Demopraxy does not emerge from a vacuum. It belongs to a line of thought that, spanning the twentieth century and the first quarter of our own, has attempted to restore to the word “democracy” its active, process-based, and constituent dimension -rescuing it from the fate of being a mere institutional form, a representative apparatus functioning through delegation and inertia. Figures differing in method and discipline align within this lineage, yet are united by the same gesture: shifting the focus from government as an institution to government as a practice.

On the levels of method and empirical evidence, demopraxy maintains its closest dialogue with the work of Elinor Ostrom. The American political scientist, the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics, spent decades documenting in the field communities capable of self-governing shared resources -fishermen, farmers, irrigation communities- outside the logic of both the state and the market. From this empirical work emerged a theory of polycentric governance: multi-level systems of government in which formal institutions and community practices intertwine and reciprocally correct one another.

The resonance with the demopractic theory of the two governments -a government of practice and an institutional government held in productive tension- is structural, not superficial. Where Ostrom showed that certain communities can self-govern, demopraxy takes a further step: it asserts that self-government is not a local exception but a general anthropological capacity, and that the contemporary political task is to make it explicit, recognisable, and reproducible.

On a philosophical level, demopraxy inherits much from Hannah Arendt, particularly from her analysis of action in The Human Condition (Vita activa). The Arendtian distinction between the repetitive "labour" of the worker and the initiatory "action" of those who inaugurate something new -always in plurality and always within the space of appearance of being-with- is the deepest conceptual substrate of the dichotomy between automaton and author. However, where Arendt remains within a descriptive and contemplative dimension -acutely diagnosing the crisis of action in modern societies but offering few indications on how to reactivate it- demopraxy configures itself as an operational project: it identifies concrete traps (the seven paths of automatism) and equally concrete medicines (the seven paths of authorship, organised under the acronym DIARIES), develops practices, and builds contexts.

A third affinity, of a more radical nature, links demopraxy to the thought of Cornelius Castoriadis. The Greek-French philosopher distinguished heteronomous societies -which receive their rules as given by an external or transcendent authority- from autonomous societies, which know themselves to be the authors of their own institutions and take responsibility for transforming them. That transition from heteronomy to autonomy has the same form as the transition from automaton to author. Castoriadis, however, thought primarily of the collective and political dimension of the process; demopraxy integrates this dimension with a level that was less present for him - that of daily micro-practices, rituals, symbolic devices, and gestures that construct authorship one action at a time.

To this fundamental trio are added other voices that demopraxy encounters as fellow travellers: Paulo Freire, with his critique of "banking education" (which produces automata, compliant executive subjects, while "problem-posing education" produces authors, subjects capable of reading and rewriting the world) and the notion of conscientização (conscientization) which speaks directly to the demopractic transition from passive learning to the authorship of the word; Ivan Illich, with his critique of counterproductive institutions that produce dependency instead of capability; Murray Bookchin, with libertarian municipalism and the centrality of local assemblies; David Graeber, with the claim of democracy as an ancient and plural practice, long predating its liberal and representative domestication.

In all of this, demopraxy does not present itself as a synthesis of existing positions, but as its own conceptual operation. Three traits distinguish it.

The first is its rooting in art. While Ostrom comes from political science, Arendt and Castoriadis from philosophy, and Freire from pedagogy, demopraxy develops within an artistic experience -Cittadellarte, the Third Paradise, Pistoletto’s Formula of Creation- and considers artistic practice not as a metaphor but as a method: art as the exercise of authorship par excellence, and therefore as a gymnasium for demopraxy.

The second is its operational dimension. Demopraxy does not limit itself to describing or prescribing: it produces works and devices that put theory to work in the most diverse contexts. At the first level, there are the demopractic works realised in places spanning continents and cultures -from Cuba to Geneva, from Rome to Biella to Seoul- works that configure public spaces, participatory processes, and relational architectures according to the principles of demopraxy. Alongside this level are the initiatives of the Ambassadors of the Third Paradise, an international network of subjects who translate the philosophy of the Third Paradise and demopractic principles into their own local communities, generating autonomous and interconnected actions, and the Statodellarte project, which proposes a model of collective organisation based on widespread creativity and art as an engine for social transformation. At a more granular level, demopraxy produces practices and proposals aimed at communities, businesses, groups, and families -from the "demopractic lunch" to the practices of RITWHEN, projects tested at Cittadellarte but still at the prototype stage- tools for the daily exercise of authorship, scalable to the most diverse contexts of social life, allowing anyone to experience first-hand the transition from automatism to authorship.

The third is its nature as a universally proposable but locally adaptable proposal. Demopraxy is neither a closed doctrine nor an ideological political programme: it is a grammar of practices that every community can adopt and adapt to its own context, without having to adhere to a specific identity or party.

This quality makes it particularly suited to the present time, in which the great twentieth-century narratives have lost their force, but the need for radical democratic practices is more urgent than ever.

Paolo Naldini