Chris Pierson has been professor of politics at the University of Nottingham since 1996. He has also held visiting positions at the Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, at the Australian National University in Canberra and at the Hansewissenschaftskolleg in Lower Saxony. He is best-known for his work on welfare states (including the three editions of Beyond the Welfare State? and The Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State, edited with Castles, Leibfried, Lewis and Obinger) but always as part of a much broader interest in the dynamics of social change, which included Socialism After Communism: The New Market Socialism (1995) and Hard Choices: Social Democracy in the 21st Century (2001). He has spent most of this millennium working on the history of ideas of property in the Latin West, convinced that this is the under-considered terrain in which the roots of many of our modern discontents are to be found. The two volumes of Just Property are the first fruits of this project.

• Introduction ; 1. The Greeks: property and the common good ; 2. The Romans: private property and personhood ; 3. The Early Christian Church: property and sinfulness ; 4. The Medieval World: Roman laws, natural laws, and God's law ; 5. The Late Medieval World: princes, popes and supreme poverty ; 6. The Early Sixteenth Century: renaissance and reformation ; 7. The Later Sixteenth Century: absolutism and resistance ; 8. Natural Law and Natural Right in the Seventeenth Century: Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf ; 9. Seventeenth-Century Radicals: republicans, levellers and diggers ; 10. Locke ; Conclusion

Pierson takes the reader through the Greeks, the Romans, the early Christian church, the Medieval World, the early sixteenth-century, the later sixteenth century, natural law and natural right in the seventeenth century, and seventeenth-century radicals. While this list of topics indicates Piersons ambition, it does little to convey the impressive scholarship that he demonstrates throughout this magnificent book.