Aligning Workers with Capital: Popularized Property in Conservative Political Thought

This paper, a chapter from the dissertation The Petit-Proprietary Imagination: From Agrarian Society to Asset Economy, examines how the petit-proprietary imagination—the theorization of the society of small property owners—evolved in the context of 20th-century industrialized societies. Initially rooted in agrarian republicanism, where widespread landownership was imagined as a double-deterrent of threats to social order posed by both aristocratic elites and “the masses,” in the industrial era, the petit-proprietary imagination was revived through the prospects of mass homeownership. The chapter focuses on the British Conservative Party's promotion of the "property-owning democracy," which emerged as an alternative to collectivist labor movements and state egalitarianism in the 1920s. By suggesting that homeownership fostered psychological responsibility and commitment to conservative values, conservatives aspired to mitigate class animosities and align workers’ interests with capital. In other words, the petit-proprietary imagination retained its earlier emphasis on widespread property ownership as a soother of the potentially tumultuous passions of the masses. Unlike its earlier—agrarian—iteration, however, the petit-proprietary imagination now lacked a critical stance toward wealth concentration, thus losing its earlier plebeian edge by failing to challenge elite power. In tracing this ideological shift, the chapter explores how the petit-proprietary imagination’s horizon of political possibilities was challenged and reconfigured as it was decoupled from land and adapted to industrialized society.