Hannah Arendt: from Property to Capital... and Back?
Abstract
Scant attention has been paid to the notion of property in Hannah Arendt’s
thought, and this paper aims to address this gap. For Arendt, property is the realm of privacy,
located in the house. She argues that the modern age represented its loss with the expropriation
of the peasant classes after the Reformation. As a result, wealth started to be accumulated and
became productive through the labor of the new propertyless classes. This new way of dealing
with property needed a new notion of property for the laborers. Locke’s understanding gave the
laborers the hope of being property-owners through their labor and simultaneously justified
the unending accumulation of money; nevertheless, property in its true meaning was never
recovered. Arendt believes that recovering property under conditions of equality is an essential
consideration, and this egalitarian vision of property only can be achieved if law protects prop-
erty as well as set limits on the accumulation of wealth.