Dear Leif, I hope you don't mind I'm sharing this with our list, this may not be an area I have thought true sufficiently, very generally, I've always thought that we should make sure we have pluralistic forms of democracy, and not just one forum, for example, now, our representative mechanisms have been hijacked, while in russia, it was the councils .. so the political commons itself could not be just one institution, but a plurality, keeping each other in balance and making power accumulations more difficult we also have different domains, the territorial, the places where we work and study, and our cultural institutions (which may be a-territorial), and may require their own institutions .. I was intending to spend 3 years, as of January 2012, to study democratic forms On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 6:47 PM, Leif Olsen <[email protected]>wrote:

Dear Michel,

Coming back to our exchange a while ago, I wonder if you can give me some links to where you elaborate on 'political commons' - as compared to 'commons' from an ownership point of view. By this I mean 'how' this third force (i.e. non-private / non-state) shall engage in the political arena. Since politics is an area of debate and decisionmaking that affects *all* other aspects of society too, I see a need to establish a forum - a 'politcal commons' if you so wish - where such (i.e. non-private / non-state) interests can be represented. I call this 'Reference Parliaments', in which I see a significant philosophical overlap with the ideas you promote.

Nevertheless, I cannot really see from your writing 'how' you expect this third force to be politically represented. Can you elaborate on this?

Cheers /Thomas

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