Home owners; idle dwellers? Revisiting Engels and Proudhon’s debate on housing, property, and freedom

Today, housing remains a paradigmatic site of debate about broad socio-political matters: individual autonomy and responsibility, state perfectibility, democratic health, leisure, and familial reproduction. This essay revisits Friedrich Engels’s canonical pamphlet 'The Housing Question' (1872) to interrogate the enduring association between home ownership, place attachment, and conservation—or conservatism. I demonstrate that strong and productive connections exist between the Housing Question debate, contemporary politics, and contemporary housing discourse. Engels’s rebuke of Proudhonist housing-related commendations continues to hold significance in discourses on what housing is, and what it should and should not be. Drawing on his pamphlet, I conceptualize the figures of the Engelsian “unfettered jailbird” and the Proudhonist homeowner as respectively embodying revolutionary mobility and idle rootedness. Idle rootedness is conceived as freedom in the Proudhonist approach. This directly contrasts with the Engelsian approach which casts home ownership as unfreedom.! These two opposed approaches are also two perspectives on the impacts of being housed. In Engels’s account, housing participates in encouraging or preventing man’s idleness and unfreedom. Proprietorship and place attachment, in this latter sense, are conceptualized as practically antithetical to emancipatory futures.