The municipal experience

By communal experiment, we mean three things. The first is political experimentation with common government. It manifests itself at certain moments in history, precipitating more or less durable political forms, notably in urban regimes. But it is also a potential feature of the historical future of any political society. There is therefore a discontinuous history of these experiences that cannot be circumscribed in the grand narrative of the history of sovereignty, and it is this tradition, transmitted, dreamed of and constantly reinvented, that forms, in its second acceptation, the communal experience. But it will also be understood here as a sensitive experience, in a sense shaped by the history of political emotions: how does making a commune affect the lives of those who commit or abandon themselves to it?
Once again this year, the seminar will take the form of a trans-disciplinary collective workshop designed to bring to bear on certain historically situated experiences (the Greek city, medieval towns, the insurrectionary Commune) the gaze of history, anthropology, sociology and political philosophy, in preparation for a theoretical questionnaire which, the following year, can be tested on the history of communal Italy.