Uncle Tom’s Cabin

What we call the possessive case in English corresponds to the genitive case in several other languages. ‘Genitive’ means ‘denoting what kind of’ rather than ‘denoting literal possession’; it is a way of forming a word that serves as a sort of adjective. Thus, ‘girls’ clothing’ may mean, not that the clothing belongs to some girls, but that it is the kind of clothing associated with or purposed for girls. I think this usage is fairly widespread, at least in Indo-european languages.

It might be worth looking into John R. Commons’s distinction between the restrictiveness of ownership and the productivity of that which is owned. That might even be a more broadly-held notion among American legal realists of the early 20th century, such as Robert Hale.

Going back over the economists from John Locke to the orthodox school of the present day, I found they always had a conflicting meaning of wealth, namely a material thing and the ownership of that thing. But ownership, at least in its modern meaning of intangible property, means power to restrict production on account of abundance while the material things arise from power to increase the abundance of things by production, even overproduction.” John R. Commons, Institutional Economics. Vol. I: Its Place in Political Economy, p. 4

“The distribution of income, to repeat, depends on the relative power of coercion which the different members of the community can exert against one another. Income is the price paid for not using one’s coercive weapons. One of these weapons consists of the power to withhold one’s labor. Another is the power to consume all that can be bought with one’s lawful income instead of investing part of it. Another is the power to call on the government to lock up certain pieces of land or productive equipment. Still another is the power to decline to undertake an enterprise which may be attended with risk. By threatening to use these various weapons, one gets (with or without sacrifice) an income in the form of wages, interest, rent or profits. The resulting distribution is very far from being equal, and the inequalities are very far from corresponding to needs or to sacrifice.” — Robert L. Hale, “Coercion and Distribution in a Supposedly Non-Coercive State,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Sep., 1923), pp. 470-494

And then there is, of course, Herr Marx from the German Ideology. The notion of ‘command over other people’s labour’ comes from Adam Smith.

“When the narrow-minded bourgeois says to the communists: by abolishing property, i.e., my existence as a capitalist, as a landed proprietor, as a factory-owner, and your existence as workers, you abolish my individuality and your own; by making it impossible for me to exploit you, the workers, to rake in my profit, interest or rent, you make it impossible for me to exist as an individual. — When, therefore, the bourgeois tells the communists: by abolishing my existence as a bourgeois, you abolish my existence as an individual; when thus he identifies himself as a bourgeois with himself as an individual, one must, at least, recognise his frankness and shamelessness. For the bourgeois it is actually the case, he believes himself to be an individual only insofar as he is a bourgeois.

“But when the theoreticians of the bourgeoisie come forward and give a general expression to this assertion, when they equate the bourgeois’s property with individuality in theory as well and want to give a logical justification for this equation, then this nonsense begins to become solemn and holy.

“Above “Stirner” refuted the communist abolition of private property by first transforming private property into “having” and then declaring the verb “to have” an indispensable word, an eternal truth, because even in communist society it could happen that Stirner will “have” a stomach-ache. In exactly the same way here his arguments regarding the impossibility of abolishing private property depend on his transforming private property into the concept of property, on exploiting the etymological connection between the words Eigentum and eigen and declaring the word eigen an eternal truth, because even under the communist system it could happen that a stomach-ache will be eigen to him. All this theoretical nonsense, which seeks refuge in etymology, would be impossible if the actual private property that the communists want to abolish had not been transformed into the abstract notion of “property”. This transformation, on the one hand, saves one the trouble of having to say anything, or even merely to know anything, about actual private property and, on the other hand, makes it easy to discover a contradiction in communism, since after the abolition of (actual) property it is, of course, easy to discover all sorts of things in communism which can be included in the concept “property”. In reality, of course, the situation is just the reverse. In reality I possess private property only insofar as I have something vendible, whereas what is peculiar to me [meine Eigenheit] may not be vendible at all. My frock-coat is private property for me only so long as I can barter, pawn or sell it, so long as it is marketable. If it loses that feature, if it becomes tattered, it can still have a number of features which make it valuable for me, it may even become a feature of me and turn me into a tatterdemalion. But no economist would think of classing it as my private property, since it does not enable me to command any, even the smallest, amount of other people’s labour. A lawyer, an ideologist of private property, could perhaps still indulge in such twaddle.

The Draco Tavern story Grammar Lesson, by Larry Niven, should be required reading before proceeding with this thread — and probably with the Gaza ones, now that I think about it.

…and anyway çš„ indicates an adj. before a noun, not necessarily possession.

…or I guess an implied noun, yadda yadda.

Wikipedia page on genitive mentions çš„ but it does other stuff too.

“For example, I have argued that the communal and familial right of the Jewish people to self-perpetuation trumps the trivial insult to the body that is the result of circumcision”

Oh god. Now you have done it. There is no more rabid online group then anti circumcision commenters. They. Just. Won’t. Stop.

/that said I totally agree with you.

Invoking rights, shouldn’t one have individual rights to refuse even well-motivated interventions on one’s body (like even simple blood transfusions ala Jehovahs), but not communally expansionist rights to sell body parts for personal gain (an extra kidney) or even for plausibly altruistic reasons that entails publicly sanctioned self-sacrifice (donating your healthy heart to a dying child)? Protective ownership versus unlicensed property ownership of one’s own body? (I’m excluding the mind and mental products.)

Anybody tried to procure some nembutal lately?

One can presumably sell one’s soul, though.

“For example, I have argued that the communal and familial right of the Jewish people to self-perpetuation trumps the trivial insult to the body that is the result of circumcision”

I’m not sure where this is satire, or merely a target for it. Where does this justification to modify the bodies of our inferiors end, if indeed it does end? If chopping off “trivial” parts is ok, is tattooing their wrist a step too far? Does this extend to harvesting duplicate organs? Or killing them for medical research? And who gets to decide which people are sufficiently inferior for this to apply?

Personally I feel that the property/possession rights discussion would be better located somewhere else. I don’t want people classing my body as just another lump of meat to be bought and sold, legislated and litigated, edited and modified. I’m much more into “legal recognition of inherent rights” and similar approaches. The rights of children are a useful way to think about some parts of this. When in the progression from a couple of cells to a human do various rights come into force?

One doesn’t own oneself as if it were an independent object. One inhabits one’s body as a part of one’s relation to the surrounding world. And one only becomes one (a) self, through one’s relations to others. How can one participate in a discourse, when its basic conceptual “grammar” is so bad?

The key book in English is G.A. Cohen’s Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality, which is his demolition of Nozick. Among the things he argues there is that critics who say that the concept of self-ownership is incoherent (including Kant) are wrong, but that the thesis of self-ownership is nevertheless false. That is, it is not conceptually confused to think of people as self-owners, but they are for all that not correctly thought of as self-owners.

#25 – many people would view your example as non-standard. Some people say (but don’t write), “the woman at the desk, her hair is too long,” but this is the sort of thing that grade school teachers try to beat out of their students.

It’s more acceptable in compound nouns (Mary and John’s wedding, Sam and Harry’s Steak House) but to me it still seems at least informal.

“That seems wrong. Assuming that they are also self-owners, you have the negative duty not to encroach on their property, including their property in their own person.”

To whom would one owe that duty, absent the social relations defining property? How would it be enforced, absent various socially-agreed exceptions?

@Peter T: your comment trades on an ambiguity in “social relations”. There’s no conceptual reason why members of an anarchic community can’t mutually recognize one as self-owners, and in that sense self-ownership would form part of their system of social relations.

@TonyLynch Hobbesian individuals in the state of nature don’t have self-ownership (claim rights over their bodies and powers), they have liberty rights to make use of anything that they want to (even one another’s bodies) in pursuit of their aims.

John Quiggin @33,

I agree that it’s a mistake to pose philosophical problems in terms of grammar. But, in this case, I’d say the mistake has already been made by Nozick, and it’s necessary to clear up the grammatical confusion before responding.

But isn’t that what Wittgenstein did? Pose philosophical problems in terms of grammar, attempt conditional, provisional answers in the form of grammar as usage — in his mystical aphorisms — which is why, perhaps, he became so important for the Language Poets.

Some quotes:

*Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.

*A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.

*Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

Chris Bertram,
I don’t think it’s dogmatic, it’s common sense. The notion of property or individual ownership is a social notion. Why would a person who was abandoned to the elements at birth and subsequently lived their lives out in exclusion from all human kind think up property rights – and how would they come to have the language (which is also social) to do so?

Property is a social construct – I can’t see how it can truly be argued property iof all things is a foundational moral condition? And the western rhetoric of ‘human nature’ generally excludes all the other ways of human being not congruent with its claims.

I don’t mean by this that moral obligations to respecting persons’ bodies etc are only socially constructed rather than there being moral absolutes against torture etc – I just mean that the particular idea of property is necessarily preceded by a social context with social obligations.

Copyright is a good example of this – individual claims to the right to profit from their thoughts/creative works etc excludes poor people from gaining knowledge or entering in to commodified cultural realms . Social obligations to all people should mean that laws should not privilege the author and those that can buy knowledge over those who cannot.

The nature/culture(or social) distinction has existed in western thought since the classical period. And the dominant western idea of human nature has been used to justify authoritarian property based politics, liberal or not, since around Hobbes at least.

What do you think is mistaken with the way I have written of the distinction in classing property as social rather than either natural or foundational in terms of moral absolutes?

Also, we can refer to people as “having” an eye colour, or a broken heart, or a complete lack of surprise, and we call these things “properties” of the person in question. We can, at the risk of slight ambiguity, say that my hometown is one of my properties. In fact, that usage is fairly common in software development.

The linguistic origin of this use of “property”, and how it relates to exclusive property rights, is sadly beyond me, but it does reinforce the point that we have some ambiguity in our reference to things being the “property of” a person.

Stephenson quoter-kun @ 43:
The linguistic origin of this use of “property”, and how it relates to exclusive property rights, is sadly beyond me,

A quick look at the Online Etymological Dictionary yields this:

c.1300, properte, “nature, quality,” later “possession, thing owned” (early 14c., a sense rare before 17c.), from an Anglo-French modification of Old French propriete “individuality, peculiarity; property”…

This would suggest the “quality of” meaning in English is (somewhat) older, with the “ownership” aspect a later derivation; on the other hand, both the French word and the Latin word proprietas from which the French word was derived also included the meaning “ownership”, so the various senses tend to go together.

I haven’t got time now, but the phrase “Tom’s owner” belongs to a grammatical pattern in English whereby a construction involving a verb and a noun phrase is nominalized, i.e., converted into a construction that plays the syntactic role of a nominal in a larger construction. For example, 1) a verb – nominal construction (verb – direct object), such as “Denmark conquered England .” becomes “Denmark is England’s conqueror.” or, “Ford killed Lincoln.” becomes “Ford is Lincoln’s killer.” and so forth. Or 2) a nominal – verb (intransitive) construction such as, “The plane crashed.” becomes “The plane’s crash was controversial.” Within the noun phrase what in main clauses is expressed with verb – nominal or nominal – verb is now expressed with the “genitive” or “possessive” marker in construction with what was the main clause nominal, while the main clause verb is now the head (or “innermost constituent”) of the nominalized construction. The ‘s (or ‘of’ as in “killer of Lincoln”) indicates an abstract grammatical dependency relation which is preserved (invariant) in the move from a verbal construction to a nominal one. (The verb would be the “head” and the nominal a dependent; in the deverbal nominal phrase, the deverbal nominal is the head and its former object or subject is the dependent. It has nothing at all to do with “possession” in the concrete sense; “Tom’s owner” is related to “X owns Tom.” English strictly speaking does not have a genitive case, but this sort of pattern can be found in languages that have genitive cases in the true sense. (See also, for example, “Quiggin’s stirring of the waters was deplorable”.)

There are many languages that do make a grammatical distinction between inalienable (e.g., one’s body and its parts) and other kinds of “possession”.

I’m sorry, I could express this more elegantly, but I did this note in a great hurry.

@JPL: Meh. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. It has a syntactic function just like a proper word: It’s a preposition. It precedes its object and indicates the relation to its antecedent.

Scott Martens and JPL,

Which English grammar books are you both reading that say there is no genitive case? Although there is no traditional English grammar since they read Latin grammar instead when Anglo Saxon turned into English, all the grammars I’ve looked at say there is a genitive case.

The Oxford Modern English Grammar and TheCambridge Grammar of the English Language both say there is a genitive case.

A Shakespearian Grammar also says there is a genitive case but that the Elizabethan period was a very destructive one for inflections generally. It notes some inflections fell out of practice but retained their power; some inflections were both kept and retained their power (eg. his as the genitive of he for of him); some inflections were retained but their power was lessened or lost. It gives lots of examples, like Piers Plowman has ‘myn one’ where myn is the genitive of I; and the genitive use of your , our, their &c.; and the subjective genitive like ‘the kindred of him hath been flesh’d upon us’ ‘tell thou the lamentable tale of me’ and so on.

“I like to freak out the undergrads by explaining how both languages have no adjectives”

I tried to freak out a famous linguist (Ray Jackendoff) by pointing out that Japanese adjectives conjugated for tense, and he wasn’t freaked out at all. I need a more obscure language.

The Japanese possessive is even more flexible than the English one. The standard translation of “of the people, by the people, for the people” uses the same possessive marker for all of of, by and for. Oops; something’s getting lost in translation there…

“There is no single word for “father” in Cree, because to be a father is always to be someone’s father, and the morpheme for father can only appear with possessive prefix to indicate “my father”, “your father”, “his/her father”, etc. ”

Japanese largely works like that as well. It’s quite useful, actually, since in conversation you have to switch, thus making it clear you know who is being talked about. (In novels, the speaker is almost never specifically identified, since there’s enough information in any spoken phrase to identify the speaker.) In principle (for objects as well as relatives), Japanese does it by sticking an “honorific” in front of the word to make it something belonging to the other party and leaving it off when you are talking about your own , but for family names, the morpheme often changes as well: haha (my mother) vs. okaasan (your mother). It’s not easy: within the family, you address and refer to your parents with the honorific, but outside the family, you refer to them without said honorific. Younger Japanese get it wrong so often, hearing someone get it right is surprising.

this book has a lot of information on the genitive in Old English- The Genitive Case in Anglo Saxon Poetry https://archive.org/stream/genitivecaseina00shipgoog#page/n12/mode/2up
It looks at a whole range of things: giving and taking, use and experience, motion and mental activity , rule and control, believing and dis believing, emotion, help and pity and so on. It looks very detailed.

And this looks at the types of modern genitive – (this author puts a great number of charts and n sums and verticle and horizontal axes in this article) ‘Genitive and of-construction in modern written English. Processability and human involvement ‘ by Rolf Kreyer

“Early categorisations of the genitive meanings can be regarded as attempts to apply the categories of Latin or Ancient Greek to Modern English. Thus, Poutsma (1914: 40ff.), for example, distinguishes six meanings of the genitive (‘possessive’, ‘origin’, ‘subjective’, ‘objective’, ‘appositive’ and ‘of measure’)….. However, the question remains as to whether the semantics of the English genitive is appropriately described by categories found in ancient languages.
….
a. POSSESSIVE GENITIVE: Mrs Johnson’s passport Mrs Johnson has a passport
b. SUBJECTIVE GENITIVE: her parents’ consent her parents consented
c. OBJECTIVE GENITIVE: the family’s support (…) supports the family
d. GENITIVE OF ORIGIN: the girl’s story the girl told a story
e. DESCRIPTIVE GENITIVE: a women’s college a college for women
f. GENITIVE OF MEASURE: ten days’ absence the absence lasted ten days
g. GENITIVE OF ATTRIBUTE: the party’s policy the party has a (certain) policy
h. PARTITIVE GENITIVE: the baby’s eyes the baby has (blue) eyes
….
1. Zunser’s hymn: the hymn that Zunser produced
2. Their advice: They advised5
3. Her amazement: Someone/Something amazed her
4. Her tormentors: the ones who torment her
5. Their Hebrew lesson: The Hebrew lesson they study
6. His abruptness: He is abrupt
7. Miss Taylor’s coffee break: the break Miss Taylor spent drinking coffee
8. Halsey’s grocery: the grocery that Halsey owns
9. Her patient’s closet: the closet that her patient uses
10. Hazel’s head: the head that is part of Hazel
11. Your PTA: the PTA of which you are a member
12. Esteban’s doctor: the doctor of whom Esteban is a patient
13. Detroit’s long cold streets/tomorrow’s weather: the long cold streets in
Detroit/the weather for tomorrow
14. Miscellaneous
…
1. X is kin to Y (Kinship)
Peter’s father – Peter is kin to his father
2. X has (a/..) Y (Possessive) Peter’s car – Peter has a car
3. Y is part of X (Partitive)
Hazel’s head – the head is a part of Hazel
4. X Verb(Y) (Subjective)
Her parents’ consent – her parents consented
5. so. Verb(Y) X (Objective)
The boy’s release – so. released the boy
6. X has Y at their disposal, X makes use of Y (Disposal) Peter’s doctor – Peter has the doctor at his disposal
7. (the) Y in X, (the Y for X), … (Time & Space) Detroit’s cold streets – the cold streets in Detroit Tomorrow’s weather – the weather for tomorrow
8. X is Adj(Y) (Attribute)
The victim’s courage – the victim is courageous
9. X produces/tells/writes … Y (Origin)
The general’s letter – the general wrote a letter”

He seems to goes on to list 104 types of genitive and of-constructions in his own typology but it is so lengthy I haven’t read it and won’t copy it out here

http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/hahn.koo/teaching/ling115/papers/kreyer_2003.pdf

Actually the annotations here: http://books.wwnorton.com/books/978-0-393-05946-5/ examine the influence of Marx (and mid-nineteenth century economic thinking generally) on Stowe. The scholar Bill Gleason of Princeton has also written at length about slaves and cabins here: William Gleason, ““I Dwell Now in a Neat Little Cottage”: Architecture, Race, and Desire in The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” in In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on the Bondwoman’s Narrative,” eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Hollis Robbins. Basic/Civitas, 2004.

@ZM, #53:

A. M. Zwicky. On Clitics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
A. M. Zwicky and G. Pullum. Cliticization vs. Inflection: English N’T. Language,
59(3):502–513, 1983.
A. M. Zwicky. Clitics and Particles. Language, 61(2):283–305, 1985.

Dammit, this is the second time this week I’ve had google my own thesis for a reference.

Just look up the “Zwicky Criteria” or “Zwicky-Pullum criteria” if you want access to the whole debate. It looks like at first like an incredibly boring set of papers on a minor bit of English syntactic pedantry – whether “‘s” and “n’t” are clitics or suffixes. But it opened the gateway to a flood of bitching and moaning because the Zwicky criteria are the only really general principles we have for deciding what is and isn’t a word at all. This is not a trivial issue at all. Linguists would shed blood on that subject, if we could be bothered to bring knives to conferences.

English does have a genitive case analogous to Latin and German, but only for pronouns.

@Mdc: IIRC (which I may not, English is not actually my strong suit as a linguist, it’s just my native language), the thinking is that either the Old English suffix broke free to live a life as an autonomous (or semi-autonomous) lexeme, or that at one time people said things like “John his father” and eventually dropped everything but the “s”. Both of these possibilities occur in other languages, and the relevant period is thin on well attested speech. But someone with more background in issues in English linguistics should answer.

“The man was listening closely but what he said next: I wouldn’t name him because if you cain’t name somethin you cain’t claim it. You cain’t talk about it even. You cain’t say what it is.” (Outer Dark)

Interesting thread.

I think it was John Mackie who said there is no natural law of property, but it is natural that there be some law of property. I think what this means is that, humans being what they are, as society develops beyond a very rudimentary state, people will naturally develop some notion of property, just because it’s damned convenient. That much is natural. The details are a matter of collective agreement and can be criticized on a variety of grounds and changed for a variety of reasons, but not because some particular arrangement violates uppercase Natural Law.

@68 I wondered that myself. But… http://tinyurl.com/lwczozd

It makes me very sad to think the language of capitalism is now being used to define existence and being. Self-ownership seems a cold approach to life. Who am I? I am self-owned! What is this hand here? Oh – I own it!

To paraphrase Whitman:

“I celebrate my self-ownership, and use my self-owned voice to sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me absolutely does not belong to you.
For I own it!”

In terms of the economic approach to “ownership,” I view labor from the perspective of a free-lancer; time (to me) is money, with many variables and factors to consider about each project.

The value of labor is a fascinating topic. But self-ownership, to me, less so… and not very poetic at all.

Yeah, count me in among those impressed by Sandwichman’s quote at 5.

It made this unusual op-ed:http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=198657 far more legible in my reread than when I read it originally.

And yes, this is a very worthwhile thread and I’m impressed by many of the comments and wishing I was smart enough to contribute. Oh well, gives me a chance to sound smart when I monologue about “time’s up”, with plentiful Alex Trebek mentions to the unwary.

-s is from the Anglo-Saxon masculine singular genitive ending for some nouns. It goes back to Proto-indo-european, shows up in Greek, Latin, German, etc. No ‘his’ involved. It is interesting that it seems to have broken loose and become a sort of floating pre- or rather postposition, especially in less formal speech.

ZM 07.30.14 at 12:00 am @ 76 — Propertarian-libertarians do not believe that the Constitution creates rights, only that it recognizes them as something already existing somehow. Questions of ontology and epistemology are thereby raised, and I have raised them, but (among believers) to little avail.

One might say that, in reason, no intelligent, willful beings would knowingly and voluntarily support a social order which would produce their death or enslavement, thus getting life and liberty to apparently fall out of Nature, out of the way things are; but in fact many people do seem to support regimes which will kill of enslave them. In any case property, the social construction of possession, is much more complicated, so it seems well beyond such simplicities. And so a sort of religion must be created.

Since the topic seems drifting from linguistics or semantics

Understanding Society discusses C B MacPherson’s Possessive Individualism

“Macpherson offered the basis of a strong critique of a certain kind of liberalism — the liberalism that places essentially the whole normative weight on the value of the individual and his/her liberties, and essentially no emphasis on the social obligations we all have towards each other.”

But the genitive does not convey relations only of possessive owner to property – it conveys other relationships too (apparently up to 104 types) – you read/listen to the statement/sentence/paragraph/novel etc and should be able to work out what particular relationship the genitive conveys (unless the writer happens to write in such a fashion as to make it impossible to comprehend his/her meaning). Non-possessive meanings are not metaphoric/figurative – they are included in the possible literal meanings of the genitive.

If land changed hands ceremonies like the extant marriage ceremony used to take place (I don’t know how often or different varieties of wording etc)
(Example Translated from the Anglo Saxon in the 19th C)
“So I hold it as he held it, who held it as saleable, and as I will own it – and never resign it – neither plot nor plough land – nor turf nor toft – nor furrow nor foot length – nor land nor leasow – nor fresh nor marsh – nor rough ground nor room – nor wold nor fold – land nor strand – wold nor water .”
” Do as I rede thee” is the reply “Keep thee to thine own – leave me to mine own – I covet not thine – neither lathe nor land – noir sac nor soc – Nor covet thou mine – nought need I from thee – nought did I mean unto thee”
The Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth : Anglo Saxon Period, Volume 2 by Francis Palgrave p. cxxxv

After checking, the constitutional amendment in the US that is read to attribute personhood to corporations is the 14th amendment 1868 – which was originally made to protect freed slaves.
It was also cited in Roe v Wade and Bush v Gore
Personhood was attributed earlier through constitutional provisions privileging contracts as inviolable.

In some cases I would think the question would come down to which contract/obligation was primary – and this would need go to court to be decided. Judges might be disinclined to determining the primariness of obligations but hopefully courts of appeal would return the matter to the disinclined judges to determine e.g. Chernaik v. Kitzhaber 2014

“In reversing the Lane County trial court, the Oregon Court of Appeals remanded the case
ordering the trial court to make the judicial declaration it previously refused to make as to
whether the State, as trustee, has a fiduciary obligation to protect the youth from the impacts of climate change, and if so, what the State must do to protect the atmosphere and other public trust resources.”

Meredith,
“In fact, where and when do we see the word “own” come into common use? ”
According to the OED own is from the Old English – it denotes relations including possession but also other relations including kinship, fondness, closeness, independence, aloneness, desert (as in just desert), acknowledgement etc depending on the context. It is hard to tell if it had a stricter earlier meaning but someone knowing Old English could probably tell. It is related to similar words in Old German etc and is related to owe and ought.

In England land is tenure rather than say a householder’s property outright and ultimately is under the Crown – “Thus the monarch is lord paramount, either mediate or immediate, of all land within the realm. The tenure of land is based upon the assumption that it was originally granted as a ‘feud’ by the monarch to his immediate tenant on condition of certain services, and, where there has been subinfeudation, that the immediate tenant in turn regranted it” (Halsbury’s Laws of England)* However ramblers’ rights seem to exist in England so there might be some idea of customary usage granting usage rights if not property rights (?)

When England cruelly colonised America the colonisers created both a new English commons (replacing the indigenous commons) and a realm of private tenure. New English commons in Maryland ‘functioned as a prime instrument of dispossession’ ‘Mattagund addressed authorities in these terms: “Your cattle and hogs injure us you come too near to us to live and drive us from place to place. We can fly no further let us know where to live and how to be secured for the future from the hogs and cattle.”

John Locke’s ideas were influential and he was a proponent of colonisation and enclosure and likely made up his ‘Natural Laws’ rhetoric to support such things (since it is not based on history or common sense I can’t see what else it could be) “The notion of a universal commons completely open to all—Locke’s “America”—existed mainly in the imperial imagination. …. Cleared, plowed, and enclosed farms were a part of that process of appropriation, but so were varieties of what we can call the “colonial commons.” ” “In the real world of colonial North America, the destruction of indigenous property forms and the establishment of new, colonial property regimes did not follow the pattern that John Locke and countless other theorists suggest. . . . . John Locke’s misdescription of colonial property formation as the enclosure of a great universal commons was anything but an innocent mistake. …. Placing the focus on the pioneer, with his log cabin, his ax, and his plow, rather than on the cattle, hogs, and sheep he sent roaming across native common lands, has the effect of obscuring the central business of colonising “new” lands, which is to say the dispossession of indigenous peoples and the imposition of new property regimes.”
From: Greer, A 2012, ‘Commons and Enclosure in the Colonization of North America’, American Historical Review, 117, 2, p. 365,

The ideas of the English having authority over American land in some sort of New English land regime seems to have begun before colonisation, this article suggests with the two Richard Hakluyts (cousins) – the Elder authoring Notes on Colonisation (1578) and the Younger writing a ‘lengthier and more sophisticated Discourse [1584]… purport[ing] (on behalf of Raleigh, his patron) to establish that the Queen of England could assert title “more lawfull and righte then the Spaniardes or any other Christian Princes” to at least as much of America “as is from Florida to the Circle Articke”….” ” In discussing relations between the colonizers and indigenous inhabitants, meanwhile, the “Inducements” [offered] were more frankly oriented to achieving an ascendancy by any means necessary: plans for “traffic” [trade] were just and lawful, but in any case could easily be defended against interference “by reason that we are lords of navigation, and they not so.””

“the original charter of Virginia, granted in 1606 by James I …. licensed two schemes of “habitation and plantation” in “that part of America commonly called VIRGINIA,” territory “not now actually possessed by any Christian Prince or People.” …. Each was to comprise “all the Lands, Woods, Soil, Grounds, Havens, Ports, Rivers, Mines, Minerals, Marshes, Waters, Fishings, Commodities, and Hereditaments” lying within “the Space of fifty miles of English statute measure” inland and along the coast, and a hundred miles out to sea; neither was to be established within a hundred miles of the other. Each scheme’s patentees were granted “all the lands, Tenements, and Hereditaments” within its precincts, to be held of the Crown,….”
From: Tomlins, C 2001, ‘The Legal Cartography of Colonization, the Legal Polyphony of Settlement: English Intrusions on the American Mainland in the Seventeenth Century’, Law & Social Inquiry, 26, 2,

* I forgot to note in an earlier comment that in Australia after the Mabo case in the 1990s there was recognised to be an additional sort of land title in existence to that of tenure under the crown – this is Native Title – this is separate and precedes the Crown but must be established through the Crown’s courts in the contemporary period. So there are actually two sorts of co-existing land regimes in Australia – Indigenous and Crown. Indigenous people can find it hard to establish native title in the courts some cases – such as the Yorta Yorta people’s claim which was dismissed in the courts due to the ‘tide of history’ washing away their cultural continuity (although it was not so much the tide of history but actual people’s words and deeds and the governments’ assimilation policies etc but the judges didn’t seem to care about who was responsible) but then Labor Premier of Victoria Steve Bracks recognised their claim in part by signing a co-operative land management agreement (although the Minister for the Environment has the greater authority) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yorta_Yorta_v_Victoria)

Anarcisse:

“Propertarian-libertarians do not believe that the Constitution creates rights, only that it recognizes them as something already existing somehow. Questions of ontology and epistemology are thereby raised, and I have raised them, but (among believers) to little avail.”

I think this line of objection trades on an ambiguity between de facto legal rights and normative rights. Of course the Constitution created a bunch of legal rights that previously did not exist. But there’s a perfectly good — and I’d argue, unmysterious — normative sense in which many of those rights were rights we held before the Constitution was ever written, and which we would have had even if it never had been.

In general I don’t see why people find natural rights so problematic (at least conceptually — I get why people might be substantively opposed to them): when I say we have a natural right to phi, I’m just saying that, normatively, we have a right to phi that doesn’t depend for its existence on any recognition by anyone, including governments. Maybe that’s ontologically and epistemologically mysterious (I don’t think so), but I don’t see how it’s any more so than other normative claims.

Dan 07.31.14 at 12:39 am —
If you have normative anything you will be challenged to say where your norms come from when you run into someone with different norms. Hence the appeal to great vague entities like Nature and God.

Billikin 07.31.14 at 1:55 am —
Responsibility means having to answer to somebody, so the questions ‘To whom?’ and ‘For what?’ are likely to arise. As with norms, there may be differences of opinion which cannot be resolved by appeal to the aforesaid great vague entities.

ZM @76,

You’re talking about the DOI, not the Constitution.