‘Property is both an institution and a concept’

As an institution property could be said to be legal and social, governing the use of most things and the allocation of some items of social welfare. As an institution, property is a complex organizing idea; resources and wealth may appear to be dependant on property ownership. Often the more property a person owns the greater their overall wealth and freedom to do as they wish. Few primitive peoples, whose societies have been researched by anthropologists, have turned out to lack any conception of it. In the modern world, any normal person will have heard of it, from childhood onwards. In the modern world, the institution of property is everywhere embodied in law. Indeed the various organs of government deploy it, officially, as part of the mechanism for controlling the use of things and as part of the mechanism for supervising or directing the allocation of wealth. An example could be people with larger homes pay a greater rate of council tax than those with smaller less valuable hom...