PROPERTY BETWEEN LAW AND THE ECONOMY

The article deals with a particular theoretical question: is property a legal or an economic notion? The need to study it is explained by the situation in the Russian social sciences in which, from mid XX century onwards, the notion of property plays an exceptional role, hardly perceptible to scholars accustomed to reason in other paradigms. Unlike their colleagues from other countries, many Soviet, then Russian specialists in social sciences believe that along with property in the juridical sense there is also property in the economic sense understood as the basis of the socio-economic structure of a particular society. The article explores the genesis and the development of this concept which we owe to the Soviet interpretation of Marxism in the age of Stalin. To this aim the author analyzes how this problem is viewed by the leading Russian medievalists, lawyers, economists and philosophers. He demonstrates the internal contradictions of this concept and the problems which scholars face when trying to apply it to the realities of long bygone days and to those of our times. The author argues that property is definitely a legal notion, and that its study by the methods of the juridical science permits to learn a lot about law, society and file economy of both ancient and contemporary worlds.

property, rights of property, property relations, modes of «having tilings», production relations, Marxism, Soviet medieval studies, contemporary Russian social studies, institutionalism