Vincent Ostrom's Research Program in Human Association : Replacing Equilibrium with Yin-and-Yang in Political Economy

This paper uses Vincent Ostrom's treatment of government as entailing a Faustian bargain to explore some challenges that confront the research program he pursued in the theory of human association. To enable this exploration, I replace the standard resort to the law of the excluded middle with the principle of complementarity between opposites (yin-and-yang). In his substantive thinking, Ostrom worked with an ill-ordered soul and not a well-ordered utility function. This analytical scheme leads to recognition that both conflict and cooperation are endemic in human societies, with the crooked timber of humanity never allowing any good thing ever to be permanent. Ostrom was a realist or meliorist and not a utopian in his thinking about the potential for human association. Ostrom set forth a notion of genuine democracy that stands in sharp contrast with the faux-democratic ideas that are in promiscuous play today. As for the prospects for genuine democracy, Ostrom's scheme of thought would surely have counseled a sober skepticism