Theorizing the Society of Small Owners

Sociologists and political economists have recently pointed to the peculiar figure of the small asset owner. With the rise of neoliberalism, they have suggested, financial asset ownership has not only been concentrated in the hands of the few but also popularized, and while this has hardly mitigated the inequality-spurring implications of the much faster growth of capital than income and output, this popularization of asset ownership may nevertheless have challenged the middle classes’ earlier identification with ‘wage earner interests’—by inaugurating their political reconfiguration as (however small and credit-dependent) ‘asset owners.’ In this process, it has been argued, the interests of the middle class have become aligned, not with their fellow workers, but with their supposed antagonists: the 1%. But while the sociological and political-economic literature has demonstrated the contemporary pertinence of this phenomenon in full, the discussion has more recently fizzled out into a classificatory debate about class—what it is, how it is best measured, and whether the emergence of an asset-based society has really changed the nature of it. Though not without merit, this debate has followed the well-worn path that class-analytical discussions usually take when small property owners appear on the agenda: an initial burst of interest, a spirited rebuttal, and, ultimately, the familiar paradoxical conclusion that small property owners somehow both constitute a class and, at the same time, do not. Given this ambivalence, it is questionable how useful traditional class analysis really is for a political analysis of what Piketty calls the new “society of petits rentiers.” After surveying the recent literature on the popularization of asset ownership in sociology and political economy this paper argues for an alternative. Specifically, it identifies a compelling tradition of political theory that has dealt precisely with the political implications of societies of small property owners, a tradition that I term the petit-proprietary imagination. A historical reconstruction of this tradition can both provide a critical distance from which to “look at our own historical condition” while simultaneously affording us useful resources for an alternative theorization of our petit-proprietary predicament—without getting lost in the thorny weeds of class classification. As examples of such resources, the paper presents, first, Tocqueville’s theorization of petit-proprietary inertia and, second, how the decoupling of the petit-proprietary imagination from its original landed base caused a loss of emancipatory promise.