Private Property

Private property is a legal designation for the ownership of property by non-governmental legal entities. Private property is distinguishable from public property, which is owned by a state entity; and from collective (or cooperative) property, which is owned by a group of non-governmental entities. Private property is further distinguished from personal property, which refers to property for personal use and consumption. Private property is a legal concept defined and enforced by a country's political system.

Prior to the 18th century, English-speakers generally used the word "property" in reference to land ownership. In England, "property" did not have a legal definition until the 17th century. Private property as commercial property was invented with the great European trading companies of the 17th century.

The issue of the enclosure of agricultural land in England, especially as debated in the 17th and 18th centuries, accompanied efforts in philosophy and political thought—by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), James Harrington (1611–1677), and John Locke (1632–1704), for example—to address the phenomenon of property ownership.

John Locke, in arguing against supporters of absolute monarchy, conceptualized property as a "natural right" that God had not bestowed exclusively on the monarchy. Influenced by the rise of mercantilism, Locke argued that private property was antecedent to, and thus independent of, government. Locke distinguished between "common property", by which he meant open-access property; and property in consumer goods and producer-goods, the latter of which referred to land. His chief argument for property in land was improved land management and cultivation over common (open-access) land. Locke developed a normative theory of property rights based on labor, which stated that property is a natural result of labor improving upon nature; and thus by virtue of labor expenditure, the laborer becomes entitled to its produce.

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