Presenting a comprehensive, critical examination of the claim that private property is one of the fundamental rights of humankind, Waldron here contrasts two types of arguments about rights: those based on historical entitlement, and those based on the importance of property for freedom. He illustrates this contrast with a detailed discussion of the theories of property found in Locke's
Second Treatise
and Hegel's
Philosophy of Rights
, and offers original analyses of the concept of ownership, the idea of rights, and the relation between property and equality, finding that traditional arguments about property yield some surprisingly radical conclusions.