ABSTRACT

This chapter explores how the common benefits clauses that still exist in many state constitutions might be used to shape legal and political arguments against neoliberal oligarchy in the United States. It addresses key aspects of the contemporary condition in America. The chapter outlines the relevant aspects of liberalism and neoliberal oligarchy. It describes the various forms that the common benefits clause takes in different state constitutions. The chapter focuses on how the common benefits clauses can offer an alternative to neoliberal oligarchy and a way of making political and legal arguments against this increasingly dominant ideology. It expresses that the colonial vestiges of an unrealized possibility, of an alternative vision of the relationship between citizen and government, can be mobilized today to work against the dispossession of the commons that is taking place in the US under a government that a growing number of scholars is most accurately characterized not as a democracy but rather as a neoliberal oligarchy.