Common As Air by Lewis Hyde

The Los Angeles Public Library's ALOUD Series presented Common As Air by Lewis Hyde on September 23, 2010.

About the book

Lewis Hyde's seminal work "The Gift," lauded by the likes of Margaret Atwood, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Lethem, keenly examined the intersection of creativity, economics and culture in order to construct an argument for the essentialness of art in contemporary society. Over 25 years later, Hyde's theory of gift economy as the foil of market economy has become even more relevant in our confusing age of digital rights management and open source software. With his newest book, "Common as Air," Hyde has returned to offer a critique of the idea that all creative work is "intellectual property" and to elucidate and defend our "cultural commons."

The question of how our cultural commons, our shared store of art and knowledge, might be made compatible with our modern age of stringent copyright laws, intellectual property rights, and restrictive patenting is taken up with considerable brio by Hyde. Moving deftly between literary analysis, historiography, biography, and impassioned polemic, the book traces the idea of commonage from its English pastoral manifestations and pays particular attention to the American founding fathers' ideals of self-governance and civic republicanism grounded in the vision of a public realm animated by openly shared knowledge and property rights that functioned for the benefit of society rather than individuals alone. Hyde leaps nimbly, if sometimes too hurriedly, from the Ancient Mariner to the human genome project, ultimately offering a vision of human subjectivity that is fundamentally social, historical, and plural. If the book is perhaps not wholly successful in showing how we might concretely legislate for a cultural commons that would simultaneously allow for financial reward and protection from monopoly, it is nonetheless a fascinating and eminently readable attempt to coordinate commerce and creativity in what he sees as an increasingly restrictive economy of ideas.

Hardcover, 305 pages.

SKU: 7693