‘He was,
indeed, in the habit of always comparing what he heard or read with an already
familiar canon, and felt his admiration quicken if he could detect no
difference. This state of mind is by no means to be ignored, for applied,
to political conversations, to the reading of newspapers, it forms public
opinion and thereby makes possible the greatest events in history.’ (Proust 2000: 469)
Proust, M.
(2000) In Search of Lost Time: III The Guermantes Way. Vintage
Books, London.
I am speaking
at Kings College on 29th May on Elinor Ostrom. I am hoping that lots of people come along
and we can have a good discussion, I have tried to pick a topic that goes
beyond what people may already know about Elinor Ostrom and tried to move
things on from what I have written about her before in my intellectual biography The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom and
my account of Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals.
I will try to situate her approach, to explain
a way of understanding where her work comes from and how it relates to the work
of other thinkers and traditions. Elinor
Ostrom, as is obvious, to those who have read her work or may have even met her
was a complex, diverse and, above all, unusual thinker. What I am especially concerned to do is to
situate her as a pragmatic thinker and to show that while we can never escape
ideology and ideological readings of her work are tempting, her pragmatism
makes her particularly interesting and important. Pragmatism, of course, can never be separated
from ideology but my point is that if we come to a thinker in the spirit of
Proust’s words, looking for confirmation of our pre-existing beliefs and biases,
this may be unproductive.
Here I
will introduce Elinor Ostrom’s work, if you are already familiar you can
probably skip this. I will suggest that
she is a difficult thinker to ‘situate’, she doesn’t quite fit in with an
established cannon or tradition, there is always an excess or supplement or
contradiction in placing her.
I will go
on to look at the fact that ideological readings of her work can be tempting.
I will
outline briefly that while viewing her as liberal thinker how Paul Dragos
Alligica shows to my mind quite convincingly that she has a strong affinity with
the American philosopher John Dewey.
WHO WAS
ELINOR OSTROM.
Elinor
Ostrom (1933-2012) was the first and so far the only woman to win a Nobel Prize
in economics. Strictly speaking there is
no specific economics nobel but the Swedish Royal Bank Prize is by convention described
as such! She was awarded it, sharing
with another institutional economist Williamson, for her work on commons. Commons are collectively owned resources. In 1968 the biologist Garrett Hardin published
The Tragedy of the Commons in the journal Science. He suggested that common ownership would
inevitably lead to the destruction of the environment. He argued that commons, for example, fields,
fisheries or forests, should be privatised or controlled by the state, rather
than continuing as collectively community owned property. Elinor Ostrom while taking Hardin’s thesis
seriously argued that commons were not always tragic, she found many examples
of commons that had been sustained sometimes over centuries. Her body of work dealt with researching how
commons could be maintained and focussed on locally agreed sets of conservation
rules which created ecologically sustainable institutions for resource management. Her work built strongly on that of her
husband Vincent Ostrom. Intriguingly
they took a methodologically individualist approach to social phenomena but worked
in a collective manner. The fact that
she dealt with a serious of problems that concerned many on the left but drew
most obviously on thinkers normally conceived as on the right, most significantly,
James Buchanan, even at this level of brief description brings a pleasing challenge
to all who would describe her work with certainty and simplicity.
IDEOLOGY
Ideology
is a difficult term. First like many
terms in political science it can be used in a pejorative sense like ‘imperialism’,
‘fascism’ or perhaps ‘statist’. Equally
where it has been used to analyse rather than insult, its complexity makes it
difficult to pin down. I believe the
Marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton wrote that is was the second most diversely
defined term in the English language the first being ‘nature’. Positively and simply it might denote a
political or philosophical discourse based on a set of linked concepts. Socialism, green politics (sometimes termed
ecologism), liberalism, conservatism and fascism are all in this sense ideologies. I am using it here to include this notion of
a relatively stable set of ideas that provide a political and, inevitably, a
philosophical worldview. I am also using
it in the sense of a group identity, like Proust’s character we seek to read
what we already know and to take comfort from such reading!
So those
of us, on the left, who are enthused with the commons and angry about its
enclosure (which incidentally continues in the 21st century), have
an obvious ideological excitement about Elinor Ostrom’s work. Yet read most accounts of her and they are
full of free market Austrian economists such as Frank Knight, James Buchanan
and Hayek. She certainly can be understood
with reference to ‘classic liberalism’. But,
in turn, she subverts so much of what is seen as liberalism including the notion
of undiluted self-interest and the primacy of private property.
OSTROM AND
DEWEY.
Paul Dragos
Aligica, who was a student of the Ostroms, has written extensively on their
legacy. While he stresses the liberal
aspect of their work, they rejected state solutions where community action was
possible, which he sees as an approach where Hobbesian pessimism (which would
call for a strong state) is met with a (Adam) Smithean, and thus classically
liberal alternative, Dragos Aligica notes the strong connect between both
Ostroms approach and that of the US philosopher John Dewey. While Aligica does not claim Elinor would
have claimed to have been a follower of Dewey, many aspects of his philosophy
such as a focus on language, democracy and practical implications of conceptual
work, are shared with her. Aligica and Boettke have previously noted the sophisticated linguistic element of the
Ostroms’ work, which they relate to the pragmatists Searle and Pierce. Thus while sympathetic to direct democracy
and popular participation, values of diversity and ecological respect, neither Ostrom
sought to set up a system based on fixed and unchanging concepts.
PRAGMATISM
Elinor
Ostrom was a pragmatist in a specific sense that she sought to answer a problem
or puzzle, rather than dealing with broad prescriptions. Her approach contrasts strong in this regard
with Garrett Hardin. Ideological approaches
to the commons, either condemning or celebrating collective ownership, can be
contrasted with a pragmatic view that poses commons as a collective action
problem. This was very much her approach,
some resources can not easily be owned privately, they are almost inevitably
commons, commons can lead to degradation, so how can we work out ways of making
the commons sustainable.
THE LIMITS
OF PRAGMATISM
So often
we find that self-declared pragmatism is contrasted with the (foolish and dogmatic)
ideology of others. Ideology being used
in this way as a pejorative term which is challenged with ‘common sense’. ‘I am practical, you in contrast are enslaved
by dogma.’ This is not a move that
Elinor Ostrom made but nonetheless it may be impossible to entirely separate
pragmatism from ideology in her work or indeed in that of any thinker. An emphasis on practical problem solving provides
a contrast, broadly, with an ideological approach based on a pre-existing framework
which is defended. However, the kinds of
problems which are thought worthy of solving are conditioned perhaps by
ideological considerations.
Elinor
Ostrom should not be seen, in my opinion, as providing a flag to follow, a
symbol to pursue in support of an ideology but instead provides a set of concepts
for dealing with socio-ecological problems.
Ideology
might be viewed as closed, in contrast, her work and that of Vincent was always open to further reformulation.
SUGGESTED
READING
Dragos
Aligica, P. (2014) Institutional Diversity and Political Economy: The Ostroms
and Beyond. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Ostrom, E.
(1990) Governing the Commons. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Dr Derek
Wall is an associate lecturer in Political Economy at Goldsmiths College.
His books include The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom (2014) and Elinor
Ostrom's Rules for Radicals (2017)
