Simone Knewitz, The Politics of Private Property: Contested Claims to Ownership in U.S. Cultural Discourse (London: Lexington, 2021), 283 pp.

In her recent book, The Politics of Private Property, Simone Knewitz challenges national narratives of the land of opportunity, egalitarianism, and the cultural imperative of house ownership in the United States by analyzing conflicts over property, contested claims to ownership, and challenges to the social order in recent U.S. history. Thus, she sets out to discuss contradictions between the U.S. self-conception as a “universal middle-class society” and the reality of unequal distribution of wealth and race-based measures of exclusion (5). Knewitz carves out “the kinds of property stories that the U.S. culture tells about itself” and focuses on how dominant political actors employ private property narratives to “legitimize, naturalize, and prolong social and economic inequality in the United States,” but she also demonstrates how property narratives can be mobilized to challenge the status quo (9, 5).

While previous studies by historians as well as cultural and legal studies scholars have often treated private property as “a national consensus, if not the country’s civil religion,” Knewitz delineates property as a site of controversy over power and resources and emphasizes contested claims to ownership (232). By illustrating how property combines economic, legal, and political aspects with elements of identity, morality, and justice, Knewitz outlines the intersections between law and culture, accentuates the cultural and political dimensions of U.S. property discourse, and highlights how ideas of property dictate wealth distribution, mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, and relations between state, market, and the individual. Thus, her research ties in with critical investigations of capitalism and economic inequality.

Using a variety of sources, Knewitz traces property discourses from the early nineteenth to the twenty-first century to historicize property narratives which dominate contemporary political debates. She sets aside investigations of colonial property systems to focus on paradigmatic moments in U.S. national history, when property relations and social institutions were challenged and questions of resources and power were renegotiated (232). Knewitz finetunes her investigation by incorporating the research of Cheryl Harris, Charles W. Mills, and George Lipsitz to cultivate a critical race perspective that makes visible the historic exclusion of People of Color and Indigenous populations from property theories and ownership (15). This “lens of racialized exclusion” reveals how the foundational seventeenth- and eighteenth-century property theories of Thomas Hobbes, William Blackstone, and John Locke were employed to justify the occupation of Indigenous lands, the seizure of the products of forced labor generated through slavery, and the exclusion of People of Color from the housing market (15).

In her introduction, Knewitz details “the cultural myth of home” which transformed house ownership into “the quintessential form of private property in the American imagination” during the twentieth century (4). Homeownership was long promoted by a government which associated democratic participation with property ownership and advanced through tax exemptions and subsidies (4). While the financial crisis of 2008 ended the dream of home ownership for many, physical property still carries connotations such as citizenship, agency, and independence (5).

Knewitz opens her investigation in Chapter 1 with an examination of different antebellum labor protest movements demanding equal access to property (23). She demonstrates that while the legal concept of property transformed as the United States developed into an industrial market society, workers associated property with a just social order. They claimed a natural right to ownership of land and resources and called for more egalitarian access to property, though largely with regard to White farmers and laborers (68-70). Knewitz’s examination of the anti-rent movement in New York offers a fascinating view of property and rent discourse from the perspective of laborers and tenants, an insight especially intriguing today, in times of increased homelessness and federal eviction moratoria.

In Chapter 2, Knewitz turns to the property discourse centered around the question of slavery in antebellum America. She examines the framing of slavery as an economic and political question concerned with how to define property. Discussions of property at the time were mainly concerned with social order, material distribution of resources, political hegemony, and the constellation between states, the federal government, and the individual. Knewitz demonstrates that the concept of property continued to be intertwined with violence, coercion, and exclusion throughout these debates. Interestingly, she argues that slavery advocates as well as opponents often referred to the same philosophical foundations, namely liberalism, and employed notions of property and freedom in their favor (75, 107).

In the third chapter, Knewitz traces the emergence of a culture of mass consumption at the turn of the twentieth century and analyzes the new role of corporations in U.S. society. Following a precise account of the evolution of the “new property,” Knewitz convincingly connects the rise of corporate capitalism with the disintegration of property. As she shows, White workers increasingly participated in the “new culture of consumption” as the White homeowner rose in the cultural imaginary as “the quintessential property owner” (25). Highly interesting proves Knewitz’s exploration of homeownership campaigns addressed towards the working class and the affective association they forged between homeownership, family, and proper living.

In Chapter 4, Knewitz turns to the Black liberation movement of the 1960s to analyze how the narrative of private property was instrumentalized to oppose Black liberation efforts. She examines the measures of social and economic exclusion employed to deny Black individuals access to the housing market and material gains, unless they participated in the “hegemonic order of liberal capitalism” (191). Knewitz also illustrates how Black power activists nonetheless confronted racist structures in social and economic spheres and resisted a more individualized approach to private property (191). The strong suit of this chapter is the examination of the Black Power movement’s ideological diversity, including tendencies of Black capitalism.

The fifth chapter then focuses on property conflicts during the presidency of George W. Bush and the interplay between government measures, the welfare state, and the criticisms and demands of the libertarian property rights movement. Knewitz emphasizes how the emerging “ownership society” ultimately served those who were owners, further excluded those who were not, and rejected calls for more equitable resource and property distribution (227). This chapter bridges the gap to the twenty-first century and historicizes Bush’s investment in an “ownership society” as the continuation of the U.S. tradition of understanding house ownership as a social virtue.

Knewitz concludes that the commitment to private property in the United States has too long been understood as a cultural consensus. She criticizes this interpretation because it neglects the long history of contested claims to ownership and the mobilization of property narratives to challenge the hegemonic property discourse (27-28). Nevertheless, dominant property narratives remained surprisingly stable and thus largely reproduced the social order even throughout times of crises. Today, the onset of the “digital age” challenges capitalism and property narratives in unfamiliar ways and, following Knewitz, it will be the challenge of the twenty-first century to establish a new system which frames property as a shared obligation and a social right, integrating shared access, collaboration, and common resources (244).

With The Politics of Private Property, Knewitz retraces the development of property narratives over the past two centuries with the help of rich and varied source material and effectively combines legal and cultural perspectives. The focus on contested claims and the analysis of stabilizing factors as well as challenges to the status quo offer a fresh perspective on familiar property discourses. By demonstrating how all parties involved instrumentalized property narratives to challenge or preserve the social order, she highlights the agency of those who protested against the status quo. Knewitz emphasizes racial exclusion and the class dimensions of property discourse, but the inclusion of a gender perspective could have enriched her analysis further, especially in chapters 1 and 2. Although she chooses to focus on physical property throughout her work, her examination of the disembodiment of property in the third chapter includes an analysis of the gendered and racialized mechanisms of exclusion that determine access to intellectual property recognition and protection. Knewitz’s approach to the contested terrain of property and the conclusions she draws from her historical analysis for current and future cultural discourse seem especially relevant in times of populism, late capitalism, financial instability, and the challenges and opportunities of the digital age. Her work can be recommended to anyone interested in the study of private property, social movements, and questions of national narratives and identity.

Fenja Heisig (Universität Osnabrück)