David Bollier and his coauthor Silke Helfrich have just published one of the most comprehensive and in-depth looks at what the commons means in contemporary life and its implications for re-thinking the economy, ecological stewardship, care work, and culture.

Their new book, Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons, is an ambitious attempt to synthesize what Bollier and Helfrich have learned from scores of commons around the world over the past twenty years. Bollier is Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center, and Helfrich is an independent activist and author in Germany and cofounder of the Commons Strategies Group.

Free, Fair and Alive is wide-ranging in its analysis of the power of commoning, but it focuses primarily on the internal social and interpersonal dynamics of commoning; how the commons worldview opens up new possibilities for change; and the role of language in reorienting our perceptions and political strategies.

The book is a foundational reconceptualization of the commons as a living social system. Instead of regarding commons as resources, in the style of standard economics and Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” essay, the authors show that commons are in fact dynamic, living social processes. They rely on a whole set of human values and behaviors that the standard economic narrative regards as marginal or invisible.

Bollier said, “Our book is a rare inquiry into commoning – the verb, the social practices, the moral relationships – which is quite different from the commons — the noun, as resources and their exchange value. The further Silke and I got into studying and rethinking the commons as a concept, the more that we realized that prevailing categories of thought are simply too reductionist to capture what is really going on within commons.”

He noted that standard economics, property law, and policy assume the reality of rational, autonomous individuals, as reflected in the idea of homo economicus, the philosophy of modern liberalism, and the presumed separation of humanity and “nature.” The authors regard these assumptions as fundamentally misleading, especially if for anyone who understands humanity in a biological sense.

A theme that resonates throughout our book is the idea of relationality. Commoning is about building relationships of trust in the course of meeting collective needs. In this fashion, the commons help us develop a new “politics of belonging.” Commoning also helps people develop a new economics of sufficiency that can deal with runaway economic growth and ecosystem collapse.

Based on their knowledge of scores of commons, Bollier and Helfrich developed a new framework for understanding the commons – what they call the “Triad of Commoning.” It combines three essential aspects of any commons – provisioning, peer governance, and social life – each of which is entangled with the others. This framework acknowledges that commons are alive! They are not simply inventories of unowned “resources.”

The book – published by New Society Publishers – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, which should enhance its availability. The German version of the book was published by transcript Verlag in April. Check out the Contents page and Introduction here.

Bollier and Helfrich are embarking on a tour in Europe and UK starting September 14 to engage a number of audiences with the themes of the book. You can view their appearances on the Free, Fair and Alive website events page.

Best wishes,

Staff of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics