The Poetics of the Sharing Economy

“The Poetics of the Sharing Economy” analyzes the conflict between two rival paradigms of social value – the paradigm of monetary capital vs. the paradigm of infinitely shareable public goods – in the works of Shakespeare, Hobbes, Milton, and Locke. The aim of this project is to uncover the now neglected history of a fundamental conceptual clash that not only played a decisive role in the elaboration of modern liberalism, but which has also once again emerged as an urgent problem in the world of twenty-first century digital information capitalism.The idea that certain goods are infinitely shareable – "the more I give to thee, / The more I have" (Romeo and Juliet) – was a recurrent motif in the works of Shakespeare and Milton. Although this motif has resurfaced in recent social scientific work on the sharing economy of the open-source software movement, it has not yet received any of the sustained scholarly attention needed to explicate its import in the context of early modern poetic, political, and economic theory. As well as filling this significant gap in early modern literary scholarship, this dissertation also highlights the important contribution that criticism of Shakespeare and Milton can make to our attempts to get to grips with the fundamental moral and political dilemmas of the age of digital “surveillance capitalism” and “algorithmic governance”.