Labor and Property: A Critical Guide to Political Economy

Martin Elson

For Liz, and Kurt

How to use this guide

This guide maps how the major traditions of political economy have understood labor and property. It is written for serious newcomers and built to be useful to specialists. Newcomers can read it in order. Specialists can open any entry to check a position, an attribution or a source.

Each entry stands alone and follows one pattern. It opens with a short overview in plain language, then gives the full treatment: each tradition’s positions, what its thinkers wrote (Text) as distinct from later interpretation (Reading), and the strongest objections. Quotations after “Text:” are the words of the thinker the entry or paragraph names, unless another author is named, and the guide gives each one’s work and location (book, chapter, section or page) in the sentence rather than in footnotes. It closes with “Where to read it,” a list of the primary texts with exact titles, dates and locations. The guide points to the sources; it does not replace them.

Parts 0 to XI are descriptive and aim to present each camp as its best defenders would. Reporting a position is not endorsing it: the guide sets out views its author rejects, among them the old natural-law defenses of voluntary slavery and self-sale, because later arguments for inalienable rights were made against them and cannot be understood without them. Claims not yet confirmed are flagged “to verify” where they occur. Part XII is different in kind: it argues a position rather than reporting one, drawing on the guide but set apart from it.

Contents

Part 0: Conceptual toolkit
Entries 1–5

Part I: Natural-law precursors
Entries 6–9

Part II: Classical political economy
Entries 10–13

Part III: Ricardian socialists
Entries 14–17

Forthcoming
Part IV: Marx and Engels
Part V: Mutualism and individualist anarchism
Part VI: Marginalist and Austrian responses
Part VII: Georgism
Part VIII: Twentieth-century libertarian theory
Part IX: Ellerman and objections
Part X: Contemporary landscape
Part XI: Synthesis and reference
Part XII: Toward a synthesis (signed essay)