Rights, undoubtedly emancipatory and crucial in terms of autonomy and the manifestation of the self, also contain the potential for a troubling universalism and objectification of the self: they can make the self an object and amplify exclusionary, non-relational impulses, thus encouraging us to be unnecessarily alien from and to each other. Property rights, given their relationship to exclusion, have more potential here than most other rights. Tracing some historical moments relating to the development of morality, spatial enclosure and property rights, this paper makes an argument for an understanding of law and property rights as shifting structural practices that can perhaps at times go beyond the simple enforcement of bare exclusion in the context of property relations – in this way, law and property rights are not fixed in relation to spatial epistemology and ethics but can continually be reshaped as hopefully truly universal relational frameworks to accommodate justice better and allow for the distinct, contingent subjectivity and ‘housing’ of each citizen.
Alan Cunningham (Wed,) studied this question.