This volume traces the development of ideas about property in the Western world from the early eighteenth century, through the Enlightenment and the experience of the French Revolution to the critical stance of socialists and anarchists in the nineteenth century. Just Property amply illustrates, by historical example, why property should be at the core of political theory. The strength of Just Property is in how it combines rigorous scholarship with witty commentary that quietly celebrates Rousseau's 'heroic failure' and sighs at the German Idealists' knack for starting in all the wrong places.