Beyond the Public and the Private: Thomas Spence and the Current Debate on Common Property

The purpose of this article is to show the concept of common property of Thomas Spence (1750-1814) as a genealogy of the current political debate about the commons. This debate is characterized by two main ways of conceiving of common property : one that considers the commons as a material heritage produced by Nature, and one that focuses on labour and proposes the concept of commonwealth for the wealth produced during production processes. Spence’s Plan reconciles the differences between these two versions of common property : in fact, being a project for the reappropriation of both the commons and the commonwealth, the Plan offers the conceptual tools to help overcome the limitations of the current debate.