Abstract

The essay gives some indications on the history of subsidiarity and its principle, outlines the diversity of historical and theoretical contexts in which it emerges or receives accommodation and implementation, noting the inevitable uncertainty of its epistemic status. The reference to Kantian schematism prefigures a key to revisiting subsidiarity both as an object of dialectical confrontation and as an effective operational tool. The scheme, as an operative rule for constructing concepts, is then adopted to read the properties of some elementary geometric entities in an isomorphic key with respect to the structure of distinct modes of inter-human cooperation in order to outline an epistemological-categorial axis for re-reading subsidiarity.