ABSTRACT
Hobbes’ seventeenth-century definition of the commonwealth as based in an ‘us’ and ‘them’ conflict continues to inform well-known conundrums for research on the commons like how the ‘free rider’, rival interests (subtractability), or monopoly rent (Harvey, 2012) inevitably lead to a denigration of shared resources. The so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’, the idea that unregulated comportments lead to the destruction of a given set of ‘resource(s) shared by a group of people’ and that only privatization or state regulation can stop the abuse or profiteering from occurring, flows out of classical contract theory even though contemporary versions avoid problematic assumptions about human nature. The normative argument points to a
heuristic model that postulates the material culture of the commons can be used fairly, equitably, or efficiently.
