1G.W.F. Hegel, Outlines of a Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 199 (§ 211).
2For more on this, see Mikhaïl Xifaras, “Marx, justice et jurisprudence. Une lecture des ‘vols de bois.” Revue française d’histoire des idées politiques, no. 15, (April 2002), 22.
3F.A. Hayek, “The Legal and Political Philosophy of David Hume.” Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), 107.
4Ibid., 108.
5See Dardot and Laval, The New Way of the World, 128.
6See Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, La Nouvelle Raison du monde. Essai sur la société néolibérale (Paris: La Découverte 2010), 6. We will return in the following chapter to the German Historical School of Savigny in the context of Marx’s articles on the “theft of wood.” Translator’s note: the English translation of Dardot and Laval’s La Nouvelle Raison du Monde is an abridged translation, and accordingly some references to this work can only be found in the original French edition.
7Ibid., 170.
8In the analyses that follow, we rely on the second section of Law and Revolution, vol. 2, titled “The English Revolution and the Transformation of English Law in the Seventeenth Century,” 199–372.
9Berman, Law and Revolution, vol. 2, 461.
10Ibid., 303.
11Ibid., 264.
12Ibid.
13Ibid., 10.
14Ibid., 229.
15Ibid., 214. The Court of Common Pleas, established by Henry II in 1178, was the first permanent royal court.
16Ibid., 213. Amongst the Prerogative Courts, Berman mentions the Court of the Star Chamber, the Court of Requests, the Court of Marches, and the Court of the High Commission. We should add to this list the High Court of Admiralty and the High Court of Chancery, which were not technically Prerogative Courts but which nonetheless contributed to the consolidation of royal power.
17Ibid., 217. The suppression of the Prerogative Courts was confirmed by Charles II in 1660, which rendered the decision of the 1641 Parliament irreversible.
18Ibid., 237.
19Ibid.
20Ibid.
21Ibid., 239.
22Ibid., 241.
23Dictionnaire de philosophie politique, ed. Philippe Raynaud and Stéphane Rials (Paris: PUF, 2003), 108.
24Ibid., 242.
25Ibid.
26Ibid., 244.
27Ibid., 243.
28Ibid., 243 and 465, note 37. Here, Berman points out the difficulty of finding terms in other languages that correspond with this English term.
29Ibid., 245.
30It is precisely this ideological conception of the law that Jeremy Bentham attacks in his ironic polemic, especially the belief in what he calls the “wisdom from ancestors.” See Jeremy Bentham, The Book of Fallacies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
31Berman, Law and Revolution, vol. 2, 244.
32Ibid., 246.
33Ibid.
34Ibid., 247.
35Ibid., 248.
36Ibid., 256.
37Ibid.
38Ibid., 257.
39Ibid., 259.
40Ibid., 260.
41See Raynaud and Rials, Dictionnaire de philosophie politique, 108–109.
42Ibid., 108.
43Ibid., 274–275.
44Ibid., 244.
45Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 78. Linebaugh’s book is an indispensable source of information on the Magna Carta and provides a very illuminating, if sometimes reductive, approach to the subject. It will be referenced throughout this section of the chapter.
46These two documents can be consulted at: www.earlyenglishlaws.ca.uk.
47Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 78.
48Qtd. in “Common Law,” in Philippe Raynaud and Stéphane Rials (eds.), Dictionnaire de philosophie politique, 110.
49Ibid., 79.
50Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 33. Berman comes to the same conclusion in his account: “the Puritan Revolution was conceived to be a restoration of the ancient liberties of Englishmen as laid down in the Magna Carta and other medieval statutes and judicial decisions prior to the usurpation of supreme power over church and state by the Tudor-Stuart monarchy more than a century earlier. The Commonwealth’s Great Seal of 1649 was inscribed: ‘The First Year of Freedome Restored.’” See Berman, Law and Revolution, 206.
51For the 1215 version of the text, see Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 81–296.
52Geoffrey Robertson, Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice (New York: New Press, 1999), 2–3. Qtd. in Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 22.
53Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 85.
54Ibid., 6.
55Ibid., 38.
56Ibid., 39. The Statutes at Large were collections of Anglo-Saxon laws.
57Ibid., 300.
58Ibid., 290.
59See Jane Winters, “Forest Law,” Institute of Historical Research: www.earlyenglishlaws.ac.uk.
60Ibid., 4.
61Ibid., 291.
62Jane Winters, “Forest Law”: www.earlyenglishlaws.ac.uk. Also see John R. Maddicott, “Magna Carta and the Local Community.” Past and Present, vol. 102 (1984). Qtd. in Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto.
63Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 34.
64Ibid., 32–33.
65Ibid., 33. We tend to render the term “commoners” as both “common practitioners” and “common users,” depending on the context; we also render the verb “common” as “practicing the common” and the progressive form “commoning” as “practice of the common.”
66See W.G. Hoskins and L. Dudley Stamp, The Common Lands of England and Wales (New York: Harper Collins, 1963).
67E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: the New Press, 1993), 127. We will refer to this essential work later in order to clarify the relationship between the law of the common and common law.
68Ibid., 133.
69Ibid., 37.
70Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 284.
71These terms can be found in the indispensable glossary at the end of Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 302, 306, 308, 309.
72Ibid., 40.
73Ibid., 41.
74Ibid., 297.
75Ibid. Perhaps the “bad customs” mentioned in the 1215 Charter refer to Purprestures, Wastes, and Asserts or similar legal infractions.
76Ibid., 296–297.
77Ibid., 298.
78Ibid.
79Ibid., 299.
80Ibid.
81Ibid., 300.
82Ibid., 44.
83Ibid., 44.
84Berman, Law and Revolution, vol. 2, 332. We must be attentive here and differentiate between “feudal tenure,” which characterizes a certain type of relationship between a lord and vassal (by virtue of which the vassal is, for example, obliged to render service of arms or pay a scotage), and “manorial tenure,” which denotes the relationship between the manorial owner of a landed estate and its associated peasantry.
85Ibid.
86Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 79.
87Ibid.
88Berman, Law and Revolution, vol. 2, 499.
89Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 80.
90Ibid., 72.
91Ibid., 45.
92Ibid., 55.
93This is in reference to Engel’s pamphlet “The Peasant War in Germany.” See: https://www.marxists.org/
94Berman, Law and Revolution, vol. 2, 56.
95Ibid.
96Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 11, 40.
97See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2008), and Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World (London: Verso, 2013).
98E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common, 98, 136.
99Ibid., 124. In Nottingham during the Victorian era, a witness mentions that the opening of common lands usually happened on August 12, and he deplores the violence and abuse practiced by the local population on this occasion.
100Ibid., 107–108.
101Ibid., 97.
102Ibid.
103Qtd. in ibid., 128–129.
104Ibid., 129.
105Ibid., 129 (note 3).
106Ibid., 129–130.
107Ibid., 130.
108Ibid.
109Ibid., 134.
110Ibid., 136–137.
111Ibid., 99.
112Ibid., 120–121.
113Qtd. in ibid., 108.
114Qtd. in ibid., 116.
115Qtd. in ibid.
116Ibid., 121. In Leicester, for example, the enclosure movement began in 1708 but wasn’t completed until 1803 (ibid., 124).
117We draw extensively in this section from E.P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters: the Origins of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975). Ibid., 21.
118Ibid., 22.
119Ibid., 21–22.
120Ibid., 22.
121Ibid., 27.
122Ibid., 27.
123Ibid., 190. “King John” was the name of the leader of a band of poachers who stole deer in Hampshire between 1720 and 1723.
124Ibid., 32.
125Ibid., 36.
126Ibid., 62.
127Ibid., 64.
128Ibid.
129Ibid., 136.
130Ibid., 239.
131Ibid., 241.
132Ibid., 261.
133Ibid.
134Ibid.
135Ibid., 264.
136Ibid., 265, 267.
137Thompson, Customs in Common, 137.
138Ibid., 139.
139Ibid.
140Ibid., 139–140, 143.
141Ibid., 144.
142Ibid., 128.
143Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, 267.
144Thompson, Customs in Common, 104.
145Ibid.
146Ibid., 110.
147Ibid., 126.
148Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 279.
1See Pierre Lascoumes and Hartwig Zander, Marx : du “vol de bois” à la critique du droit (Paris: PUF, 1984), 175. In Edgar Reitz’s 2013 film Die andere Heimat – Chronik einer Sehnsucht (Home from Home), the first scene takes place in 1843 and features a proclamation in a village square prohibiting the collection of dead wood from fallen trees.
2Ibid., 135.
3Nadine Vivier, Propriété collective et identité communale. Les Biens communaux en France 1750–1914 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1998), 217.
4Ibid., 218.
5Ibid., 218.
6Ibid., 90 and 113. The list of forest-related offenses established by the Forestry Guard in 1845 gives us an idea of both the diversity and the extent of peasant needs the forest satisfied: theft of blueberries and other fruits of the woods, forest products necessary for the production of brushes and brooms, livestock feed, wood for roofing slats, hop poles (for crossing water), piles, stairs, trestles and scaffolds, pitch resin collected from damaged trees, etc. (Ibid., 95–96).
7Karl Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood: First Part, October 25, 1842.” Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 1: 1835–43 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 226 (our emphasis). Marx refers here to the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina adopted in 1532 by the Imperial Diet in Regensburg, which treats “theft by necessity” as a civil rather than criminal matter.
8Ibid., 230, 231.
9Xifaras, “Marx, justice et jurisprudence. Une lecture des ‘vols de bois,’” 10.
10Ibid., 11.
11Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” 227.
12Ibid.
13Xifaras, “Marx, justice et jurisprudence. Une lecture des ‘vols de bois,’” 12–13.
14Ibid., 13.
15Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” 235.
16Ibid.
17Ibid., 236.
18Ibid., 236, 237.
19Ibid., 262–263. This phrase is taken from Charles de Brosses’ Du culte des dieux fétiches ou Parallèle de l’ancienne religion de l’Égypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigriti (1760), which was translated into German in 1785, and which Marx had just read before writing his articles on the theft of wood.
20Xifaras, “Marx, justice et jurisprudence. Une lecture des ‘vols de bois,’” 13. At the beginning of the October 30 article, Marx reminds us how, “in France, the warden’s charge concerns the fact but not the value.” Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” 240.
21Ibid., 237.
22Ibid.
23Ibid., 238.
24Ibid.
25Ibid.
26Ibid.
27Ibid.
28Ibid.
29Ibid., 240.
30Ibid.
31Ibid., 241.
32Ibid.
33Ibid., 242.
34Ibid., 245.
35Ibid., 251.
36Ibid.
37Ibid., 253.
38Ibid., 255.
39Ibid.
40Ibid., 259.
41Ibid., 261.
42Ibid.
43Ibid., 262.
44Xifaras, “Marx, justice et jurisprudence. Une lecture des ‘vols de bois,’” 15–16 (note 49).
45According to Hegel, the particular common interests of all the members of a social estate are those which mediate between the particular interests of each individual and the general interests embodied in the state.
46Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” 261.
47Ibid., 241.
48Ibid., 236.
49Qtd. in Ibid., 256.
50Ibid., 256.
51For more on this Lockean conception of self-ownership, which Marx never disavows and in fact borrows as the principle of “individual property” in communism, see Dardot and Laval, Marx, Prénom : Karl, 645 and 690.
52Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” 256.
53Ibid., 249.
54Ibid., 248.
55Ibid.
56Ibid., 249, 248.
57See William Shakespeare, King John: http://shakespeare.mit.edu/
58Ibid.
59Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 67.
60This is what Daniel Bensaïd argues in Marx: Les Dépossédés. Karl Marx, les voleurs de bois et le droit des pauvres (Paris: La Fabrique, 2007), 41. The label “liberal rationalist” is borrowed from Althusser’s periodization, wherein Althusser designates a “liberal rationalist period” in Marx’s intellectual development (ibid., 12).
61Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” 230.
62Ibid.
63The situation in Germany was very different. At the end of the fifteenth century, Germany was composed of several hundred provinces (Länder) united in a rather loose political assemblage called the Empire (Reich); each province was governed by imperial law in addition to local and feudal customary laws that differed from one region to the next, as recorded in various legal collections, such as the Sachsenspiegel (the “Mirror of the Saxons”) or the Schwabenspiegel (the “Mirror of the Swabians”), etc. Additionally, customary rights often differed from city to city (see Berman, Law and Revolution, 34.).
64Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” 230.
65Ibid., 231.
66Ibid., 230.
67Ibid., 231.
68Ibid.
69Ibid., 232.
70Ibid.
71Ibid.
72Ibid., 139.
73Ibid.
74Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, 23 (§3).
75Xifaras, “Marx, justice et jurisprudence. Une lecture des ‘vols de bois,’” 35.
76Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” 232–233.
77Ibid., 233.
78Xifaras, “Marx, justice et jurisprudence. Une lecture des ‘vols de bois,’” 8–9.
79See Chapter 7, and § 211 in Hegel’s Outlines of a Philosophy of Right in particular.
80Xifaras, “Marx, justice et jurisprudence. Une lecture des ‘vols de bois,’” 25.
81Ibid., 23–25.
82Ibid., 29.
83Ibid., 32.
84Ibid., 43.
85Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” 232.
86See Xifaras, “Marx, justice et jurisprudence. Une lecture des ‘vols de bois,’” 45 (notes 114, 115).
87Ibid., 46.
88Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” 233.
89Ibid., 234. Translator’s note: Marx, in the original German, uses the adverb schon (already) to qualify the verb “find” in this sentence, but this is lost in the English translation of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels. A more literal (and accurate) translation would thus read, “the poor already find their right in their activity.” Dardot and Laval are especially interested in Marx’s use of schon, as they subsequently elaborate.
90Ibid., 233.
91Xifaras, “Marx, justice et jurisprudence. Une lecture des ‘vols de bois,’” 38 (note 101).
92To get a precise sense of the concept of “occupation” at the end of the nineteenth century in relation to the concept of “possession,” we relied upon the fourth volume of Dictionnaire des Antiquités grecques et romaines de Daremberg et Sagli and Chapter 3 of Henri Allart’s De l’occupation en droit romain, des brevets d’invention en droit français (1877). For exegesis on the distinction between corpus and animus in relation to the category of possession in Roman law, see the entry on “Possession” written by Jean-Marc Trigeaud in the Encyclopédie philosophique universelle, II, Les Notions philosophiques (Paris: PUF, 1990).
93Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” 231.
94See Dardot and Laval, Marx, Prénom : Karl, 53.
95Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 141. Xifaras rightly emphasizes this “anticipation of the theme of the universal class that developed after 1843.” See Xifaras, “Marx, justice et jurisprudence. Une lecture des ‘vols de bois,’” 18 (note 57).
96Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” 232.
97Ibid., 234.
98Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, 199 (§211).
99“For Marx, as for Savigny, the principle of the intelligibility of the law (its reason) is not found in the conscious exercise of the faculty of thinking (reason).” Xifaras, “Marx, justice et jurisprudence. Une lecture des ‘vols de bois,’” 39.
100Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” 234.
101Xifaras, “Marx, justice et jurisprudence. Une lecture des ‘vols de bois,’” 38.
102Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” 234.
103Ibid.
104Ibid.
105Ibid.
106Ibid.
107This is one of Mikhaïl Xifaras’s suggestions in “Marx, justice et jurisprudence. Une lecture des ‘vols de bois,’” 38 (note 101).
108Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Closed Commercial State, trans. Curtis Adler (New York: SUNY Press, 2012), 130.
109Ibid.
110Ibid.
111Ibid.
112Fichte, The Closed Commercial State, 201 (footnote 1).
113Ibid., 130–131.
114Ibid.
115We have every reason to think that Marx had indeed read Fichte, given his close intellectual relationship with the Fichtean Bruno Bauer during the years 1840–1841. Marx even collaborated with Bauer in the drafting of a pamphlet titled The Trumpet of the Last Judgment.
116We should think in particular here of the position of the class in immediate relation to the land – i.e., the “substantive estate” of the landowners – and its status in the House of Representatives as Hegel conceives it.
117Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” 235.
118Ibid.
119We are in complete agreement in this respect with Mikhaïl Xifaras, in “Marx, justice et jurisprudence. Une lecture des ‘vols de bois,’” 37.
120Nadine Vivier, “Le rôle économique et social des biens communaux en France.” Les Sociétés rurales en Allemagne et en France, actes du colloque international de Göttingen (Caen: AHSR, 2000), 195.
121Reiner Pass, “Les communaux et leur usage dans l’économie domestique paysanne,” 179.
122Nadine Vivier, Propriété collective et identité communale, 299.
123Nadine Vivier, “Le rôle économique et social des biens communaux en France,” 205.
124Mikhaïl Xifaras, “Marx, justice et jurisprudence,” 47.
125Jean Jaurès, Les Origines du socialisme allemande (Toulouse: Librairie Ombres Blanches, 2010), 57. The argument in this chapter is, actually, mainly concerned with the question of value measurement: Fichte’s answer involves the creation of two measures of value: a “use” value and a “work” value, which he is ultimately unable to reconcile.
126Jean Jaurès, Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française, t. I, La Constituante, première partie (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1983), 283–284.
127Ibid., 282. Note 17 then reads as follows: “the ears that escape the harvesters belonged to the poor; it was God’s share; the wheat was traditionally gathered, and on the field there was a very high thatch that also belonged to the poor. Hence the hostility to the use of the scythe, on the part of these poor beneficiaries, which cut the wheat at ground level and left only a very short stubble.”
128Ibid., 286 (our emphasis).
129Ibid., 295.
130Ibid., 302.
131Ibid., Volume IV, Le Gouvernement révolutionnaire, 142.
132Ibid.
133Ibid.
134Ibid., 145.
135Ibid (our emphasis).
1Translator’s note: in English, the term “associationism” also denotes a school of thought in theoretical psychology. Built successively on the work of philosophers such as John Locke, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, and Ivan Pavlov, psychological associationism conceives human consciousness as a series of successive and “associated” mental representations linked by an underlying principle. For an account of the history of socialist associationism, see Philippe Chanial, La Délicate Essence du socialisme. L’association, l’individu et la République (Bordeux, Le Bord de l’eau, 2009).
2See Émile Coornaert, Les Compagnonnages en France du Moyen Âge à nos jours (Paris: les Éditions Ouvrières, 1966). For the historical relationship between these brotherhoods and fraternal societies, we make reference to the interesting remarks of André Gueslin, L’Invention de l’économie sociale (Paris: Economica, 1998), 146.
3Speech from the Sitting of June 14, 1791. Qtd. in Henri Hatzfeld, Du paupérisme à la sécurité sociale, 1850–1940 (Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 2004), 192.
4See Henri Desroche, Le Projet coopératif. Son utopie et ses pratiques, son appareil et ses réseaux (Paris: Les Éditions Ouvrières, 1976) and “Sociétaires et compagnons. Des associations ouvrières aux coopératives de production (1831–1900).” Archives de sciences sociales de la coopération et du développement, no. 55 (1981), 51–73.
5Translator’s note: Bourses du travail, which translates most directly as “labor exchanges,” were a form of labor council that emerged in France during the Third Republic. The councils were working-class (but also government sanctioned and surveilled) organizations built on the principles of mutual aid and self-organization.
6See Édouard Dolléans, “Introduction.” Jean Vial, La Coutume chapelière. Histoire du mouvement ouvrier dans la chapellerie (Paris: Éditions Domat-Montchrestien, 1941), III.
7Beatrice and Sidney Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (New York: Longmans, Green, 1920), 1–64.
8Ibid., 114.
9Qtd. in ibid., 115–116.
10See Chapter 5.
11Karl Marx, “Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association.” Collected Works, vol. 20 (New York: International Publishers, 1985), 11.
12On the question of law, see Célestin Bouglé, La Sociologie de Proudhon (Paris: Armand Colin, 1911).
13Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, “Letter to Clerc, March 16, 1863,” Correspondance (Geneva, Slatkine), 309. Qtd. in Georges Gurvitch, L’Idée du droit social. Notion et système du droit social. Histoire doctrinale depuis le XVIIe siècle jusqu’ à la fin du XIXe siècle (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1972), 353.
14Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, qtd. by George Gurvitch, “Proudhon aujourd’hui,” in Écrits allemands II (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006) 51.
15Proudhon, What is Property?, 23.
16Pierre-Joseph, General Idea of Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, trans. John Beverley Robinson (New York: Gordon Press, 1972), 243.
17Gurvitch, L’Idée du droit social, 339.
18In this sense, Proudhon anticipates Duguit’s theory of public services. See Léon Duguit, Law and the Modern State: French and German Doctrines (Hardpress Publishing, 2012) and Manuel de droit constitutionnel. Théorie générale de l’État, organisation politique (Paris: A. Fontemoing, 1907).
19On these points, see Gurvitch, L’Idée du droit social, 346.
20Proudhon, Systèmes des contradictions économiques ou Philosophie de la misère, 266.
21Bouglé, La Sociologie de Proudhon, 186–187.
22Ibid., 187.
23Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église, 157.
24Proudhon, qtd. in Gurvitch, L’Idée du droit social, 374. Proudhon seems to lean toward the absolutism of property, rather than the absolutism of the state, in his posthumously published book The Theory of Property (see: https://blog.proudhonlibrary.org/
25Proudhon, “Letter to A.M. Cournot, Aug 31, 1853,” Correspondance, vol. IV, 370.
26Gurvitch, L’Idée du droit social, 335.
27Qtd. in Bouglé, La Sociologie de Proudhon, 111.
28Proudhon, The General Idea of Revolution, 110.
29Proudhon, De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières, 113–114.
30Gurvitch, L’Idée du droit social, 363.
31Ibid., 38.
32As opposed to a utilitarian conception of law, Grotius finds the source of law in humanity: “this Sociability … or this Care for maintaining Society … is the Fountain of Right, properly so called.” Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, Book 1 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 85–86.
33George Gurvitch, “La philosophie du droit de Hugo Grotius et la théorie moderne du droit international,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale (1927). Gurvitch refers to the following passage from Grotius’s The Rights of War and Peace: “in Matters for which each Association was instituted, the whole Body, or the major Part in the Name of the whole Body, oblige all and every the particular Members of the Society” (545).
34As Gurvitch points out, the term “socialist,” contrary to popular opinion, was not born at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but was used in the legal tradition of natural social law in the seventeenth century to refer to Grotius. See Gurvitch, “La philosophie du droit de Hugo Grotius et la théorie moderne du droit international,” 377 (note 3).
35Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, 219.
36Ibid., 216.
37Ibid., 221.
38Ibid., 223.
39Ibid.
40Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Correspondance de P-J Proudhon, ed. Jérôme Langlois, vol. 14 (Paris: Librarie Internationale, 1975), 290.
41Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, 246.
42In Les Confessions d’un révolutionnaire Proudhon wrote, “in every society, there are two types of constitutions: I call one the social constitution, the other is the political constitution.” Whereas the latter is based on authority, the former is based on the organization of economic forces and the “balance of interests based on free contracts.” The social constitution, for Proudhon, is the outcome of a process of discovering principles and rules “that are still today the subject of much socialist controversy” (217).
43On this point, see Isaac Joshua, La Révolution selon Karl Marx (Geneva: Pages 2, 2012).
44Georges Gurvitch, Éléments de sociologie juridique (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1940), 58–59.
45Voyenne, Le Fédéralisme et Proudhon, 148.
46This work was written in 1864 and published posthumously in 1870 under the title Contradictions politiques. Théorie du mouvement constitutionnel au XIXe siècle (Paris; Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie, 1870). It features a preface, written by M.L. Boutteville, explaining the conditions under which this posthumous text was published.
47Proudhon often critiqued the liberals of his age for wanting to give more power to local government without completely renouncing state centralization; this kind of liberalism undermines true federalism. The prototypical liberal, for Proudhon, is Édouard Laboulaye. He is “one of those ‘soft geniuses’ who always wants to find a ‘happy medium.’” See Proudhon, Contradictions politiques, 245.
48Ibid., 226.
49Ibid., 225.
50Ibid., 237.
51Ibid., 237.
52Ibid., 245–246.
53Ibid., 237.
54Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières, 123.
55Maxime Leroy, La Coutume ouvrière. Syndicats, bourses, fédérations professionnelles, coopératives, Doctrines et institutions, 2 volumes (Paris: CNT-RP, 2007).
56Ibid., vol. 1, 25.
57Ibid.
58Qtd. by Leroy, La Coutume ouvrière, vol. 1, 293. See Fernand Pelloutier, L’Organization coopérative et l’Anarchie (Paris: L’Art Social), 18.
59Ibid., 28.
60Ibid., 29.
61Ibid., 201.
62Ibid., 28.
63Marcel Mauss, “L’action socialiste.” Le Mouvement socialiste, October 15, 1899. See Marcel Mauss, Écrits politiques (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 79, 79.
64Leroy, La Coutume ouvrière, vol. 1, 26.
65Émile Levasseur, Histoire des classes ouvrières en France depuis la Révolution jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Librairie de Guillaumin et Cie, 1867).
66Leroy, La Coutume ouvrière, vol. 1, 26.
67Ibid., 200.
68Ibid., 39.
69Ibid., 57.
70Ibid., 194.
71Ibid., 196. The jaunes must therefore submit to the rouges when the latter are in a majority position on a strike vote because they all share a collective fate.
72While composing his work in 1913, Maxime Leroy was still optimistic about the development of systems of obligations that might constitute an international workers’ society. See Leroy, La Coutume ouvrière, vol. 2, 825.
73Ibid., 530.
74Marcel Mauss, The Gift: the Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990).
75See Jacques Godbout and Alain Caillé (eds.), See L’Esprit du don (Paris: La Découverte, 1992) and Philippe Chanial (eds.), La Société vue du don. Manuel de sociologie anti-utilitariste appliquée (Paris: La Découverte, 2008).
76On all these points, see Sylvain Dzimira, Marcel Mauss, savant et politique (Paris: La Découverte, 2007).
77On the eve of the First World War, there were more than 3,000 consumer cooperatives in France.
78Marcel Mauss, “La coopération socialiste.” L’Humanité, August 3, 1904, in Écrits politiques, 142.
79On this topic, see the texts Mauss dedicated to the Russian revolution and bolshevism, especially “Appréciation sociologique du bolchevisme,” in Écrits politiques, 537.
80For more on this, see Henri Desroche, “Marcel Mauss ‘citoyen’ et ‘camarade’: ses incursions écrites dans le domaine du normative.” Revue française de sociologie, vol. 20 (1979), 221–237.
81Marcel Mauss, qtd. by Henri Desroche, “Sociétaires et compagnons.”
82Marcel Mauss, “La coopération socialiste,” 147.
83In the July 16, 1906 edition of L’Humanité Mauss argued, in the context of a plan for a “national cooperative” state: “voilà the two ideas of ancient communism and modern individualism; voilà the rivalries are suppressed; voilà the benefits made uniform; voilà widespread safety everywhere ; voilà equalized purchasing power for everyone ; voilà the unlimited possibility of accumulating funds ; voilà the indefinite extension of cooperation in all districts where it has been difficult to penetrate.”
84See Henri Desroche, “Jean Jaurès ou l’économie sociale comme économie collective.” Pour un traité d’économie sociale (Paris: Coopérative d’information et d’édition mutualiste, 1983), 115–128.
85Jean Jaurès, “Coopération socialiste,” La Petite République, September 19, 1900.
86Qtd. in Jean Gaumont, Au confluent de deux grandes idées. Jaurès coopérateur (Paris: Fédération nationale des coopératives de consommation, 1959), 71.
87On Jaurès’s conception of social property, see Philippe Chanial, “La propriété sociale contre l’État. Jaurès, le collectivisme et l’association.” Contretemps, no. 5 (2002). Also see Philippe Chanial, La Délicate Essence du socialisme, 141.
88Marcel Mauss, “L’action directe.” Écrits politiques, 187.
89Marcel Mauss, “L’action socialiste,” Écrits politiques, 78.
90Ibid., 76–77.
91Mauss, “Les coopératives et les socialistes.” Écrits politiques, 115.
92Mauss, “Appréciation sociologique du bolchevisme,” 557.
93Mauss, “L’action socialiste,” 80.
94Mauss, “La coopération socialiste,” 146.
95Marcel Mauss, “Manifeste coopératif des intellectuels et universitaires français,” Revue des études coopératives, October–December (1921), 7. See Henri Desroche, “Marcel Mauss, ‘citizen’ and ‘comrade,’” 231.
96Mauss, “Manifeste coopératif des intellectuels et universitaires français,” 8. In his address to the first National and International Congress of Socialist Cooperatives in July 1900 in Paris, Mauss called for a national and international federation of cooperatives: “when we have founded immense cooperative workshops on the model of communist production; when we have completely overrun the branches of production, either by regulating prices by wholesale purchase, or by blacklisting the factories that exploit the workers and fight against unions, or by producing goods ourselves; when we have created, through a whole network of solidarity institutions, a close and intimate union between all the members of the workers’ cooperatives; when we have established our own relations with diverse workers’ organizations: producer cooperatives, professional unions, and the international workers party, then we can think of organizing ourselves internationally in a complete way.”
97Mauss, “Appréciation sociologique du bolchevisme,” 555.
98Ibid., 554.
99Mauss, “La coopération socialiste,” 146.
100Jean-Louis Laville, Politique de l’association (Paris: Le Seuil, 2010), 82.
101Ibid., 237.
102See Stéphane Beaud and Michel Pialoux, Retour sur la condition ouvrière (Paris: La Découverte/Poche, 2012).
103Mauss, “Appréciation sociologique du bolchevisme,” 541.
104Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution,” The Journal of Politics, vol. 20, no. 1 (Feb 1958): 5–43. While Arendt argues that the revolutionary councils were “primarily the answer to political tyranny,” the workers’ councils were a “reaction against trade unions that did not represent the workers but the party’s control over them” (29).
105Ibid., 30: “Under modern conditions, the councils are the only democratic alternative we know to the party system, and the principles on which they are based stand in sharp opposition to the principles of the party system in many respects.”
106See Part 3, Proposition 5.
107Karl Marx, “Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association.” The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 518.
108Ibid.
109Ibid.
110Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France.” The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 629.
1See Chapter 7.
2See the end of Chapter 6.
3Vincent Descombes, Les Embarras de l’identité (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), 245 (our emphasis).
4See Marcel Mauss, Essais de sociologie (Paris: Le Seuil, 1971).
5“Institution,” l’Encyclopédie philosophique universelle, vol. 2, Les Notions philosophiques.
6The active significance of the word is retained in the French verb instituer, which designates the establishment of a standard of action, the establishment of a legitimate power, the delegation of a title or power to someone, or the act of training or educating a natural being in the art of self-regulation. It is precisely this last meaning that Montaigne adopts in his essay titled “On Educating Children.” See Michel de Montaigne, “Chapter 26: On Educating Children,” The Complete Essays (London: Penguin Classics, 2003).
7See Chaïm Perelman, Droit, morale, philosophie (Paris: LGDJ, 1968).
8Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, trans. W.D. Halls (New York: The Free Press, 1982), 45
9Qtd. in Dictionnaire de la pensée sociologique (Paris: PUF, 2005), 360.
10The German verb vorfinden, which belongs to the language of Hegel and Marx (as we will discuss later in this chapter), is especially apt in this context.
11Mauss, Essais de sociologie, 16 (our emphasis).
12Ibid., 16–17.
13Ibid., 17.
14Ibid.
15Ibid., 26.
16Ibid., 28–29.
17Max Weber, Economy and Society: an Outline of Interpretative Sociology, vol. 1, trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 52.
18Ibid., 50.
19Ibid., 51.
20Ibid., 54.
21Ibid., 53.
22Ibid., 92. Weber here introduces the concept of “constitution” in a non-juridical sense to signify “when, for what purposes, and within what limits, or possibly under what special conditions (such as the approval of gods or priests or the consent of electors), the membership of the organization will submit to the leadership.”
23Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: NLB, 1976), 600.
24Ibid.
25Ibid., 269.
26This example is borrowed from Alphonse De Waelhens, “Sartre et la raison dialectique.” Revue philosophique de Louvain, 3rd Series, vol. 60, no. 65 (1962), 88.
27Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 348.
28Ibid.
29Ibid (in the sense of Hegel’s notion of aufheben).
30Ibid. 446, 447.
31Ibid., 600.
32Ibid., 583. For Sartre, it is not by accident that this emphasis on hierarchy leads, in the case of the army, to “the archetypal institutional group” (ibid., 604).
33Ibid., 599.
34Ibid., 608.
35Ibid., 628.
36Ibid.
37Ibid., 606.
38Ibid.
39Ibid., 608.
40Ibid., 620.
41Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, trans. Jeffrey Seitzer (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
42For their definition of these three elements, see Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 357.
43Specifically the Spinoza of the Tractatus Politicus (1677) and the Machiavelli of the Discourses on Livy (1531). For Hardt and Negri, these two authors constitute a “minor line” of political theory that conceives of institutions in terms of social conflict, as opposed to the “major line” that is based on the social contract tradition (ibid., 355).
44Ibid., 358.
45Ibid.
46Ibid.
47Ibid.
48Ibid., 371.
49Ibid., 372.
50Ibid., 373.
51Ibid. It is in this respect that Hardt and Negri argue that the global governance of empire has “the merit” of “registering the increasing autonomy of the network of singularities, the overflowing and unmeasurable forms of value produced by the multitude, and the ever greater power of the common” (ibid., 372).
52Ibid., 374.
53Ibid., 375.
54Ibid.
55This was a definition given by Negri during the seminar “Du public au common” on March 21, 2012.
56Hardt and Negri, Declaration, 51.
57Ibid., 51–56.
58Ibid., 65.
59Ibid., 53.
60This, at least, was what Negri said in his presentation on his and Hardt’s book Commonwealth during a seminar titled “Du public au commun” on November 28, 2012.
61Paul Fauconnet and Marcel Mauss, “La sociologie, objet et méthode.” Marcel Mauss, Essais de sociologie, 17.
62Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 112.
63Ibid., 3. “The imaginary of which I am speaking is not an image of.” One of Castoriadis’s most consistent criticisms of Lacan is the latter’s reduction of the imaginary to the “speculatary,” “the mere image of,” and its consequent association with “deception” and “illusion.” See Cornelius Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth, trans. Kate Soper and Martin H. Ryle (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), 58–59.
64Cornelius Castoriadis, “Institution of Society and Religion,” in World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, trans. David Ames Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 311.
65Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 127. On this point, see Arnaud Tomès, “Introduction à la pensée de Castoriadis.” Cornelius Castoriadis, L’Imaginaire comme tel (Paris: Hermann Philosophie, 2007), 48–50.
66Cornelius Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” trans. David Ames Curits, in Cornelius Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, ed. David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 145.
67Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 388 (note 25).
68Ibid., 127 (our emphasis). Arnaud Tomès is right to observe how Castoriadis distinguishes the “first and radical” imagination from the second imagination, which is “reproductive or combinatorial.” See Arnaud Tomès, “Introduction à la pensée de Castoriadis,” 59 (footnote 2).
69Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” 152–153.
70Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of the Social, 124.
71Ibid., 110. Castoriadis is referring here to the “higher phase of communism” in orthodox Marxism.
72Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution of Society, 125.
73Ibid., 44.
74Ibid., 44–45.
75Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” 159.
76Ibid., 160.
77Translator’s note: in the original French, Dardot and Laval mark this difference as “la politique et le politique” respectively.
78Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” 157.
79Ibid., 155.
80Ibid., 159.
81Ibid., 168.
82Vincent Descombes, Les Embarras de l’identité, 244.
83Ibid., 244.
84Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” 169.
85Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 3. On these points, see the indispensable book by Nicolas Poirier, Castoriadis. L’imaginaire radical (Paris: PUF: 2004).
86Castoriadis warns against potential categorical confusion here: “one might attempt to distinguish in the accepted terminology between what we term the ultimate or radical imaginary, that is the capacity to make rise as an image something which does not exist and has never existed, and the products of this imaginary, which could be designated as the imagined.” See Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 127 (note 25).
87Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” 144.
88Ibid., 150.
89“The radical imaginary exists as the social-historical and as psyche/soma. As social-historical, it is an open stream of the anonymous collective; as psyche/soma, it is representative/affective/intentional flux. That which in the social-historical is positing, creating, bringing into being we call social imaginary in the primary sense of the term, or instituting society. That which in the psyche/soma is positing, creating, bringing-into-being for the psyche/soma, we call radical imagination” (Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution of Society, 369).
90Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 294. Castoriadis uses the psychoanalytic term “autism” to refer to a state of non-differentiation between the self and the outside world.
91Cornelius Castoriadis, “Psychoanalysis and Politics,” in World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, trans. David Ames Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 133.
92Castoriadis, Crossroads of the Labyrinth, 95.
93Castoriadis, “Psychoanalysis and Politics,” 134 (our emphasis).
94Vincent Descombes interprets Castoriadis’s notion of “implicit power” in this sense: “Castoriadis’ ‘implicit’ power corresponds fairly well to the French word ‘custom’ as used by writers such as Montaigne or Pascal. As in these authors, the word designates a habit, a second nature, and consequently an expressive power of the individual” (Embarras de l’identité, 247).
95Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth, 40 (our emphasis). This expression is a play on Freud’s famous phrase “where id was, there ego shall be.” See Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1965), 100.
96Cornelius Castoriadis, “Individuality, Society, Rationality, History,” in Power, Politics Autonomy, ed. David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 76. Also see Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 75: “we term praxis that doing in which the other or others are intended as autonomous beings considered as the essential agents of the development of their own autonomy.”
97Ibid., 76, 78.
98This difficulty is clearly perceived by Habermas, who argues, contra Castoriadis, that emancipatory praxis cannot impact the institution of social meaning since it cannot proceed from intentional collective action: how are we to consciously work to overthrow instituted meanings? For an illuminating re-construction of Habermas’s critique, see Philippe Caumières, Critique sociale et émancipation (Paris: Texteul, 2011), 45–46.
99Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth, 34: “indeterminacy and creation do no in themselves bear value.”
100Cornelius Castoriadis, “Done and To Be Done,” in The Castoriadis Reader, trans. David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 362 (our emphasis).
101Castoriadis, “Psychoanalysis and Politics,” 136: “heteronomous societies accomplish a Sinnschöpfung for everyone, forcing upon all the internalization of this meaning.”
102Similarly, the idea that praxis, while still a conscious activity, “is something quite different from the application of prior knowledge” seems to be directly inspired by Aristotle, since technical activity (poiesis) proceeds from prior knowledge. See Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution of Society, 76.
103Castoriadis, World in Fragments, 167. As Castoriadis adds: “Autonomy is not a habit – that would be a contradiction in terms – but autonomy is created by the self-exertion of autonomy, which presupposes, in a certain manner, that it preexists itself.” For Aristotle, this “definition” (insofar as one agrees to translate hexis proairétiké as the “disposition to choose”) applies equally to vice and virtue (which is why, moreover, one is responsible for one’s own vice or virtue).
104Cornelius Castoriadis, “Individual, Society, Rationality, History,” 76.
105Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth, 72.
106Castoriadis, “Psychoanalysis and Politics,” 129. Also see Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth, 13. By describing psychoanalysis as a “practico-poietic activity,” Castoriadis explicitly rejects the Aristotelian opposition between ends that are immanent to the activity and the external work of the agent.
107Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth, 83.
108Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 196. In this sense, the Christian God is not dissimilar from the demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus, in the sense that both are manufacturers rather than creators; the former because it produces the world from its own essence, and the latter because it imitates a pre-existing intelligible model.
109“Free associations, for instance, are not just a means.” Castoriadis, “Psychoanalysis and Politics,” 129.
110Plato, The Symposium, 42 (205b–c).
111Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution of Society, 196 (footnote).
112Castoriadis, “Individual, Society, Rationality, History,” 64. And in The Rising Tide of Insignificancy, 292, Castoriadis argues: “when I say that history is creation ex nihilo, that does not signify in any way that it is creation in nihilo, or cum nihilo. The new form emerges; it takes up what it finds lying about. The rupture is in the new meaning it confers upon what it inherits or utilizes.”
113Castoriadis, “Individual, Society, Rationality, History,” 64.
114Cornelius Castoriadis, “Done and To Be Done,” 370.
115Ibid., 37.
116Philippe Caumières, Castoriadis. Le projet d’autonomie (Paris: Michalon, 2007), 58.
117Consider, for instance, the text of Genesis 1 that is usually invoked to support this dogma: in this book it is not a matter of creation from nothing, but the creation of heaven and earth from a deserted and empty land, and from the darkness on the surface of the abyss. What we have here, then, is creation from pre-existing matter (the Hebrew verb bara, which appears in this text, can also mean “create,” “make, “model,” or “form”). As early as the fourth century, Emperor Julian the Apostate observed that Moses did not say that the abyss, the water, or the darkness were produced by God in the same manner as light: “of them he says not a word to imply that they were not already existing at all, though he often mentions them.” See Julian the Apostate, Against the Galileans (remains of the three books, excerpted from Cyril of Alexandria, Contra Julianum [1923, 319–433]): http://www.tertullian.org/
118Cornelius Castoriadis, “Time and Creation,” in World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, trans. David Ames Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 397.
119Ibid., 397–398.
120Castoriadis, Crossroads of the Labyrinth, 75.
121Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” 150. We emphasized the “from” (à partie de, or the famous ex nihilo) because it shows how working from the already given does not prevent the creation of radical being.
122For a detailed explanation of this phrase, see Dardot and Laval, Marx, Prénom : Karl, 202.
123We indicated in a note at the beginning of this chapter that this expression is best rendered by the German verb vorfinden, which belongs to the language of Hegel and Marx. This verb more precisely signifies the necessary anteriority of the instituted in relation to institution as an activity, an anteriority that classical sociology abusively detaches and isolates from its counterpart, namely instituent activity.
124Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. & Norton, 1978), 595.
125See Karl Marx, “Thesis on Feuerbach,” The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. & Norton, 1978), 144
126On this point, see Dardot and Laval, Marx, Prénom : Karl, 201–202.
127Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth, 13.
128Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” 597.
129On this point, see Chapter 8: “activity” as fundamental to the rights of the poor.
130Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 136.
131For commentary on this text, see Arnaud Tomès, “Introduction à la pensée de Castoriadis,” 89–142.
132Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 217.
133Ibid., 218
134Ibid., 110.
135For more on the analogy between language and a game, see Philippe de Lara, “Le paradoxe de la règle et comment s’en débarrasser,” Wittgenstein, métaphysique et jeux de langage, eds. Sandra Laugier (Paris: PUF, 2001), 97–127; on the notion of “use-based meaning,” see Jocelyn Benoist, “Sur quelques sens possibles d’une formule de Wittgenstein,” ibid., 153–179.
136Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 33 (§ 82–83).
137See Chapter 7.
138Qtd. In Bernard Chavance, Institutional Economics, trans. Francis Wells (London: Routledge, 2009), 26.
139Ibid., 23.
140Usually in the sense of economic game theory, but sometimes in the sense of sports (as in North).
141North’s definition of institutions, given in the context of the genesis of property rights, was discussed in Chapter 4.
142Equilibrium is understood here in the sense of Nash equilibrium, “in which no player can improve his situation by acting on his own (without cooperating with others) as the other players maintain their previous strategy” (ibid., 84).
143Ibid., 56.
144Ibid. We should note that Elinor Ostrom, as outlined in Chapter 4, also established a typology of rules based on game theory.
145Institutional psychotherapy is, today, a discipline that finds itself embattled by adherents of both behavorialism and neuroscience.
146Patrick Chemla, “Transmettre le mouvement de la PI, c’est récuser l’arrêt sur image.” Lecture given at the “Europsy” colloquium, 2012. For Tosquelles, transversality was not a strictly political concept, but was rather a “source of Gestaltung, a form in motion that gives way to vectors of singularity supporting the political dimension.” For more on the POUM, see the classic work by Victor Alba, Histoire du P.O.U.M (Paris: Ivrea, 2000).
147See Jean Oury, Le Collectif. Le séminaire de Sainte-Anne (Nîmes: Éditions Champ social, 2005).
148Jean Oury, Psychiatrie et psychothérapie institutionnelle (Nîmes: Éditions Champ social, Nîmes, 2001), 48.
149Ibid., 234.
150Ibid., 235. Oury cites here an article by Hélène Chaigneau published in L’Information psychiatrique of October 1970 titled “Psychanalyse et psychothérapie institutionnelle.”
151This is what Oury calls the “diacritical function.” For more on this notion and its articulation within the collective, see Oury, Le Collectif, 108–109, 117.
152At the commencement of the September 19, 1984 meeting of the seminar “Le Collectif,” Oury talked about how he used the word “collective” twenty-five years earlier in a different sense than its usual meaning: “it did not accord with the meaning of the term in Jean-Paul Sartre’s book, Critique of Dialectical Reason” (ibid., 11).
153Valentin Schaepelynck, Une critique en acte des institutions. Émergences et résidus de l’analyse institutionnelle dans les années 1960, Doctoral Thesis in Education, Paris-VIII, December 2013), 162. We are indebted to this work for the insight it provides on Félix Guattari’s contribution to the institutional psychotherapy movement.
154Félix Guattari, “The Group and the Person,” in Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews, 1955–1971 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2015): 206–234.
155Despite some terminological differences – for Guattari, langue is identified with “code” – this opposition is reminiscent of Castoriadis’s opposition between fixed sign systems (“code”) and the transformative invention of meaning (“language”).
156Guattari, “The Group and the Person,” 234.
157We should note that this theme of permanent recreation through praxis will, in Guattari’s later work, tend to fade in favor of the opposition between the “machine” and “structure,” as demonstrable in a 1969 text titled “Machine and Structure,” intended for l’École freudienne de Paris but which was instead published in Change: in its opposition to structure, the machine thus occupies a place analogous to that which Marx assigned to the productive forces in their opposition/relation to the relations of production. Guattari thus seems to increasingly adopt a certain “economism” that leads him to ultimately abandon the question of the institution.
158Maxime Quijoux, Néolibéralisme et autogestion. L’expérience argentine (Paris: Éditions de l’IHEAL, 2011).
159Both examples are from Quijoux’s book.
160Ibid., 223.
161Ibid., 266.
162Ibid.
163This is a frequent expression of Quijoux’s.
164This is the collective name given to a recuperated factory in the city of Neuquén, in the south of Argentina.
1See Teatro Valle Occupato. La Rivolta culturale dei beni comuni (Rome: Derive Approdi, 2012).
1Derrida spoke often of this “democracy to come” (a démocratie à venir). See Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 78–94.
2English in the original.
3Maurice Godelier, The Mental and the Material, trans. Martin Thom (London: Verso, 1986), 1.
4Jean Jaurès, L’Armée nouvelle, vol. 2 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1992), 459.
5Arendt, The Human Condition, 38.
6Ibid.
7Ibid., 69.
8Ibid.
9Ibid., 50, 51.
10Ibid., 115.
11Ibid., 38.
12Ibid., 49.
13Cornelius Castoriadis, Quelle démocratie?, t. 2, Écrits politiques 1945–1997, 402–403
14Ibid., 403.
15Ibid., 352.
16Ibid., 240–241 and 358.
17Ibid., 361.
18See Chapter 2, “The Democratic Common versus the Common of State Production.”
19Castoriadis, Quelle Democratie?, 391.
20Hybrid managerial forms, such as those found in non-profit organizations and local government, are all avenues to be investigated and explored.
1Catherine Colliot-Thélène, La Démocratie sans “demos,” 15.
2On this point, see Alberto Lucarelli, La democrazia dei beni comuni (Rome: Laterza, 2013).
3Article 544, French Civil Code. See: http://www.fd.ulisboa.pt/
4Marie-Alice Chardeaux, Les Choses communes, 274 (note 5).
5Martine Rémond-Gouilloud, “Ressources naturelles et choses sans maître,” 232–233.
6Marie-Alice Chardeaux, Les Choses communes, 273. For a distinction between a use right (jus utendi), the right to levy the fruits of a thing (jus fruendi), and the right of abuse (jus abutendi), see the clarifications made by Alain Testart, Propriété et non-propriété, 4–15. See Chapter 6, The “Illusion of Archaic Collective Property.”
7Article 578, French Civil Code. See: http://www.fd.ulisboa.pt/
8Ibid.
9Mikhaïl Xifaras, La Propriété. Étude de philosophie du droit, 99, 104.
10Ibid., 105 (it is in this context that Xifaras re-constructs the terms of this nineteenth-century legal debate).
11Ibid., 105–106.
12Ibid., 107–108.
13We will return to this point in our discussion of the “global commons” in Political Proposition 9.
14Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access: the New Culture of Hypercapitalism, where all of Life is a Paid-For Experience (New York: J.P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000).
15Fabrice Flipo, Michelle Dobré, and Marion Michot conversely emphasize the environmental impact and cost of the new technologies underpinning the service economy. See Fabrice Flipo, Michelle Dobré, and Marion Michot, L’impact environnemental des nouvelles technologies (Montreuil: L’Échappée, 2013).
16We are thinking in particular here of the recent promotion of bicycle and electric car rentals in big cities. But, of course, this is not a new phenomenon: laundromats and public telephones already operate according to the same principle.
17See Nicolas Buclet, “Concevoir une nouvelle relation à la consommation. L’économie de fonctionnalité.” Annales des Mines. Responsabilité et Environnement, vol. 39 (2005): 57–67.
18Rifkin, Age of Access, 11.
19One need only consider the example of the franchise, which does not own its concepts, brand, workplace operation, or marketing strategies (Rifkin, The Age of Access, 83).
20According to Denise R. Johnson, “property law could not remain stuck in a physicalist, land-centered theory that was irrelevant to or inadequately accounted for new forms of property.” See Denise R. Johnson, “Reflections on the Bundle of Rights,” Vermont Law Review, vol. 32, 255.
21See Anthony M. Honoré, “Ownership,” in The Nature and Process of Law: An Introduction to Legal Philosophy, ed. Patricia Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 370–375.
22Edella Schlager and Elinor Ostrom, “Property-rights regimes and natural resources. A conceptual analysis.” Land Economics, vol. 68, no. 3 (August 1992): 249–262.
23See the Introduction.
24According to the documentary Planète à vendre (Planet for Sale) (2013), which we referenced in Chapter 2, Ethiopia has sold 1.6 million hectares of land to foreign investors, even though 80 percent of the country’s population are farmers. In the case of an Indian company mentioned in the documentary, the state sold each hectare for only ten dollars!
25Marie-Alice Chardeaux, Les Choses communes, 237. While the work of this author has taught us a great deal in field of law, we disagree with her identification, or lack of distinction, between the “common” and the “thing” in common that flows from it. Without this distinction, it is impossible to free ourselves from what we call the reification of the common.
26Ibid., 274.
27On this distinction, see Chapter 6, “From Statism to the Creative Practice of Law-Making.”
28Marie-Alice Chardeaux, Les Choses communes, 237.
29Ibid., 313–314. “‘All’ is a plurality of non-individualized subjects, it is the ‘universal community of the human race,’ ‘humanity’ in its entirety.”
30Ibid., 314. Chardeaux invokes here the relativity of public international law in order to show how norms such a right, whose acceptance is subject to the goodwill of the states, “very rarely has universal scope.”
31It is revealing, in this respect, that the prefect of Rome responded to the occupiers of the Teatro Valle after a notary recognized the status of the Teatro Valle Bene Comune foundation as having no title for the disposition of a legal seat “without the authorization of the legitimate owner.” There could not be a better example of the law of property’s refusal to recognize the right of use.
32All the information on this occupation and its objectives was taken from the website www.bastamag.net.
33See Chapter 3, “The Demand for the Commons Against ‘Intellectual Property’.”
34See Actes des premières rencontres internationales contre la biopiraterie (Paris: June 15, 2009), 31.
35This is what Chardeaux recommends in Les Chose communes, 344.
36For a very different conception of what prevents use from becoming a right, but a conception that is still completely outside the law, see Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).
1The problem of political action in the context of today’s “destabilized” party system is not just a problem for labor, but a broader concern of all citizens.
2On this point, see Dominique Mezzi (ed.), Nouveau siècle, nouveau syndicalisme (Paris: Syllepse, 2013), 113.
3Sophie Béroud, Jean-Michel Denis, Guillaume Desage, Baptiste Giraud, and Jérôme Pélisse, La lutte continue? Les conflits du travail dans la France contemporaine (Bellecombe-en-Bauges: Éditions du Croquant, 2008).
4See Robert Linhart, The Assembly Line, trans. Margaret Crosland (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981).
5See Michel Lallement, Le Travail. Une sociologie contemporaine (Paris: Gallimard, Paris, 2007), 251.
6Danièle Linhart, Travailler sans les autres ? (Paris: Le Seuil, 2009).
7Philippe Davezies, “Une affaire personnelle,” Laurence Théry (ed.), Le Travail intenable (Paris: La Découverte, 2006), 256.
8Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1979). Also see Michael Burawoy, Politics of Production (London: Verso, 1985).
9Thomas Coutrot, Critique de l’organisation du travail (Paris: La Découverte, 2002), 63.
10See Yves Clot, Travail et pouvoir d’agir (Paris: PUF, 2008), 147.
11Thomas Coutrot, Critique de l’organisation du travail, 70–71.
12See Thomas Coutrot, L’Entreprise néolibérale, nouvelle utopie capitaliste ? (Paris: La Découverte, 1998), 220. Also see Norbert Alter, Donner et prendre. La coopérationen entreprise (Paris: La Découverte/Poche, 2010).
13Danièle Linhart, Travailler sans les autres?, 213.
14Cornelius Castoriadis, “Le mouvement révolutionnaire dans le capitalisme modern.” Capitalisme moderne et révolution (Paris: 10/18, 1979), 105.
15On this point, see Rudolf Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe (London: NLB, 1978), 269.
16Ibid., 298.
17See Danièle Linhar, Robert Linhart, and Anna Malan, “Syndicats et organisation du travail. Un rendez-vous manqué.” Sociologie et sociétés, vol. 30, no. 2 (Fall, 1998): 175–188.
1Qtd. in Pierre Rosanvallon, La Démocratie inachevée. Histoire de la souveraineté du peuple en France (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 340.
2Marc Sangnier, qtd. in ibid., 342.
3Jean Jaurès, “Esquisse provisoire de l’organisation industrielle.” La Revue socialiste, vol. 22, no. 128 (August 1895), 144.
4Jean Auroux, France’s Minister of Labour from 1981 to 1983, wrote, “just as citizens are in the city, so must workers be in their workplace.” See Jean Auroux, Rapport au président de la République et au Premier ministre (Paris: La Documentation française, 1981), 4.
5All efforts in this direction in France have met with the most determined opposition from employers, from the François Bloch-Lainé report in 1963 up to the Pierre Sudreau report in 1975, not to mention the timid Auroux reforms in 1982, which recognized the rights of workers’ representatives to be consulted via the works council (comité d’entreprise).
6French Civil Code, Article 1832. See: http://www.fd.ulisboa.pt/
7See Baudouin Roger (ed.), L’Entreprise. Formes de la propriété et responsabilités sociales (Paris: Collège des Bernardins, 2012).
8See Antoine Artous, Henri Maler, and Jacques Texier, Marx et l’Appropriation sociale, (Paris: Syllepse, 2003).
9Jean Jaurès, “Esquisse provisoire de l’organisation industrielle.” La Revue socialiste, vol. 22, no. 128 (August 1895), 136.
10Daniel Bachet, Les Fondements de l’entreprise. Construire une alternative a? la domination financière (Paris: Éditions de l’Atelier, 2007), 195.
11Ibid., 196.
12Ibid., 211. Also see Daniel Bachet (in collaboration with Gaëtan Flocco, Bernard Kervella, and Morgan Sweeney), Sortir de l’entreprise capitaliste (Belle-combes-en-Bauges: Éditions du Croquant, 2007).
13Isabelle Ferreras, Gouverner le capitalisme? (Paris: PUF, 2012), 10.
14Ibid., 20.
15Thomas Coutrot, Démocratie contre capitalism (Paris: La Dispute, 2005), 171.
1In other countries, the ESS is referred to as the “third sector” or the “non-profit” sector, but these terms are not purely synonymous. For comparative work on the non-profit sector, see the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University: http://ccss.jhu.edu/
2See Thierry Jeantet, L’Économie sociale, une alternative au capitalism (Paris: Economica, 2008). For a more critical approach, see Philippe Frémeaux, La Nouvelle Alternative? Enquête sur l’économie sociale et solidaire (Paris: Alternatives économiques/Les Petits Matins, 2013).
3Jean-Louis Laville, Agir à gauche. L’économie sociale et solidaire (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2011), 15.
4In 1999, an international study by the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University showed that the non-profit sector in the twenty-two countries it studied represented one trillion dollars in revenue, which is equivalent to the GDP for the world’s eighth largest economy. See Lester M. Salamon, Helmut K. Anheier, Regina List, Stefan Toepler, S. Wojciech Sokolowski, et al., Global Civil Society: Dimensions of the Nonprofit Sector (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, 1999): http://ccss.jhu.edu.
5See David Hiez and Éric Lavillunière, Vers une théorie de l’économie sociale et solidaire (Brussells: Larcier, 2013).
6Philippe Frémeaux, “L’évaluation de l’apport de l’économie sociale et solidaire.” Rapport de mission à monsieur Benoît Hamon, ministre délégué en charge de l’Économie sociale et solidaire et de la Consommation (September 2013), 20.
7Léon Duguit, Manuel de droit constitutionnel (Paris: Éditions Panthéon-Assas), 286.
8Laville, Agir à gauche, 48–49.
9Ibid., 25. Also see Matthieu Hély, “L’économie sociale et solidaire n’existe pas”: www.Laviedesidees.fr (2008) and Matthieu Hély and Maud Simonet (eds.), Le Travail associatif (Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris-Ouest, 2013).
10Bruno Trentin, La Cité du travail. Le fordisme et la gauche (Paris: Fayard, 2012), 422.
11See the OECD report, The Non-Profit Sector in a Changing Economy (2003): http://www.oecd.org/
12Frémeaux, La Nouvelle Alternative?, 111.
13As Jean-Louis Laville emphasizes, “the solidarity economy, which is often described as a new phenomenon, is in reality of form of resurgence rather than emergence” (Agir à gauche, 23).
14Thierry Jeantet, L’Économie sociale, une alternative au capitalism, 31 and 33.
15Ibid., 55.
16Philippe Chanial and Jean-Louis Laville, “Associationnisme.” Antonio Cattani and Jean-Louis Laville (eds.), Dictionnaire de l’autre économie (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 47.
17The economic measure of “growth” is not compatible with the wealth produced by these various associations. Wealth is generally measured in terms of the stock of appropriable goods, and by the production of goods as quasi-commodities – i.e., non-market goods whose value is estimated based on production costs. But a large part of the indispensable value the social economy provides to society falls outside this narrow mode of evaluation, hence the utter stupidity of quantitative estimates of the social economy as a measure of GDP. Numerous authors (Alain Caillé, Jean Gadrey, Dominique Méda, Patrick Viveret) have shown that growth in GDP no longer corresponds to increases in well-being in a large number of countries. In strictly economic terms, it is not possible to measure the “social utility” of the social economy or other forms of activity that participate in what economic jargon refers to as “environmental and social health.” It is an illusion to believe that it is possible to objectify relational and subjective phenomena that are inherently difficult if not impossible to quantify.
18Jean Gadrey, “L’utilité sociale en question. À la recherche de conventions, de critères de méthodes d’évaluation.” Jean-Noël Chopart, Guy Neyret, and Daniel Rault (eds.), Les Dynamiques de l’économie sociale et solidaire (Paris: La Découverte, 2006), 278. Also see Jean Gadry, “Utilité sociale.” Antonio David Cattani and Jean-Louis Laville (eds.), Dictionnaire de l’autre économie. For a synthesis of these ideas, see Diane Rodet, “Les définitions de la notion d’utilité sociale.” Économie et Solidarités, vol. 39, no. 1 (2008).
19Marcel Mauss, “Appréciation sociologique du bolchevisme,” Écrits politiques, 544.
20For a discussion of these “critical existential communities,” see Christian Arnsperger, Éthique de l’existence postcapitaliste (Paris: Le Cerf, 2009), 246.
1See Gosta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (London: Polity Press, 1990).
2Giovanna Procacci, Gouverner la misère. La question sociale en France (1789–1848) (Paris: Le Seuil, 1993), 24.
3Léon Duguit, Souveraineté et liberté, 167–168.
4Jacques Donzelot, L’Invention du social. Essai sur le déclin des passions politiques (Paris: Fayard, 1984).
5Ibid., 75. Also see François Ewald, L’État Providence (Paris: Grasset, 1986).
6This phrase, la “société assurantielle,” comes from François Ewald.
7Alain Supiot, “À propos d’un centenaire. La dimension juridique de la doctrine sociale de l’Église.” Droit social, no. 12 (December 1991): 916–925.
8Robert Castel and Claudine Haroche, Propriété privée, propriété sociale, propriété de soi. Entretiens sur la construction de l’individu modern (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 83 and 96; and Robert Castel, Les Métamorphoses de la question sociale, 363.
9Translator’s note: paritarisme refers to a principle of co-management that includes an equal number of employee and employer representatives.
10See Thomas H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship and Social Development (Garden City: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1965).
11Bruno Trentin, La Cité du travail.
1See, for example, Anton Pannekoek, “Public Ownership and Common Ownership,” Western Socialist (1947).
2Such was not the case early on: the main proponents of public services in the 1880s were the “possibilists,” according to the derisive term used by the statist Jules Guesde. For these proponents of communal socialism, who were truly the heirs to Proudhon, the local extension of public services was strategically central. See Paul Brousse, La Propriété collective et les services publics (Bordeaux: Le Bord de l’eau, 2011 [1910]).
3Earlier critics of the state have, in this respect, tended to become the instruments of private power. A significant portion of the decentralized, self-governing left of the 1970s was converted to new ideals of capitalist management in the 1990s. We therefore understand how delicate a matter it is to advocate for public service reforms, given the existing state of power relations.
4Jean Jaurès, “L’État socialiste et les fonctionnaires.” La Revue socialiste, vol. 21, no. 124 (April 1895), 392.
5This decision about the “fundamental” nature of rights and what needs are “essential” is, of course, a historical matter determined by political struggles, social mobilization, local values, etc., and is not determined by the nature of the goods in question themselves (as dominant economic theory would have it), or the objective nature of needs (as is the sociological view). See Jacques Fournier, L’Économie des besoins. Une nouvelle approche du service public (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2013).
6See “Record of Marx’s Speeches on General Education,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 21: 1867–71 (New York: International Publishers, 1985), 398.
7Translator’s note: the most common English translation of this phrase is “ubiquitous organ.” See Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 629.
8The Justinian Code uses the phrase obsequium civilium munerum to designate the charge of someone who holds a public office.
9Qtd. in Léon Duguit, L’État, le Droit objectif et la Loi positive (Paris: Dalloz, 2003), 2.
10Léon Duguit, Manuel de droit constitutionnel, 73.
11Ibid., 77.
12Ibid., 74.
13One of the worst consequences of neoliberal public service reform is the destruction of the “spirit of public service” as encouraged by the New Public Management. The destruction of this spirit is largely based on the hyper-utilitarian approach favored by Public Choice theorists who see individuals in the most rudimentary egotistical terms.
14Léon Duguit, Manuel de droit constitutionnel, 185.
15Ibid., 186.
16Émile Durkheim, Leçons de sociologie (Paris: PUF, 1990), 117.
17Ibid., 136.
18Maxime Leroy, Syndicats et services publics (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1909), xi. Leroy favors a Saint-Simonian approach in which the state is reduced to the role of technical “manager” run by professional unions.
19Duguit’s idealism is never more obvious than when he is scandalized by the fact that the state does not provide work for all able-bodied adults, or when he demands state protection against exploitation: “it is unacceptable that one who works for another should be exploited by his employer and be obliged to accept starvation wages or perform work beyond his capacity. It is the state’s duty to create laws that protect labor. By enacting such laws, it merely fulfills its obligation to ensure the free development of each individual’s physical activity (Manuel de droit constitutionnel, 299).
20Thus, when Duguit argues that the products of the state should not be regarded as the property of the state, he mistakes his wishes for realities: “what we call state property (le patrimoine de l’État) is legally and socially protected because it is assigned to the public services,” as he puts it. What he overlooks is the fact that governmental authorities are only ideally obliged to act in the interest of the collective. As we have seen over the course of the past few decades, the state can also prey on public wealth through forms of privatization in which state actors are the first beneficiaries. See ibid., 79.
21Harold Laski, Democracy in Crisis (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1933).
22Ibid., 59.
23Ibid., 60.
24Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of The Individual in Public Services (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 2010).
25Pierre Bourdieu, “The Abdication of the State,” in Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 182.
26See Marion Gret and Yves Sintomer, Porto Alegre. L’espoir d’une autre démocratie (Paris: La Découverte, 2005).
27Luigi De Magistris, “Prefazione.” Alberto Lucarelli, Beni comuni. Dalla teoria all’azione politica (Vairegfio: Dissensi, 2011), 13.
28It was the Rodotà Commission for the Reform of Public Property Standards that proposed introducing the distinction between three kinds of property: common, public, and private.
29See Ugo Mattei, Beni comuni. Un manifesto (Rome: Laterza, 2012), 77–88 and Alberto Lucarelli, “L’Europa: La leggenda dell’obbligo di privatizzare.” Il Manifesto, May 1, 2010.
30Alberto Lucarelli, Beni comuni, 21 and 23.
31Ibid., 45.
32Ibid., 25.
33Ibid., 53.
34Ibid., 58. It is doubtful whether the introduction of the category of common goods into the Italian Civil Code will be the last word on the politics of the common in Italy. The Rodotà Commission’s ambiguous definition of “common goods” – which was undoubtedly due to the balance of power within the Commission – undermines the coherence of the Commission’s efforts. For it is impossible to reconcile the naturalistic definition of common goods, from which the Commission generated a rather traditional list of “common goods,” with the definition of the new category’s objective, which is the realization of the fundamental rights and the free development of each person, in the service of future generations.
35Alberto Lucarelli, La Democrazia possibile. Lavoro, Beni comuni, Ambiente, per una nuova passione politica (Viareggio: Dissensi, 2013), 31.
36See Agnès Sinai, L’Eau à Paris. Retour vers le public (Paris: Eau de Paris, 2012). Also see Alberto Lucarelli’s commentary on the Parisian situation in La Democrazia possibile, 151.
37See Anne Le Strat, “Préface,” in Agnès Sinai, L’Eau à Paris, 7.
1TIPNIS is an abbreviation for the “Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory.” It is a 12,000 km2 protected natural park, and the conflict that emerged in relation to the construction project in the park revealed the antagonisms within the Morales government’s electoral base. See Franck Poupeau’s discussion of these tensions within the Latin American left in Les Mésaventures de la critique (Paris: Raisons d’agir, 2012), Chapter 3.
2This is the phrasing offered by Mireille Delmas-Marty.
3On this point, see Chapter 1, “The Reification of the Common.”
4Alain Supiot, The Spirit of Philadelphia: Social Justice vs. the Total Market (New York: Verso, 2012).
5David Rose, Guantanamo: America’s War on Human Rights (London: Faber and Faber, 2004).
6Supiot, The Spirit of Philadelphia, 64.
7From this perspective, wages are “burdens” and social rights are “hindrances” to competition. The World Bank’s program for comparing national legislation, entitled “Doing Business,” tries to encourage the most worker-unfriendly, but investor-friendly, standards and practices.
8Antoine Garapon, La Raison du moindre État. Le néolibéralisme et la justice (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2010), 189.
9Mireille Delmas-Marty, Le Pluralisme ordonné (Paris: Le Seuil, 2006).
10Mireille Delmas-Marty, “Vers un droit commun de l’humanité” (interview with Philippe Petit), Textuel, Paris (1994).
11Julie Allard and Antoine Garapon, Les Juges dans la mondialisation. La nouvelle révolution du droit (Paris: Le Seuil, 2005), 11.
12See Garapon, La Raison du moindre État, 190–191. This development further illuminates our discussion in Chapter 7 on the ambiguities of common law.
13Antoine Garapon and Pierre Servan-Schreiber (eds.), Deals de Justice. Le marché américain de l’obéissance mondialisée (Paris: PUF, 2013).
14Jean-Marie Harribey, “Le bien commun est une construction sociale. Apports et limites d’Elinor Ostrom.” L’Économie politique, no. 49 (January 2011): 98–112.
15For a halfway-correct critique of this assessment, see François Lille, À l’aurore du siècle, où est l’espoir? Biens communs et biens publics mondiaux (Brussells: Tribord, 2006). While Lille does a good job of critiquing the neoliberal use of the category of public goods, he also thinks it is possible for the category to be used progressively. We think this is a mistake; it is the category itself that must be rejected.
16See Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, and Marc A. Stern (eds.), Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
17Ibid., 452.
18See “Biens publics mondiaux,” Antonio Cattani and Jean-Louis Laville, Dictionnaire de l’autre économie, 66–75.
19Kaul, Grunberg, and Stern, Global Public Goods, 453.
20See Joseph Stiglitz, “The Future of Global Governance.” Initiative for Policy Dialogue: Working Paper Series, Colombia University: https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/
21See Jean-Jacques Gabas, Philippe Hugon, Étienne Le Roy, et al., Biens publics à l’échelle globale (Brussels: Collophon, 2001) and Jean-Jacques Gabas et Philippe Hugon, “Les BPM: un renouveau théorique pour penser l’action publique à l’échelle mondiale?” Politiques et management public, vol. 21, no. 3 (September 2003).
22See François Constantin, “Les biens publics mondiaux, un imaginaire pour quelle mondialisation?” François Constantin (ed.), Les Biens publics mondiaux, un mythe légitimateur pour l’action collective ? (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 2.
23See, for example, the World Bank’s “Millennium Development Goals”: http://www5.worldbank.org/
24Pascal Lamy, “Vers une gouvernance mondiale?” Institut d’études politiques de Paris, October 21, 2005: www.wto.org.
25See, for instance, the United Nations Global Compact and its Ten Principles: https://www.unglobalcompact.org/
26Monique Chemillier-Gendreau, Humanité et souverainetés. Essai sur la fonction du droit international (Paris: La Découverte, 1995).
27See Mireille Delmas-Marty, Vers une communauté de valeurs?, 207.
28On this topic, see Marie-Alice Chardeaux, Les Choses communes, 221–222. According to Chardeaux, the notion re-connects with the original meaning of the term patrimonium (as that which derives from our fathers and their forefathers, etc.), and is therefore more of a metaphorical or allegorical term than a technical legal concept.
29See: http://portal.unesco.org/
30Sompong Sucharitkul, “L’évolution continue d’une notion nouvelle: le patrimoine commun de l’humanité”: www.fao.org.
31Susan J. Buck, The Global Commons: an Introduction (London: Earthscan Publications, 1988), 1.
32See: http://portal.unesco.org/
33The first article of the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights (1997) states, “the human genome underlies the fundamental unity of all members of the human family, as well as the recognition of their inherent dignity and diversity. In a symbolic sense, it is the heritage of humanity”: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/
34See Sompong Sucharitkul, “L’évolution continue d’une notion nouvelle: le patrimoine commun de l’humanité.”
35Jean Gadrey, “Les biens publics et communs des économistes.” La Vie de la recherche scientifique, no. 393 (May/June/July 2013), 23.
36Constitution of the World Health Organization: http://www.who.int/
37The 2008 ILO Declaration on Social Justice for a Fair Globalization, for instance, describes “full employment” and “decent work” as fundamental rights.
38Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization.” Political Theory, vol. 34, no. 6 (Dec. 2006): 690–714.
39Catherine Colliot-Thélène, “Pour une politique des droits subjectifs. La lutte pour les droits comme lutte politique.” L’Année sociologique, vol. 59, no. 1 (2009), 252.
40See Mireille Delmas-Marty, Le Pluralisme ordonné. Les Forces imaginantes du droit, vol. 2 (Paris: Le Seuil, 2006).
1See Chapter 3. This is what we call “diffusion from the outside.”
2See Dardot and Laval, Marx, Prénom : Karl, 318–319.
3Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 66.
4Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, The Principle of Federation, trans. Richard Vernon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 38. Drawing on the same etymology, Daniel Elazar combines foedus and convent (pact) to argue the combination of self-rule and shared rule is the defining characteristic of federalism. See Daniel Elazar, Federal Systems of the World: a Handbook of Federal, Confederal and Autonomy Arrangement (Harlow, UK: Longman Publishing, 1991), xv.
5Bruno Théret, Protection sociale et fédéralisme, 46 (note 9). Théret cites Thomas O. Hueglin, “New Wine in Old Bottles? Federalism and Nation States in the Twenty First Century: a Conceptual Overview.” Karen Knop, Sylvia Ostry, Richard Simeon, and Katherine Swinton (eds.), Rethinking Federalism: Citizens, Markets, and Governments in a Changing World (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995), 203.
6See Chapter 1.
7Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch,” in Political Writings, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 99.
8Ibid., 102.
9Ibid., 98.
10Ibid., 99.
11Ibid., 102.
12Ibid., 105.
13Ibid.
14On this point, we are drawing from the very convincing explanations provided by Catherine Colliot-Thélène in her essay “Pour une politique des droits subjectifs,” 118–119.
15For Michel Foucault, Kant’s “guarantee for perpetual peace is therefore actually commercial globalization.” See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 58.
16See Chapter 1, “Between the Vulgar and Universal.”
17Catherine Colliot-Thélène, “Pour une politique des droits subjectifs,” 135. Colliot-Thélène also references Durkheim’s interpretation of Kant (Leçons de sociologie): “the right of mankind to live on the earth implies the right of individuals to occupy small portions of the surface of the earth.”
18Ibid., 137.
19Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 131.
20Ibid., 132.
21Ibid., 133.
22James Madison, “Federalist No. 62, February 27, 1788,” in The Federalist Papers (New York: Tribeca Books, 2011), 178.
23Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist No. 9,” in The Federalist Papers (New York: Tribeca Books, 2011), 24.
24Qtd. in Arendt, On Revolution, 192.
25Ibid., 258. Later in the chapter we will see that Proudhon saw no fundamental contrast at all between 1789 and 1793, but rather viewed the latter as a continuation of the unitary and centralist trends begun during the former period.
26In fact, in their Declaration to the French People on April 19, 1871, the Communards specifically referenced the commune movement that had begun during the twelfth century. See Dardot and Laval, Marx, Prénom: Karl, 308.
27Ibid: “it was out of necessity, out of the pressing needs of the people that unleashed the Terror and led the Revolution toward its destruction” (377). “From the outset, or nearly the outset, the French Revolution’s trajectory diverged from its original course because of the immediacy of the suffering: it was guided by the demand for freedom from poverty, not tyranny, and was driven to act by the limitless immensity of the misery of the people, and the pity it provoked” (406).
28Castoriadis, Quelle démocratie?, 241.
29Arendt, On Revolution, 268.
30See Donald V. Smiley, Intrastate Federalism in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985).
31For an analysis of German ordo-liberalism, see Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 79–179, and Dardot and Laval, The New Way of the World, 75–100.
32See Jürgen Habermas, Zur Verfassung Europas: Ein Essay (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011). The expression “executive federalism” is borrowed from politicians in the Canadian province of Quebec, who use the term to criticize the federal government’s increasing use of intergovernmental conferences to bypass the will of the people as expressed in provincial legislatures.
33For more on this, see Gérard Raulet, “La crise de l’Union européenne : une crise de légitimité démocratique.” Yves Charles Zarka, Refaire l’Europe avec Jürgen Habermas (Paris: PUF, 2012), 98–102.
34Pierre Mesnard, L’Essor de la philosophie politique au XVIe siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1977), 578.
35Ibid., 581. According to Mesnard, Althusius’s entire lexicon is dedicated to signifying the warm collective feeling that endows every community with its unity.
36Ibid., 587.
37Ibid., 593.
38Indeed, it was through an opposition between the “network” and the “pyramid” that Antonio Negri introduced Althusius’s federalist thought in a session of the March 21, 2012 seminar “Du public au commun.”
39Proudhon, The Principle of Federation, 38, 39.
40Ibid., 39.
41Ibid. Rousseau’s characterization of the contract (“the total alienation of each associate, together with all of his rights, to the entire community”) is, for Proudhon, the perfect definition of a “unitary republic.”
42Ibid., 41.
43Bruno Théret, Protection sociale et fédéralisme, 41.
44Ibid., note 1.
45In a letter from November 2, 1862, during the period in which he was working on his theory of federalism, he summarized the fundamental idea in these terms: “if I began in 1840 with anarchy, which was the logical conclusion of my critique of the governmental idea, then I finished with federation, the necessary basis of right among the European peoples and, later, of the organization of all States.” See Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology, Iain McKay (ed.) (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2011), 686.
46Gustave Lefrançais, Le Mouvement communaliste à Paris en 1871 (Cœuvres-et-Valsery: Ressouvenances, 2001), 197.
47Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Address of the Central Authority to the League, March 1850,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Collected Works, Volume 10: 1849–51 (New York: International Publishers, 1978), 285. Hannah Arendt cites this passage in her essay “On Revolution” (249, note 64), but she was mistaken in her assertion that this text was drafted two years after The Civil War in France (though this does not detract from the relevance of her criticism of the text).
48Ibid., 286 (note).
49Proudhon, De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières, 288.
50Ibid., 293.
51Ibid., 298.
52Ibid., 287.
53Ibid., 90.
54Ibid., 83.
55See Chapter 9, “Federalism as Social and Political Organization.”
56See Chapter 1, “Co-Activity as the Basis of Political Obligation.”
57Hannah Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience on Violence, Thoughts on Politics and Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 229, 230.
58Ibid., 232.
59Qtd in Arendt, On Revolution, 245.
60Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” 233.
61Catherine Colliot-Thélène, La Démocratie sans “demos,” 179.
62According to Soysal Yasemin Nuhoglu, Limits of Citizenship (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press) 1994, 3 (qtd. in ibid., 175), this type of transnational community is, in fact, already constituting itself.
63“City citizenship” refers to the historical experience of the bourgeoisie who took part in the management of public affairs in medieval towns. For the emergent bourgeoisie, this form of citizenship preceded national citizenship. For more on the Kantian distinctions between various forms of citizenship, see Catherine Colliot-Thélène, La Démocratie sans “demos,” 120–121.
64Pierre Hadot, La Citadelle intérieure (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 227–228. Hadot quotes Marcus Aurelius: “as the Emperor, Rome is my homeland; but as a man, I am a citizen of the world” (our emphasis).
65Yves-Charles Zarka, L’Inappropriabilité de la Terre (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013), 45. Zarka’s essay tries to deduce a norm of unappropriability from a phenomenological conception of the earth as “soil” (sol) that necessarily ties us to a relation of belonging. Yet it is precisely the foundational character of this relation that seems problematic to us. Nevertheless, we do agree with Zarka that “one does not depart from the logic of appropriation by opposing one form of appropriation with another, i.e., public appropriation rather than private appropriation (individual or collective) (ibid., 49).
66Ibid., 86, 48.
67James Holston, Cities and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), qtd. in Catherine Colliot-Thélène, La Démocratie sans “demos,” 183.
68Catherine Colliot-Thélène, La Démocratie sans “demos,” 182.
69Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” 233.
1G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 6–7.
2Paul Krugman, the American Nobel Prize-winning economist, lucidly articulated this state of “intellectual collapse” as entirely evident once a president of France, and leader of the Socialist Party, endorsed the dogmatic “Say’s law” – the two-centuries-long foundation of liberal belief in self-regulation of the market, which states that “supply creates its own demand.” This is only one symptom amongst the thousands of “collapses” we observe everywhere around us – in public discourse, in the comments of journalists and the editorials of the “serious” news outlets, in our businesses and governments, and even amongst some of our closest colleagues. See Paul Krugman, “Scandal in France.” The New York Times, January 17, 2014.
3We are hardly reassured by recent reports or position papers that warn us about how exploding economic inequalities are threatening global equilibrium and economic stability, especially when these reports come from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Vatican, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), or the Davos Economic Forum. See World Economic Forum, Global Risks 2014 (Ninth Edition), January 2014: http://www3.weforum.org/
4Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013).
5The main argument along these lines can be found in the work of American historian Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1952). Albert O. Hirschman has also shown how reactionary rhetoric is always manifest in three great schemes: perversity (“any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy”), futility (“attempts at social transformation will be unavailing”), and jeopardy (“the costs of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious, accomplishment”). See Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 7.
6François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: the Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 502.
7But we also know that on the eve of the 1848 revolution, Tocqueville, who had become aware of the strange dissemination of socialist ideas in Europe, reversed his forecasts. He even sounded the alarm to right-thinking Europeans: “danger de l’avenir: guerre de classe” (“danger of the future: class war”), as he put it in 1847. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Œuvres complètes, III, 2. (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 727. Later, at the height of the crisis in his famous address to the National Assembly on September 12, 1848, he stressed the extent to which the stakes of the February Revolution were rooted in property and the demand for equality.
8Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 57.
9Cornelius Castoriadis, “What Revolution Is,” Society Adrift: Interviews and Debates, 1974–1994, (eds.) Enrique Escobar, Myrto Gondicas, and Pascal Vernay (New York: Fordham University Press), 144.
10Ibid.
11Arendt, On Revolution, 32.
12Ibid., 33.
13Ibid., 39–40.
14Georg Büchner, Danton’s death/Leonce and Lena/Woyzeck, trans. Victor Price (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 28.
15Arendt, On Revolution, 51, 47.
16Ibid., 102.
17Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Idea of Revolution,” in The Rising Tide of Insignificancy, trans. from the French and edited anonymously as a public service (Electronic publication date: December 4, 2003), 288. See: http://agorainternational.org/
18Ibid., 290.
19Ibid., 290 (our emphasis).
20Ibid., 290–291.
21Ibid., 291.
22Ibid.
23Ibid., 198.
24Ibid., 202.
25We have, on occasion, made use of this Foucauldian concept in order to theorize resistance against neoliberal governmentality. Without speaking to the value of this concept as such, it seems to us that only a revolutionary project is capable of achieving what Foucault called “the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible.” See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 96.
26Pierre Aubenque, Problèmes aristotéliciens: Philosophie théorique (Paris: Vrin, 2009), 124.
27Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Lawson (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 12–13 (983b).
28This is what the Greeks called ho boulomenos – or “the first comer” – in the sense of “anyone who wishes may speak, whenever he wishes.” See Bernard Manin, “Direct Democracy and Representation: Selection of Officials in Athens,” in The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15.
29The current expression “evidence-based policy” is derived from the expression “evidence-based medicine.”
30We must not forget Aristotle’s formulation: “the good in the sphere of politics is justice, and justice consists in what tends to promote the common interest” (Politics, 112 [1282b]).