With socialism largely discredited in recent years, the moral and legal status of private property has become an increasingly important area for discussion in contemporary political and social thought. Offering a contribution to legal theory, and to political and social philosophy, this work examines the two currently dominant traditions - those of neo-conservative utilitarianism and liberal communitarianism - emphasizing the strengths of both approaches and laying the groundwork for a theory to bridge the gap between them.

In an era in which socialism has been widely discredited, the moral and legal status of private property is crucial, and property theory has become one of the most active and exciting battlegrounds of contemporary political and social thought. In this important contribution to the theory of property, Carol Rose sympathetically examines the two currently dominant traditions--neoconservative utilitarianism and liberal communitarianism--acknowledging the strengths of each and laying the groundwork for a theory to bridge the gap between them.By insisting that community norms must underlie any property regime, she expands the horizons of property theory, exploring the role of narrative and storytelling in the establishment of these norms. The result is a study that credits the insights of rival views and breaks new ground both substantively in its implications for understanding property and methodologically in its application of the study of narrative to property law. Property and Persuasion is a valuable contribution to legal theory as well as to political and social philosophy, and it is essential reading for students and professionals in all these fields.

This analysis of the human need to persuade offers a new, creative, application of Aristotelian essentialism to human discourse. Using Thomas Aquinas’s adaptation of essentialism as a starting point, Jeffrey J. Maciejewski argues that persuasion is natural to human beings and that it possesses dispositional properties that bring about stages of human action that ultimately harmonize the operations of the mind in addition to harmonizing human relationships. Aquinas’s philosophy of human nature is reviewed and re-examined in order to discover why it is that humans need to persuade themselves and each other. The book should be of considerable interest to scholars of human nature, Thomist philosophy, and those interested in the history of rhetoric and rhetorical theory.

Drawing on Indigenous peoples' struggles against settler colonialism, Theft Is Property! reconstructs the concept of dispossession as a means of explaining how shifting configurations of law, property, race, and rights have functioned as modes of governance, both historically and in the present. Through close analysis of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists from the nineteenth century to the present, Robert Nichols argues that dispossession has come to name a unique recursive process whereby systematic theft is the mechanism by which property relations are generated. In so doing, Nichols also brings long-standing debates in anarchist, Black radical, feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial thought into direct conversation with the frequently overlooked intellectual contributions of Indigenous peoples.

Property is more diverse than is usually assumed. Developing the concept of property diversity, this book explores the varied role of property in placed human landscapes. In acknowledging the propertied diversity about us, the book highlights the paucity of our settled contemporary assumptions of property as defined by private ownership. Challenging this universalizing model, the book analyses how this self-limiting view produces critical blind spots in modern property discourse. In response, it offers a re-conceptualization of property that matches the grounded reality of our rich and diverse relationships with land. Integrating the plurality of real property types (private, public and common) with inclusive understandings of both interest and ownership, it thus identifies and substantiates an overarching theory of property diversity. Drawing on studies from numerous jurisdictions, including the USA, New Zealand, Australia, and the UK, its analysis of property as something more – and indeed other – than a place-less abstraction provides an invaluable contribution to the contemporary law and theory of property.

Influence: Science and Practice is an examination of the psychology of compliance (i.e. uncovering which factors cause a person to say "yes" to another's request) and is written in a narrative style combined with scholarly research. Cialdini combines evidence from experimental work with the techniques and strategies he gathered while working as a salesperson, fundraiser, advertiser, and other positions, inside organizations that commonly use compliance tactics to get us to say "yes". Widely used in graduate and undergraduate psychology and management classes, as well as sold to people operating successfully in the business world, the eagerly awaited revision of Influence reminds the reader of the power of persuasion. Cialdini organizes compliance techniques into six categories based on psychological principles that direct human behavior: reciprocation, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Modernity arrived in Japan, as elsewhere, through new forms of ownership. In A Fictional Commons, Michael K. Bourdaghs explores how the literary and theoretical works of Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), widely celebrated as Japan's greatest modern novelist, exploited the contradictions and ambiguities that haunted this new system. Many of his works feature narratives about inheritance, thievery, and the struggle to obtain or preserve material wealth while also imagining alternative ways of owning and sharing. For Sōseki, literature was a means for thinking through—and beyond—private property. Bourdaghs puts Sōseki into dialogue with thinkers from his own era (including William James and Mizuno Rentarō, author of Japan’s first copyright law) and discusses how his work anticipates such theorists as Karatani Kōjin and Franco Moretti. As Bourdaghs shows, Sōseki both appropriated and rejected concepts of ownership and subjectivity in ways that theorized literature as a critical response to the emergence of global capitalism.