Individual Ownership and Collective Ownership in the Nineteenth -Century Debate before the Sacred Economic Congregation

Abstract

This work aims at retracing the origin and the characteristics of the debate on ownership in the Papal States during the 19 th century. Such reconstruction will be possible thanks to the documents presented to the Sacred Economic Congregation. The latter, during the first two decades of the 19 th century, received the papal mandate to discuss a draft law in order to eliminate all the obstacles opposed to the diffusion of the free and absolute private ownership. The notice related to a Law on ownership favoured the birth of an intense debate that created a division between the papal authorities, on the one hand, and the local communities, on the other hand. As we will see throughout the research, the two sides of the conflict protected two different models of ownership that, in turn, were expressions of two legal mentalities on the forms of appropriation: the individual one, typical of the modern world, and the collective one, an expression of the medieval civilisation.