> Yes, government of things is necessary and there is something in it. But as
> you say, it isn't an inevitable feature of common ownership.
>
> Basically, it is necessary for human society to have developed a culture
> appropriate to the economic system. In the sense that the author of the TotC
> and those like him would be inclined to destroy the commons out greed.
>
> Likewise, those who come from a culture of sharing, tend to make a real mess
> of trying to participate in an economy of selfish greed. They just don't get
> it. Anymore than people from a self-serving capitalist culture can get heir
> head around a commons economy. Its just totally alien and incomprehensible
> to them. As is marvelously demonstrated by this fellow who wrote TotC.
This is basically the argument that C.B. MacPherson made, at around the same time, in his analysis of /The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism/ and of his introduction to Hobbes' /Leviathan/. Only he points out that what Hobbes was looking at was a place where even if people were happy with what they had, they would be forced to compete just to stay where they were. In other words, the notion that life is nasty, brutish, and short without the Leviathan was based not on innate human psychology but instead a contingent "psychological postulate that only some men innately want ever more, [which] requires a model of society which not only permits continued invasion of each by each, but also compels the moderate men to invade; [and] that the only model which satisfies these requirements is the possessive market society, which corresponds in essentials to modern competitive market societies" (68).
So in MacPherson's estimation, the argument for "the tragedy of the commons" is, like Hobbes' "state of nature," "a logical abstraction drawn from the behaviour of men in civilized society:" "Take men as they now are, remove the fear of unpleasant or fatal consequences of their actions to themselves, and their present natural* proclivities would lead directly to the state of war" (26-7).
*if he'd had them, "natural" would be in scare quotes.
Anyone read this new book by Cass Sunstein? It really seems like the most craven kind of popularization of public choice theory, etc. all of which assumes none of the questions about how we should be governed are up for discussion: just an issue of channeling the chattel in the right direction with as little coercive force as possible. How this is different than the post-war administrators they supposedly despise is beyond me. The basic outlines are identical to the kind of administrative communication research--like Roger's "Diffusion of Innovations" or even the word by Katz and Lazarsfeld (my edition had an intro written by opinion poll guru Elmo Roper). In other words, if nothing else, it's nothing new except that it's been run through the "rationalizing capitalist democracy" machine. But I've only read the articles leading up to it, not the book itself. Anyone?
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