Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 256 (§8).
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 35.
Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Marx & Engels Collected Works 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), 109.
The distinction between the three dimensions follows the proposal made in: Rahel Jaeggi, “What (if anything) is wrong with capitalism? Three approaches to the critique of capitalism,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 54 (2016): 44–65.
“5 shocking facts about extreme global inequality and how to even it up,” Oxfam International, ➝.
Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in Marx & Engels Collected Works 3, 274.
Quoted in Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 58.
Admittedly, there are also passages in Marx that are more compatible with the ethical critique of property outlined below. For a generous reading of Marx, see John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review, 2000).
Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 110.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1973), 296.
Werner Hamacher coined this phrase, before Agamben’s rediscovery of the Franciscans; see Werner Hamacher, “The Right Not to Use Rights: Human Rights and the Structure of Judgments,” in Political Theologies, eds. Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (New York: Fordham, 2006).
For a trenchant critique of contemporary subjectivities as marked by the property regime, see Eva von Redecker on phantom possession: Eva von Redecker, “Ownership’s Shadow: Neo-Authoritarianism as Defense of Phantom Possession,” Critical Times 3, no. 1 (April 2020): 33–67.
On the anticolonial critique of property, see groundbreaking interventions by: Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); and Robert Nichols, Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
Annabel Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 12.
Compare Agamben, The Highest Poverty, 111, 125.
Compare Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 105–6.
Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy (London: Verso, 2006); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 44.
Agamben, The Highest Poverty, 129.
See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1992), 7.
For him, the true essence of the concept of property only reveals itself in mass consumption: today’s products can no longer be used, and property rights only lead to abuse. See Agamben, The Highest Poverty, 131.
Compare Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 22.
Agamben, The Highest Poverty, 144.
See, for example, Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, (Oakland: PM Press, 2018).
For a convincing argument on transferring the principles of peer production to the material economy, see Christian Siefkes, From Exchange to Contributions (Berlin: Edition C, 2007).
Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 2005), §18.
This text was translated from the German by Jacob Blumenfeld, and is a summary of some of the central arguments from the book Der Missbrauch des Eigentums [The Abuse of Property] (Berlin: August-Verlag, 2016).
Housing is a collaboration between e-flux architecture and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Chair for Theory of Architecture.