Dispossession and Civil Society: The Ambivalence of Enlightenment Political Philosophy

This essay offers an overview of the contradictory logics of possessiveness and property rights in political-economic thought from Thomas Hobbes to Adam Smith to David Hume, using Thomas Macauley’s remarks on Britain’s colonial efforts in India an dplacing those within the genealogy of liberal thought on the organization of civil society. The essay argues that the origins of civil society lie in dispossession, and it relocates colonial degeneration not abroad, but within the European metropole.