Commons Democracy

Commons Democracy is about an unacknowledged history of democracy in the US: we haven't seen it because we haven't known to look for it. It's a story that, like the familiar one, begins in the Revolutionary era. But instead of the tale of the Founders' high-minded ideals and their careful crafting of the safe framework for democracy--representative republican government--this book uncovers the democratic spirit, ideals and practices created by ordinary folk in the early nation: what I call "commons democracy." The rich variety of commoning customs and practices (by no means simply agricultural) across the colonies in the Revolutionary era offered non-elite actors a tangible and durable relationship to democratic power, one significantly different from the representative democracy that would be institutionalized by the Framers in 1787. Indeed, the commons democracy that my book describes cultivated a sensibility that countered the supposed ubiquity of the self-interested, rational, utility-maximizing homo economicus being charted by the liberal economists of the eighteenth-century. This democracy was understood in the late colonies and early US as the political power not just of the "many," some abstract "majority," but specifically of the common--ordinary folk. Ordinary folk practiced a democracy that was robustly participatory, insistently local, and roughly equalitarian. This idea, that political participation, power and direction could come from the bottom of the social order was an exact inversion of how political power had been long been understood by the elite. Commons Democracy tells the story of how the nascent commons democracy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century challenged and struggled with the liberal democratic state-building project that would triumph in the United States over the course of the nineteenth-century. This is a story about the capture of "democracy" for the official purposes of state consolidation and expansion. But it is also a story about the ongoing (if occluded) vitality of commons democracy, to remind readers of its availability as part of our democratic history and contemporary toolkit.