From the liberal utopia of self-interest

One of the underlying principles behind Adam Smith’s optimistic vision for the market society that was emerging around him was how markets worked to bind self-interested people together. People, liberated from the excesses of an absolutist state, could find a certain harmony through market exchange. Self-interest was socialising. The more people exchanged the more interdependent they became and the more they could empathise with one another.

Smith was never the ‘Greed is Good’ caricature some imagine him to be, but his liberalism represented a broader shift to a social vision where “self-love” was a mechanism to allow people to manage themselves without the need for an overly interventionist state. Neoclassical economics, while dumping many of the broader methodological commitments entailed in classical thinking, nonetheless retained at its core an optimistic view that the interaction of self-interested individuals would lead to stable, optimal, outcomes and guard against the need to establish an external authoritative body.

This is interesting to keep in mind when we turn to ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, an article Hardin wrote for the journal Science. Published at a time when the American environmental movement was developing around the theme of natural limits to growth, Hardin’s article was driven by the fear that population growth would bring about environmental catastrophe. In the article, Hardin likened the population problem to one of farming on common land. If you have five farmers grazing their cows in one common field, it is in each individual farmer’s rational self-interest to add another cow to their herd. The gain they’ll get – extra milk, extra meat – will be all for themselves, while the loss the cow causes to the land through overgrazing will be shared collectively. For that reason, says Hardin, it makes sense for each farmer to keep on adding cows to the common field. And this eventually brings disaster. With no limit, the cows soon do irreversible damage to the plants they live on, and ultimately the soil is destroyed. By following their own, individually rational self-interest the farmers see their cows starve, then they starve and ultimately the planet starves. It’s a great tragedy.

Encoded in this story is a very different idea of the way self-interest can play out collectively than the one portrayed in classical and neoclassical thought. Self-interested interaction is not the solution to the question of collective governance; instead it is the problem of governance. Unless we find a way to control, coerce, or incentivise self-interest to work in the collective good, it will lead to our collective ruin.

To the dystopia of rational choice

Hardin was not coming from a tradition of liberal economics but a different body of thought: rational choice theory. While rational choice theory is certainly a market-based reading of the social world, it works in a very different way to the market of neoclassical economics. It is all about trying to use markets for the purpose of intervention and control, and so entailed a radical remaking of the discipline of economics.

It is a vision of humanity born in the dark context of Cold War American fears. Here, think-tanks focused on optimal troop deployment, missile management and nuclear war-gaming were struggling to establish techniques of military dominance over the Soviet Union and what they saw as the cancerous global spread of communism. The ideas they were developing were not dedicated to explaining the universal, collective gains Adam Smith thought commercial society would deliver, but instead were focused on how control could be maintained in a context of unpredictability and highly imperfect information.

Through rational choice theory the parable of Smith’s self-interested butcher, baker and brewer freely exchanging their way to commercial utopia was replaced by the parables of the tragedy of the commons and the prisoners dilemma, where competitors – whether persons or some larger grouping such as nation states – are locked into a zero-sum, me-versus-you or us-versus-them competitive struggle. Rather than producing the optimum result by simply acting in their own interests, the competitors ultimately destroy themselves through their individually rational desires.

As such the problem of the commons – where public goods, like street lighting or clean air that are difficult to exclude anyone from enjoying – is understood here as a problem of managing self-interest. And this makes the issue of governance very different. The issue is not to simply implement market rule and sit back as neoclassical economics might imply. Nor is it a case of trying to develop institutions that ensure efficient markets as institutional economics would suggest. Rather it is about trying to harness markets to cajole and control the consequences of self-interest.

Neoliberal reforms have been accompanied by an enormous expansion in monitoring, surveillance, data gathering and coercion.

The great irony here is that rational choice theory is now upheld as a kind of libertarian anti-government fantasy that has led to privatisation, outsourcing, and deregulation. The commonly held idea here is that the era of neoliberal governance that rational choice is associated with is about forcing market competition. But revisiting the tragedy of the commons shows how neoliberalism has been about control, coercion and using markets to better manage that coercion. It is why neoliberal reforms – constructed on the idea of self-interested actors locked into a world-wide prisoners dilemma in everything they do – have been accompanied by an enormous expansion in monitoring, surveillance, data gathering and coercion.

Coercion, lifeboats and Hardin’s nativist politics

Beginning in the late 1940s, the political and popular concern with the poverty and instability of the Global South began to grow. This concern was not focused predominantly on the plight of the people though. There was little thought for the immiseration of a significant part of the world due to continued exploitation through (neo)colonial practices. Instead, this was a concern first and foremost with the success of the US-led capitalist economic order over its Soviet nemesis at the dawning of the Cold War. The US needed to ensure continual access to global natural resources to power both military and economic development. Rapid population growth in the global south, most importantly in India, threatened to both create scarcity and produce instability – the kind of instability that could result in poor countries going ‘red’.

This geopolitically infused neo-Malthusian concern was popularised by the widely read book The Population Bomb by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, published the same year as Hardin’s ‘Tragedy’. In response, Hardin’s proposals to address the rising populations of the Third World and the threat of their swamping the lifeboats of the First included the coercive control of women’s reproduction if needed. And not only women in the Global South, as Hardin was also deeply vexed by the migrant population in America.

Hardin’s work was rooted in a racialised panic about birth rates, one that was only sharpened through the lenses of the Cold War and rational choice. Throughout his life Hardin wrote for two audiences: the scientific community and broader public, for which he is recognised and lauded; as well as nativist organisations and smaller publishers in America. His work was supported by grants from the anti-migration Pioneer Fund and he published in far-right publications like The Social Contract, a nativist magazine founded by anti-immigration activists. It was in these magazines that he vocally expressed his concern that ethnic-European Americans risked being outbred by migrant populations.

This side of Hardin’s work is often absent from the way we study ‘The Tragedy’ today. But by showing how his use of rational choice reframed the question of governance from how to liberate self-interest to how to control it, we can see how it simultaneously obscures the racialised concerns over population during the Cold War period, and how it links to the coercive and neoconservative reality of today’s neoliberal politics. As Hardin himself wrote, “To survive in comfort, we must create a new conservatism”.