The terms “capitalism” and “socialism” continue to haunt our political and economic imaginations, but we rarely consider their interconnected early history. Even the eighteenth century had its “socialists,” but unlike those of the nineteenth, they paradoxically sought to make the world safe for “capitalists.” The word “socialists” was first used in Northern Italy as a term of contempt for the political economists and legal reformers Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria, author of the epochal On Crimes and Punishments. Yet the views and concerns of these first socialists, developed inside a pugnacious intellectual coterie dubbed the Academy of Fisticuffs, differ dramatically from those of the socialists that followed. Sophus Reinert turns to Milan in the late 1700s to recover the Academy’s ideas and the policies they informed. At the core of their preoccupations lay the often lethal tension among states, markets, and human welfare in an era when the three were becoming increasingly intertwined. What distinguished these thinkers was their articulation of a secular basis for social organization, rooted in commerce, and their insistence that political economy trumped theology as the underpinning for peace and prosperity within and among nations. Reinert argues that the Italian Enlightenment, no less than the Scottish, was central to the emergence of political economy and the project of creating market societies. By reconstructing ideas in their historical contexts, he addresses motivations and contingencies at the very foundations of modernity.

Housing and Home Unbound pioneers understandings of housing and home as a meeting ground in which intensive practices, materials and meanings tangle with extensive economic, environmental and political worlds. Cutting across disciplines, the book opens up the conceptual and empirical study of housing and home by exploring the coproduction of the concrete and the abstract, the intimate and the institutional, the experiential and the collective. Exploring diverse examples in Australia and New Zealand, contributors address the interleaving of money and materials in the digital commodity of real estate, the neoliberal invention of housing as a liquid asset and source of welfare provision, and the bundling of car and home in housing markets. The more-than-human relations of housing and home are articulated through the role of suburban nature in the making of Australian modernity, the marketing of nature in waterfront urban renewal, the role of domestic territory in subversive social movements such as Seasteading and Tiny Houses, and the search for home comfort through low-cost energy efficiency practices. The transformative politics of housing and home are explored through the decolonizing of housing tenure, the shaping of housing policy by urban social movements, the lived importance of marginal spaces in Indigenous and other housing, and the affective lessons of the ruin. Beginning with the diverse elements gathered together in housing and home, the text opens up the complex realities and possibilities of human dwelling.