Berkeley Program in Law and Economics

The goal is to represent the problem of the conditions of the emergence and stability of cooperation among interacting individuals, as we interpret the classical contractualist approach of the problem of the origins of civil and political rights, in terms of the model of commons tragedy. This is pursued in order to show that the formation of the civil and political rights follows a process with two stages: privatization and statization or subjectivity and objectivity. The privatization process is related to the emergence of the individual as individual throughout the emergence of the property rights as dimensions of his individuality. In this case, each individual is himself a scarce resource still it is a common property from the point of view of the others individuals. The process of statization is related to the emergence and stability of the cooperation among the individuals. The social cooperation is the next stage and it is a strategy that results necessarily from each rational individual in order to make objective the recognition by the others of his property rights that was subjectively constructed in the process of individualization or privatization. The social cooperation, by its turn, requires the design of a contract among the individuals looking for recognition in which each of the property rights is specified and also its amount. Besides, it must specify the design of a mechanism, the State, to which is attributed the task of being in charge of the enforcement of the contract. The characteristics of the design as of the contract as of the mechanism of the state depend upon certain axiological elements of the classical contractualist conception. Hobbes chooses as the main axiological element the property right to life and states the main problem is that of the preservation of the life. This means that here the goal is to make the property right of life objective or, in other words, that must be a mutual recognition of this property right. In order to reach this goal it will be acceptable a trade-off between others property rights such as freedom, equality and also the right to defend each one with all means, among them the life of the others.