Tragedy of the Commonwealth and the Vision of Wendell Berry, The

Second, in his zeal to preserve the commonwealth's localized economy, Berry advances a standard anti-competitive protectionism aimed at leveling the proverbial economic playing field with tariffs, progressive taxation, and heightened restrictions on trade.26 But his boilerplate proposals lack virtually any empirical assessments and fail to articulate how his protectionist policies would avoid the prohibitive rise in consumer prices that have disproportionately and adversely affected the rural poor in every other economy in which they have been tried. Instead, his writings are conclusory and never account for the argument or even the possibility that his protectionist impulse may harm the very agrarian landholder and local community he intends to help.

Finally, Berry condemns the destructive effect of the legally fictional "corporate person," vehemently protesting the corporate ownership of land and the "folly" of conferring "personhood" on that which is not a person.27 But his arguments lack imagination, for he fails to imagine a state, a nation, or even a commonwealth without the corporate person as a legal construct. Neglecting centuries if not millennia of common law and statutory justification for the corporate form, he takes no notice of the debilitating legal, economic, and social implications of eliminating the corporate person.28 Moreover, Berry's objections collapse under the weight of their own inconsistency, for he denounces the corporate entity as an irresponsible, greedy "pile of money,"29 incapable of hope, remorse, humility, or "change of heart,"30 while simultaneously assigning to it the sort of blame, culpability, and responsibility that could only be ascribed to persons. Berry ignores this tension, content instead to cast aside hundreds of years of legal cognizance in favor of his empirically unsubstantiated hypothesis that both the environment and commonwealth would be better preserved if persons did not own land corporately because corporations are not themselves persons.

This article explores some of the legal and economic aspects of what Berry calls the "commonwealth" and highlights several tensions within his efforts to prevent its tragic ruin. It focuses almost exclusively on his essays and does not attempt the far more onerous task of distilling his vision of the commonwealth from his fiction and poetry. It pays particular attention to those select agricultural essays that speak most explicitly of the commonwealth, property ownership, land use, and the law's relation to the environment. After initially explaining Berry's vision of the commonwealth and land use,31 this article looks both at how that commonwealth is destroyed and how Berry hopes to save it.32 sections II and III offer an abridged catalogue of Berry's extensive essays and functionally allow the iconoclast to speak for himself. section IV then turns a critical eye toward a few of Berry's proposals, analyzing their relationship to common law tradition, the problem of knowledge, protectionist pricing, and the legal artifice of corporate ownership. In conclusion, the article questions the wisdom and healing power of his prescribed, homeopathic remedy.