This is a rich and fascinating historical survey. Its key idea is that self-sustaining economic growth is possibly only in areas in which private or, as Hayek would have preferred us to say, several property is respected. The author became persuaded that "A wide-ranging book" was needed about "the institution of private property" by the response of World Bank officials to a talk which he gave to them. In it he argued that if they wanted to see "real growth and modernisation" in the countries with which they were dealing "then tinkering with the levers of macroeconomic policy -- here a little fiscal stimulus, there a little monetary restraint -- would not do the job." Instead the "legal and political systems" of those countries "would have to be bought more closely into line with those of the Western world."

The general response of those officials was, apparently one of polite puzzlement: such ideas had never previously been entertained on the premises of the World Bank. That was the seed from which the present book grew. Unfortunately for the reviewer the word 'grow' is all too apt. For the book would seem to have grown with the accumulation of its materials rather than to have been first planned and later constructed according to that plan.

For instance, the first chapter on 'The Blessings of Property' does not proceed systematically to state what these blessings are. Instead it begins with an account of how "Over one hundred years ago, the institution of private property fell into intellectual disrepute." In its second section we are told that although the 'many blessings of a private property system have never been properly analysed" its main merit is that it is the necessary but not sufficient condition of "liberty, justice, peace and prosperity". The third section 'The Lens of Property', maintains that "Seen through the lens of property, the continued and unanticipated pre-eminence of the West in the half century since World War II becomes understandable." The fourth section, 'Property and Progress' notices that "Property's eclipse coincided with the reign of progress, and points out an important connection between the two" ideas.

Despite its ramshackle construction even that first chapter is frequently illuminating. It notices, for instance, that all the classical economists, lived in places where there was a satisfactory law of property, regularly enforced. Their successors were thus enabled to overlook this necessity. Later chapters provide abundant examples of the lamentable consequences for what it is politically correct to call developing countries of taking such defective economists' advice.

In many cases the policies based upon such defective economists' advice produced results quite opposite to the intentions of their promoters. The most striking examples of this are provided by the chapter entitled 'Land Reform: Taking Liberties Abroad.' Although the policies of land redistribution promoted by the US occupation forces in Japan and Korea must be accounted successful, the similarly intentioned but very differently managed policies promoted by the US in South Vietnam and in Iran led directly to the overthrow of the leaders whom they were intended to sustain: namely President Thieu and the Shah. It was, as Mr Bethell nicely says, a matter of "Well intentioned people" feeling "that they could be entrusted with Leninist means in order to achieve Jeffersonian ends."

Although, as has been hinted already, Mr Bethell's arrangement of his materials is somewhat shambolical those materials are abundant, and again and again provide welcome fresh support for conclusions most readers of Free Life will find congenial. Thus Part VIII deals with two historical puzzles: 'Property in Arabia'; and 'Why Did Ireland Starve?'

Mr Bethell insists that no one should be misled by the brutality of the Islamic punishments for theft to think that property or indeed any other rights are securely protected in any Arab state. He quotes the fourteenth century historian Ib Khaldun as recording that "civilisation always collapsed in the places the Arabs . . . conquered." He goes on to note that today the region of the Arab League "has a (rapidly growing) population of 260 million, but its non-oil exports are less than those of Finland (population 5 million).

Again, "When the Palestinian Authority was created, in 1993, a Ministry of Planning was created and, thanks to foreign aid, the planners began to receive salaries before any wealth was created . . . Arafat's bureaucracy laid its heavy hand of economic controls on to Gaza. Forty percent of the land was confiscated . . . more than 2,000 small production facilities were closed down, and more than 40,000 labourers were laid off."

Nothing could be more unlike the deserts of Araby than green and fertile Ireland. In 1997 our newly elected Prime Minister seized his first opportunity to apologise for the alleged fact that, at the time of the Great Famine, the government in London had allowed a crop failure to "turn into a massive human tragedy." But economic historians insist that the prime problem is to discover why Ireland was so poor. "The proximate cause of the famine was the fungus . . . But the famine is not easily explained by the blight, which also struck Belgium, the Netherlands and Scotland with little demographic effects.

In the first half of the nineteenth century many people sought for the cause of Ireland's poverty, and found answers in various places. Malthus after a tour of the country wrote to Ricardo in 1817, claiming that the "predominant evil of Ireland" was a population "greatly in excess of the demand for labour." But by the time of the second edition of his Principles of Political Economy (1836) Malthus had changed his mind. "There is indeed a fatal deficiency in one of the greatest sources of prosperity, the perfect security of property; and till this defect is remedied it is not easy to pronounce upon the degree in which the redundant capital of England would flow into Ireland with the best effect.

Antony Flew

(Antony Flew is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at the University of Reading. He is also the author of countless books and shorter publications)