own house however I like, but I might be limited in what I may do to the exterior of the house if the results would be a nuisance to others or if I live in a historic preservation district. Hence, property rights are essentially social in character. Moreover, the limits on what I or others may do vary depending on the kind of property in question and its societal relevance. Most of what I might own is trivial from the perspective of shared social life, but some of it is not. For instance, my ownership of a company that employs others is likely to be regulated in ways that my ownership of a toaster is not. 

There is another sort of societal concern with what I own, however, that has to do purely with its magnitude. If I own a great deal and others own very little, this situation is not neutral. Many areas of social life depend on the broader distribution of private property. One such area is my standing in the community itself. The more I own, the more say I will tend to have in how we organize ourselves socially and politically. This is because of how the possible and actual exercise of my rights impinges on—and limits—others. Such inequalities, in turn, have a profound effect on how we regard one another and on how each of us is regarded by the state. 

One of the key imperatives of bourgeois life is to own enough not to depend materially on others. In the version of this ideal known as “the American dream,” owning one’s home is imaginatively central, since home ownership enables a prominent sort of independence: we all need somewhere to sleep and to store our other possessions. In places where public transportation is scarce, which is pretty much everywhere in the United States except the central core of a handful of cities, owning a car is likewise valorized, given the importance of freedom of movement to many other aspects of life, including work, leisure, and family activities. 

While I spend my time immersed in these everyday realities, I have come to regard them with a degree of detachment. I sometimes find myself daydreaming about institutional ways of life—in the military or in a religious community—where this imperative to either own things or be controlled by others holds much less sway. 

For a period of my life, when I was a student in Oxford and Cambridge, I owned very little. I had left behind most of my things in Texas, giving them away to college friends, though I did ship several boxes of books to England, more as comfort objects than as useful possessions given the extensive libraries that were available for my use. 

The residential collegiate system at those universities is highly communal. Students and teachers alike take their meals together in the dining halls, use the libraries for their work, and socialize in common rooms furnished by their respective colleges. These small college communities open out into the wider university in various ways, but also offer a sort of cloister for their members. 

When I have returned on occasion to these collegiate universities for significant periods of time, I have been surprised by how quickly this communal pattern of life comes to feel both familiar and reassuring. It may be that I am simply less inclined than others to value a more general sort of discretion to shape the patterns of one’s life without coordination or permission. Still, in my experience, it is precisely a mode of freedom such communal life affords that appeals to me. The institution does not simply set bounds on what you individually can do; it also sets expectations for what all its members collectively should do. 

Take the common meal, for example, which was an important topic in ancient Greek theories of social solidarity. Many of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges have dining halls that are sometimes used for members to come and go, taking meals on their own or with a small group of others at long tables. (Such tables will be familiar to those who have watched the Harry Potter films, which used the Great Hall of Christ Church, Oxford, as their backdrop.) But at other times, in many colleges, formal meals occur with a set starting time and a range of other customs that regulate and shape the proceedings depending on the culture of the college, such as standing when the fellows and tutors enter, saying a Latin grace, and even listening to choral music supplied by the chapel choir. 

When I first arrived as a student at Balliol College, Oxford, with its reputation for liberalism (by the standards of Oxford’s most ancient colleges, anyway), I was grateful that these customs, which I witnessed as a guest at other colleges, were largely regarded as exclusionary and archaic, even at the rare formal dinners we had on Tuesday evenings. When I later moved to study at St. John’s College, Cambridge, with its almost-nightly formal meals, however, what I realized was that these customs were an invitation to the members of the college to pay sustained attention to one another. These three-course meals were not expensive for students; indeed, they were heavily subsidized by the college. The college did so in order for us to share a space, to sit alongside friends as well as others we might not know, and to devote time away from study and other occupations to converse, find common ground, and thereby learn from one another. 

The chief function of the formalities in this context was to give these ordinary tasks of social life a gravity and a dignity that they might not otherwise have. When I eventually took my turn as a scholar of the college to say the Latin grace every night for a week, I did so with pleasure. No one, of course, was compelled to attend formal hall, but these meals’ ready availability—and the sheer beauty of the hall—made them widely attractive. 

In participating, we exchanged discretion—specifically, the ability to fit meals into our busy days at a time and pace convenient for us—for a common task and a shared experience. Looking back, I think of these evenings with great fondness, their value and meaningfulness to me incalculable alongside the more direct benefits of the education I received. All of this was only possible through the sustained commitment of the institution to the practice of shared meals. 

As a university teacher now, I wish there were more opportunities to break bread with my colleagues and students, apart from the slightly stilted evenings that tend to follow conferences or symposia. We ought to get to know one another better apart from any disciplinary affinity. But that goal, of sharing an intellectual life, is not one that even the most distinguished research universities in the United States favour, even as they notionally celebrate the goal of interdisciplinarity. Rather, we are pushed toward excellence in our respective fields, each in our own way. As a result, our universities are often less than the sum of their parts. 

The general lesson is this: ​​in being so focused on what each of us wants, what each of us thinks most important, our shared life and our private lives become impoverished. 

I said above that communal life can afford us a special kind of freedom, which may seem in tension with my thought that such a life demands that we give up, to some extent, our individual pursuits. This tension is merely apparent. The kind of freedom I have in mind is not discretion, the ability to dispose of things (including not only our possessions but our time) as we see fit, but rather leisure, the freedom to do what we most want to do apart from exigency or constraint. A life with too little discretion may be burdensome, but having a great deal of discretion is no guarantee that one has the freedom of leisure. 

Moreover, owning things is a path toward such leisure only in a society where communal resources are not devoted to securing what each of us needs. Locke’s idea that the world’s resources belong to us in common before anyone sets some of them aside reminds us that regimes of property are always a specific way of addressing our essential human neediness. But private property, and the ethical ideal that goes with it, does not do away with other forms of neediness that survive our having even the greatest personal riches: the basic human need for one another in order to live a fulfilling life and all the endeavours in such a life that are essentially shared. These endeavours are diminished when we keep ourselves from others behind literal walls and gates, as well as behind the more subtle psychological barriers that the organization of individual lives around private property can throw up. 

I have spent some time over the past few years in the company of the Bruderhof, an Anabaptist community founded by Eberhard Arnold in Germany in 1920. A number of their major communities now happen to lie within a short train ride of New York City in the Hudson River Valley. Members of the Bruderhof vow to put not only themselves at the disposal of the community but also all their property, “both that which you now possess and that which you may later inherit or earn.” They do so in imitation of the example they find in the early Christian community described in the Acts of the Apostles. 

One lesson from my time with the Bruderhof is that there is simply less to do there, not only less possibility of exercising discretion but also less need to think of doing so. But that fact has not made my time there—or what I do with it—feel less valuable. A major reason for that experience is the Bruderhof’s culture of hospitality: guests are invited into the life of the community and tended to with care and attention. But another reason is a sense of expectation that certain tasks are undertaken on a collective basis, which frees up members to do their particular work or indeed to do as they see fit. 

To be clear, while I have enjoyed my time in the Bruderhof communities and find a great deal to be attractive about them, I am not rushing to join one either. Even so, these experiences have sharpened my sense, when I return to my life in New York City, that the lure of discretion is frequently a false one. I suspect that many of those I know whose lives are similar to mine might give up dimensions of private-property ownership if they felt secure in the prospect of communal provisions of comparable goods. 

We are told that there is a crisis of loneliness afflicting people in the United States and in similar liberal democratic societies. Part of what is striking about this situation is that you can feel lonely even when you are surrounded by other people. What matters more is our sense that others understand us and that they share in the activities of our life, in our joys and sorrows. 

This crisis has, it seems, grown worse in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic and its significant disruption to social life. This disruption was not simply to the possibility of socializing in the short term before vaccines and treatments lowered the risk for many people but also to people’s disposition to socialize—and, for some young people at least, to their skills at organizing a satisfying social life. People who now regularly or always work at home may find it difficult to experience chance social encounters that can provide the opportunity and impetus for a wide-ranging social life. 

Private property—and the privacy it affords—is a double-edged sword. To be sure, I expect that most people value quite highly the relative privacy of living in isolation from others (or at least too many others) if they can. But the privacy of private property, our power to exclude others from exercising their discretion in ways we would find unwelcome, tends to cut us off from the goods of shared living. When we see our homes as ours alone, are we still able to open-heartedly invite others—even those we might consider our intimates—into them? 

In the face of this challenge, I have been trying, in my own life, to practice a certain detachment from my possessions. I imagine to the extent that I can that, instead of being their owner, I am simply their steward. I have a sentimental attachment to some of my kitchen equipment, for instance, especially those objects that were given to me as gifts or with which I associate significant memories. Nevertheless, by seeing myself simply as the steward of these things, I can orient my use of them not only to my own benefit but also to that of others, not least those whom I invite into my home for shared meals. 

I would likely object, out of instinct, to a dinner guest attempting to carry a favourite pot or pan away with them at the end of a meal, but this image also brings me to wonder: What if that guest had a good reason for doing so? I can easily imagine several. Perhaps the pot or pan would find its way back to me eventually. These thoughts help to remind me that what I own ought to be used for the sake of the common good—even where there is no real threat of a friend turning pilferer—and that someone else might sometimes see better than I do what the common good requires of my use of my possessions. 

For the simple reason that each of us cannot live a satisfying life on our own, possessing private property can never be its own end, nor can the exclusion of all others who might exercise their discretion in ways that impinge on us be a suitable goal. Moreover, wisdom and imagination are always needed to secure the just and admirable use of possessions, whether they are private or common property. Any story, whether Lockean or otherwise, about how private property is justified or necessary must respect these considerations. In addition to sharing in our stewardship of the earth and its resources, we share an inescapable responsibility to one another. It is only in that task of shared life that genuine happiness can be found.