II. Liberal Intuitions About Property

Let's begin with some common intuitions about property: When I own a thing, I can do what I like with it. If I want to use my expensive laptop as a bath toy for my three-year-old, I can do that. If I scratch my CDs, let my antique books go to ruin, or keep my beautiful house a mess, other people may cry, “What a shame!” but they have no right to interfere. In my own home, I can go around half-dressed, or waste water and electricity, or forbid visitors from criticizing my politics. Sometimes other people have claims that constrain my property rights. I may be required to mow my lawn, or barred from making certain changes to the exterior of my house, or I may have to give an heirloom to my sister rather than sell it. But on the whole, the point of ownership is to allow us each a space within which we can satisfy our desires, or express our values, as we see fit. We need private property if we are to have a realm in which we can act independently, can be free of the demands of others.

But we can have this freedom only if we do not use it to infringe on a like freedom for others. So the main thing we may not do in our private realms is exert force on other people. Even in my own home, I may not beat others, or tie them up, or in any other way use violence to get them to carry out my will. The use of force is reserved to the sovereign—that is indeed what sovereignty means. It follows that it is a grave mistake to explain sovereignty by comparing it to the rights of ownership: the state's rule over us is wholly unlike our rule over the things we own. The state can exert force over us even within our homes—if we have committed a crime, or are about to commit a crime—but may not do what it likes with us even in spaces that it controls. There is no equivalent, in the realm of sovereignty, to my having a right to scratch my CDs or treat my laptop as a bath toy: the state may not similarly treat me, or my things, as its own. It must treat me and my property in accordance with laws, and those laws are supposed to express a respect for me and everyone else in its domain. In short, the state may legitimately do harsher things to its citizens than they may do to one another, but in their private realms citizens may act more arbitrarily than the state. I may bar black people, or Jews, from my home, but may not inflict any sort of violence on someone who objects to this policy. The state may inflict violence on people who so much as enter its precincts without permission, but may not refuse entrance to anyone on the grounds that she is black, or a Jew.

III. A Brief History of Private Property

Such, at least, is the general view of the state and the private realm characteristic of liberalism. Of course these intuitions are in good part the product of a certain history; if we are to endorse them, we need to see if that history has led us astray.

The obvious place to start, in reviewing that history, is Aristotle's defense of private property in Book I, chapter 5 of the Politics. Aristotle offers several different reasons for private property, which have remained central to discussions of the subject ever since. In the first place, he says, separating out possessions and making clear who has title to what helps prevent fights between people. Plato had suggested that common property would create bonds of friendship between people—“Friends have all things in common,” ran an old Greek proverb, which Plato quotes in support of his position—but Aristotle points out that in fact people who have to share everything often get into arguments: “The partnerships of fellow-travellers are an example … for they generally fall out over everyday matters and quarrel about any trifle which turns up.”Footnote ⁸ He leaves room for the possibility that some common property may enhance our relationships: “although every man has his own property, some things he will place at the disposal of his friends, while of others he shares the use with them.” (1263a34). The Lacedaemonians, he notes, share slaves and animals, and allow travellers to take food as they need it from fields they pass. But in general property should be private. When people can pursue their own interests in their own way, they complain less about one another.

Aristotle adds that people are more efficient when they can work on their own: “they will make more progress, because everyone will be attending to his own business” (1263a29). He also says that the desire for private property is based on a love of self “implanted by nature and not given in vain,” and that while selfishness is properly condemned, this basic love of self is not selfishness and should not be confused with it. Indeed, he says, people need property in order to display true benevolence: “there is the greatest pleasure in doing a kindness or service to friends or guests or companions, which can only be rendered where a man has private property.” This last is partly a pragmatic point—we need goods in order to carry out most services for others—but also in part a conceptual one. Nothing will count as liberality where men have all things in common, Aristotle says: “for liberality consists in the use which is made of property” (1263a39).

So private property for Aristotle 1) prevents quarrels, 2) increases material prosperity, 3) is something for which we have a natural, perhaps ineradicable desire, and 4) enables us to care for others. Implicit in the argument for the last two points is the suggestion that property is tied to our agency—what later philosophers would call our freedom. Aristotle does not spell out this suggestion as clearly as his successors would, but otherwise he anticipates just about every argument that later thinkers would make on behalf of private property. He also mixes these arguments, unworried about whether or not they follow from a single moral or political principle. Private property makes us more efficient, he says, but also prevents quarrels, satisfies a natural instinct, and enables us to develop certain virtues. He grounds property, that is, on pragmatic concerns, concerns about virtue, as well as an appeal to nature's purposes. We might say: If private property is to prevent human quarrels, its justification should also be as uncontroversial as possible. Realizing this, Aristotle gives a variety of justifications for private property, appealing to people with a variety of moral and political views.

And Locke's justification for property is similarly eclectic. Commentators have long maintained that Locke's account is an uneasy mixture of different strains of argument.Footnote ⁹ That makes good sense if Locke is an heir, here, to Aristotle;Footnote ¹⁰ he also explicitly set out in the Second Treatise, for political purposes, to unite people across a wide spectrum of social, economic, and religious divisions.Footnote ¹¹ (In Locke, the very mode of argument seems meant to reflect a liberal recognition that states bring together people with a variety of comprehensive views about how to live.) Accordingly, there are utillitarian, divine-command, proto-Kantian, and purely intuitive strands in Locke's account. In defending his labor-mixing account of first acquisition, especially, Locke gives us utilitarian arguments for the importance of labor (Second Treatise, secs. 40–43),Footnote ¹² but also makes a case that God wants us to labor (secs. 32–35), links labor to a freedom that he sees as essential to our personhood (sec. 27), and implies that the idea that unclaimed resources belong to those who work on them is so “plain” to any rational being that there can be “no doubt of right, no room for quarrel” over it (secs. 28, 39).

This eclecticism is I think essential to Locke's legacy, and it is a mistake to identify his views with just one of the lines of argument I have listed. They do not depend so strongly on a view of God as our Creator, for instance, that they collapse if that premise is taken away. Nor do they depend so much on utilitarian premises that they cannot be used to defend the rights, say, of aboriginal peoples to treat their lands as sacred rather than developing them agriculturally. Certainly, when Locke says that “God gave the world to men … for their benefit … , [so] it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated,” (sec. 34), one might take this to imply that the Native Americans, whom Locke describes as leaving their territory an “uncultivated waste” (sec. 37), have no right to their land as against people who will use it to provide greater “benefit” to humankind. But Locke also has a proto-Kantian side, which gives much stronger protection to rights. One line of argument running throughout the Second Treatise, after all, presents our “freedom to order [our] actions … as [we] think fit” (sec. 4) as our core natural right, and our right to property as merely an outgrowth of this right; Locke indeed notoriously uses the word “property,” often, for liberty as a whole, not just our right to our possessions. He also, in writings outside the Second Treatise, argues that labor is something good in itself, aside from its utilitarian value—“God intends man to do something”Footnote ¹³—and in both those writings and the Second Treatise, presents it as an expression of our personhood (sec. 27). By giving labor pride of place in defining property, then, Locke is in good part emphasizing simply the importance of human activity—human agency—independent of the consequences it may have for cultivation and other forms of economic development. A. John Simmons argues that we should see Locke's mixing argument as rooted in “a broader right of self-government”: a right to “control … one's plans and projects.” For Locke, property “does not just insure survival,” says Simmons: “it is also the security for our freedom, protecting us against dependence on the will of others and the subservience to them that this creates.”Footnote ¹⁴

And it is this proto-Kantian emphasis on agency that most inspired many of Locke's liberal successors, including, of course, Kant himself. Adam Smith writes that “the property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable,” and uses this point to defend the right of a poor worker to employ “the strength and dexterity [of his hands] in what manner he thinks proper without injury to his neighbour.”Footnote ¹⁵ Kant sees property as flowing from a more fundamental principle by which each of us authorizes the others to have exclusive use over certain objects, so that we can all express our freedom.Footnote ¹⁶ And Fichte moves from here to a right “to live” that rights of ownership only subserve, arguing on this basis that the state should provide property to those who might otherwise not have it, so that they too can build a life for themselves.Footnote ¹⁷ Today, many liberal theorists hold a similar view.Footnote ¹⁸ On this line of thought, the main reason for the importance of private property is that we need it in order to be free—and that view, if true, should appeal to liberals across all cultures, and comprehensive moral and religious views.

But exactly how much Locke should be credited with the close tie between property and freedom in later liberal thought may be debatable. What he unquestionably adds to the story I have been telling are two other points: 1) the idea that individuals have a right to claim goods for their own only if they leave “enough and as good” for others, and 2) the distinction, central to this paper, between property and jurisdiction. Let me say a word about each of these points.

If one man annexes his labor to goods that have hitherto been unclaimed, “no man but he can have a right to [them],” says Locke, “at least where there is enough and as good, left in common for others.” (sec. 27) Jeremy Waldron has argued that Locke does not intend this “enough and as good” condition to be an absolute restriction on the claiming of property.Footnote ¹⁹ Gopal Sreenivasan has responded, convincingly in my opinion, that on the contrary Locke relies on the enough-and-as-good condition to answer his own central question about how individuals could take goods from the common without asking for the consent of the other commoners (sec. 25): if one meets this condition, one does not need the consent of others because “he that leaves as much as another can make use of, does as good as take nothing at all.” (sec. 33)Footnote ²⁰ Locke regards this condition as holding primarily in the human world that existed before the introduction of money; he is aware that it will be harder for everyone to come by land, especially, once money allows for great inequality. He does seem to have thought that in his own day “enough and as good” land was still available to everyone in some parts of the world (sec. 36), but the inequality he endorses should surely make that impossible at some point. What happens then? Well, as Sreenivasan argues, Locke sees the vast increase in usable goods made possible by agriculture and industry as maintaining a version of the “enough and as good” criterion even after the introduction of money. Given the vast increase in the total amount of material goods available to human beings, even those who cannot find unoccupied land after the introduction of money, should be able, by their labor, to acquire adequate material goods for the preservation of their life and pursuit of their ideals.Footnote ²¹ This point will be of some importance later on, since I think it is clear that Locke did not think that a system of property rights could be justified that clearly fails to allow everyone access to adequate resources. And his followers, right down to Robert Nozick, have long insisted on some sort of “enough and as good” condition for the legitimacy of property.Footnote ²²

For the purposes of this essay, Locke's other major contribution to accounts of property is the first clear recognition of the sharp difference between property and sovereignty. This has received little attention in the secondary literature, but it runs through both of his Treatises on government. Other writers in Locke's time had treated sovereignty and ownership as more or less the same thing, speaking indifferently of rights over things and rights over persons.Footnote ²³ Locke, for reasons deeply built into his polemical project, distinguished sharply between the two. As we shall see shortly, the conflation of property and sovereignty goes with a paternalistic conception of the latter, and Locke's opponent in the Treatises was of course the arch-paternalist, Robert Filmer. Early in the first Treatise, Locke is already concerned to argue that God, in granting to Adam governance over the earth and the lower animals, was not ipso facto granting “Private Dominion, … or Property” (I, secs. 29–41), and it is a running theme of the second Treatise that the sovereign is not a property-owner but the umpire that settles conflicts among property-owners. All the sovereign's actions should express and enforce the law of nature, not a particular or private will of any kind, while property-ownership amounts to a right precisely to express one's particular will, and seek one's private “benefit.” This distinction between sovereignty and property cuts at the foundations of the view of Locke's Tory opponents. For most Tories, as Richard Ashcraft has shown, “[t]he king was the proprietor of the kingdom”: “Tory thinking tended to make the monarch essentially a landowner.” In fact, Ashcraft says, Tories saw only the king as really having property rights: “technically speaking a property ‘right’ was something that ‘none can have in any lands or tenements, but only the King in right of his Crown, because … all lands within this realm were originally derived from the Crown.”Footnote ²⁴ Filmer expresses this view perfectly, understanding kings as fathers of their kingdoms, fathers as owners of their wives and children, and fathers, as well as owners, as “govern[ing] by no other Law, than by his own Will.”Footnote ²⁵ For Locke, kings are not fathers of their kingdoms, and neither kings nor fathers govern by their own will. An owner may “free[ly] dispos[e] of his Property according to his own Will” (sec. 59), but both kings and fathers are supposed to represent the law of reason rather than their own will, and kings differ from fathers in that they are supposed to express the law of reason in its application to fully free, independent people: which is to say, for Locke, to people who are themselves property-owners. Although Locke never quite puts the point in terms of a contrast between sovereignty and property, it is hard to find another figure in the history of political thought who more fully relied on that distinction.

IV. Implications of the Liberal Conception of Property

I want to draw three morals from this brief historical review. The first is that we can accept the broad lines of Locke's defense of private property without endorsing the utilitarian streak in that defense. That means, for one thing, that we can adopt a more generous conception of “use” than the one he gives us.Footnote ²⁶ We may say, for instance, that Australian aborigines establish occupation of territories by calling up a songline while traversing it (that is their version of “mixing their labor” with it), and that they value it for this use rather than for material benefit. We may say that Sierra Club activists who want to preserve a wilderness for its beauty, or for the endangered species that live in it, rightly regard enjoying the beauty of nature, and protecting endangered species, as “uses” of land—ways of achieving valued goals or activities on it—every bit as legitimate as one that increases our stock of food or housing.

Accordingly, non-European groups, claiming lands back from Europeans, or trying to prevent European attempts to exploit their resources, can rely on Locke's account of property in defense of their claims. They certainly want to hold on to a notion of property much like Locke's. They do not advocate for the lands in dispute to be left unowned, or held in common by all human beings. They want instead to establish their claims to the lands in questions, for members of their group as opposed to humanity as a whole. And they want to establish those claims because they want to be free, to live according to their own values. So they can disagree with Locke's conception of “benefit” while retaining the rest of his account.

A second point goes with the first: Locke's account of property need not justify the strict or absolutist conception of property rights beloved of modern-day libertarians. That property is a condition for freedom does not entail that it is the only such condition; and that we need some property to have a realm of free action for ourselves does not entail that we need a strict claim to everything with which we mix our labor, or acquire in free exchange. Locke makes clear, later in the Treatise, that once civil society is established, governments may do a great deal to structure the holdings of private people (see secs. 30, 50, 140). And Kant and Fichte, in taking over Locke's arguments, maintained that the state, in order to guarantee every citizen the freedom that comes with private property, should make sure that the poor have property as well as the rich. From these views, many forms of welfare state liberalism can be justified. The insistence on fixed and inviolable property rights characteristic of those who oppose any state structuring of the economy draws either on (i) an intuition that pre-social property rights must be absolute, to be found nowhere in Locke, or (ii) Locke's utilitarian tendencies (extending them, by way of certain free-market premises, to argue that only strict individual property rights will make for productive economies), not on the linkage he suggests between property-ownership and liberty.

Third, and finally, Locke provides us with very strong reasons to distinguish between property and sovereignty. A Lockean sovereign, unlike the private citizens over whom it rules, has a responsibility to protect the individual freedom of everyone in its domain. Whether we construe Locke as a proto-utilitarian or a proto-Kantian, he clearly insists on the need for each of us to pursue our happiness, or exercise our self-government, in our own way; the sovereign protects this individualistic approach to the good life. But the right to private property is essential to our individual pursuits—which is to say that in using our private property it is crucial that we not need to worry about the interests and values of others we affect. It follows that the exercise of sovereignty cannot be just one more instance of a property right. The sovereign cannot rightly see itself as the “owner” of the people or territory over which it rules. Rather, in order to protect the individual pursuits of everyone in its domain, the sovereign must stand above property rights. The sovereign acts as the umpire or arbiter that settles conflicts among individuals over property, so as to provide everyone in its domain with a space in which they can act freely. But an umpire or arbiter cannot be party to the conflicts it is supposed to resolve. So the umpire or arbiter must not be among the property-owners whose rights it protects; it must stand beyond ownership. We each own things, but our sovereign does not own us: it governs us, or we govern ourselves through it.

Note that one can endorse this distinction even if one favors a very limited set of private property rights. One may want the state to run transportation and communication systems, cultural institutions, and other public works; one may want the state to redistribute property from rich to poor; one may even oppose the private ownership of all means of production. But if one grants the legitimacy of any private property, any realm in which one can act as one likes with one's own things, then one should also grant that the state should stand beyond such ownership, rather than being an owner itself. The distinction between sovereignty and property goes with the basic liberal intuition that people should have some significant room in which to run their lives as they see fit, and one can move quite far in a social democratic direction while still accepting that. The legitimacy of private property does not depend on what configuration of private property one endorses, just on the idea that one should be able to declare ownership over some things: to insulate enough things from the interference of other individuals, and the state, that one can pursue a variety of interests and projects on one's own. Exactly how extensive these private realms should be can be left open to debate. But if there are to be any such realms, the sovereign must stand beyond them.

V. Collapsing the Distinction Between Property and Sovereignty

To clarify what I have said thus far, consider two opposing directions in which the distinction between property and sovereignty can collapse:

In one direction there is the error—the main error that concerns me here—of treating sovereignty as if it were a kind of property: as if the state has the same rights over what it governs that a property owner has over what she owns. This is a mistake that glosses over the main reason we assign property rights to people in the first place. By saying that a property-owner has rights over her goods, we mean that she may rightfully make choices about how to use them that seem arbitrary or irrational to others. But sovereigns have a duty to make sure that everything they do is not arbitrary; it must rather be law-governed, and directed to the interests of all those over whom they rule.Footnote ²⁷ Ignoring this duty, and collapsing sovereignty into property, is an error made most famously by absolute monarchs, but I will argue that it is also made by many nationalists, who see a particular group of citizens as “owning” the state or its territory. And the error remains to this day a common one, in part because remnants of feudal conceptions of sovereignty continue to play a role in our thought and language—for instance, in those aspects of domestic and international law that attribute property rights to states.

In the domestic case, this is fairly harmless. We may talk casually of “state-owned” roads or lands, just as we once talked about “the king's highway,” but the adjective “state-owned” could almost always be replaced by “state-governed” or “state-run” in these contexts without any change in practice. In the international context, the notion that states own the lands they rule is more baleful. For it goes with a view by which each state is like an individual property owner, vis-à-vis the international community, with a right to do what it likes with its resources and indeed its people. International law tends to regard states as having the same inviolable rights against interference as individual property owners have in their private realms. The grave harms done by this principle of noninterference (described, unfortunately, as the doctrine of “state sovereignty”!) are well known, and have been subject to harsh critique by many liberal theorists. One way to bolster that critique is precisely to insist on the distinction between property and sovereignty. No state should be seen as owning its territory. It governs that territory, and rightly so only insofar as it applies laws that protect the rights of its citizens.Footnote ²⁸

The error that lies in the other direction folds property into sovereignty.Footnote ²⁹ To collapse the distinction in this direction is to suppose that people should use material resources only in accordance with principles of governance accepted by their community. This is the mistake of communists, and other proponents of an organic state in which the individual is to find his or her “real” freedom in the will of the body-politic as a whole. On this view, no use of material resources should be arbitrary, and no control over such resources should rest on the decision of individuals alone. Anything we do to a piece of land, a house or farm, even an item of food or clothing, should be subject to laws that reflect the will of all: I should be able to claim a material thing for my own use only to the degree that I follow the community's rules for that use.Footnote ³⁰ Perhaps I may not scratch my CDs, in that case, or use my laptop as a bath toy—that might be a waste of a resource someone else could have used better—and I certainly may have to regulate my behavior, even in my “own” home, in accordance with communal standards for justice or decency. There will be nothing like private property if we go down this road, even if people can, for limited purposes, exclude others from the use of various things; this is a road that leads to the abandonment of liberalism, of any concern for individual liberty.

And if a rejection of communism, and other organicist views of the state, amounts to a liberal platitude, that is all to the good, since this rejection also makes best sense against the background of a sharp contrast between sovereignty and property. The two extremes on either side of the distinction nicely clarify the mean that constitutes liberalism. Liberalism consists in a balance between a private realm where individuals can make idiosyncratic choices with their own things, and thereby live out the differences in their conceptions of the good human life, and a public realm governed by laws based on reasons to which all those individuals, whatever their differences, should be able to assent. That balance entails that we see property and sovereignty as complementing rather than resembling each other, and failing to perform their proper function if we identify them.

VI. Interlude: Sovereigns As Umpires?

On the conception of the state developed thus far, its functions appear to be largely juridical, mediating disputes over property so as to preserve every citizen's ability to have a private realm in which to work out her conception of the good life. Of course, this cannot be all that states do. They must for one thing make sure that people have freedom of thought and action when they acquire property. That means that, at a minimum, they must protect people from violence, manipulation, and fraud, probably that they must also provide them with a certain level of education, and perhaps that they should guarantee them some minimum level of health, housing, and other elements of basic welfare.Footnote ³¹ There is controversy among liberals over how much of this is necessary for individuals to be free; there is no controversy over the idea that the state should guarantee whatever is so necessary to all its citizens. Some liberals allow that the state may also carry out other functions—construct various public goods, perhaps also preserve and celebrate one or more of the cultures of its citizens—as long as what it does in this regard does not violate anyone's freedom. But for any liberal the primary function of the state is to provide the background conditions we need to construct a realm of free activity for ourselves, and to make sure we can act according to our own judgment within those realms. One of these background conditions is the provision of an umpire to adjudicate conflicts over the nature or extent of these realms. But there are other conditions as well.

It is, however, not unreasonable to construe everything the state should do on the model of its juridical function. For in its capacity as neutral adjudicator, the state is obviously required to be neutral among its citizens and equally concerned for each. But on liberal views, that is also how it should supply education, welfare, and other public goods.Footnote ³² Certainly, if an agent of the state were to use its powers to supply these goods as a means of constricting some people's freedom, liberals expect there to be another agent to which the latter could appeal, as a neutral arbitrator of their dispute with the offending agency. Once again, then, the state would need to take on a juridical role, to restrain its own overreaching branch. For this reason, liberals from Locke onward have always taken the state's role as neutral arbitrator to be its primary function, the one thing it must do if it is to enhance rather than detract from our freedom.

Indeed, the juridical conception of the state antedates Locke, and is central in the modern era even to nonliberal ideologies. The very idea of sovereignty was formulated in response to a sense that deep disputes over interests and ideology had become a permanent feature of modern societies, and needed to be mediated by an umpire of some sort. Jean Bodin is known for his insistence that sovereignty be indivisible, and that it represent a power subject to no higher political control; his attempt to develop a systematic account of sovereignty was motivated first and foremost by a frustration with the conflicting claims that the powers in medieval kingdoms made on one another.Footnote ³³ Magistracies of all sorts came with inherent powers that even kings could not override. Lord-vassal relationships crossed borders in such a way that many aristocrats swore their liege to people in other countries; the king himself might owe fealty to a lord elsewhere. And the church, of course, claimed authority in many matters over both kings and lords. Nations could not form unified legal and political entities under these conditions, and Bodin suggested that the logic of statehood requires a source of governing power in each state from which all other power properly flows, and to which all other powers are answerable. The idea that this source of power—sovereignty—should be indivisible inclined Bodin to favor placing it in the hands of an absolute monarch, but he did not insist on this: he certainly conceived that it could rest instead in a representative body of the people.Footnote ³⁴ The crucial thing, for him, was for the sovereign to have authority over all other authorities, and thus be capable of settling disputes among them. And the idea that the sovereign is in this sense essentially a dispute settler, able to resolve disagreements among other elements of a body politic because it stands beyond them, remained a central theme in Hobbes, Rousseau, and Carl Schmitt, the main later theorists of sovereignty.

Of course, none of these figures, with the possible exception of Rousseau, was a liberal; Schmitt, certainly, had no use for liberalism. But they all understood the state as potentially riven by ideological divisions over how life should be led, and saw it as unable to function unless it could overcome these disputes. They all, that is, recognized the defining feature of modernity: the existence of irresolvable disagreements over the good human life. No longer could one assume, as small, close-knit tribes and tribal kingdoms might have done in the past, that everyone in one's society shares the same conception of life, or on the other hand, as some ancient empires had done, that one system of law could unite a host of different societies. The rise of the nation-state, which is generally dated to right around Bodin's time, depends simultaneously on a will to create a common society among individuals with very different views of life and a will to distinguish that unit from larger entities that might override, and thereby disrupt, whatever shared principles of governance the society in question might reach.

So sovereignty, as the condition for the possibility of a limited common polity for a limited group of human beings, arises together with, and because of, the recognition that the members of this group are likely to have different views of how to live. Some theorists, following out the absolutist tendencies in Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Schmitt, respond to this recognition by calling for a sovereign who will eliminate such differences as much as possible. Others—these are the liberals—see the appropriate common strand, in a society of people with different views of how to live, as precisely a respect for individual freedom. And these latter theorists insist that there will be no such freedom unless people have lands and goods on which and with which they can pursue their visions of the good without interference—that is, have private property. How much private property, and the degree to which rights over this property can be curtailed in the name of public, socially-shared projects, differs greatly from liberal to liberal, but the idea that there must be some such property, that some domain must be separated off from the domain of the sovereign so that individuals can live out different lives, is virtually definitive of liberalism.

My main point in this section is however that in modernity sovereignty and property are set in opposition to one another even for illiberal theorists. They may want to narrow, or close, the gap between the two by collapsing property into sovereignty, by pushing for an organicist state in which there is little individual freedom (see Section V, above). But even these people recognize that the very notion of a power that can hold a distinct society together—unify its various elements while distinguishing it from larger structures—must not be an entity that controls some goods among others within that society, and is thereby subject to the sorts of disputes it is supposed to resolve. Even collectivists recognize that sovereigns cannot be property-owners, that a modern state requires a governing power that transcends the entire society, rather than representing a particular element within it.

VII. Lingering Traces of Confusion Between Property and Sovereignty

So the contrast between sovereignty and property is a peculiarly modern idea. It has not always been acknowledged. On the contrary. Locke makes the distinction clear, but many of his contemporaries treated property and sovereignty as two species of the same genus, and they were in this expressing what had been the common view for centuries. As we saw earlier, Locke's Royalist contemporaries held that only the king truly held property in Britain, and that he drew his sovereignty from his property rights over the land.Footnote ³⁵ This was the standard view in the feudal world: kings own the territories over which they rule, it was thought, and run the state as an expression of their property rights.Footnote ³⁶ Possession passed from king to lower-level lords and from those lords to their vassals. In practice, a vassal might enjoy something like the privileges of a property-owner in his home, but no one except the king had a right of property in any part of the kingdom.Footnote ³⁷

Traces of the feudal view also remained in Europe long after the medieval world was over. It was only in the first decade of the nineteenth century that Prussia attempted to establish “a society in which property was divorced from political domination (Herrschaft),” and in doing this it broke new ground in German-speaking Europe.Footnote ³⁸ Conservative jurists attacked this program, arguing explicitly that sovereignty and property should not be distinguished. Adam Müller and Ludwig von Haller held that society was healthiest where fathers rule their families, and lords rule their vassals. Jerry Muller writes: “For Haller, … property created a domain in which authority could be legitimately exercised. The head of the familial household, the lord of the manor, and the monarch of the state each ruled the realm of their property.” The whole point of property, on this view, was to establish a basis for the exercise of authority. Conservative defenders of the old order “objected to the very notion of a political realm, in which laws were applied equally and impersonally by state officials, and … property would be ‘private’ and distinct from political power. On the contrary, they insisted, Herrschaft was personal, and property should remain indissolubly linked to political authority.”Footnote ³⁹

The idea that the rights of a ruler are identical with the rights of a property owner is therefore not incoherent. It simply goes with a paternalistic conception of governance, in which people should be guided by their rulers. It goes, that is, with an illiberal and undemocratic worldview that most of us today find stifling. But that is to say that the disappearance of this view, to the extent that it has disappeared, is a product not of greater clarity about the nature of governance but of a change in moral and political outlook. The separation of property from sovereignty reflects a choice we have come to make, rather than something that follows from the very logic of governance.

And the fact that a contrary view dominated much of the world for so long gives us reason to be alert for the possibility that traces of it may remain on the contemporary scene. It is in this light that I suggest we re-examine the language used in nationalist conflicts. The idea that a particular group could “own” the entire territory over which a state rules is just as much a dissolution of the difference between sovereignty and property as the idea that a king could own such a territory. Nothing—not even the long habitation of a group's members in a certain area—can transform ownership into sovereignty. I do not mean by this to vacate the notion that states may legitimately foster the culture or religion of groups in their realm. I think we can make sense of this notion in a way that fits in with the proper tasks of a liberal state. But ownership implies something stronger: a claim on the part of one group to express its desires or values throughout a certain territory, regardless of the interests of others who live there. No legitimate state may grant such a claim, at least if liberalism constrains legitimacy. If an entity wants to claim sovereignty over an area, it can do so legitimately only if it takes on the responsibility of protecting the ownership claims, and concomitant individual freedom, of everyone it will have sovereignty over: of being a neutral arbiter for their property disputes, and a guarantor, thereby, of their rights to pursue disparate conceptions of the good human life.

VIII. Group Ownership

To get clearer on these issues, let's examine group ownership. Groups pose a number of problems, for a liberal. Locke saw grave threats to freedom coming from the Catholic Church every bit as much as from the monarchy. To be sure, he was particularly concerned about what might happen if the monarchy itself became Catholic, but his worries about Catholicism were not limited to that, and many later liberals, such as Smith and Kant, wrote extensively on the dangers that churches can pose to freedom, even when run purely as voluntary organizations.Footnote ⁴⁰ Smith also worried about the oppression that “combinations of masters” can inflict on laborers,Footnote ⁴¹ and about the injustices perpetrated by the East India Company.Footnote ⁴² In later times, many liberals were to oppose the various legal innovations that made possible the modern corporation, because they saw large private organizations as dangerous to individual freedom. Lockean terms provide a simple way to put this danger: Large private groups can control material resources in such a way that others do not have “enough and as good” access to what they need; they can thereby exert unwarranted control over the options among which others can choose.

That said, on practically any liberal view, the right to own property must go out to groups as well as to individuals. Otherwise, our individual freedom would be severely constricted. We all have important interests and projects, as individuals, that are only achievable in groups. Many large enterprises that individuals care about—art museums and football stadiums and wilderness preserves—are virtually impossible for an individual to carry out on her own; many activities—games, religious rituals—are defined by their group character; some group activities are essential to the expression and fostering of love and friendship. So we could not have the individual freedom we seek if we could not carry out projects as part of a group. But if there are to be group projects, there must also be group ownership over the resources needed for those projects. Accordingly, when five or ten individuals want to live on a communal farm, or set up a school, they normally have the same right that a single one of those individuals would have to buy land or a building or tools for their project. Indeed, most land is bought by groups: by families, who need group ownership if they are to remain a family.

And for the most part, group ownership works just like individual ownership. If five of us buy a home or farm together, we can exclude from its premises anyone whose political views we do not like, who violates a rule of decorum on which we insist, or whose skin color or religion bothers us. We cannot lock anyone up, or inflict violence on him, for infractions of these or any other rules, but we can establish whatever rules we like as conditions for entering our joint turf. We can also establish what rules we like for how our joint enterprise is run. We can choose a “king” of our home or farm, a single absolute decision-maker; we could give such power to two or three of our members; or we could make our decisions using some form of democracy. If we are just five people, we will almost certainly go for a democratic model, probably seeking unanimity on most issues. But it's worth remembering that according to most liberals, and the law in liberal countries, a voluntary association need not be democratic, or even liberal. It is common, and unproblematic, for a Catholic monastery to be led by an Abbot or Abbess to whom everyone else there owes obedience, and who in turn reports up a chain of command to a monarchical Pope.

Some kinds of group projects will face more legal constraints than this. If a group of us decide to start a school, we will need to meet certain requirements if we want accreditation. If we start a business, we will need to meet certain health and safety requirements. These are not unlike the zoning, safety, and historical preservation requirements that can impinge on what an individual does with his private home, but states tend to impose greater restrictions on institutions that serve the public. The point, of course, is that a school or business does “serve the public”; it is not merely an expression of one or more individuals' private desires and values. But even in these cases, the state tends to constrain the relevant private institution while allowing the individuals who formed it to live out their values within those constraints. If a group of us wants to teach communism or Buddhism, or to run a gay-friendly school or a school with no homework or exams, we can do that. We can also run a business that gives all its profits to the Church of Scientology, or requires its workers to wear uniforms. Within very broad limits, liberalism allows groups as well as individuals to live out their values, and to set up institutions that help them do that. Cultural and religious groups in liberal countries frequently have their own schools, newspapers, museums, community centers, and social clubs. In that sense, the idea that liberalism is a strictly individualist doctrine, which prevents groups from expressing and developing their identity, is simply false. It is just that group life, in a liberal state, tends to occur in the realm of property rather than sovereignty (in the “private” rather than the “public” realm). There may well be something limiting about that—to express its values fully, and sometimes to survive, a group may need support from or representation in the public realm—but it seems wrong to assume that groups with a presence in the private realm alone must lack “self-determination.” Surely a group with the institutional means of shaping its future that I just listed does “determine” itself.

IX. When Group Ownership Challenges Sovereignty

Now to some extent groups that run institutions of the sort I have described may begin to cross the line between property and sovereignty. When a group runs a school or other institution that is supposed to carry out one of the government's own tasks, the sovereign may need to delegate some of its powers to that group. Schools have the responsibility of covering educational requirements imposed by the state, and the state needs to ensure that they actually do that. If a school wants to discipline its students, what it does in that respect will also need to be approved by the state. So a group that runs a school moves away from being a pure property-owner, with rights to do what it likes in its domain, and takes on some of the character of a sovereign, with a right to mandate certain types of behavior of the people it serves as well as a duty to respect the rights of those people. Schools cross into the realm of the state, and the state accordingly grants them a measure of its own powers and responsibilities.

There are other ways in which a group may move from a purely private to a partly public status. Go back to our communal farm. I originally had us imagine that a group of five started the farm. I also noted that five people can function like a family, seeking unanimity in their decisions, and more or less getting along even where they are not unanimous out of feelings of affection and loyalty. Now suppose that the farm grows to one hundred people. At this point, divisions will be inevitable and unanimity impossible, except under gag rules or practices aimed at groupthink. Even if everyone who comes in belongs to the same sliver of a sub-sub-group, what exactly leftwing Lubavitchers, say, or capitalist worshippers of Gaia are supposed to think about who should do the cooking, or whether marijuana use is acceptable, is unlikely to be clear, and will provide opportunities for the domineering to throw their weight around, the passive-aggressive to grow resentful, and everyone with a simmering feud to take up supposedly principled sides against one another. Even the most communally minded will start wanting to make sure that their individual voices are heard and individual interests respected. What counts as the group may indeed become hard to define, with factions accusing each other of betraying the group's mission. Nor need appealing to numbers settle who represents the group, since a minority can always say that the majority has been cobbled together by bribery or ignorance or manipulation.

This sort of dissension means that the group will come to need internal procedures of governance. And once it sets those up, individuals within it may claim that the group is violating its own procedures, and sue in state courts if their claims go unheeded. The internal governance procedures establish a kind of contract between the group and its members, which gives the state a right to intervene if the contract is not kept. Indeed, even if the group does keep to its internal procedures, some members of it may appeal to the state for help. If I contributed everything I owned to a communal farm that has now, I believe, betrayed the commitment it made to me when I joined, then I may withdraw from it, and sue to get some of my property back. Or I may want the group to live up to some obligation it took on—it promised schooling for my children, say, and has thus far provided none—and sue to get it to live up to that obligation. And liberal states will take such suits seriously: they have reason to be concerned about minority rights in a group like this, which is large enough to run the whole lives of most of its members, and too large to need to worry about the demands of any individual member. A large communal farm can become a virtual state within a state, lacking the right to use violence but absorbing the private space of its members so thoroughly that the threat of expulsion or ostracism turns into a serious form of coercion. The line between property and sovereignty thus gets blurred, and the state accordingly needs to ensure that the group's leaders meet the responsibilities of sovereignty. A liberal state cannot tolerate little dictatorships in its midst. It cannot recognize groups as morally important entities once they cease to reflect the freedom of the individuals that make them up, and become instead a means of suppressing that freedom.

Now imagine another scenario: The size of the group remains the same but it comes to affect many people outside of itself. Perhaps the communal farm is the only source of fresh vegetables for a hundred-mile radius. Or it acquires all the land around a lake that had been a favorite waterhole for everyone in the area. Or it turns out to be situated on top of the only supply of a mineral that the society as a whole badly needs. In any of these and many other ways, what started as a private project may come to control a resource of great importance to a wider public, and thus have a significant impact on the lives of people beyond its membership. We might say, in Lockean terms, that not “enough and as good” resources are left for others in this sort of situation. In any case, the state may understandably want to constrain a group that has this sort of leverage. Even if the group is left in its ownership, it may have to do things like ensure that everyone in the area has access to its produce, or can continue to use the lakefront. The power that a group like this can exert over society as a whole extends beyond that of an ordinary property-owner and begins to breach the realm of sovereignty; the sovereign, therefore, will try to ensure that it takes on some of the responsibilities of a sovereign.

In the last kind of case, little turns on the fact that a group owns the property in question: an individual, too, might come to own the only farm in an area, or an entire lake. These things just become more likely as the number of people who constitute the property-owner grows. In the first kind of case, by contrast, it is essential to the problems involved that we are talking about a group rather than an individual owner. When a sovereign treats a group as a private owner, it regards the group as having a group “mind” or “will”—as claiming property for the sake of joint projects that its members accept. The sovereign therefore needs to ensure that the members of the group really do participate in this shared mind or will: really share the group's projects.

But is there such a thing as a shared mind or will? There is no scientific reason to say so. From the moral point of view we can regard a group as unified in this way, however, as long as its members do. That this unity exists only from the moral point of view has important implications. It makes clear, for one thing, that the unity is never constituted by natural factors alone. Even a kin group—a family or clan or tribe—constitutes a unit with intentions of its own only so long as its members regard it as important to them. (Individuals who do not regard it that way will either leave or be coerced to go along with it: in either case, they no longer count as part of the group's agency.) The same goes, more strongly, for cultural and religious and political groups. The very definition of these groups is a moral act: how membership lines are drawn depends on what the group sees itself as trying to achieve.

It follows that groups constantly face the possibility that individuals or sub-groups within them may want to redefine them. A state that respects group projects only insofar as that is entailed by its respect for individual freedom needs always to be on the lookout for the possibility that a group claiming moral unity is in fact squelching dissent or preventing its members from leaving. By ensuring that this is not so—by protecting individual freedom within groups—the state protects the ability of each group to function as a morally relevant unit of agency. Protecting each member's ability to will his or her membership freely is necessary for the group to be what it is trying to be.

In certain cases, this will be obvious. A group that officially defines itself as “Christian” may be led by Catholics or Baptists who structure the group's policies to reflect specifically Catholic or Baptist conceptions of Christianity, at the expense of other Christians. A group that officially defines itself as “Slavic” may be led by Poles who have no interest in Czech or Serbian culture, or Czechs or Serbians who couldn't care less about Poles. Here we may want to say that the group is not even properly a single group, or not the group it claims to be.

But there are also cases in which a group starts off with something close to unanimity on what it should do and stand for but over time some members either disagree with how the original vision gets interpreted or change in ways that lead them to dissent from that vision. As a result, they want to change the group or leave it. If the group resists such demands, it will squelch the freedom of these members, even if they originally signed on to its vision. Even people who agree on a view will not agree on every interpretation of that view. And we are free, over time, only if we are allowed to change our minds. Groups must accept these points, since they themselves need, over time, to reinterpret their original vision or alter it. Accordingly, they cannot reasonably deny their members such flexibility.

A group that continues over generations will in addition have to deal with the likelihood that some of the children or grandchildren of its original members will come to dissent from its vision, and want to change the group or leave. It is even more obvious that I cannot strictly bind my children with my decisions than that I cannot strictly bind my future self. In any case, the potential for dissenting descendants makes yet clearer why a group's declared view of itself at one moment cannot be taken to define it over time.

Finally, as we saw earlier, a group may threaten the freedom of outsiders by controlling an excessive proportion of resources needed by everyone in its area.

What these different forms of potential oppression make clear is that the threat to individual freedom that groups pose is not eliminated by the declaration of its members at one time—even if unanimous—that it stands for a certain vision. The declaration that a group is Arab or Jewish, or wishes to celebrate Arab or Jewish culture, does not settle its ongoing nature or purpose even if there is no dissent from the declaration at the moment it is made. One aspect of the sovereign's role is the protection of individuals who may in the future dissent from their group's self-definition, and of future individuals who may reject that identity. States thus have reason to avoid identifying with any particular group even if there is just one group in the territory over which they rule, and that group at some point unanimously calls for the state to identify with it.

X. Purposes of Sovereignty

Let's now explore the other half of our dichotomy: sovereignty. What purposes, on liberal views, does the sovereign power serve? Sovereigns in fact pursue all sorts of purposes. Some governments are used by those who control them to acquire wealth for themselves or their families; some attack weaker countries for the sake of their resources, or for the glory of victory; some impose a religion on their subjects by force; and some massacre millions of aristocrats or intellectuals in the name of class solidarity. None of these things is a proper goal for government, however, at least by the lights of liberalism. A liberal government is supposed to act only in ways that protect, express or enhance its citizens' liberty—to protect the private realms in which its citizens live out their disparate visions of the human good, and to provide a public realm, compatible with the private ones, that enhances what the citizens can do on their own. The possibility that public goods may enhance what we can achieve by way of private goods alone has been controversial among some heirs to liberalism, but most liberals accept it. Many liberals also accept the idea that those public goods may include the fostering of cultural and religious identity; most states generally regarded as liberal in any case do carry out projects of this kind.Footnote ⁴³

But even a state that promotes a cultural or religious identity need not and should not see itself as owned by the group whose identity it fosters, or as an agent of that group's ownership rights over the state's territory. Instead, it can and should justify what it does for this or any other group on the basis of principles that it can justify to all its citizens. To remain a rightful holder of sovereignty, a liberal state may never serve as the agent of a subset of its citizenry. So even if it acts for the sake of a group, it must do so in ways that its other citizens can accept. That means that it needs to find reasons that it can reasonably expect to defend to all its citizens for why it helps this particular group. Some such reasons may be forthcoming: the fact that the group in question is very large may be one (helping large groups generally gives each citizen a better chance of being among those helped), or there may be reasons to foster the culture of particularly needy groups, or groups that have been discriminated against by the majority, or groups with long-standing historical ties to the land that the state governs.Footnote ⁴⁴ On the other hand, it may find no such reasons. Then it should drop the task. A sovereign needs to justify everything it does—even its support for group identities—on principles that respect the freedom and rights of all its citizens, not just some of them. Only thus can it keep itself separate from every group, and remain a fair umpire for all.

As against this, there is a common tendency to suppose that Germany “belongs to” the Germans, England to the English, and so forth, as if these cultural groups owned the entire territory over which the state rules, and the state was the agent of their ownership—as if, therefore, the other ethnic and historical groups that live in these countries are just visitors, and there would be something unnatural and unjust about Germany one day becoming a Turkish country, or England a South Asian one. This tendency seems to me deeply confused. These territories are too large, and have too many resources, to be the property of any group—that would not leave “enough and as good” land to others—and no state, on my account, should see itself as owning the land it rules. It may nevertheless be justifiable for Germany to foster German culture in its schools and museums and public holidays, so long as Germans make up the vast majority of its citizens, and for Britain to foster English culture. Both of these states may have good reason to foster other cultures as well (Turkish culture, in parts of Germany, and perhaps also Jewish culture; Welsh and Cornish culture, in Britain, and perhaps also some South Asian cultures), and in any case they should regard what they do in this respect as a task they take on—something separate from them, which they can hold at a distance—rather than something with which they are identified, or to which they are obligated by the group “owners” of their territory.

One could cut through this complicated way of understanding the nationalist projects of states by rejecting nationalism altogether. Many liberals do that. I think nationalism is too deeply rooted in human nature to be easily rejected.Footnote ⁴⁵ Even if it might have no place in an ideal world, we should accept the fact that practically all states currently do, and for the foreseeable future will, take as one of their central functions the fostering of group identities, and ask how that function can be integrated with the other features of liberal democracy.

And one pointer in that direction is to insist that the state never conceive itself as the agent, the expression of the mind or will, of any group, even when it helps that group preserve its culture or religion. It can and should always conceive itself instead as simply taking on public support for one or more groups as one of its tasks, or as managing the way one or more groups gets represented in the public sphere. It can and should, that is, see itself as beyond any group: as having more and other purposes than any group does, as constituted by a citizenry that does not coincide with the membership of any group, and as selecting leaders in ways that differ from the procedures that make for leadership in many groups. Germany, the state, is not an agent or outgrowth of the German people, nor is Norway, the state, identical even with the Norwegian church that its monarch nominally heads.

The main reasons for this are the ones we discussed when considering the relationship between group and individual wills. A state must always differ in principle even from a group that constitutes the overwhelming majority of its population, in part because it needs to defend the minority of citizens and residents, however small, who do not belong to the group, and in part because it needs to defend the rights of individuals within the majority against potential oppression by it. The state must stand beyond all groups even if it serves group needs, so that it can continue to settle disputes impartially, so that it can guarantee the sorts of individual freedom that allow group projects truly to express their members' will, and so that it can protect those who might have their freedom limited by the hegemony that a group holds over resources in some area. The state thereby can and should impose liberal constraints on groups, can and should make sure that they tolerate dissent and respect outsiders.

For a state publically to foster a group's identity is then quite different from the group's pursuing its projects in its private sphere. Sovereignty remains, even in this regard, separate from ownership, and the reasons for allowing states to foster a group identity will be different from the reasons for allowing a group to do what it wants in a home or school that it owns. The reasons, correspondingly, to allow a state to claim land for the purpose of fostering a group identity will be different from the reasons for allowing the group to claim land on the basis of private ownership. A group that wants to build a state that will support its culture or religion (for example, the Jewish Agency, on the verge of creating the state of Israel) is trying to transform itself from a property-owner to a sovereign—and must therefore take on the tasks and responsibilities of sovereignty, which involve imposing liberal constraints on all groups, including itself, and protecting and furthering the liberty of everyone within its borders, not of its members alone. A group that wants to build a state should see itself as trying to set up an entity different from itself, which will no longer be responsible to its interests alone, even if it takes those interests as one of its projects. Overlooking this point is the great mistake of nationalist movements.

XI. Implications of the Property/Sovereignty Distinction

There are many implications of the distinction I have explored here. In closing, I want to mention just three. I will illustrate them by way of the Israel/Palestine conflict, but the points apply to many other nationalist disputes as well.

1) However we might want to resolve the intricate and contentious issues about how the territory of Israel/Palestine ought to be divided up, one clue we might use in thinking through those issues is the idea that state claims to land are not ownership claims, Footnote ⁴⁶ and are not properly dealt with along the lines by which we settle claims of ownership. Claims that a state has or should have sovereignty over a piece of land are forward-looking, dependent for their resolution on how that would affect the civil and political rights of the inhabitants of the land in question, and/or citizens of neighboring areas, while claims that a person or group owns or should own a piece of land are backward-looking, dependent on what the would-be owner has done in the past to merit ownership (bought the land, lived there, inherited it, and so on). Relatedly, it makes sense that states can rule large territories but not that groups can own them. The Lockean “enough and as good” proviso makes it hard to imagine how an entire country could belong to one particular community; group ownership on that scale is virtually guaranteed to impose severely on the freedom of outsiders, and of many members of the group itself. It is absurd, therefore, to suppose that the entire land of Israel/Palestine, in Ottoman or British Mandate times, belonged either to the Jewish people or to the Palestinian people: the vast tracts of land unowned by any individual, especially,Footnote ⁴⁷ surely did not belong to any group either. Instead, sovereigns of various kinds ruled the area, each with different sets of missions, and the question that divided Jewish and Palestinian nationalists, in the Mandate period, is best put by asking, not, “which group should properly own this land?” but, “what sort of sovereign, with what sort of mission, should properly govern the land, once the British leave?” And the updated version of that question, for Israelis and Palestinians today, might be: “what sort of sovereign(s), with what sort of mission(s), should properly govern various sections of this land?” Putting things this way makes the relevant issues squarely a matter of the rightful tasks of statehood—of how, looking forward, the states in the area can best serve their citizens—rather than a question of ownership.

2) There are many actions that are reasonable for nationalist groups to take in the course of a struggle to set up a state that become wholly unreasonable if that group succeeds in its aims, and transforms itself into the leadership of a state. In the Israel/Palestine conflict, this applies most obviously to the difference between the Jewish National Fund (JNF) buying up land reserved for Jewish use before the state was created, and the Israeli government, after the state was established, making arrangements to reserve lands for Jews alone.Footnote ⁴⁸ Whatever the JNF, and other Jewish nationalist organizations, did in the years before 1948 had to answer to the authority of the British or the Ottomans, who for all their own agendas and muddled incompetence were at least not agents of the Jewish nationalist movement, and had to respond also to the demands of the Arab subjects over which they ruled, and try to negotiate between the two groups with impartiality.Footnote ⁴⁹ For the state of Israel to maintain the Jewish Agency and JNF after it came into existence, and make use of these organizations to give one group of its citizens property rights unavailable to the rest, shows that it had yet to learn the difference between a sovereign and a group property-owner: that it “had not yet learned to see itself as a state rather than … a national movement.”Footnote ⁵⁰

The same considerations make it not unreasonable that Arab nationalists resisted the purchase of lands by Jews when neither Arabs nor Jews held sovereign power in Palestine, while making the Jordanian law forbidding land sales to Jews on pain of death grossly unjust.

3) Finally, on my account there is nothing about the state of Israel's taking on a mission to foster Jewish culture that bars it from also taking on a mission to foster Arab or Palestinian culture. As the world's only Jewish state—only state, as I would prefer to put it, with a mission to preserve and promote Jewish culture—Israel may have good reason, that it should in principle be able to defend to all citizens, for giving priority to Jewish over other kinds of immigration,Footnote ⁵¹ and to the public representation of Jewish culture. But its large minority of Arab citizens, and the suffering and discrimination they have faced as a result of Jewish nationalism, give it also good reason to represent their culture(s) in its public space—to incorporate their festivals into its official holiday calendar, say, and to require fluency in Arabic, and a thorough education in Palestinian history and culture, of all its citizens.Footnote ⁵² Once we see the nationalist projects of states as tasks they take on, rather than something built into their identity, it should be obvious that they can adopt many such projects. And a state that does that, on principles it can defend to all its citizens, should be able to command the loyalty of all its citizens. A state of Israel that committed itself to promoting Palestinian as well as Jewish nationhood would have reason to hope that eventually both groups could see it as a just and decent sovereign. It would also have an easier time resisting demands by members of its Jewish majority that it abandon liberalism and become an agent of Jewish projects alone.