This is a rich, sprawling, and somewhat frustrating work of political theory, intellectual history, and moral philosophy. The third of three volumes, it is less a stirring conclusion than a question mark. Pierson seeks to explain how “we” have come “to believe that a radically unequal distribution of the world’s property” could be just. The answer, however, “is impossible to summarize because the explanations are so varied” (p. 272). Pierson gets points for honesty. His volume reflects this honesty in the range of sources it considers and the types of evidence it examines.

Of course, such a project cannot be tied up with a neat little bow. I have no doubt that I will keep Pierson’s volume handy as a reference and a guide. I have not read the preceding volumes, but will acquire them on the strength and perspicacity of this, their conclusion. Pierson brings together a multitude of figures and debates from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including a number of unjustly neglected works and traditions devoted to the question(s) of property. He reads the primary sources with seriousness and judicious care and is impressively well acquainted with the secondary literature. I would recommend the volume to anyone interested in the property question in the nineteenth or twentieth century.

Pierson’s project is to survey thinking on property in “an age of ideologies,” as the subtitle of this volume puts it. The thinkers treated here are liberals, libertarians, social democrats, radical conservatives, and feminists. Pierson devotes two chapters to each. Although the division of labor between the two chapters shifts somewhat, the first of the pair generally treats earlier thinkers and elements of each tradition.

The chapters on liberalism verge on textbook compendiums of classical liberal thought (chap. 1) and the “new liberalism” of T. H. Green and his followers, on down to Rawls (chap. 2). These opening chapters are more compiled than composed: they are summary treatments of the various thinkers, with little to no connecting argument or overarching narrative. Chapter 2 is certainly the more valuable of the two, because Green, Hobhouse, and Hobson are understudied and crucially important for understanding how liberal theory moved from J. S. Mill to Rawls even while the liberal parties did not. Where political liberalism retained roughly equal commitments to social order, the public welfare, and property’s rightful origin in labor, more philosophically inclined liberals, influenced by utilitarianism’s suggestion that “the existing property regime was constantly required to justify itself empirically—in terms of its outcomes,” became progressively radicalized (p. 56, emphasis in original).

The next two pairs—on libertarians and social democrats—go in opposite directions. The discussion of libertarian thinking, as it emerges from Herbert Spencer, is very episodic. Chapter 3 provides a summary of Friedman, Hayek, and Rothbard before turning to Nozick and the academic debates that followed in the wake of his Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Chapter 4 is then devoted entirely to ever-more-academic attempts to create a philosophically robust libertarianism of natural rights after Nozick. Social democracy, by pointed contrast, is portrayed as “more deeply embedded in a party political practice” than any of the other ideologies (p. 109, emphasis in original). The chapters on the social democrats go from Blanc and Lassalle up to the market socialism of Alec Nove and Jon Elster but never stray far from the history of the German Social Democratic Party, the British Labour Party, and the Swedish Social Democratic Party. As Pierson rightly and smartly puts it, “social democrats have generally been committed to just so much social change (including change in property relationships) as can command a stable parliamentary majority” (p. 108).

If Pierson’s chapters on social democracy contain the most synthetic historical reconstruction in the volume, his chapters on radical conservatives are perhaps the most controversial. Endorsing Mannheim’s thesis that conservatism stems entirely from the reaction to the French Revolution (p. 173), Pierson skips over Hume and Burke in a flash, discusses briefly Schmitt’s trinity of reactionaries (de Maistre, de Bonald, and Cortés), and then spends most of chapter 7 on de Tocqueville before devoting chapter 8 to Cobbett, Chesterton, and Belloc. Pierson admits that each of these is “a pretty strange sort of conservative” (p. 182; cf. pp. 191, 213). His apology is that he is highlighting the “interesting” thinkers, not those most representative of conservatism (p. 177). To a great degree, this choice works. Pierson brings out the strengths of a conservative position that frankly admits the origins of property in crime and plunder, does not worry itself with exactly how property ought to be distributed, and asks simply whether a property regime is stable enough to persist. But he also reveals the profound weakness of this position, which has nothing left to say when the property regime loses its “stability in the real world” (p. 216).

The final chapters, on feminist conceptions of property, break the mold of the preceding sections by integrating the survey of what feminist theorists have said about property with a survey of empirical research into “women’s subaltern status as property owners” (p. 241): these feminist theorists argue that the relationship between women’s bodies and property pushes property debates right up to their limit. Pierson thinks feminists are right to center the body in their discussions of property, but also that doing so creates an impasse. If it is clear that women’s bodies should not belong to others, it does not follow for many feminists that everyone should have property in their own bodies. Feminist theorists from de Beauvoir to Andrea Dworkin to Carole Pateman have criticized the concepts of contract and choice to such an extent that they cannot serve as unproblematic bases for resolving controversies about sex work and surrogacy. But Pierson is also skeptical of, for example, Sophie Lewis’s utopian call to abolish gender, the family, and property.

Thus, the volume ends by underscoring not only Pierson’s problem but also our own: inequality of property holdings is massive and growing, in ways that we cannot convincingly justify, and none of the available political ideologies charts a clear course out of this situation. Pierson deserves credit for providing such a treasure trove of ideas about property. But the uses of a book are inseparable from its limits, so it important to note those as well. I see two especially significant issues.

The first issue concerns selection. Pierson repeatedly disclaims any aspiration to either completeness or representativeness in his selection of authors and arguments for scrutiny. This is reasonable. However, there is a striking regularity to the excluded figures: the voices we hear from are exclusively from Europe and North America. Anti- and postcolonial thinkers are entirely absent, as are the theoretical traditions of China and Japan. My complaint here is not simply that the discussion ought to be more inclusive. As Pierson realizes, global wealth inequality has not followed the same trajectory as inequality within nations (p. 274). Some of the difficulties faced by social democrats since the end of the “Golden Age” have been driven by the fact that, in “a newly globalized economy,” nation-states face real limits to how interventionist they can be and in what direction (p. 157). If development in the Global South has hinged on allowing inequality within nations to balloon, it seems crucial that discussions of property by anti- and postcolonial thinkers be taken into account.

The second issue is trickier. Pierson comes down on the side of thinking of the property order as a social system, structured above all by the law. This conclusion, which is quite reasonable, sits uneasily with Pierson’s decision to focus on property in tangible, external things and to largely set aside questions pertaining to property in persons (including in oneself), in ideas, and in other intangibles. He cannot and does not set these questions aside completely. The ownership of land, and of natural resources more generally, stretches the limits of tangibility. The question of slavery is unavoidable. Nonetheless, when Pierson writes about James Madison’s distinction between property narrowly conceived as “land, or merchandize, or money” and property “in its larger and juster meaning” as “everything to which a man may attach a value and have a right,” it seems unfortunate that the volume as a whole does not foreground the tension between these two senses of property (p. 21). If, as Morris Cohen argued, “dominion over things is also imperium over our fellow human beings” (quoted on p. 281), why isn’t social and legal power over others more central to Pierson’s entire investigation? The worry here is that, no matter how careful and ambitious Pierson is, we simply cannot arrive at a satisfactory account of just property if our focus is constrained to just property.