For a Cosmopolitics of the Commons
* Book: Instituting Worlds: For a Cosmopolitics of the Commons. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval. La Découverte, 2025.
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"Rather than believing that the resolution of multiple crises will come from states or from a "international community" now in disarray, it is vital to invent a new politics of peoples beyond the sovereignty of nation-states. To overcome our collective powerlessness, it is necessary to revisit the question of democratic internationalism, while renewing it from the ecological, egalitarian, and democratic horizon of the commons.
Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval defend the idea that a new cosmopolitics—understood as bottom-up collective action across borders—could help prevent the worst. This approach is inspired by alternative experiments and transnational practices that are emerging within ecological, feminist, antiracist, Indigenous, labor, and peasant struggles.
These movements are everywhere sketching a politics of the commons—institutions founded on the self-governance of living environments. But even though their democratic and egalitarian promises already outline a different political horizon, it is not enough to patiently wait for these small islands to multiply and aggregate in order to reveal their revolutionary planetary potential.
What matters now is to ask how to think about scales of action and their interconnections without falling into the illusion of vertical stacking. This is the fundamental strategic question that Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval confront in this book.
The challenge requires assessing the legacy of past internationalisms, understanding the self-imposed limitations of the alter-globalization movement, and recognizing the inadequacy of older varieties of cosmopolitanism in meeting today’s demands.
By working to compose a common world born from multiple ways of world-making, the cosmopolitics of the commons opens the possibility of a new, lucid phase of global mobilization."