Editor’s Introduction

the concept of the commons goes back to the thirteenth-century Magna Carta, which guaranteed the enjoying of “ancient liberties and free customs, both by land and by water.” These rights allowed all people free access to shared natural assets, which in turn required common care, for the benefit of all. Five hundred years later, in his Second Treatise, John Locke posited that individuals might appropriate ownership of natural assets through their labor. Inevitably, the two philosophies collided, to the detriment of the commons—and, arguably, to the detriment of us all.

While the idea of the commons originated with land use and water access—the rights to hunt, forage, harvest, fish, and graze—the concept has expanded widely. Now we not only struggle with maintaining a global natural environment—and global health, as we have learned all too painfully through the COVID-19 pandemic—but we wrestle with balancing public and private space in urban environments, and we engage in cultural struggles over indigenous ancestral lands vs. corporate or state initiatives. We negotiate legal and economic boundaries around complex knowledge and information commons which are increasingly digital, raising questions of how “common” an asset is if access to it is not truly universal. Even “common sense” and “common knowledge” become sources of conflict when those ideas are challenged, whether by research and data or by alternate cultural understandings. And all of this is fraught by the ongoing conflict between public and private good in a world in which new ideas of public welfare and corporate responsibility vie for ascendancy with capitalism and financialism.

In this special issue of Social Research, guest-edited by our board member Akeel Bilgrami, we explore a number of these facets of the concept of the commons, and confront not only the tragedy of its impending destruction by common neglect but its potential to transform the human lot through new means of collaboration and sharing.