Social Policy and Practice In The Commons

The underlying social policy imperative of the commons theory of voluntary action should be seen as nothing less than a renaissance of the Deweyian objective of recreating the endangered democratic public sphere by revitalizing community life. This is what “citizen participation” and “community development” and “coproduction” are (or should be) all about. Before the emancipatory and enlightening objectives of critical theory can be genuinely understood and applied to policy and practice in the context of the American commons, however, it must be translated fully out of the Marxian-Hegelian perspective in which it arose, and into the pragmatic context