The moral economy of land

From Land Reform to Ownership Society, 1880-2018

Bibliographic Data

ID3175352
AuthorsAlexander Dobeson (0000-0002-6352-3592, Copenhagen Business School, corresponding author), Sebastian Kohl (0000-0002-8358-6021, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Sociology , Cologne, Germany)
Year2024
Volume22
Issue2
Pages737-764
Publication date2024-06-20
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocio-Economic Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1475-1461 • E-ISSN: 1475-147X
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/ser/mwad048
OpenAlexW4386096922
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited45

This article offers a comparative-historical perspective on the moral economy of land. We reconstruct the moral economy of the popular land reform movement that opposed the illegitimate income streams of rentiers and speculators in the early 20th century, tracing the movement's legacy through a long-run analysis of political party platforms since 1880 in the USA, the UK, Germany and Sweden. We find that the land reformers' conceptualization of land as a moral good was a key topic in early 20th-century party politics. Parties across the political spectrum called for wide-ranging interventions in unregulated land markets. But despite the movement's relative success, the new ideal of the ownership society soon gained ground as an alternative to the more radical politics of land decommodification. We find growing multipartisan support for small property owners over time, culminating in the rise of a new moral conceptualization of land as capital. With the recent comeback of the land question, both rural and urban, we conclude that an understanding of historical land reform debates should inform future research toward a much-needed sociology of land

Agriculture · Archaeology · Economic system · Economics · Geography · Land reform · Land tenure · Moral economy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Land Rights and Reforms · Law · Political Economy and Marxism