The question of common goods, or the commons, is one against which to test the robustness of the conceptual framework of the civil economy. Interest in this question has grown dramatically over the last few decades, even though the first systematic reflection in economics goes back to 1911, when Katherine Coman published “Some Unsettled Problems of Irrigation” in the American Economic Review. However, in discussing alternate forms of property in the Politics Aristotle had already made specific reference to common goods: “It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common; and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition” (II.5.37).

Goods such as air, water, climate, soil fertility, biodiversity, seeds and knowledge are posing hitherto unforeseen challenges for the future of humanity, in that they are essential goods for which it is practically impossible to find substitutes. Common goods have always existed, but only in recent times has it been acknowledged that there is a problem of determining the limit beyond which we begin consuming “tragedy”. The term is taken from Garrett Hardin, an American biologist, who in 1968 published “The Tragedy of the Commons”, an article that made him famous. Clearly, Hardin could not have imagined the heated debates that his essay unleashed. First, because not all types of common goods lead to the tragedy of depletion. That happens when one considers – as did Hardin – only rivalry in consumption and non-excludability of use as characteristic aspects of the common good. For example, in his 2012 book Infrastructure, Brett M. Frischmann talks about the comedy of commons to emphasize that open access generates positive externalities that are never counted in economic calculations.

Second, because the word “tragedy” creates misconceptions. In common use it indicates “ruin”, or “inauspicious outcome”, while Hardin used the term to denote a situation similar to the prisoner’s dilemma, in which the optimal solution cannot obtain as long as the agents act according to the standard of homo economicus.