Property in the Commons

Franklin Obeng-Odoom

Review of Radical Political Economics, 2016, vol. 48, issue 1, 9-19

Abstract: This paper reflects on historical debates about creating property in the commons and how the debaters have approached the topic. It does so by systematizing existing insights, especially those provided by Richard Schlatter in his book, Private Property: A History of An Idea (1951). The analysis shows that Hardin’s widely quoted paper is not the founding essay that attacked the commons. Also, it demonstrates that there is no “property rights approach†in political economy but several property rights approaches not only between heterodox and orthodox political economy but also within heterodox perspectives. The evidence is clearly that not much has changed in the debates about the commons except, perhaps, the geographical emphasis and the identity of the dramatis personae fanning the attacks on the commons, but not the economic interests supporting the decimation and dissipation of the commons.

Keywords: common property; method; history; global (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0486613415586976 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:reorpe:v:48:y:2016:i:1:p:9-19

DOI: 10.1177/0486613415586976

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Review of Radical Political Economics from Union for Radical Political Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().