Peter Linebaugh - “The Commons in Historical Perspective”

Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

From the early Christians to the European encounter with indigenous practices, to the utopian socialists and revolutionary communists, the Commons has been the elephant in the room.  Private property, economic so-called development, and soi-disantsocial progress have had to shoot this elephant, or enclose the commons.  As the chasm between the rich and poor gapes ever more widely and as the environmental mess becomes ever more poisonous, discussion of the Commons has returned as a panacea, as an aspiration, and as a practical proposition.  At its bicentennial this lecture reviews the worldwide battle between the commons and enclosure during the age of revolution.

Link to WEST FIELD AND WESTWOOD COMMON map

Peter Linebaugh, professor, a student of E.P. Thompson, received his Ph.D. in British social history from the University of Warwick in 1975.  A graduate of Swarthmore College and Columbia University, he taught at the University of Rochester, New York University, University of Massachusetts (Boston), Harvard, and Tufts before joining the University of Toledo in 1994.  He is the author of the acclaimed social history of crime and the death penalty, The London Hanged (1991).  With Doug Hay and E.P. Thompson he edited Albion’s Fatal Tree (1975).  With Marcus Rediker he wroteThe Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon, 2000) which has been translated into German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Korean, and with a Japanese edition in progress.  His most recent book is the Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (California, 2008), which has become a reference point in the international discussion of the commons. He has written for The New Left Review, the Radical History Review, Social History, the Times Literary Supplement, and the online magazineCounterPunch. He was an active member of the Midnight Notes Collective.  For Verso Book’s Revolutions Series he wrote Peter Linebaugh Presents Thomas Paine (Verso 2009) and for PM Press he has written an introduction to the republication of Edward Thompson’s William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (Spring 2011).  Currently he is working on the relation between commoning and Atlantic revolutionary aspirations of two hundred years ago.

 

Co-sponsored by 
the New Enclosures Research Working Group (Department of Development Sociology), Program in American Studies, and the Society for the Humanities. 

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Peter Linebaugh - “The Commons in Historical Perspective”
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