Protecting the Common Good: Technology, Objectivity, and Privacy

The rhetoric of public policy after September 11 encourages us to believe that the preservation of freedom and the safety of the common good requires our universal acquiescence to technological invasions of privacy. The purpose of this article is simply to warn that the rhetoric of public policy solutions post–September 11 may be inconsistent with the philosophical and legal framework of American democracy. While serving as a solution today, this rhetoric may pose a devastating blow to the balance of individual privacy and common good that is essential to the preservation of freedom.     

共同富裕:理论前提、历史矛盾与战略抉择

共同富裕是社会主义的价值追求。它的终极意义是指在发达的生产力基础上,消灭剥削,消除两极分化,全体人民共同享有社会发展的成果。马克思关于共同富裕的思想有四个重要的理论前提。基于马克思的理论前提和我国社会主义初级阶段推进共同富裕面对的历史矛盾,现阶段稳步推进共同富裕,必须在战略抉择上着重解决四个方面的问题。     

Seigniorage,Delegation and Common Currency: Why Monetary Unions May Fail?

We provide a parable that can explain why monetary unions havehistorically been dissolved following political separation.Using a simple model of government finance in a commoncurrency area, it is shown that delegation to an``inflationary'' central banker is an optimal policy whencountries struggle for seigniorage revenues, whether delegatescoordinate monetary policy or not. Furthermore, a commoncentral bank, in which representatives coordinate monetarypolicy, will reach an outcome that is Pareto-inferior to thatproduced by a non-cooperative seigniorage war. Accordingly,without political dialogue regarding the designation of therepresentatives, a monetary union can fail.     

A Decision Theoretic Model of Public Opinion: Guns, Butter, and European Common Defense

Why do individuals support the public policies they do? We argue that individuals can have quite sophisticated policy preferences and that not correctly modeling those preferences can lead to critically misspecified empirical models. To substantiate this position we derive and test a decision‐theoretic model that relies upon three critical assumptions: (1) policies affect the provision of multiple goods about which individuals care; (2) individuals have diminishing returns to scale in those goods; and (3) preferences over at least some subset of those goods are correlated. Using this model, we demonstrate that arbitrarily small secondary policy effects can confound predictions over primary policy effects. Thus, not considering even arbitrarily small policy effects can cause one to conclude that evidence is consistent with one's theory when in fact it is inconsistent or vice versa. Testing this theory on support for forming a European common defense, we find evidence consistent with our model.     

The New Progressive Federalism: Common Benefits,State Constitutional Rights,and Democratic Political Action

In 1776, a group of political outsiders in Pennsylvania seized control of the convention and drafting process to create a robustly democratic and class-conscious state constitution. These commoners believed governments upheld and extended social and political privilege, serving primarily the interests of wealthy and powerful citizens. They tried to reverse these oligarchic tendencies, particularly through a “common benefits clause”: here the social contract prioritized the whole community and instituted a more horizontal form of equality among citizens. Ultimately, the short-lived Pennsylvania constitution of 1776 left a powerful legacy, largely forgotten but useful to remember. Today, in a broad “new progressive federalist” movement, democratic political action is rising up from city, state, and local governments to interrupt and counteract the oligarchic tendencies of the national government under the Trump administration. This paper shows how common benefit and equal privilege clauses, still on the books in many states, can inspire and inform this movement.     

The Common Root of Commitment,Resistance and Power

Abstract

This essay responds to some of the questions raised by Infinitely Demanding from the perspective of tragic conflicts. On this view, the struggle for power cannot be disentangled from the freedom at stake in liberalism and capitalism, nor from the efforts of individuals and groups to resist the powers that be. I suggest, moreover, that this entanglement threatens to divide from within not just the ethical subject, but groups and institutions as well.     

Common cents: situating money in time and place

This article addresses the issue of how the market and the non-market are to be understood especially by concentrating on the theory of money. For mainstream economics, the market is simply an institution facilitating exchange, money being the key instrument for alleviating the inefficiencies of barter. In contrast, recent work in other social sciences, such as that by Zelizer, distinguishes among markets, and various roles of money, depending on cultural and social content. While being sympathetic to such an approach, we claim that the commodity is a better analytical starting point than the market. Based on Marx's work, we then show what commodities have in common and establish a common essence for money as generalized purchasing power. This is a peculiarly bland essence that allows money to undertake the variety of social roles identified by Zelizer.     

Europe and the Common

Significant attention has been given to the necessary conditions for a viable and legitimate European polity. Drawing on traditions in political philosophy, a central strand of this debate has concerned what must be common to a set of people such that they may be ruled through the same institutions, with various types of collective bond proposed as possible bases for political community. The argument of this article is that many such approaches, which conceive a bond in terms of shared interests, cultural attributes or shared values and principles, are liable either to underplay or to overplay how much the citizens of a polity must have in common, tending either to empty public life of the pursuit of shared ends or conversely to downgrade the importance of adversarialism. Both may be seen as depoliticising moves. The article goes on to explore how a more explicitly political bond, based on the appraisal of political problems, might be conceived for a European polity.     

Performing Counter-Hegemonic Common(s) Senses: Rearticulating Democracy,Community and Forests in Puerto Rico

Political ecologists have developed scathing analyses of capitalism’s tendency for enclosure and dispossession of the commons. In this context commons are analyzed as a force to resist neo-liberalism, a main site of conflict over dispossession, and a source of alternatives to capitalism. In this paper we elaborate a view of the commons as the material and symbolic terrain where performative re-articulation of common(s) senses can potentially enact counter-hegemonic socio-ecological configurations. Expressly drawing on the concepts of hegemony, “common-senses” (inspired by Antonio Gramsci) and “performativity” (developed by Judith Butler), we argue that counter-hegemony is performed through everyday practices that rearticulate existing common senses about commons. Commoning is a set of processes/relations enacted to challenge capitalist hegemony and build more just/sustainable societies insofar as it transforms and rearranges common senses in/through praxis. The paper draws on the experience of an anti-mining movement of Casa Pueblo in Puerto Rico, which for the last 35+ years has been developing a project self-described as autogestion. The discussion pays special attention to Casa Pueblo’s praxis and discourses to investigate how they rearticulate common senses with regard to nature, community and democracy, as well as their implications for counter-hegemonic politics.