One characteristic of our current moment are initiatives that converge around the common, commons and the common good – that seek to reclaim common wealth or refocus law and politics on the common good. (1) The spectrum ranges from attempts to insulate the common good from democratic contestation and judicial control (e.g. by reinterpreting human rights as expressions of sacred natural law) (2) to initiatives and social struggles for the transfer of land, means of production and social infrastructures into common ownership and the creation of commons that are characterized by democratic and ecological relations between humans as well as humans and non-humans. 3 We set out to explore the renewed interest in the common good and the commons starting from practical and intellectual projects. We traced and discussed their roots in and connections with past and present collective practices in ways of living and provisioning, including Christian monastic traditions as alternative modes of existence. (4) And we explored their theoretical grounding in theology, philosophy, law, and in the humanities and social sciences more broadly.

To make sense of and to situate these projects and accompanying practices as well as to understand to what extent they point “beyond” liberalism or constitute a renewal of liberalism, we held several strands of thought to be particularly relevant for our conversation: democratic and liberal traditions of Catholic Social thought and their (largely unexplored) continuities and repercussions, inter alia in the work of Bruno Latour, Pierre Rosanvallon, and the writings of various participants in the workshop; the emerging scholarship on common good constitutionalism, represented in our workshop by its most prominent protagonist, Adrian Vermeule; (5) and the practice-theory of commoning, present at our gathering in Berlin with David Bollier. Works on style and design in various disciplinary and political settings that draw from thinkers of the phenomenological, but also the critical legal tradition were invoked recurrently in our workshop conversations. (6) They point to further possible avenues to understand contemporary engagements with the common(s) as relevant answers to present and future challenges.

Facing today’s profound failure of liberalism, deep economic inequalities, ecological crisis, social fragmentation and political instability, we wanted to encourage a critical and transformative re-engagement with liberal, democratic and communitarian traditions that indeed goes “beyond” established conceptual and political frames while avoiding postliberal regressions into imagined pasts or authoritarian futures.

To inspire shared social and political imaginations drawing from the utopian potential of a wide range of (sometimes radically contradictory) conceptual and political trajectories, we proposed a bold and somewhat unorthodox approach: to start from practice and experience. We invited interlocutors and listeners to jointly map projects of the common good and commoning, their situatedness in different traditions and their grounding in social, religious and philosophical thought across three interconnected and overlapping themes and clusters of questions: COMMUNIO, LABOR, CONSTITUTION.

Ways of life, styles of life | Communes and collectives, experiments in monastic and self-subsistent ways of life raise questions as to how they relate to broader society. How they understand their collectivity, underlying values and principles such as subsidiarity and solidarity, the rules that govern relations amongst members and their relations with the outside and the more-than human world. Do they aim to be seeds of wide-ranging social-ecological transformations or are they an expression of withdrawal from society? What are their underlying values or their collectively shared commitments that constitute the ground of mutual recognition as members of this community? What are the rules and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion as well as conflict resolution? How are human collectives embedded in their non-human environment, and what are the consequences of such embeddedness?

Modes of production, modes of collaboration | Projects of commoning as well as conceptual and political exercises in Common Good Constitutionalism are critical of political economy. While Common Good Constitutionalism strives to entrust a strong executive with protecting the weak from the life-destroying excesses of capitalism, projects of commoning center on common ownership, aim at deprivatization, socialization and democratization. Both approaches converge in their claim for greater autonomy of communities and collectives based on solidarity. Open and disputed questions concern pathways to socialization, individual rights and autonomy of the person, organizational forms of autonomous collectives, their governance as well as their relations with the surrounding market economy, and their protection from capitalist incursions, domination and colonization.