2025/02/28 by Alicia Steinmetz · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #American Constitutional Law and Politics #Political Theory and Influence #Rousseau and Enlightenment Thought
paper · doi:10.53765/20512988.46.1.107
openalex publication_date 2025/02/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
What is the ‘nature’ of the right to private property? Rousseau offers a surprising response. Where the dominant, Lockean imaginary of natural property rights takes their original, pre-political givenness within human reason as grounding for their inviolability, Rousseau asserts that ‘nature’ itself provides a critical and normative standard for evaluating legal property rights. In this article, I analyse Rousseau’s various models of nature in order to reveal the distinctive way in which nature operates as a normative standard across his work, uniting what otherwise might seem like disparate and contradictory arguments about property rights into a coherent account. I argue that private property is not a natural right for Rousseau; instead, it is a right that must be made natural .