The Forms of the Commons. Remarks on the Institutions of Social Cooperation

This essay is an attempt to move beyond usual conversations about the commons. Focusing on the forms of organization that the commons impose to those institutions meant to govern and reproduce them, it sketches an overview of possible ways of giving formal shape to the government of the commons. It will become apparent that all these institutional arrangements draw both on private and public law, thus showing that the commons are an actual mean to alter the private-public dichotomy that had run modern (bourgeois) law for so long. Social cooperation, reframing social practices as well as our actual mode of production, is considered as the fundamental social conduct needing for new modes of legal formalization (might they be informal) and new institutions (might they be non-sovereign).