The second part of a two-part response, in which Dagan responds to the worry that liberal property’s happy humanistic vision might end up as a distracting utopia.
The first of a two-part response, in which Dagan responds to the concern that liberal property is self-destructive.
Liberalism as the “Mansion on the Hill”
I want to suggest, however, that autonomy—even Dagan’s rehabilitated, communitarian conception of it—is a myth. Rather, the dependence and reliance (the vulnerability) against which autonomy is pitted is not pathogenic. It is not pathological. It is not an error to be fixed or a deficiency to be remedied.”
Dyal Chand’s concern is that Dagan’s vision does not ensure the level of collective restraint that will be required to pull us back from our current state of crisis. Some of the choices that Dagan argues should remain available to self-actualizing individuals, particularly those that allow for more individualized decision-making, may simply be unwise to keep available at a time when the pursuit of autonomy through property has produced serious collective harms.
This is part of our symposium on Hanoch Dagan’s book, A Liberal Theory of Property. For a concise version of Dagan’s argument, see this restatement. Image credit: Sam Abell, National Geographic. Hanoch Dagan has written a wonderful, thoughtful, and thought-provoking book. Its publication could have hardly come at a more prescient time. Many observers and commentators rightly despair over the…
Dagan’s theory of property provides a novel way to make sense of the puzzle of incorporating diversity within uniformity of property rights, but his approach fails to capture the deep pluralism of property.
In this post, we specifically consider liberal defenses of private property in the “means of production”. This focus allows us to put the liberal defense of private property into dialogue with Marxism, with which it shares a broad humanistic heritage and many particular normative framings. Our focus also connects liberal property theory with a variety of later critiques of private property in certain productive resources, including those of the progressive and realist lawyers who generated American doctrines concerning “public utility” and other modes of resource governance that are neither strictly “private property” nor strictly matters of state control.
One of the great dangers of our national climate policy vacuum is that the fox will happily take charge of the henhouse. In North Carolina, a partnership between Big Pig and Big Energy foreshadows a troubling realignment of the forces of oligarchy…
The law treats animals as objects with no legally-recognized rights or interests. Changing the basic legal status of animals will make positive change easier to achieve.
Animal agriculture relies on cultural myths about farming. The animal rights movement seeks to build countervailing narratives that center the ugly reality. The result is an ongoing legal battle about speech, truth, and visibility.
Big Meat’s rise to power is not the result of entrepreneurial savvy exercised in a free market. Multinational meat conglomerates have flourished because they are massively subsidized at the public’s expense.
While leftists begin to coalesce in opposition to industrial meat production, the imagined left alternative remains ill-defined. The goal of this symposium is to crack open these conversations on the blog.
Like all modern organizations, modern states are subject to a “data imperative”: a mandate to mine data and to decide what to manage based on what can be measured. In service of data-hungry machine learning techniques, the state (and its contractors) find themselves compelled not only to seek and demand new kinds of data, but also to mine it in a somewhat agnostic fashion to find the relations that stick. It is no longer necessary to flatten society to make it legible (as high modernism required); instead, ubiquitous data capture means that categories emerge inductively from regularities observed in the data.
Despite the disproportionate impact of climate change on vulnerable populations who have been largely ignored due to their racialization, legal scholarship on climate displacement has often adopted a doctrinal approach that fails to analyze the underlying systemic causes of the climate crisis and its relationship to race and racism.
