La forge conceptuelle. Le “commun” comme réinterprétation de la propriété

• Main Author: Etienne Verhaegen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université Catholique de Louvain 2015-12-01
• Series: Recherches Sociologiques et Anthropologiques
• Subjects: common; common goods; ownership relations; possessive individualism
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/rsa/1547
• ISSN: 1782-1592; 2033-7485

This article will attempt to show that given the multitude of significations and aims lent to the idea of “common” today, its reinsertion into the context of analysis of ownership as a central institution of social relationships contributes to clarifying the issues surrounding the movements laying claim to it. A necessary step in this direction consists in identifying the various conceptual and practical mobilizations of this idea, to grasp their originality and the particular light they bring to the renewal of interpretation of ownership. With this in mind, we propose four viewing angles or axes of interpretation which seem to us to be distinguishable in the literature and activists’ discour­ses. This ordering of the idea of “common” leads us to underline the internal tensions running through its various employments, contradictions between them and their impasses. We suggest that it is the intertwining of these conceptions and practices regarding the common which is the bearer of the societal transformations they pursue.