Widening wealth gaps in Western democracies have brought new scrutiny to relationships between property and political community. For the prior quarter century, Western legal scholars have urged privatization around the globe as the key to a virtuous circle of "market democracy." This Article traces the origins of the market democracy consensus to ideas that identify positive features of political community-liberty, wealth, or democracy-with private property ownership. Fieldwork in Ukraine, where Western privatization advice was followed at a time of founding a new polity, provides data to compare predictions with outcomes. Two unexpected figures-the Oligarch and the Precariat-emerge from the newly privatized countryside. Research into the micropractices of privatization counter-intuitively exposes private property as potentially working against democracy. The findings from this research are that oligarchy is a possibility, distribution is a problem, and relationships between property and democracy are not always mutually felicitous.
Major twentieth-century social theories like socialism and liberalism depended on property as an explanatory principle, prefiguring a geopolitical rivalry grounded in differing property regimes. This article examines the Cold War as an under-analyzed context for the idea of “the tragedy of the commons.” In Soviet practice, collectivization was meant to provide the material basis for cultivating particular forms of sociability and an antidote to the ills of private property. Outsiders came to conceptualize it as tragic in both economic and political dimensions. Understanding the commons as a site of tragedy informed Western “answers” to the “problem” of Soviet collective ownership when the Cold War ended. Privatization became a mechanism for defusing old tragedies, central to a post-Cold War project of advancing “market democracy.” Meanwhile, the notion of an “illiberal commons” stands ready for redeployment in future situations conceived as tragically problematic.
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