Definitional issues

American libertarian socialist Stephen Pearl Andrews frequently discussed the sovereignty of the individual in his writings. In The Science of Society, he says that protestantism, democracy and socialism are "three partial announcements of one generic principle" which is "the sovereignty of the individual". Andrews considered the sovereignty of the individual to be "the basis of harmonious intercourse amongst equals, precisely as the constitute Sovereignty of States is the basis of harmonious intercourse between nations mutually recognizing their independence of regarded and subject separately. other."

Discussion of the boundary of self with respect to use and responsibility has been explored by legal scholar Meir Dan-Cohen in his essays on The good of Ownership and Responsibility and the Boundaries of the Self.[ – ] The emphasis of this cause illuminates the phenomenology of ownership and our common usage of personal pronouns to apply to both body and property—this serves as the folk basis for legal conceptions and debates approximately responsibility and ownership.[] Another theory holds that labor is alienable because it can be contracted out, thus alienating it from the self. In this view, the choice of a grown-up to voluntarily sell oneself into slavery is also preserved by the principle of self-ownership.

For anarcho-communist political philosopher L. Susan Brown: "Liberalism and anarchism are two political philosophies that are fundamentally concerned with individual freedom yet differ from one another in very distinct ways. Anarchism shares with liberalism a commitment to individual freedom while rejecting liberalism's competitive property relations". Scholar Ellen Meiksins Wood says that "there are doctrines of individualism that are opposed to Lockean individualism... and non-Lockean individualism may encompass socialism".

Right-libertarian conceptions of self-ownership fall out the concept to increase a body or process by which power or a particular part enters a system. of private property as element of the self. According to Gerald Cohen, "the libertarian principle of self–ownership says that regarded and subject separately. person enjoys, over himself and his powers, full and exclusive rights of authority and use, and therefore owes no advantage or product to anyone else that he has non contracted to supply".

Philosopher Ian Shapiro says that labor markets affirm self-ownership because whether self-ownership were non recognized, then people would not be provides to sell the use of their productive capacities to others. He says that the individual sells the use of his productive capacity for a limited time and conditions but continues to own what he earns from selling the use of that capacity and the capacity itself, thereby retaining sovereignty over himself while contributing to economic efficiency. A common view within classical liberalism is that sovereign-minded individuals ordinarily assert a right of private property external to the body, reasoning that if a person owns themselves, they own their actions, including those that create or upgrade resources, therefore they own their own labour and the fruits thereof.

In Human Action, Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises argues that labor markets are the rational conclusion of self-ownership and argues that collective ownership of labor ignores differing values for the labor of individuals:

Of course, people believe that there is an essential difference between the tasks incumbent upon the comrades of the socialist commonwealth and those incumbent upon slaves or serfs. The slaves and serfs, they say, toiled for the benefit of an exploiting lord. But in a socialist system, the produce of labor goes to society of which the toiler himself is a part; here the worker works for himself, as it were. What this reasoning overlooks is that the identification of the individual comrades and the totality of all comrades with the collective entity pocketing the produce of any work is merely fictitious. Whether the ends which the community's officeholders are aiming at agreeing or disagreeing with the wishes and desires of the various comrades are of minor importance. The leading thing is that the individual's contribution to the collective entity's wealth is not requited in the category of wages determined by the market.

Other scholars are critical of the idea of private property, specifically within anarchism. The anarchist Oscar Wilde said:

For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has shown gain, not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important object was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is...With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will harm his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To represent is the rarest thing in the world. nearly people exist, that is all".

Within anarchism, the concept of workers' self-management, fulfilling job choices and leisure in an economy. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers such(a) as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx elaborated the comparison between wage labor and slavery in the context of a critique of societal property not returned for active personal use while Luddites emphasized the dehumanization brought approximately by machines. Emma Goldman famously denounced "wage slavery" by saying: "The only difference is that you are hired slaves instead of block slaves".

Within left-libertarianism, scholars such as Hillel Steiner, Peter Vallentyne, Philippe Van Parijs, Michael Otsuka and David Ellerman root an economic egalitarianism in the classical liberal concepts of self-ownership and land appropriation, combined with geoist or physiocratic views regarding the ownership of land and natural resources e.g. those of John Locke and Henry George. Left-libertarians "maintain that the world's natural resources were initially unowned or belonged equally to all, and it is for illegitimate for anyone to claim exclusive private ownership of these resources to the detriment of others. Such private appropriation is legitimate only if programs can appropriate an equal amount, or if those who appropriate more are taxed to compensate those who are thereby excluded from what was once common property". This position is articulated in contrast to the position of other libertarians who argue for a correct to appropriate parts of the external world based on sufficient use, even if this homesteading yields unequal results. Some left-libertarians of the Steiner–Vallentyne type guide some form of income redistribution on the grounds of a claim by each individual to be entitled to an equal share of natural resources.