Guido Calenda, Antonio Senta, LA PRATICA DELL’AUTOGESTIONE, 2017

Self-management, understood as an organizational practice characterized by forms of non-hierarchical cooperation, is a transformation of the socio-economic fabric immediately applicable in all times and spaces. Intertwining different disciplines, an economist and a historian demonstrate – also using experimental tests based on game theory – how it is not only possible but even convenient to replace the prevailing I-rationality, based on competition and personal interest, with an emerging we-rationality, based on solidarity and mutual help. Thus an unprecedented analysis is outlined which also confirms what libertarians have been supporting for over one hundred and fifty years, namely that the idea of ​​a cooperative society managed from below is not a utopia but a project at hand. As evidenced by the many self-management currents already active in the social fabric – from libertarian schools to production and consumption networks, from the advocates of common goods to the movements for degrowth, etc. – that are experiencing in a myriad of here and now the many forms of self-management.

Guido Candela, former professor of Economic Policy, is Alma Mater professor in the Department of Economic Sciences of the University of Bologna.

Antonio Senta (Fiesole, 1980), researcher at the University of Trieste, is a member of the scientific committee of the Berneri-Chessa Family Archive of Reggio Emilia and of the OttocentoDuemila series promoted by the Clionet association.