 Finally, we should not forget that not all genealogies set out to flatter the practices or institutions they purport to explain. Karl Marx’s account of primitive accumulation (1976 [1867]) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s non-normative description of the invention of property in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Rousseau 1994 [1755]) are genealogies written more in a Nietzschean spirit of pathology than as part of any quest for justification. Such negative genealogies reminds us of the importance of Mill’s observation that in approaching the justification of private property we must remember that, ‘we must leave out of consideration its actual origin in any of the existing nations of Europe’ (Mill 1994 [1848], p. 7).