"Most people understand property as something that is owned, a means of creating individual wealth. But in Commodity & Propriety, Gregory S. Alexander uncovers in American legal writing a competing vision of property that has existed alongside the traditional conception. Property, Alexander argues, has also been understood as proprietary, a mechanism for creating and maintaining a properly ordered society. The real tradition in American legal thought about property can be discovered in the ongoing debate over the priority of the market versus the social good."--BOOK JACKET.