The ideas behind Solon

Solon: laws anyone can read

Solon of Athens, whose name this project borrows, reformed the laws of a city on the edge of civil war. According to ancient sources he freed Athenians who had been enslaved for debt, and he had the laws written on wooden tablets set up in public, where anyone could read them. Then he left the city for ten years, so that nobody could press him to change them.

Our sources on Solon are late and incomplete; historians still debate the details.

The Landsgemeinde: the whole community in one square

In Glarus, citizens have met in the open air to make their laws since at least 1387. Anyone may speak and propose a change on the day: in 2006 one citizen's amendment from the floor merged twenty-five municipalities into three, going further than the government had proposed. In 2007 Glarus became the first Swiss canton to let sixteen-year-olds vote on cantonal matters.

Appenzell Innerrhoden holds its own assembly on the last Sunday of April, where men may still show a sword instead of a voting card. It is also the warning: its assembly voted down women's right to vote until 1990, when the Federal Supreme Court ruled that excluding women broke the constitution. Women first voted there in 1991.

Condorcet and Arrow: the count is never neutral

In 1785 the Marquis de Condorcet showed that a group can prefer A to B, B to C and C to A — even when every member's own preferences are perfectly consistent. In 1951 Kenneth Arrow proved that with three or more options no ranked voting rule meets a short list of reasonable fairness conditions all at once.

Arrow's theorem concerns ranked methods; score methods fall outside its conditions. It does not mean no vote can be fair.

Elinor Ostrom: communities can govern their commons

Elinor Ostrom studied fisheries, forests and irrigation systems that communities had run well for generations, without a state or a market taking over. She found eight design principles they shared: clear boundaries; rules fitted to local conditions; the people affected help make the rules; monitoring; graduated sanctions; ways to resolve conflict; outside recognition of the right to organize; and nested layers for larger systems.

Ostrom's own warning: there are no panaceas. Principles, not a recipe.

Exit and voice

Albert Hirschman observed that members of a failing organization have two responses: leave (exit) or speak up (voice) — and that loyalty delays exit and gives voice time to work. Charles Tiebout modelled people choosing among local governments the way they choose among goods, an idea often summed up as voting with your feet.

Tiebout's model assumes people can move freely and at no cost; real life is harder, which is why exit has to be designed for.

Panarchy and the framework for utopias

In 1860 the Belgian botanist Paul-Émile de Puydt proposed that people should be able to choose their government the way they choose an insurer — without moving house. A century later the philosopher Robert Nozick described the minimal state as "a framework for utopias": a place where people form and leave communities of their own design.

Charter cities: new rules need trust

The economist Paul Romer proposed building new cities under new charters — different rules, chosen in advance, that people could opt into by moving there. The early attempts showed how much depends on legitimacy: in Honduras he resigned from the project's transparency commission in 2012 after agreements were signed without it.

The network state

Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State describes communities that form online around a shared purpose, organize for collective action, crowdfund land around the world, and seek diplomatic recognition — cloud first, land last.