The slander of the commons

Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" is an influential example of a long tradition of justifying enclosure based on asserting the flawed morality of the commoners

Hautbois Common, Norfolk; John Chrome; metmuseum.org

In 1968, an American ecologist named Garrett Hardin published an article in the journal Science entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons”. The rather thorny question Hardin dealt with in the article was how to manage a growing population on a planet with finite resources. Its application to thinking about population growth has been less impactful than the parable from which it takes its title. The parable, adapted from a lecture given in 1832 by British economist William Foster Lloyd, describes an imagined scenario where an undetermined number of herdsmen share a common pasture. Hardin’s parable illustrates how the natural outcome of this scenario is the complete depletion of the commons.

The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons… As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, "What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?" This utility has one negative and one positive component… Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another.... But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit--in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

Hardin’s article has gone on to be cited more than 38,000 times. The titular tragedy has been taught in thousands of high school and university classes, is the subject of innumerable think pieces and videos, including one produced by TED-Ed that has 3.2 million views. It is considered a foundational truth when dealing with problems that require cooperative solutions. The logic goes that these types of problems are so difficult because all individuals involved are selfishly seeking to maximize their own gain. When everyone does that, the natural outcome is to deplete the world of its finite resources. We seem doomed to struggle against our own human nature in the fight for survival.

Hardin’s thesis, however, has been robustly disproven. A large body of research and commentary, much of it spurred by Hardin’s article, has shown that humans are quite capable of managing a shared common resource in a way that ensures its continued viability and the flourishing of the community. In fact, Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for her “analysis of economic governance, especially the commons” (becoming the first woman to win the prize) had already shown in her doctoral dissertation three years earlier how a local collective in Southern California had set up a public system to successfully manage their shared groundwater. Over the next few decades, her work demonstrated how collectives from a number of countries and societies, including Japan, India, Nepal, Switzerland, and the Philippines, worked together to preserve and maintain shared resources. She showed definitively that Hardin’s tragedy was not a foregone conclusion.

Hardin’s real commoners

Hardin was unconcerned with this line of work. As an ecologist with no training or expertise in economics, he seemed to have drunk the Kool-Aid of neoclassical economics fully, assuming without question that all the herdsman in his parable are acting to maximize their own benefit. Although it has been used as a justification for a rightwing agenda, including the privatization and managed economies of the neoliberal era, the framing of the parable and the interpretation is at odds with many free market, libertarian ideas of the supremacy of individual liberty. Hardin argues that it is the unrestricted freedom of the commons that leads to ruin, suggesting that the only solution is that society should agree to be bound by a contract which could be enforced by the government. Not your typical libertarian argument.

But the parable makes more sense in the context of Hardin’s original argument: population control. In fact, reading “The Tragedy of the Commons” alongside Hardin’s other work is actually quite horrifying. Hardin was a nationalist, white-supremacist eugenics advocate who believed that wealthy Western countries were in danger of being overrun and destroyed by non-white immigrants. The population problem, for Hardin, was that non-white poor people in poor countries were breeding faster than the capacity of the world’s resources, located predominantly in rich white countries, to support them. He advocated, in a 1974 article in Psychology Today, for elimination of aid—including food aid—to poor countries, stressing that rich countries were in a “lifeboat” and could not afford to assist others at the risk of capsizing or sinking themselves. If the poor countries had not planned and budgeted for their citizens, that was not the fault of America. Some tough love is required here.

Hardin returns again and again to his strained commons analogy in these discussions and his articles, appealing to our sense of rationality to try to make us see past his clearly white-nationalist agenda. His appeal to selfish human nature—bolstered by widely-accepted economic theory and dressed up in labored formal academic jargon—provides the veneer of an amoral, mechanistic analysis of the problem, when in fact his analyses and interpretations sit squarely on the foundation of a race war. This was made clear in an article that was also published in Science eight years before “Tragedy”. In the article, entitled “The Competitive Exclusion Principle”, Hardin shows all his cards. The principle “may be briefly stated thus: Complete competitors cannot coexist.”

What does the exclusion principle mean? Roughly this: that (i) if two noninterbreeding populations "do the same thing"-that is, occupy precisely the same ecological niche… and (ii) if they are "sympatric" that is, if they occupy the same geographic territory-and (iii) if population A multiplies even the least bit faster than population B, then ultimately A will completely displace B, which will become extinct.

Hardin’s stark worldview is laid bare here. The population-control issue is a matter of white survival. His use of the commons analogy is completely in the service of an agenda which seeks to limit reproduction of non-white people so they don’t overrun and extinguish white people. The “herdsman” he demonizes in his parable are stand-ins for millions of poor non-white commoners.

Puny and stunted cattle

This strategy of demonizing commoners or “uncivilized” people as a justification for taking their lands or imposing control over them is an old one. The entire Western colonial project was often justified using the rhetoric of civilizing the “savages”. The Industrial Revolution in England, which saw the enclosure of over six million acres of commons, required a justification, and the playbook of slander of the uncivilized poor fit nicely.

The peasants in the Middle Ages were able to avoid dependence on wages due largely to their use and management of the commons. Commons were plentiful in Europe. They were composed of uncultivated lands. Fields, marshes, streams, lakes, meadows, forests, moors, bogs, the so-called wastes, all were part of the commons. These sustained life and livelihood for commoners, “provided crucial resources for the peasant economy (wood for fuel, timber for building, fishponds, grazing grounds for animals) and fostered community cohesion and cooperation.”¹

So much of the land was in some way shared. You could walk across the parish from one end to the other along common tracks and balks without fear of trespass. Your children could seek out bits of lane grass and river bank for the geese or pigs; they could get furze or turf, go berrying or nutting in the woods or on the common.²

Up until the mid seventeenth century, the value of the commons was recognized and the rights of the commoners were defended by the public and by government. The common right was firmly established, indeed customary since before the law of the manor became accepted. The crucial dependency of the lives and livelihoods of the commoners on their access to and cultivation of common lands was also well known. It was also accepted that in most instances, enclosure hurt commoners, producing instability and dependence on wage labor. Enclosure enriched one large farmer at the expense of impoverishing twenty small ones. The utility and value of the small farmer with access to commons was defended, and the independence provided by common rights was viewed as a boon to society and the national interest:

Because profit did not come easily, farmers turned their hands to everything. Their wives did the same. Their dairies stocked the markets with eggs and poultry. The money they made was spent on shop goods for their families... But after enclosure and the foreclosure of mortgages, these families moved to other parishes (if they could afford a settlement) or they left, indentured, for America. The old lingered on in the village. All were ‘fenced out of their livelihood’, prey to the ambitious and aspiring.³

Thus, public opinion was with the commoners, and the government followed suit. But the tide slowly shifted in the seventeenth century, when for the first time there developed a “public argument in favor of enclosure even when it did cause local distress... bad enclosure, first sanctioned in the mid seventeenth century, found its most passionate supporters in the mid eighteenth.” Defendants of enclosure justified its ruin of the peasants by appealing to the national interest and the economy. The effects on the commoners could not be denied, but the poverty to which they were subjected was now viewed in positive terms, as it would lead to a population increase because the poor married earlier and had more children, thus contributing to the labor force and guaranteeing economic growth

Enclosure meant larger agricultural and manufacturing populations, greater agricultural production, stable grain prices. The traditional argument was reversed: now proletarianization, instead of damning enclosure and the disappearance of common right, justified it.

The advocates of enclosure also justified the land seizure by slandering the commoners. While they had historically been seen as simple, hardworking, generous, and kind, they were now painted as backward, lazy, wretched, barbarians, violent, and drunk criminals. Their presence on the land devalued it. Their skeletal cows and sheep and pathetic pigs took away grazing from other, more fit livestock. As William Foster Lloyd put it in his lecture that would be used a century later in Hardin’s racist arguments, “Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted? Why is the common itself so bare-worn, and cropped so differently from the adjoining inclosures?”

Clearly the commoners didn’t know what they were doing. Should they be allowed to destroy the land? Common right, recognized for centuries, was now tarred as a crime in and of itself. Commoners had no legal right to the land, they were thieves by their very existence. Those in favor of enclosure viewed the commoners as primitive, savages. They failed to see the richness of existence afforded by these waste places and the communities that were built around them. In most cases, they did not even speak to those whom their enclosures would force out. They relied on what they saw, on their own impressions. Commoners were in need of improvement and development; always a coded reference to turning commons into privatized, cultivated land. Commoners were in need of civilization. There is a paternalism in the arguments for enclosure that is present in all colonial projects. A denial of the humanity of those deemed less civilized. A noble cause to turn the backward people into good citizens, contributing members of society. They were spurred along in their contributions by over 4,000 enclosure acts passed by Parliament.

A gift of ninety acres to mankind

The enclosure movement, which created vast stores of private property out of the commons, also sought moral justification on another front. Surprisingly, as ubiquitous an idea as it is today, the notion of private landownership has been a relatively new development in history. Throughout antiquity, land had been considered the property of gods, and stewardship had been granted to various kings or rulers, who in turn granted it to others. This resulted in the “setting up of various forms of complex, flexible, nonspatial, overlapping land-tenure systems with significant collective and communal elements.”⁴ As late as 1500, only a few societies had set up private property systems. The private property system as we know it was largely the result of the enclosure and colonial movements, which set up a system of appropriation of land and designation of private property that was rare throughout history and only then being established in Europe itself.

John Locke; National Portrait Gallery, London; npg.org.uk

The justification for this system of expropriation was the political philosophy of John Locke (among others), who argued in the seventeenth century that private property was the result of a prehistoric “original appropriator”. “Locke’s original appropriator is the first person (presumed male) who, generations ago, took a piece of unclaimed land and improved it with his labor, thereby gaining the right to permanent, tradable, and heritable ownership of that land.”⁵ Locke’s treatise on property is a masterclass in mental gymnastics, in which he moves from admitting that “God... has given the earth to the children of men; given it to mankind in common,” therefore making it difficult to see “how any one should ever come to have a property in any thing” to asserting that by their labor, men improve the earth and so have the right to appropriate its products, and the land itself, as their property. Moreover, initially, such appropriation is valid only “where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.”⁶ Locke justifies not only the appropriation of land as property, but doing so without the consent of the commoners, by asserting that

he who appropriates land to himself by his labour, does not lessen, but increase the common stock of mankind: for the provisions serving to the support of human life, produced by one acre of inclosed and cultivated land, are.. ten times more than those which are yielded by an acre of land of an equal richness lying waste in common... And therefore he that incloses land, and has a greater plenty of the conveniences of life from ten acres, than he could have from an hundred left to nature, may truly be said to give ninety acres to mankind.⁷

It seems to escape Locke here that the benefit of enclosing the commons and expropriating land from the poor was not realized in any tangible benefits or “conveniences” to those commoners, but was realized only in profits for the landowner as the product of the enclosed property was sold on the market or exported. The benefit to “mankind” touted by Locke here remains abstracted and elusive. Indeed, we might more accurately describe those who profit from this system as propertied mankind.

Locke’s own motivations for arriving at this labored conclusion are questionable to say the least, as he had a clear financial stake in many enclosure and colonial movements, holding stock in slaveholding companies and working as the personal secretary and counselor of the Earl of Shaftesbury, who was an advocate of colonial policy, agricultural reforms and enclosure. Locke’s philosophy was used heavily as a moral justification for the enclosure and colonial movements. Despite any empirical evidence, his “original appropriator” theory of property ownership remains a staple of libertarian/propertarian arguments about the foundational and historical nature of private property.

The real tragedy of the commons

Photo by Master Unknown on Unsplash

Hardin’s “Tragedy” remains a particularly pernicious example of societal embrace of the individualism proffered by both neoclassical economics and Western capitalism. Although his telling of the commons analogy is at odds with the economic dogma that individuals acting in their own best interest will magically produce an aggregate good for all of society, the lesson taken by those who have picked up his analogy and run with it is just as harmful. For Hardin, it is the action of individuals that leads to societal (maybe even global) collapse. Thus, this collective of individuals must be willing to bind themselves by government contract, much as Odysseus was bound to the mast by his shipmates, to avoid their own destruction.

While Hardin’s use of the analogy and slander of the commoners was in the service of his own racist agenda, the historic slander of the commoners and discrediting of their handling of the commons was in the service of the development of the capitalist mode of production. Indeed, without the colonial and enclosure movements, the Industrial Revolution, and therefore the rise of capitalism, as a mode of production, would not have been possible. As Marx put it “The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process [of capitalism].” This expropriation was justified by an appeal to the flawed character of the commoners.

Herein lies the real tragedy of the commons. In painting individual selfishness as human nature and the main driver of societal and global destruction, the blame gets shifted from the true culprit: capitalism. The modern take-home message of Hardin’s tragedy is that we, as individuals, must curb our consumption, or our emissions, or our selfish use of public goods, lest we deplete and destroy the world. In reality, it is the voracious enclosure and plunder of public goods and commons by capitalists, who care nothing for the successful generational management of these commons, that is destroying our world. In contrast to indigenous or communal ways of managing shared resources, which depend on a knowledge and reverence for the natural cycles and interrelations of connected ecosystems, capitalists extract and exhaust resources, leaving soil infertile and ground barren, poisoned, and unproductive, before moving on to the next point of extraction.

No amount of watching how much plastic we use, or recycling, or biking or walking, or conservational efforts can compete with the sheer destruction of the earth and its resources by corporations that are fixed above all on short-term profits. Sustainable management of shared resources is antithetical to short-term returns. Individual selfishness is not the issue. Human nature is not the issue. Capitalism and its obsession with short-term profits is the issue. Until we manage or bind the behavior of capitalists—indeed, until we overthrow the capitalist system itself—no amount of individual effort will avert the tragedy.

1. Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004).

2. J.M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure, and Social Change in England 1700-1820 (Bristol: Past and Present, 1996).

3. Quotes in this section are from J.M. Neeson, Commoners.

4. Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall, The Prehistory of Private Property: Implications for Modern Political Theory (Edinburgh: University Press, 2021), 4.

5. Widerquist and McCall, Prehistory, 33.

6. John Locke, Two Treatises of Goverment (Cambridge: University Press, 2003). 285.

7. Locke, Treatises, 294.