IT is the aim of Socialism to transfer the means of production from private ownership to the ownership of organized society, to the State.1  The socialistic State owns all material factors of production and thus directs it.

The programme of the liberal philosophy of the State was summarized in a number of points which were put forward as the demands of natural law. These are the Rights of Man and of Citizens, which formed the subject of the wars of liberation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They are written in brass in the constitutional laws composed under the influence of the political movements of this time.

The contrast between realism and nominalism which runs through the history of human thought since Plato and Aristotle is revealed also in social philosophy.1  The difference between the attitude of Collectivism and Individualism to the problem of social associations, is not different from the attitude of Universalism and Nominalism to the

Regarded as a sociological category ownership appears as the power to use economic goods. An owner is he who disposes of an economic good.

The physical having of economic goods, which economically considered constitutes the essence of natural ownership, can only be conceived as having originated through Occupation. Since ownership is not a fact independent of the will and action of man, it is impossible to see how it could have begun except with the appropriation of ownerless goods. Once begun ownership continues, as long as its object does not vanish, until either it is given up voluntarily or the object passes from the physical having of the owner against his will.

It is only slowly and with difficulty that the idea of Law triumphs. Only slowly and with difficulty does it rebut the principle of violence. Again and again there are reactions; again and again the history of Law has to start once more from the beginning.

The earliest attempts to reform ownership and property can be accurately described as attempts to achieve the greatest possible equality in the distribution of wealth, whether or not they claimed to be guided by considerations of social utility or social justice. All should possess a certain minimum, none more than a certain maximum. All should possess about the same amount –that was, roughly, the aim. The means to this end were not always the same. Confiscation of all or part of the property was usually proposed, followed by redistribution.

It is an old trick of political innovators to describe that which they seek to realize as Ancient and Natural, as something which has existed from the beginning and which has been lost only through the misfortune of historical development; men, they say, must return to this state of things and revive the Golden Age. Thus natural law explained the rights which it demanded for the individual as inborn, inalienable rights bestowed on him by Nature.