Translation of: Commun.

Includes bibliographical references.

Introduction The Common: A Political Principle -- 1. Archaeology of the Common -- Part I The Emergence of the Common -- 2. The Communist Burden; or Communism Against the Common -- 3. The Great Appropriation and the Return of the "Commons" -- 4. Critique of the Political Economy of the Commons -- 5. Common, Rent, and Capital -- Part II Law and Institution of the Common -- 6. The Law of Property and the Unappropriable -- 7. Law of the Common and "Common Law" -- 8. The "Customary Law of Poverty" -- 9. The Workers' Common: Between Custom and Institution -- 10. Instituent Praxis -- Part III Nine Political Propositions -- Political Proposition 1 We Must Construct a Politics of the Common -- Political Proposition 2 Use Rights Must Challenge Property -- Political Proposition 3 The Common is the Principle of Labor's Emancipation -- Political Proposition 4 We Must Institute Common Work -- Political Proposition 5 Economic Associationism is the Pathway to the Society of the Common -- Political Proposition 6 The Common Must Be the Basis of Social Democracy -- Political Proposition 7 Public Services Must Become Institutions of the Common -- Political Proposition 8 The Commons Must be Global -- Political Proposition 9 We Must Institute a Federation of Commons -- Post-Script on Revolution in the Twenty-First Century.

Around the globe, contemporary protest movements are contesting the oligarchic appropriation of natural resources, public services, and shared networks of knowledge and communication. These struggles raise the same fundamental demand and rest on the same irreducible principle: the common. In this exhaustive account, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval show how the common has become the defining principle of alternative political movements in the 21st century. In societies deeply shaped by neoliberal rationality, the common is increasingly invoked as the operative concept of practical struggles creating new forms of democratic governance. In a feat of analytic clarity, Dardot and Laval dissect and synthesize a vast repository on the concept of the commons, from the fields of philosophy, political theory, economics, legal theory, history, theology, and sociology. Instead of conceptualizing the common as an essence of man or as inherent in nature, the thread developed by Dardot and Laval traces the active lives of human beings: only a practical activity of commoning can decide what will be shared in common and what rules will govern the common's citizen-subjects. This re-articulation of the common calls for nothing less than the institutional transformation of society by society: it calls for a revolution.