Property-Owning Democracy: A Short History

This chapter gives an account of the history of the idea of a 'property-owning democracy' , and draws out some of the implications of this historical narrative for contemporary debates. In particular, it locates the genesis of the egalitarian model of property-owning democracy in two episodes in the history of political thought: in the rise of commercial republican thinking in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and in the mid-twentieth century high tide of the socialist critique of capitalism. The underlying aim of this historical enquiry is to reconstruct the context in which James Meade developed his thinking on property ownership, and by extension to shed light on the appropriation of Meade’s ideas by John Rawls and later political theorists. The chapter concludes that the history of the property-owning democracy ideal should give pause to those contemporary egalitarians who seek to present the redistribution of private property as a clear practical alternative to either the welfare state or socialism.