This contribution investigates the anthropological foundations of European democracies’ continuous entanglement with economic and military expansionism and a hierarchical separation between public and private spheres, both of which have enabled the appropriation of nature and others’ labour as property on which citizens’ abstract personhood could be founded. Drawing on an argument made by David Graeber, it is suggested that modern European history can be interpreted as a process of the ‘generalization of avoidance’, in which such abstract, property-based forms of personhood, which were initially what defined the superior party in relations of hierarchy, came to be a model for the figures of market participant and citizen within the spheres of formal equal exchange of economy and politics. From this perspective, and building on an account of different stages of capitalist history as ‘subjectivation regimes’, the article then analyses the transition from the ‘exclusive democracy’ of post-war organized capitalism in Western Europe, in which citizens’ entitlement, through the collective guarantees of ‘social property’ (Castel), increasingly allowed individualized competitive practices of status attainment and gave rise to individualist movements for extended citizenship, to current-day flexible capitalism. This regime, seizing on those calls and instrumentalizing the desires for competitive status consumption, has effected a broad restructuring of the social as a unified field of competition in which new hierarchies and inequalities materialize in global chains of appropriation, causing a ‘dividual’ fragmentation of property-based personhood and generating calls for responsible citizenship as an inherent counter-movement. In conclusion, it is suggested that anthropologists have much to contribute to investigating the possibility of democratic, post-capitalist ‘anthropologies of degrowth’.

这项研究调查了欧洲民主国家与经济和军事扩张主义的持续纠缠以及公私领域之间等级划分的人类学基础，这两者都使自然和他人的劳动成为财产，而公民的抽象人格可以以此为基础成立。根据戴维·格雷伯（David Graeber）的论点，有人建议，现代欧洲历史可以被解释为“回避的普遍化”过程，在这种过程中，这种抽象的，基于财产的人格形式最初是上级政党的定义。在等级关系中，它成为经济和政治正式平等交换领域中的市场参与者和公民人物的模型。从这个角度来看，通过“社会财产”（Castel）的集体保证，人们的权利越来越多地允许获得地位的个体化竞争做法，并引发了扩大公民权的个人主义运动，发展为当今的灵活资本主义。这种制度抓住了这些呼吁，并实现了对竞争地位消费的期望，将社会作为一个统一的竞争领域进行了广泛的重组，在这一领域中，新的等级制度和不平等现象在全球拨款链中出现，从而导致了“个体”分裂。基于财产的人格并产生负责任的呼吁公民身份是一种固有的对立运动。总之，建议人类学家在调查民主的，后资本主义的“堕落人类学”的可能性方面有很多贡献。