View source for Roy Heidelberg on the Difference Between the Commons and the Public Sphere


=Discussion=

David Bollier:

"In his essay in this issue, '''Roy L. Heidelberg astutely dissects “the incompatibility of the commons and the public”''' (Heidelberg, 2024). While there is a tendency in modern life to conflate the two, in fact each term points to different worldviews and political orders based on different conceptions of “the people.” It is important to understand this tension because so many modern complications in law, policy, and governance flow from it.

Heildelberg traces the clash between “public” and “commons” to an obscure 1652 book by English diplomat and scholar Thomas Elyot, which declares the commons as a realm of “’only the multitude, the base and vulgar inhabitants not advanced in honor or dignity,’ meaning that the commons lacked what the people contained.” Heidelberg writes:

Essentially, Elyot postulated that the common folk cannot be left to themselves; it is ultimately a disservice to them and to the nobility to allow that. In order for all to prosper, the common folks must be guided by those who are especially capable of governing and leading. For there to be order, the commons must be subsumed under the public…. To call something common is to label it as unrefined, average, run-of-the-mill….while the idea of the public [allows for] the possibility of a general governance, meaning one that applies to all.” (Heidelberg, 2024)

Over the centuries, state power has continued to assert its claim to legitimate governance of “the people” and its general economic and cultural superiority, while commons have been subordinated and maligned as deficient – a tradition upheld by the ‘tragedy of the commons’ parable. The modern rediscovery of the commons is constrained by this deep structural clash of political power, worldview, and social order that separates the state and the commons.

As commoners and allied movements today struggle to disenthrone free-market narratives – with greater or lesser awareness of the ontological premises at stake – they have drawn on the history of commons/public tensions to create a different landscape of political struggle. In so doing, they have opened up new cultural spaces. They have forced a reckoning with the foundational terms of order. Instead of ideological conflicts revolving around familiar axes of “private” vs. “public” power (i.e., corporations and investors vs. the state) and arguments over which should prevail, a new conversation becomes possible: How might we structure relationships among people in local, distributed circumstances, independent of both market and state? Through the commons discourse, it has become possible to consider social design options that go beyond the constrictive framing of choices afforded by the market/state.

Much remains to be theorized and socially enacted before a clearer idea of a post-capitalist, commons-friendly politics can be limned."

(https://thecommonsjournal.org/articles/10.5334/ijc.1389)


[[Category:Democracy]]

[[Category:Commons]]

[[Category:Politics]]

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[[Category:P2P State Approaches]]