Frédéric Gros asks whether owning things is itself a form of violence
In a new book, the philosopher argues against the old idea that property guarantees freedom, proposing instead a break with what he calls 'propriétarisme.'
The philosopher Frédéric Gros has published a new book, "Violence de la propriété," which questions the idea, developed since the eighteenth century, that property is a source of freedom. According to France Culture, Gros suggests instead that stepping away from what he terms propriétarisme could make people freer and happier.
Le Monde, discussing the book in a piece on Marx and what it calls the lost meaning of appropriation, reports that Gros proposes a different way of thinking about property: not as accumulation and predation, but as a relational appropriation of the world.
Gros's book was the subject of a France Culture broadcast on September 2 and of a Le Monde essay on September 3, both engaging with his argument that ownership, as commonly understood, carries within it a form of violence toward others and toward the world.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
