“Universal Jubilee”: Social Property and 1790s Radicalism

Abstract:This essay uses the scriptural figure of jubilee to approach agrarian reform proposals made by Thomas Paine and Thomas Spence during the 1790s. It does so in light of Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology, which calls for the incorporation of ideology and culture into the study of economic history. Using Piketty’s concept of “social property,” I show how Paine and Spence envision jubilarian transformations of the idea of private property via the installation of permanent redistributive mechanisms. Jubilee, I argue, is distinct from two better-known images of historical change in the 1790s, millenarianism and perfectibilism.