This paper addresses critically, from the standpoints of social historyand sociology, dominant views on path dependence, institutions and property inthe New Institutional Economics and Law and Economics literatures, which wefind lacking in what concerns the analysis of concrete social relationships andprocesses. We argue for an approach to property rights, specifically in land, thatgoes beyond the perspective on property as an institution and builds on theanalytical potential of the definition of property rights as social relations, as wellas for the view of property as a bundle of rights and against the revival of theabsolute concept of property under a juridical numerus clausus of propertyforms. We submit that it is at this more concrete level of social relations that wemay detect the historical sequences of events and outcomes generating pathdependence.
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