Key Arguments

• Property originally signified one’s location and membership in the political community.
• Expulsion could result in destruction of the house; wealth of foreigners or slaves could not substitute for such property.
• Poverty did not deprive the family head of location and citizenship.
• Privacy’s sacredness paralleled the sacredness of hidden birth and death, marking the household as a realm impenetrable to public knowledge.

Source Quotes

Wealth, on the contrary, whether privately owned or publicly distributed, had never been sacred before. Originally, property meant no more or less than to have one’s location in a particular part of the world and therefore to belong to the body politic, that is, to be the head of one of the families which together constituted the public realm. This piece of privately owned world was so completely identical with the family who owned it that the expulsion of a citizen could mean not merely the confiscation of his estate but the actual destruction of the building itself.

Originally, property meant no more or less than to have one’s location in a particular part of the world and therefore to belong to the body politic, that is, to be the head of one of the families which together constituted the public realm. This piece of privately owned world was so completely identical with the family who owned it that the expulsion of a citizen could mean not merely the confiscation of his estate but the actual destruction of the building itself. The wealth of a foreigner or a slave was under no circumstances a substitute for this property, and poverty did not deprive the head of a family of this location in the world and the citizenship resulting from it.

This piece of privately owned world was so completely identical with the family who owned it that the expulsion of a citizen could mean not merely the confiscation of his estate but the actual destruction of the building itself. The wealth of a foreigner or a slave was under no circumstances a substitute for this property, and poverty did not deprive the head of a family of this location in the world and the citizenship resulting from it. In early times, if he happened to lose his location, he almost automatically lost his citizenship and the protection of the law as well.

In early times, if he happened to lose his location, he almost automatically lost his citizenship and the protection of the law as well. The sacredness of this privacy was like the sacredness of the hidden, namely, of birth and death, the beginning and end of the mortals who, like all living creatures, grow out of and return to the darkness of an underworld. The nonprivative trait of the household realm originally lay in its being the realm of birth and death which must be hidden from the public realm because it harbors the things hidden from human eyes and impenetrable to human knowledge.

Key Concepts

• Originally, property meant no more or less than to have one’s location in a particular part of the world and therefore to belong to the body politic,
• the expulsion of a citizen could mean not merely the confiscation of his estate but the actual destruction of the building itself.
• The wealth of a foreigner or a slave was under no circumstances a substitute for this property,
• The sacredness of this privacy was like the sacredness of the hidden, namely, of birth and death, the beginning and end of the mortals

Context

8 THE PRIVATE REALM: PROPERTY: Genealogy of property as locative membership and its sacred privacy.