scholarly journals Public goods in Michael Oakeshott’s ‘world of pragmata’

2019 ◽  
pp. 147488511989045
Author(s):  
Maurits de Jongh

Michael Oakeshott’s account of political economy is claimed to have found its ‘apotheosis under Thatcherism’. Against critics who align him with a preference for small government, this article points to Oakeshott’s stress on the indispensability of an infrastructure of government-provided public goods, in which individual agency and associative freedom can flourish. I argue that Oakeshott’s account of political economy invites a contestatory politics over three types of public goods, which epitomize the unresolvable tension he diagnosed between nomocratic and teleocratic conceptions of the modern state. These three types are the system of civil law, the by-products of the operation of civil law and public goods which result from policies. The article concludes that Oakeshott offers an important corrective to political theories which favour either market mediation or radical democratic governance of the commons as self-sustaining modes of providing and enjoying goods.

2020 ◽  
pp. 009059172097991
Author(s):  
Maurits de Jongh

The commons have emerged as a key notion and underlying experience of many efforts around the world to promote justice and democracy. A central question for political theories of the commons is whether the visions of social order and regimes of political economy they propose are complementary or opposed to public goods that are backed up by governmental coordination and compulsion. This essay argues that the post-Marxist view, which posits an inherent opposition between the commons as a sphere of inappropriable usage and statist public infrastructure, is mistaken, because justice and democracy are not necessarily furthered by the institution of inappropriability. I articulate an alternative pluralist view based on James Tully’s work, which discloses the dynamic interplay between public and common modes of provision and enjoyment, and their civil and civic orientations respectively. Finally, the essay points to the Janus-faced character of the commons and stresses the co-constitutive role of public goods and social services for just and orderly social life while remaining attentive to the dialectic of empowerment and tutelage that marks provision by government.


2008 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 602
Author(s):  
Andri Gunawan Wibisana

AbstrakIndonesia 's Regional Representatives Board is planning to submit a Bill onenvironmental services. The Bill proposes the establishment of a newinstitution in managing environmental service fund, which is collectedthrough a user-charge system. This new institution is expected to be anindependent Commission of Environmental Funds Management, of whichcommissioners are responsible only to the President. The author finds thatthe spirit of the Bill has nothing to do with the needs to implement economicinstruments in terms of user charge. Instead, the Bill stems from the needs toprivatize public goods such as environmental services. The spirit can be seenin the forms of reference to Hardin's "the Tragedy of the Commons ", inwhich public goods are considered a form of inefficiency in the allocation ofresources that will eventually lead to the overexploitation of the goods. Inaddition, the spirit of privatization can also be seen in the Bill's proposal tohand over the tasks of the Commission, which include planning, execution,and monitoring, to private entities. The author argues that, with such spiritof privatization in the management of natural resources, the Bill is actuallyinconstitutional, and hence, should be rejected.


2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (50) ◽  
pp. E11771-E11779 ◽  
Author(s):  
Urvish Trivedi ◽  
Jonas S. Madsen ◽  
Jake Everett ◽  
Cody Fell ◽  
Jakob Russel ◽  
...  

Coagulation is an innate defense mechanism intended to limit blood loss and trap invading pathogens during infection. However,Staphylococcus aureushas the ability to hijack the coagulation cascade and generate clots via secretion of coagulases. Although manyS. aureushave this characteristic, some do not. The population dynamics regarding this defining trait have yet to be explored. We report here that coagulases are public goods that confer protection against antimicrobials and immune factors within a local population or community, thus promoting growth and virulence. By utilizing variants of a methicillin-resistantS. aureuswe infer that the secretion of coagulases is a cooperative trait, which is subject to exploitation by invading mutants that do not produce the public goods themselves. However, overexploitation, “tragedy of the commons,” does not occur at clinically relevant conditions. Our micrographs indicate this is due to spatial segregation and population viscosity. These findings emphasize the critical role of coagulases in a social evolution context and provide a possible explanation as to why the secretion of these public goods is maintained in mixedS. aureuscommunities.


Wild Capital ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 121-139
Author(s):  
Barbara K. Jones

By assigning economic value to the manatee, the costs and benefits associated with conserving and protecting them and their habitat can more effectively compete in the marketplace. Just as the Endangered Species Act assigned value to social benefits or Eleanor Ostrom demonstrated how governing the commons could turn public goods into private ones, assessing the measurable benefits of a resource makes both environmental and economic sense. The manatee’s charisma, combined with a recognized economic value, has helped us maintain a better relationship with the species and moved the manatee and its habitat to the frontlines of Florida’s conservation agenda. Their increased numbers and expanding human fan base have made them the face for improving ecosystem biodiversity and water quality, as well as encouraging better land use decisions along Florida’s rapidly developing coastline. Effective branding by well-respected institutions like Save the Manatee Club and The Ocean Conservancy has made saving the manatee a cause that transcends the local and hopefully has made co-existing with the gentle giants in their habitat something each one of us will readily choose to do.


2018 ◽  
pp. 135-161
Author(s):  
Annika Mann

This chapter reconsiders the emergence of political economy, biology, and literature as separate fields of research—disciplines—by examining representations of noxious generation in the politics and poetry of the late eighteenth century. In the debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine over the status of the French Revolution, both writers collapse biological theories of reproduction and political theories of social collectivity, depicting generation as the proliferation of embodied collectives stimulated by print. In their poems The First Book of Urizen (1794) and “To a Little Invisible Being, Soon to Become Visible” (probably composed in 1799), William Blake and Anna Barbauld critique that collapse, even as they reflect upon how that collapse is itself facilitated by the tools of poetic discourse, by form and figure. Both poets explore how the “visible form” of writing, the structure of the book, and the figure of the womb are complicit in the generation of new kinds of bodies in the world. In so doing, Blake and Barbauld expose the unavoidably shared ground of poets, political economists, and scientists at the very moment those writers began increasingly articulating their own separateness.


2019 ◽  
pp. 9-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Archon Fung

Though we all depend upon democracy, each of us in our public and civic roles is motivated to act in ways that deplete its sustaining conditions. In this chapter, Archon Fung proposes that one part of the solution to this problem is a thicker professional and civic ethics. The argument has three components. The first is a basic account of democratic governance that advances procedural and output legitimacy. In order to produce legitimacy, however, democracy has five sociopolitical “underwriting” conditions: commitment to process over outcome, social coherence, a spirit of compromise, responsive government, and epistemic integrity. Finally, different kinds of actors—politicians, media professionals, and citizens—have powerful self-interested motives to pollute “the commons” of democracy. Each of these role-specific discussions develops a set of ethical commitments that actors should adopt to sustain democracy instead of undermining it.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document