On Ideal Types, Abstraction and Noise in the Political Economy of Housing

ABSTRACT

Javier Moreno’s “Residential Accumulation: A Political Economy Framework” does a great job at distilling how two opposite logics – capitalist production and rent extraction – are at work in housing markets. What I am missing from the framework is room for noise, for variation and variegation, for an ‘and+and’ story, for allowing geographical and market specificity, for different expressions of residential accumulation rather than the assumption that specific forms are the ‘normal’ or pure forms of capitalist accumulation. Many assumptions and generalisations are made. Some of these may be necessary to construct the ideal type of housing provision under capitalism, but there is a point where the ideal type becomes a specific rather than a general or abstracted type, that is, specific to one set of capitalist relations rather than generalizing from a common, or even majority, form of capitalist relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing
• political economy
• ideal types
• max weber
• capitalist accumulation
• varieties

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.