Public Goods and the Commons: Opposites or Complements?

• Author: Maurits de Jongh
• Published date: 01 October 2021
• Date: 01 October 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720979916
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720979916

Political Theory

2021, Vol. 49(5) 774 –800

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591720979916

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Article

Public Goods and the

Commons: Opposites or

Complements?

Maurits de Jongh1

Abstract

The commons have emerged as a key notion and underlying experience

of many efforts around the world to promote justice and democracy. A

central question for political theories of the commons is whether the

visions of social order and regimes of political economy they propose

are complementary or opposed to public goods that are backed up by

governmental coordination and compulsion. This essay argues that the post-

Marxist view, which posits an inherent opposition between the commons

as a sphere of inappropriable usage and statist public infrastructure, is

mistaken, because justice and democracy are not necessarily furthered

by the institution of inappropriability. I articulate an alternative pluralist

view based on James Tully’s work, which discloses the dynamic interplay

between public and common modes of provision and enjoyment, and

their civil and civic orientations respectively. Finally, the essay points to

the Janus-faced character of the commons and stresses the co-constitutive

role of public goods and social services for just and orderly social life while

remaining attentive to the dialectic of empowerment and tutelage that

marks provision by government.

Keywords

public goods, commons, anti-statism, James Tully, post-Marxism, privatization

1Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands

Corresponding Author:

Maurits de Jongh, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University,

Janskerkhof 13, Utrecht, 3512 HJ, Netherlands.

Email: m.j.dejongh@uu.nl

979916PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720979916Political Theoryde Jongh

research-article2020

de Jongh 775

Introduction

The commons have emerged as a key notion and underlying experience of

many efforts around the world to promote justice and democracy. From the

co-governance of local water resources to the global movement for open

access to research, the commons hold out a promise of equality, inclusion,

and sustainability. Reflections on the normative appeal and critical purchase

of the concept abound as the field of commons studies matures. One out-

standing aspect of these reflections is how they are couched in anti-statist,

and not merely in anti-market, terms. The point of the commons is, in a slo-

gan, to inaugurate a world “beyond market and state.”1 The opposition

between the commons and trends of privatization, commodification, and

financialization (together with their associated policies, rationalities, and

subjectivities) hardly comes as a surprise. More peculiar is that they also

serve to articulate a radical critique of public goods that are backed up by

governmental compulsion and coordination. This critique becomes all the

more pronounced when their provision, notably in its welfare state form, is

pictured as the handmaiden of late capitalism and its acquisitive spirit, giving

rise to anathemas like normalization, tutelage, and bureaucratic domination.

This essay argues that political theories that posit an inevitable opposition

between government-provided public goods and the commons are deeply

mistaken. If transformative projects of “commoning” are to fulfil their nor-

mative promise, they must instead be embedded in, and enabled by, an

authoritative public infrastructure. Instead of conceiving them as foes, the

challenge is to promote virtuous circles of interplay between public and com-

mon modes of providing and enjoying goods.2 This challenge becomes espe-

cially crucial to counter undesirable instances of privatization. The underlying

motivation for this essay is that an orientation on objects, and on different

types of goods, does not block our sight of (in)justice in social relationships,

but instead helps us to illuminate and criticize it in unforeseen ways. Different

types of goods postulate, I submit, different types of human relationships and

represent different visions of social order and regimes of political economy.3

My essay first presents a reconstruction of the post-Marxist view of the

commons, which associates them with practices of inappropriable usage that

must be pitted against a regime of public and private property that is secured

by state and market. While there is much to learn from its critique of propri-

etary models of social relations, the second section argues that this view fails

to appreciate the normative significance of the distinction between differenti-

ated and absolute conceptions of property, as well as the contingent rather

than necessary character of the link between “inappropriability” and desid-

erata of equality, inclusion, and sustainability. The third section presents an