The financialisation of the social project: Embedded liberalism, neoliberalism and home ownership

Abstract

This paper argues that the relentless logic of commodification has served to undermine a key element of the social cement of contemporary capitalism: home ownership. In addressing this issue, the paper explores the development of the post war ‘social project’ of home ownership with particular reference to mature home ownership societies such as the USA, Japan, Britain and Australia. The paper then outlines the new fault lines and fractures which have emerged in post-crisis home ownership systems and the way in which a more vigorous, financialised private landlordism has emerged from the debris of the subprime meltdown. A key argument is that in a new and more intensified process of housing commodification, the social project promise of home ownership for a previous generation has shifted to a promise of private landlordism for current generations. In summary, the social project of Keynesian-embedded liberalism has been undermined by the economic project of neoliberalism.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 297 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.