Hardin wrote:
>"Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all."
to me, this is the more interesting part of his claim and gets at something that always bugs me about anarchist-type arguments.
the idea is that a community is self-regulating, to prevent itself from abusing its resources. but as i think Perelman says and this article points out, the commons-based community doesn't allow people complete freedom. it regulates itself via tacit rules -- norms -- about how people are to _use_ land.
a commons-based community has different institutions -- what amount to tacit rules about how to behave -- than a capitalist-based community. they both produce different kinds of people -- McPherson's possessive individualism, etc. neither system can have pure freedom because such doesn't exist. freedom is whatever individuals in a particular society think it looks like. if we mean freedom to do whatever one wants, then those wants are circumscribed from the get go.
but what bothers me about anarchist-type explanation is that it appears that their is no social control, when in fact there is, and must be.
bill bartlett is fond of taking this line when it comes to work and the question of how we can have a society where some people will lay around on beach chairs reading, while others will scrub toilets, grow crops, sweep streets, lawyer (*grin*) and teach.
well, they probably won't be inclined to lounge around on beach chairs reading b/c societal norms -- enforced by others -- will make it clear that people who don't contribute to society's needs are to be shunned as social outcasts.
which is why foucault ends up mattering to a lot of people since he updated french sociology's explorations of the normative rules that regulate society. which is why foucault ends up mattering to people because instead of assuming life would be peachy after the revo, his work helps us think about the ways struggles over normative behavior -- tacit rules about how we are supposed to behave toward ourselves and others -- will always be contested and that is a _good_ thing.
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)