Capital, Culture and the Commons In conversation with Professor Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University, and Professor Sanjay Seth, St Andrews

This event will centre on Professor Akeel Bilgrami's Capital, Culture and the Commons, a short but philosophically ambitious reflection on the relationship between shared life, culture and alienation.

Beginning from the question of how the commons are sustained, Professor Bilgrami challenges the familiar assumption that shared goods can be secured through law, regulation and the punishment of non-cooperation alone. Instead, he argues that such mechanisms depend on a deeper background of shared practices, meanings and forms of life: what he calls the cultural commons.

Bringing Marx into conversation with Foucault, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, the book considers how this background is undermined by alienated social relations, and why any recovery of the commons must involve more than institutional design.

Professor Bilgrami's remarks will be followed by an in-conversation discussion with Professor Sanjay Seth.

This is a International Political Theory (MLitt) event.