Hanoch Dagan and the liberal concept of autonomy

Abstract

Scarcely anything these days is said in property circles about autonomy. Much is said about costs and about the structure of property (Smith, 2004; 2012). A few libertarians and Kantians, mainly from our neighbours to the North (Ripstein, 2009; Weinrib, 2012), do discuss independence, but independence is not the same as autonomy. Autonomy and its relationship to property are largely neglected topics. All that changes with the appearance of Hanoch Dagan’s important new book (Dagan, 2021). The greatest achievement of his book is to base property, as both a concept and an institution, on personal autonomy. This is a major contribution not only to property theory, but also to liberal theory in general, and it deserves a wide and diverse audience. There is a long tradition in liberal political and legal thought defining freedom in terms of independence, understood as a constraint on the conduct of others. Dagan departs from this tradition by defining freedom in terms of autonomy: