Property as Freedom: Reconfiguring the Role of the State, Before and After Neoliberalism

Recent scholarship on neoliberalism has focused on aspects of neoliberal politics to explain the resurgence of populist sovereignty, the unraveling of democracy, and ultimately the current remaking of the human subject. Yet this neoliberal logic of the (mis)use of government--which makes the state ineffective at performing duties such as protecting the public good from private actions, ensuring the welfare of the most disadvantaged, or representing the political voice of the polity as a whole--may have had historically older origins in practice than much of the literature suggests. The present thesis contends that the state has never been a vehicle for attending to democratic modes of practice, and that neoliberalism is in fact intensifying a mode of governance that predated it by centuries. To accomplish this, I look at two classical political thinkers’ views on the state and on property to understand how this deficit of democracy cannot just be attributed to neoliberalism but to liberal democracies' failure to recognize the responsibility of the state towards all its citizens, in this particular instance on the matter of property rights. I broaden this analysis to key neoliberal thinkers and their arguments about property and freedom, paying close attention to the very concept at the heart of neoliberalism's ultimate domain, the market. I conclude by proposing a different way for the state to relate to the market, in order to get us closer to a truer democratic ideal.