Book Review

Gregory S. Alexander's Commodity & Propriety is a significant achievement, synthesizing the history of American property law on three different levels. First, Commodity & Propriety functions as a basic survey of the history of legal ideas about property across the full timeline of modern American history. Drawing together the arguments of a large number of the most significant secondary books and articles in the field, Alexander generates a very readable chronological narrative of the history of American property law. Within this first level of synthetic interpretation, Alexander distinguishes his project from the usual fare of historical survey: first, by integrating into his summaries several focused forays into primary intellectual history sources such as William Blackstone, James Kent, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Dillon, John Chipman Gray, John Commons, Morris Cohen, and Charles Reich; and, second, by incorporating an overarching story of cyclical change between periods of government versus market solutions to socioeconomic problems. Thus even at this first level of synthesis, one gets a sense of the multiple levels at which Alexander's book works—a quality that elevates it well above the standard legal-historical overview.	1
The second level at which Commodity & Propriety operates as synthesis is at the nexus of law and history. Despite the proliferation of joint degree programs and interdisciplinary legal research, the truth is that it is a very rare book of sociolegal scholarship that appeals to both the law and the history communities. This book is such a rarity. Alexander's historiography is the historiography of historians: Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, J. G. A. Pocock, Marvin Meyers, Charles Sellers, and Eugene Genovese (to name just a few of the interpretive works Alexander employs in his discussion of antebellum property law). Simultaneously, one can read this book just as easily as a straightforward historical-jurisprudential argument about theories of property law with Frank Michelman, Bruce Ackerman, Carol Rose, Joseph William Singer, Thomas Grey, and Margaret Jane Radin composing the more explicitly jurisprudential strand of Alexander's dialogue. Indeed, it is as a property law book that this work achieves its greatest interpretive success as a challenge to neoliberal conceptions of the evolution of American property law represented in such works as Richard Epstein's Takings (1985).	2
And that is the third and most compelling interpretive level at which this synthesis works—in the classic synthetic mode as a resolution of an important thesis/antithesis dialectic. As Alexander makes perfectly clear in his introduction, he is consciously interested in reconciling the two contending interpretive traditions that currently dominate legal-constitutional debate. The traditions that he alternatively identifies as liberalism versus republicanism, negative versus positive liberty, and commodity versus propriety are, of course, the products of extensive, complex, and contested theoretical and historical literatures, and one could spend much time unpacking and debating this heuristic. But basically Alexander deploys these labels to represent two antagonistic poles of debate about property: the negative liberal, market-oriented, laissez-faire, absolute individual rights–based regime, on the one hand, and the more positive communitarian, governmentally activist, welfare state, relative social rights–based regime, on the other. In provocatively synthetic fashion, Alexander answers the question of liberalism or republicanism with a decisive "Yes." That is, the history of American property law is replete with elements of both traditions. Indeed, for Alexander, American property law history is best thought of as a pendulum oscillating between the relative strengths of these two gigantic, opposed traditions in American legal-political thought.	3
As a work of synthesis in these three modes, Alexander's book is very successful. It is a readable and dependable survey of the intellectual history of American property law. It is written for and appeals to both historians and law professors. And in plugging into important contemporary debates about communitarianism versus individualism and regulation versus deregulation, it provides a suitably provocative overarching thesis that makes the intellectual history of American property very much relevant and alive.	. . .