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Next in the series of posts on "The Tragedy at 50" (the last one is here ), we have Monica Eppinger's "Cold-War Commons: Tragedy, Critique, and the Future of the Illiberal Problem Space" . The abstract: Major twentieth-century social theories like socialism and liberalism depended on property as an explanatory principle, prefiguring a geopolitical rivalry grounded in differing property regimes. This article examines the Cold War as an under-analyzed context for the idea of “the tragedy of the commons.” In Soviet practice, collectivization was meant to provide the material basis for cultivating particular forms of sociability and an antidote to the ills of private property. Outsiders came to conceptualize it as tragic in both economic and political dimensions. Understanding the commons as a site of tragedy informed Western “answers” to the “problem” of Soviet collective ownership when the Cold War ended. Privatization became a mechanism for defusing old tragedie...

The Journal of Policy History  recently published Linda Nash's "From Safety to Risk: The Cold War Contexts of American Environmental Policy" . From the introduction (notes omitted): The late twentieth century marked the rise of “risk society,” to use Ulrich Beck’s well-known term . In Beck’s account, the seemingly endless proliferation of material risks to health and environmental integrity is the outcome of late capitalist modernization, a proliferation that society’s institutions are completely unable to control or address. But without disputing the fact that industrialization has introduced a multitude of new threats to both bodies and environments, their conceptualization as “risks”—rather than merely as “dangers”—was more than a choice of words; it marked both an important policy change and a crucial cultural and political shift. The dominance of risk discourse in environmental and health policy has not gone unchallenged. Since its inception in the 1970s, the assumpt...