Dai beni comuni al comune. Diritto, Stato e storia

This article – discussing the volume of Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Commun – is intended to work out the meanings, with their historical background, of a crucial discursive field in today’s political debate: the terms common /commons. The aim is to understand, following the multifold proposal of Dardot and Laval, how to overcome the evident indeterminacy of a word such as commun. The critical analysis of the extremely complex, and frequently fuzzy, genealogies of common /commons is a fundamental step in this intellectual program, indeed a precondition for elaboration of a convincing conceptual tool. This concept, in the perspective outlined by the Authors and now at the hearth of debate, is interpreted, according to a request for radical democracy, as a principle of self-government (to be introduced in all spheres of social life), based on conflicting practices which create new institutions.