Property as a Medium of Habit Formation: On the Political Anthropology of Property in the 19th Century

To address these questions, we examine discourses in political science, economics, social science, and social policy. Our focus is on the theorization of habit formation and socialization, particularly the development of individual character in relation to the shifting connection between ownership and habit in the realm of consumer goods and associated needs. It seems that property-based individualism has moved away from its original connection to land ownership. Over time, it has become a cross-class model of identity, where property and consumption are seen as keys to freedom and social participation. To put it differently: How did possessive individualism shift from being a privilege of the landed early bourgeoisie, tied to power and exclusivity, to becoming a broader model of social integration in an industrial consumer society?

We propose that, as the socio-ecological transition from an economy of scarcity to an economy of growth progressed—with increasing market integration and the circulation of goods—new infrastructures made the notion of self-civilization plausible beyond mere subsistence and even beyond property ownership. Once landed property ceased to be a prerequisite for cultivating good habits, other goods took its place, though their possession and consumption now served primarily as indicators of virtue. We suggest that consumption, understood as a marker of achievement, operates as a communicative form of self-description, whereby bourgeois virtues—and thus bourgeois participation—are mediated through consumption. If property functions as a medium for shaping habitus and character, the traditional possessive-individualist link between property and individual freedom can persist under new conditions: freedom from natural constraints is redefined as the freedom to consume.

We analyse this transformation as a structural shift in possessive individualism, which takes on a paradoxical form within the liberal entanglement of the individual, private property, and freedom. It endures as a socially integrative (political) model of subject formation, yet it increasingly depends on common goods and state intervention. Meanwhile, real ownership of land and industrial means of production becomes more invisible, losing its central political and semiotic position as the defining marker of private property.

In our study of this economic and socio-historical transformation—central to the history of liberal theory but largely overlooked in the political history of ideas—we adopt two perspectives: the so-called "women's issue" and the self-conception of consumer cooperatives. By developing a gender- and class-specific typology of nineteenth-century possessive individualism, we focus on developments in England, which were formative for other Western European states. Through an ensemble of exemplary figures—from nomads and settlers to workers' wives and bourgeois wives—we construct a heuristic framework for examining how the social integration of groups historically excluded from property rights was realized within the history of knowledge, ideas, and culture. At the same time, we investigate the parameters and social structures that shaped new lines of exclusion within this evolving landscape.