Abstract
The concept of property is basic for several human sciences: economy, law, but for the history the most substantial seems the philosophic and anthropological approach taking into consideration mental, spiritual and interpersonal aspects. Property as a relation of ownership or possession is associated to the idea of freedom and its limitations. The possibility to dispose of objects of property are being realized in time and space; spatial potentialities are larger, the time is but irreversible, therefore property as physical relation is associated rather with the space. The disposal of time belongs to power, because the power is being put into effect in taking decisions, in determining the coming future. Historically property is the basis of identity (the right on oneself and on one’s own; all the societies were confronted with the task to protect, on one hand, and to limit, on the other hand, the property. In the Modern time the comprehension of sacrality of property as the pledge of democracy developed, the history is considered as an evolution from slavery to freedom. But natural boundaries of property, before all in the time, make its phenomenon quite unstable and changeable. Material property is rarely maintained within one family during several generations. In the Middle Ages the idea of antiquity as substantiation of ownership of land served for the protection of property. In that period personal rights to own a territory were not separated from political rights to rule subjects, from this, for example, the difficulty to translate such term as Latin “status”, Italian “stato”, i. e. possession, later “the state”. political belonging (citizenship) is the specular social characteristics of the property. The idea of property of a territory extends also to the history of peoples and is realized through pretensions of states. The contradiction between physical, natural instability and the necessity of fixing the rights generated the attribution to the property of sacral status. In archaic societies the offence to the property of clan was punished with the death, superior owners were cods and spirits. The denial of property in Christianity expressed its transitory character; it determined also the contradiction between private property of a person or a family and collective property of people, society, and state. The property even in its immaterial forms (“intellectual property”) is bound with material side of life; from here are elements of its negation in different religious and communist doctrines. But mechanisms of property redistribution are necessary for every society.
Keywords
property, time, space, state, borders, affiliation