Neoliberalism as Accumulated History and Plural Values: The Private Property of Oil Extraction and Urban Redevelopment

• In Event: 255 - Section on Economic Sociology Paper Session. Market Processes and Economic Lives in the Era of Neoliberalism

Abstract

Whether referring to politics, policies, organizations, or culture, sociologists treat neoliberalism as having replaced earlier, more statist regimes. By emphasizing change, sociologists have elided how much the ideas, policies, and politics of the past have been incorporated into the present. This paper interrogates experiences with private property in land in the contemporary US, in two contexts where powerful actors’ attempts to change property’s use and ownership grabbed citizen attention: the market-based exchange of private property for oil extraction in the rural West and the confiscation of private property by eminent domain for redevelopment in the urban Northeast. From an analysis of these two sites, I offer two preliminary conclusions. First, neoliberal property should be partially understood as accumulated history. Today’s entitlements are not only a reaction against preceding eras but also a product of them, incorporating past decisions, ideas, and practices. Particular distributions of rights and strongly held beliefs justifying and critiquing those distributions have emerged from over a century of government treating land as private property, and from private control through periods of changing economic conditions and cultural expectations. Second, citizens pragmatically address plural values of land that can and, they believe, should be protected in private property. They sometimes, but not always, invoke the commodification/ anti-commodification dichotomy that politics of the previous era made so familiar. In this neoliberal moment, there is much more commonly a widespread acceptance and negotiation of the protection of both financial and non-financial values held in property and of commensuration between them.

Author

• Debbie Becher, Barnard College - Columbia University