The Politics of Property: Labor, Freedom, and Belonging

This book offers a theory of property that takes into account current debates about gender, slavery, and colonialism. It introduces property as a contested concept and explores how that contestability is played out in political debates between thinkers, across ideologies, and in political practice. Analyzing the key debates, Brace illustrates how private property has been caught up with ideas of labor, freedom, and belonging and has informed the development of liberalism, socialism, and conservatism as well as the construction of class, gender, and race. While examining the works of Locke, Winstanley, Godwin, Bentham, Hegel, and Marx, this book focuses on the idea of property as a site of struggle and as a means of connecting individuals to civil society and the state. It offers valuable insights into the ways in which ideas about property influence political ideologies, thought, and practice.