The glory of the commons: Jonathan Rowe's brilliant posthumous meditation on the shared, non-commercialized realms of life that sustain us.

• Author: Noah, Timothy
• Position: On political books - Our Common Wealth: The Hidden Economy that Makes Everything Else Work by Jonathan Rowe - Book review

Our Common Wealth:

The Hidden Economy That

Makes Everything Else Work

by Jonathan Rowe

Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 123 pp.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

One of the sharper satirical jabs in People, a recent play by the English writer Alan Bennett, occurs when a consortium of wealthy investors decides to purchase Winchester Cathedral. "I know it's pricey," says an absurdly practical-minded archdeacon, "but Winchester is such a good idea." "Isn't it?" replies the consortium's smooth-as-silk agent. "And after all, the school is private, so why shouldn't the cathedral be private too?" Warming to the topic, the archdeacon proposes "a series of exclusive celebrity Eucharists [for] leading figures in business, sport, and the world of entertainment."

What makes the joke funny is our understanding that a hallowed monument like Winchester Cathedral could never belong to anyone but the public. Technically it was once the property of the Catholic Church and later became the property of the Church of England (after Henry VIII seized it). But throughout history it really belonged to the townspeople and more distant visitors who came there to worship, to witness weddings or funerals, to admire its famous chantry chapels and great stone screen, to pay respects to Jane Austen (who's buried there), or maybe just to hum a few bars from the 1966 novelty hit song ("Winchester Cathedral / You're bringin' me down / You stood and you watched as / My baby left town"). Winchester Cathedral is what architects call a "public space," which is to say it would have no function were not large numbers of ordinary people--most of them Anglican, many non-Christian, some agnostics or atheists--impelled to assemble there on equal terms, as they've been doing for more than a thousand years.

Jonathan Rowe, alongside whom I worked at the Washington Monthly in the early 1980s, and who died two years ago at the distressingly young age of sixty-five, would describe Winchester Cathedral as part of "the commons." By "commons" he meant things that are widely shared as a matter of law or sometimes mere convention. In the most literal sense, a common is a public park, like Boston Common. But in the broader sense commons can mean anything that's available to all takers for at most a nominal fee. It can be a work of timeless literature no longer under copyright. It can be an invention of enormous societal value on which a patent either expired or (as in the heroically selfless cases of Jonas Salk's polio vaccine and Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web) was never claimed. It can be the air we breathe, or the water we drink. It can be an experience we all go through, such as childhood or old age. It can be the absence of something we hate, like noise. It can be Wikipedia. It can...