Commons vs the Common Good

Discussion

Marlene Laruelle:

"This is why the commons differs from the right-wing version of postliberal “common good.” The common good is usually a moral-teleological concept, if not an outright metaphysical one. It asks what humans are for, what the good life is, and what order best conforms to human nature or divine law. It tends toward singularity and requires someone to define it: Church, state, philosopher, jurist, or some other kind of authority besides. It can produce a powerful critique of liberal fragmentation, but it also risks turning plural life into a single moral architecture.

The commons is less metaphysical and more empirical. It does not ask everyone to agree on what humans are for before politics can begin. It begins from shared dependency and is plural by design. Different communities can govern different commons by different rules. It is also post-Western because it breaks with the Western naturalist fantasy that politics begins from the sovereign individual.

This does not make the commons anti-religious. On the contrary, it creates an ecumenical terrain. Catholic social thought arrives at the commons through integral ecology, subsidiarity, and the subordination of markets to social obligations, from Laudato Si’s integral ecology and Laudato Deum’s critique of the technocratic paradigm to Leo XIV’s recent call for AI to be a collectively governed common good. Liberation theology can arrive there from below by focusing on the poor, the community, or the land. Secular socialism can arrive there through anti-capitalism and anti-productivism.

This convergence defines the political space a left postliberalism could occupy: secular and pluralist, but not liberal; ecological and communitarian, but not reactionary; conservative in what it protects, radical in what it opposes."

(https://post-liberalism.org/p/what-if-postliberalism-were-on-the?)