Making Sense of Property with Jean-Jacques Rousseau

This article argues that property is contingent, for Rousseau, being enacted through appropriation which creates a boundary that encloses something as owned while exposing it to others free to respect or reject ownership. It is proper neither to the individual nor to community but constituted through their articulation. This emphasis on relationality differentiates Rousseau’s theory from Locke’s. The self-enclosure of possessive individualism would deny the exposure to others which ownership claims presuppose. Even if individuals appropriate things through labour, their appropriation makes sense as property only through others. This sharing of sense means that property resists complete privatisation or collectivisation, entailing common agreement to get established as a right others respect. As inequality and expropriation would undermine the reciprocity underpinning that agreement, property’s respectability involves maintaining equal access to resources to promote equal political participation. Rousseau affirms a relational mode of property that articulates individuation and community integration so that citizens perceive their property as contingent on the sharing of rights, obligations, and resources. That mode transforms property’s contingency – its unstable grounding – into the basis of owners’ collective responsibility to ensure its legitimacy for others without whom proprietary rights make no sense.