The Restructuring of Property Rights Through the Institutional Economist’ s Eyes

Abstract

The classical English economist and moralist John Stuart Mill—one of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century—expressed a fascinating prediction concerning the future of the key institution of any society—the institution of property rights. In 1848, looking one and half centuries ahead, he exactly estimated not only the fragility of capitalism, but also what would happen under certain circumstances. Mill foretold the historical period we are living in the same year that The Communist Manifest of the prophets of socialism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, was published.

“For a long period to come the principle of individual property will be in possession of the field; and even if in any country a popular movement were to place Socialists at the head of a revolutionary government, in however many ways they might violate private property, the institution itself would survive, and would either be accepted by them or brought back by their expulsion…. Even those, if any, who had shared among themselves what was the property of others would desire to keep what they had acquired, and to give back to property in the new hands the sacredness which they had not recognised in the old.”

Joun Stuart Mill,Principles of Poliitical Economy