Public Wealth, Public Enemies, and the Right to Existence: Thinking about Wealth with the Earl of Lauderdale in Cairo and Split

In this article, I bring together ethnographic material from three cities in which I conducted ethnography between 2011 and 2021: Split (Croatia), Cairo (Egypt), and Ljubljana (Slovenia). The dominant analytic language in anthropology in the past 30 years to discuss national wealth, social property, and their dissolution has been the analytic of neoliberalism, in which “public goods” of the state are privatized to become part of the ever-expanding free market. But no one I met in those cities used such language to talk about what was going on. People did talk a great deal about wealth, theft, and the affronts to dignity all this entailed. In a time of generalized and dispersed global revolt, in which demands for dignity are as common as protests about any particular economic policy, it is urgent for anthropologists to find better analytic tools to make sense of what is going on. Here, I analyze my ethnographic findings with help from the writings of James Maitland (1759–1839), the eighth Earl of Lauderdale. Lauderdale was a vigorous opponent of Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, and of pervasive practices of “private avarice” among those who should be seen as “public enemies.” His critique of the “scourge of accumulation” from a time before “endless growth” was established as an inevitable value around which social life must be organized has great resonance today.