According to Dardot and Laval, the common weal is not a material good, but an activity. This activity constitutes the political principle on which commons can be created and on which they can thrive. With this conception as their starting point, the authors condemn both private property, which legitimises the brutal behaviour of corporations, and state sovereignty, which collaborates with multinationals to create new opportunities when common goods are reduced to the status of a commodity and privatised. The task of the law of commons is to describe social relations between individuals, whose activity involves the use of resources held in common, on the basis of rules for using, sharing or co-producing them. The reviewer observes that, scaled down in this way, the law may be confined to reproducing relationships that are only apparently egalitarian, but in fact heavily tilted towards, and focused on, describing material conditions quite foreign to the ideal of equality and social justice that underpins the law that derives from modern revolutions.
Keywords: The common weal - Private property - Pubic property - Sovereignty - The law of commons -Dardot/Laval