Capitalism, the Commons, and Divine Right

Why it’s on the list: Peter Barnes’s 2003 Schumacher Lecture arguing that capitalism’s failures follow from the commons — air, watersheds, spectrum, the genome — having no legal standing, and proposing commons trusts with property rights equal to a corporation’s.

Where I heard about it

• Brendan McCord — on his Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List (March 2026), closing the Institutions, Property Rights, and the Law section after De Soto’s The Mystery of Capital — the entry that pushes hardest on who holds title to what nobody made. The full list is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

About this edition

A lecture, not a book — the Twenty-Third Annual E. F. Schumacher Lecture, delivered in October 2003 and published by the Schumacher Center for a New Economics. Barnes, an entrepreneur who co-founded Working Assets, defines the commons as “the sum of all we inherit together and must pass on, undiminished and more or less equally, to our heirs.” Corporations hold property rights and the commons does not, which he calls the modern version of divine right. His proposal is institutional rather than regulatory: chartered commons trusts empowered to cap extraction, charge polluters for use, and pay per-capita dividends to all citizens.

Connections

• Commons — the category the lecture is arguing has no legal standing.
• Tragedy of the Commons — the problem Barnes proposes trusts to solve, and the framing Elinor Ostrom’s work in McCord’s next section complicates.
• Externalities — the harm the proposed charge on polluters would price.
• Capitalism — the system the lecture is trying to repair rather than replace.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.