Beyond Liberalism: Commons, Constitutionalism, and the Common Good

One characteristic of the postliberal era are initiatives that converge around the common, commons and the common good – that reclaim common wealth or refocus on the common good. The spectrum ranges from attempts to insulate the common good from democratic contestation by reinterpreting human rights as expressions of natural law to initiatives and social struggles for deprivatization, the transfer of economic resources and infrastructures into common ownership and their governance as commons according to principles of commoning. In this workshop we seek to explore this renewed interest in the commons and the common good starting from practical and intellectual projects that recenter collective practices in ways of living and provisioning. We explore their roots in and connections with past collective practices, and the theoretical grounding they may find in theology, philosophy, law and more broadly the social sciences. To make sense of and to situate these projects and accompanying practices we hold to be particularly relevant democratic traditions of Catholic Social thought and their (largely unexplored) continuities and repercussions in the work of Bruno Latour, Pierre Rosanvallon, and others as well as scholarship on common good constitutionalism.

We are aware of the significant differences and potential conflicts between initiatives of commoning that can build on socialist, liberal and democratic traditions rooted in Christian social ethics and Jewish political thought on the one hand and protagonists of common good constitutionalism and their theological interlocutors that are prone to authoritarian and integralist / theocratic perceptions of political community on the other hand. Yet, instead of foregrounding such conflicts, we seek to explore shared discontents, differences and possible common ground through a focus on concrete projects and practices.

We want to map projects of the common good and commoning, their situatedness in different traditions and their grounding in social, religious and philosophical thought across three interconnected and overlapping themes and clusters of questions: