On Property - Reinhold Niebuhr

(The third in a series of mini-reflections on Niebuhr's The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness - a vindication of democracy and a critique of its traditional defense. Previous installments can be found here and here. Note that Niebuhr wrote these words in 1944.)

Quoting Niebuhr:

Even the modern class conflict, in which these ideas are the weapons of opposing classes, was anticipated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; for Calvinism was on the whole the religion of the middle classes and sectarianism [the Anabaptists of the Continent and the Diggers of England] was the religion of the disinherited.

But modern secularism, both liberal and Marxist, has set property theories in even more complete contradiction to each other. Liberal thought tended to emancipate property relations from all political control or moral restraint which Christian thought always maintained. Marxist philosophy on the other hand derived all historical evil from the rise of private property more completely than sectarian Christianity. Thus secularism removed the last common denominator between opposing convictions on the question of property.

Ideas, as weapons of social conflict, have no independent potency. We must therefore not assume that a reconsideration of the ideas would eliminate the conflict. But democratic society must find some common denominator in this debate.

Niebuhr goes on to make his case for why a common denominator is needed.

The lead up to the passage quoted is a masterful tracing of the progress of Christian thought on property from the Desert Fathers, through Thomas Aquinas, orthodox Catholicism and orthodox Protestantism. It provides what could form the basis for the outline of a college course on property.

What would be missing from such a course would be thought on property from other traditions. I'd like to teach a course on property that covered several traditions, but I couldn't do it alone.