Humberto Maturana’s biology of love provides a biological-ethical foundation for rethinking politics as the conservation of coexistence rather than the management of populations by external control. For Maturana, love is not sentimentality but the relational domain in which the other arises as legitimate in coexistence. This white paper extends that insight into an ethical-political framework by integrating Maturana’s biology of love with Johan Galtung’s theory of direct, structural, and cultural violence; John McMurtry’s life-value onto-axiology and civil commons; and Elinor Ostrom’s work on commons governance and social-ecological systems. The central thesis is that politics becomes life-coherent when institutions conserve and expand the conditions under which persons, communities, species, ecosystems, and future generations can live, develop, participate, repair, and coexist without domination. Conversely, political pathology arises when institutions conserve themselves by disabling life-capacity while legitimating such disablement as necessary, efficient, profitable, rational, or inevitable. This framework reframes governance as non-forcing coordination: the design, protection, and repair of life-enabling conditions rather than the coercive imposition of order from above.
