ABSTRACT
According to the historian Peter Linebaugh (2016: 57) the ideas of the commodity and the commons were central to understanding the popular morality of the sixteenth century. The commons (or at least ideas of the Commonwealth) adopted a specifically humanist set of concerns implying notions of law, hospitality and related understandings of civic life. The class power of land owners, the politics of enclosure and peasant revolts helped develop a popular morality of ‘commoning’ (sharing, mutual aid and reciprocity) as opposed to the violence of the practice of enclosure. On the other hand, the morality of the commodity effectively withheld food and land from the poor. Similarly many of the ideas embodied in the English revolution of the seventeenth century rejected the ideas of the Protestant ethic, private property and the political authority of parliament for a more communal ethic based upon sharing and solidarity (MacLaughlin 2016). The historian of popular commons-based movements, E.P. Thompson (2017a) argues that the long and complex history of the commoner not only offered the story of revolt from below against hierarchical rule, but a different tradition of freedom from that of the individualism of liberalism. These features were especially present in the making of the working-class movement offering a democratic and anti-authoritarian heritage that connects the peasant movements of the past to the foundation of the labour movement. The idea of the commons offers a community-based ethic located within ideas of a shared common humanity; that stands opposed to the ethics of individualism and competition that are more connected to private property and hierarchical control.
