A Renaissance of the Commons | Nick Lewis: The Blog Cultures, like people, can run out of ideas. They can exhaust themselves in the face of events and ideas they can no longer predict, explain or control. When they do, they revert to the repetitive assertion of the simplest and most soothing of their founding ideas. These attempts to ward off the unknown through the ritualized assertion of familiar core beliefs are what anthropologists call a "ghost dance."

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In our time, the ghost dance can be seen in a celebration of laissez-faire capitalism, radical individualism, and the alienability of all human activity and nature for market consumption. In their time, these myths were invaluable. They helped emancipate the "common man" from ancient obligations to feudal overlords by giving individuals the power not only to elect their own representatives, but to freely sell their labor in open markets. Civil freedoms would henceforth be linked with market freedoms.

This is a very powerful and important analysis of the status of the Free Market Doctrine within the conceptual framework of Democratism. However, the authors, by proposing a wholesale alternative are committing an equally grave error. Particularly since they appear to be willing to pull together anything that even smacks of respectability in support of their ideology. Particularly their reliance on evolutionary psychology (mostly a collection of long tales about our reconstructed ancestors' needs) leads them astray. It is not without interest to note that Darwin's ideas on evolution through natural selection are widely recognized to have been influenced by the prevailing social economic orthodoxies of his time.

Social exchange theory is beginning to describe how people naturally make decisions and cooperate.

This is surprisingly reminiscent of the early enlightenment debates on the nature of freedom and moral value. However, the need to refer to human nature in any way makes this as much as part of the ritual of frame negotiation as the free-market doctrine it criticizes.

FMD is also ill-equipped to allocate resources and incentives in fair and humane ways. Yet just as the Enlightenment and market capitalism lifted the yoke of feudalism and unleashed unimagined forms of creativity, prosperity and civic participation, so the renaissance of the commons offers new strategies for resolving many of the paralyzing conundrums of market capitalism.

The authors are assuming that it is only the FMD that went from analogy to ritual, but they managed the same in a single paragraph.

That is not to say that I wouldn’t subscribe to this doctrine over the overhyped FMD but I would do so for political rather than ‘rational’ or ‘academic’ reasons.