Forum: The Eternal Return of the Rentier? How Our Past Weighs on Our Future

Over the past decade, a certain strain of intellectual pessimism has migrated from social theory to popular culture. Our ability to make better futures, it advises, is hamstrung by the sheer weight of the past, resulting in economic stagnation, escalating inequality, generational rifts, and political instability. In political economy, that weight of the past has often been identified with the figure of the rentier, and Piketty’s work has documented the return of this morally questionable character, living off the return on property. But today’s rentiers are no longer top-hatted financiers, and whether owning a second home represents moral turpitude or a middle-class survival strategy is actively debated in the op-ed pages of Australian newspapers. Nor is it clear that we can account for the full extent of inequity in contemporary society by continuing to rely on existing definitions of wealth. As suggested by the current popularity of concepts such as “technofeudalism”, the production of speculative claims on imagined futures shape what appear to be anachronistically exploitative forms of work.

The disorienting ways in which old and new combine to produce unfamiliar forms of inequality demands that we open up our concepts and reconsider our methods. One of the most ambitious and compelling attempts to do so has been advanced by Mike Savage in his recent book The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past (Harvard University Press, 2021). Professor Savage will be visiting the University of Sydney in April, and, taking its cue from the subtitle of his book, this panel invites leading scholars to reflect on how the past weighs on our future-making, and how we can acknowledge this without falling prey to pessimism of either will or intellect. Four panellists – Janet Roitman (RMIT), Mareike Beck (Warwick), Amin Samman (City), and Gareth Bryant (Sydney) – will provide punchy takes on the problem, and Mike will conclude with his own reflections on the post-pandemic future of the past.

Image by Mongkol on AdobeStock