Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism

by Jeremy Gilbert

Common Ground explores the philosophical relationship between collectivity, individuality, affect and agency in the neoliberal era. Jeremy Gilbert argues that individualism is forced upon us by neoliberal culture, fatally limiting our capacity to escape the current crisis of democratic politics.

The book asks how forces and ideas opposed to neoliberal hegemony, and to the individualist tradition in Western thought, might serve to protect some form of communality, and how far we must accept assumptions about the nature of individuality and collectivity which are the legacy of an elitist tradition. Along the way it examines different ideas and practices of collectivity, from conservative notions of hierarchical and patriarchal communities to the politics of ‘horizontality’ and ‘the commons’ which are at the heart of radical movements today.

Exploring this fundamental faultline in contemporary political struggle, Common Ground proposes a radically non-individualist mode of imagining social life, collective creativity and democratic possibility.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Academia

272 pages, Paperback

First published November 5, 2013

Reviews

[Kai · Rating 3 out of 5]

really excellent introduction to the political stakes of "poststructuralism"/"postmarxism" w/an emphasis on connecting Deleuze and Guattari w/ Laclau and Mouffe...but it's hard to say it's more than that. Lots of connecting (Derrida, Simondon, Lazzarato, Freud, Lacan etc all brought into the fold) with very little distinguishing between what might separate their accounts of the political, so it feels a bit superficial. A bit surprised at the lack of engagement with Badiou, Zizek, Agamben, and other contrasting thinkers.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Indeed, age of individualism, where millions of individuals conspire to make World Wars, prison states, Gulags. Compared with the collectivism of centuries ago when people could move to whatever place they wished for without papers.

Sarcasm aside, anything short of Borg is savage individualism to Gilbert.

[Luisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

O Gilbert deve ser um dos teóricos políticos mais sucintos e claros que já li. O texto dele é muito bom de ler e fiquei me sentindo uma pessoa inteligentíssima ao entender as explicações sobre teoria deleuziana que ele fornece no texto. (Não sou tudo isso, o cara que é brabo.)

[Thomas Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

You'll get lost in this book - over and over again.

To be honest, this book feels like an extreme exercise in semantics. Which is fine, given the highly philosophical nature of it.

However, there really isn't much excuse for the rambling and tangential nature that it takes in various sections. It jumps from theory to theory and introduces widely disparate vocabulary without much contextualization or adequate explanation.

From my perspective, it fails in one of its main goals: to investigate how collectivity could form the basis for democratic processes or structures and delegates this topic a rather marginal role in its main theoretical conclusions, mostly referencing works by other authors including Olin Wright, Ostrom, and other participatory theorists.

I found that disappointing since it didn't answer much of anything, but rather just pointed to dynamics that could (not have) laid solid basis for democratic bodies or relations.

[chea · Rating 3 out of 5]

[review pending]