Chapter 5 - Property in Political Economy

Summary

This chapter addresses Wollstonecraft’s engagement with narratives of property and property society in Smith and Rousseau, as reflected in her A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796). In political economy’s imaginary, the figure of property encapsulates the ambivalences at the heart of late eighteenth-century modernity and poses questions of affective response and social relation which were fundamental to political economy’s account of social origin. Wollstonecraft’s attention to property of many kinds on her travels is read as an on-going critique of the contemporary political economic order, as well as attempts to imagine alternatives to it, such as the independent, comfortable existence suggested by the farmstead or cottage. Literary form emerges as a means through which questions of human personality and identity in commercial modernity might be framed, and as a means of insisting on ‘something’ more than the mediated social relations of market society’s ‘society of strangers’.