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Revolution, Art, and Ownership
Macmillan
August 2010
On Sale: August 17, 2010
318 pages ISBN: 0374223130 EAN: 9780374223137 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Common as Air offers a stirring defense of our cultural
commons, that vast store of art and ideas we have inherited
from the past and continue to enrich in the present.
Suspicious of the current idea that all creative work is
“intellectual property,” Lewis Hyde turns to America’s
Founding Fathers—men like Adams, Madison, and Jefferson—in
search of other ways to imagine the fruits of human wit and
imagination. What he discovers is a rich tradition in which
knowledge was assumed to be a commonwealth, not a private
preserve. For the founders, democratic self-governance itself demanded
open and easy access to ideas. So did the growth of creative
communities such as that of eighteenth-century science. And
so did the flourishing of public persons, the very actors
whose “civic virtue” brought the nation into being. In this lively, carefully argued, and well-documented book,
Hyde brings the past to bear on present matters, shedding
fresh light on everything from the Human Genome Project to
Bob Dylan’s musical roots. Common as Air allows us to stand
on the shoulders of America’s revolutionary giants and thus
to see beyond today’s narrow debates over cultural
ownership. What it reveals is nothing less than a vision of
how to reclaim the commonwealth of art and ideas that we
were meant to inherit.
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