The property rights literature provided a way for economists to acknowledge the role of corporations, governments, and other complex arrangements of agency and power, by simplifying them into individual actors governed by rules of property. It identified the absence of private property rights or the existence of communal rights as a source of uncertainty and potential instability. This work of simplification prepared the ground for the development of New Institutional Economics, which became a major branch of neoliberal thought.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1931