This is a book about whiteness and masculinity and about private property as a way of seeing, ordering and restructuring the world, from the seventeenth century onwards in the anglophone Atlantic. The book studies what people imagine it means to live in a world where private property is dominant and their fears (and sometimes hopes) about living in a future world where private property has disappeared; it is a history of the culture of private property. What I am specifically interested in is private property as an ideology and how private property gave birth to a specific way of imagining the world; seeing empty spaces as always awaiting privatisation and seeing subsequent challenges to privatisation as terrifying violations of male authority or of white authority.
The narrative of private property as a source of harmony and social stability had to be told and re-told precisely because of a simultaneously parallel narrative about the imminent disappearance of private property.
That threatened social chaos is central unifying story of this book. In the propertied imagination, private property is a fragile thing, a socially positive institution beset by terrifying enemies. The narrative of private property as a source of harmony and social stability had to be told and re-told precisely because of a simultaneously parallel narrative about the imminent disappearance of private property. The social worlds described by John Locke, Edmund Burke, George Fitzhugh or Margaret Thatcher were both idyllically perfect as well as frighteningly under siege by a host of assailants; wandering vagrants and beggars, Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, nomadic Native Americans, slaves and ex-slaves and escaped slaves, socialists, communists, and anarchists, Jacobins, Republicans, the Irish, Jews, abolitionists, feminists, or any class of publicly assertive women, Mormons and other fervent religious radicals, Quakers and Anabaptists, and haughty welfare-state bureaucrats. The history of private property is the history of a recurring nightmare that one or another of these lumpen mobs would storm the castle, take control and demolish private property. And in these fevered dreams, assaults on private property were assaults on white, male authority.
One of the central ideas of race and gender theory is that they are studies of “difference”; but masculinity and whiteness as discursive practices as less about “difference” per se as they as they are concerned with sameness and normality, and with the order and social stability that normality supposedly brings. This is why they lend themselves so well to pro-private property theorising, which also values order and stability. As John Adams once declared: ‘The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.’ Stuart Hall has famously said that race is the modality through which class is lived. In this work, I contend that whiteness and masculinity are the modalities through which private property is imagined and apprehended.
Much of our contemporary thinking on race and gender operates within the framework of intersectionality; the notion that race, gender and class are co-productive. Yet where most intersectional theory tends to think of each category as discrete entities which happen to intersect but remain ontologically distinct, I argue that there is no class without race or gender; all three are expressions of power and a function of “normality” as an assumed cultural ideal. In this case, the assumption that the white male property-owner is the normative actor of capitalist modernity.
A vision of harmonious private property required a vision of a savage order where private property did not receive its due respect.
In this book, I aim to bring the new history of capitalism into a productive conversation with gender studies and critical race theory and to show how the intellectual and cultural history of private property (and of capitalism more broadly) cannot be understood outside of the obsessions with race and gender that are inherent to capitalism. The acts of imagination which this book studies – and in which race and gender were so central – were acts of legitimation, as capitalist theorists constructed an image of the ideal world capitalism promises; often constructing that image in conscious opposition to images of dismal, chaotic or violent non-capitalist worlds. A vision of harmonious private property required a vision of a savage order where private property did not receive its due respect. And as I argue in this book, over the last 400 years, there has never been a conception of private property, and of the class-structured society it underpinned, that has been free of race and gender.
Aidan Beatty teaches at the Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh.
His new book, Private property and the fear of social chaos, publishes March 2023.