Property and Justice: Research on the conceptualization of property among commentators of the Napoleonic Code in the 19th century.

Summary In the 19th century, the legitimacy of property was the subject of lively debate, but it was left to legal thought to determine what it was. A reading of the commentators of the Civil Code reveals three conceptions of property. Sovereign control evacuates all personal mediation between an active subject, endowed with the capacity of initiative and government, and a material thing, or any reified being, so that the right of ownership, the domain and the thing are confused. The right is absolute, i. e. real, supreme, perpetual and exclusive (in the sense of particular). Patrimonial belonging refers to a relationship of original identity between persons and goods, conceived in the categories of having, from which proceeds the dissociation between a point of belonging (structural position of the owner) and his patrimony (juridical universality of his goods), as two modes of the same being, inscribed in the same teleological determination. ...