18. Public Cultural Heritage and Private Property Rights: Building Sustainable Community Through Individuality

Material and immaterial culture and both economy and economics are part of one and only reality, contrary to views placing the “priceless” things out of the scope of mundane calculi. What keeps together any community are not only the aesthetic joys or sober rituals, but productive relations within the framework of cooperative division of labour, for culture is not floating into nothingness, but overwrites the material world of scarce resources which is either governed by a critical infrastructure of property rights or gets ungovernable at all. In order to culturally thrive, communities are obliged to discover those very institutions responsible for peace and prosperity which culture (in the “anthropological” sense) prepares, following époques of social selection, and on which culture (in the “artefactual” sense) roots its desired sustainability. Our thesis, all the more acute in a post-socialist society, is that private property rights link individuals in communities, by giving them sound incentives, information and instruments to create, share and bequeath tangible and intangible culture, that is the offshoot of the freedom of expression, of the freedom to produce and of the freedom to trade.