A Grand Narrative of this kind — which, despite its deliberate naivety, has considerable affinities with the millenarian narratives which have blossomed around the tree of the Christian view of history along the centuries — is likely to make sense of the view of the future to come circulating among a significant segment of 5SM electorate.
Tellingly, it is a future mortgaged by the past. In this case, the essential also includes a variety of the ideal of self-rule whose implementation is made easier by a sort of virtualization of personal identity that facilitates the traditionally difficult task of realizing a genuinely cooperative community. Despite their controversial character, the main merit of this kind of Grand Narratives lies in the fact that they give a recognizable face to the enigmatic historical change of which the 5SM and the other democratic grassroots movements around the world are both symptom and expression.
In the concluding section of my paper, I want to meet the challenge and sketch an alternative Grand Narrative to the one I have just reconstructed. I largely borrow it from a small important book recently published in Italy: I destini generali by Guido Mazzoni, professor of Italian Literature at the University of Siena, where the great transformation I have in view here is handled and grasped with great subtlety and concision.
What does this mutation consist of? In ultimate analysis, it is the realization in an unanticipated and rampant form of Marx and Engels diagnosis on the revolutionary role played by the bourgeoisie in modern history.
In a way, the authors of the Manifesto got it right. At the same time, however, they were wrong, because the dissolution of the age-old constraints to human agency and self-interest did not lead either to alienation or emancipation, but to a fluid and ambivalent predicament of both liberation and disorientation, restlessness and malaise, prosperity and poverty.
The historical dialectics, in other words, did not produce a meaningful and recognizable synthesis. How can one picture, then, that process of liquefaction or, better, of evaporation of the old way of life, which Western societies have been experiencing with growing acceleration since that revolution in morals and manners that we now tend to metonymically associate with a momentous year of our recent history: the ? It is a multifaceted makeover that led to the birth and global spreading of a new life-form: the Western way of life.
What characterizes it? In a nutshell, on the level of subjective experience, the change involves a loosening of intra-psychic constraints. On the level of personal bonds, the result of the dissolving process is, if possible, even more glaring. Faced with the undisputed primacy of the search for personal enjoyment, the affective, political, moral and social ties also take a back seat. While remaining an essential ingredient of life, they are now experienced by a growing number of people as interchangeable goods, that is, as something that does not require the assumption of unconditional commitments.
The family, the identity groups, the nation, the personal allegiances to past vestiges or future mirages lose consistency in front of the intensity and importance of immediate pleasures. Thus, hedonism ends up prevailing not in theory, but in daily practice, that is in the wake of that routine ascription of a sacred value to the most ordinary life goods that goes back to the beginnings of modern culture. As said, the image of the world emerging from this global process of dissolution without a telos or an immanent yardstick is deeply ambivalent.
This proclamation of absolute immanence is without triumphalism because it is generally experienced by those undergoing it not as an existential revolt or as the solution to the riddle about life. From an ethical point of view, on the other hand, its main effect is the collapse of the boundary between strong and weak evaluations, identity-relevant and identity-non-relevant commitments.
In this way, as already noted by Pasolini, capitalism rehabilitates and unwittingly sides with a petty wisdom known since the dawn of time. Also from a political point of view, the Master Narrative that I have just assembled as an alternative view to the fantasy-like philosophy of history underlying the democratic activism of the 5SM has a strong disenchanting effect.
Sure, democracy is the only political regime suitable for a radically secularized society in this outlook as well. In spite of this solemn sentence that sounds a lot like the Last Word, I think it appropriate, however, that the judgment should remain suspended. The first obvious reason is that the story beautifully told by Mazzoni is a narrative devoid of any sense of an ending.
Besides, one should never forget that the West does not encompass the whole world and that, despite its current success, its flaws — especially its environmental and demographic contradictions — may turn out to be fatal in the long run. A Grand Narrative is not necessarily a World Narrative. Regarding, more specifically, the future of self-government, the only thing that can be said with confidence is that it is uncertain as it has always been since it made its appearance in human history.
As I noted in the first section of the paper, a functioning democracy is the product of a delicate and precarious intertwining of several factors. Given this kind of complexity, it probably makes no sense to concoct a picture of the ideal democracy and its closed set of enabling and fostering conditions. If I had to hazard a universal claim, however, it seems plausible to maintain that a bold human construct such as self- government, which requires a great deal of initiative, courage and confidence from the agents, is hard to accomplish in the absence of a productive tension between, on the one hand, a form of love for the world as it is and, on the other hand, the aspiration to make it over and improve it in light of an ideal goal.
This was the lesson that Tocqueville warily drew from a case study as exceptional as the nascent American democracy.
His experience led him to believe that a flourishing democracy cannot exist without the urge to imagine and explore creative solutions to the riddle of self-government and the willingness to put up with the limits and flaws of any determinate solution.
Democracy is by its very nature a defective system and what it first and foremost needs are citizens who are willing to leave open as long as possible the structural conflict of interpretations that is built into the principle of self-rule as such in order to let the powerful combination of practice and imagination yield its unpredictable fruits.
And a blind dedication to this ideal, however noble, is likely to condemn its supporters to the role of mere witnesses of a lost chance. At the end of the day, however, the question remains open precisely because — it is worth reiterating the point — this is not solely or purely a theoretical matter and is entrusted to the mind, will and initiative of each and everyone, not only to the brainpower of professional thinkers.
Fortunately for us, the source of the democratic imaginary is no less democratically distributed than the weird power that comes out of it. Going back to the case study that I tried to narratively contextualize by juxtaposing two alternative Grand Narratives about the future of democracy, the 5SM, no less than the other democratic protest movements around the globe, can be pictured as providing an injection of simplicity into a political system that is getting increasingly more complex and sclerotic.
As such, this infusion of simplicity into an overgrown artificial body is equivalent to a rediscovery of the exceeding promise ingrained into the ideal of self-government. But from the point of view of the, no matter if genuine or self-interested, supporters of complexity, this is bound to appear only as a degenerate way of vindicating the ownership of sovereignty, as if the people could really exercise it without mediation.
A popul-ism, as people who know-it-all like to say. But the accusation of populism is a non-starter. We do not take a single step towards a better understanding of what is going around us these days by stigmatizing behavior that we do not understand as barbarian.
The current upheaval has less to do with a vain effort to find the ideal solution to the problems of modern liberal democracy, than with a practical exploration of possible paths leading to its regeneration.
Sure, an injection of simplicity is not sufficient to solve the problems Western democracies are facing today. Each injection of simplicity into a complex system always generates a new form of complexity that puts the problem of a possible synthesis once again on the table.
This, in turn, raises the problem of mediation within the unchallenged normative horizon of self-determination. However promising the preconditions may be, it is not easy to predict how the 5SM political daydream will work out in the near future. A growth crisis was to be expected after such an unforeseen momentous electoral success, but it is hard to say if what the movement is undergoing today is a structural crisis, arising from the inconsistent movement ideology and its never solved organizational problems.
Reasoning within the conceptual and analytical framework employed in this paper, it is sensible to end with a suspended judgment. The 5SM experience — and by this I mean its special blend of practice and theory — has some elements that definitely move in the direction of a strengthening and expansion of the democratic Italian imaginary. The problem is that this rediscovery of the ordinary, I would say, basic democratic activism is accompanied by a Manichean view of politics as a place of corrupting mediation that, paradoxically, reinforces an anti-political prejudice which is deeply rooted in modern consciousness and that has always worked, even in the bourgeois civil society, like an erosive force against the modern democratic imaginary.
Part of the ideology of the movement turns on the idea that the Digital Revolution made possible a sort of inherently cooperative collective agent that no longer needs political representation, paving the way for a real direct democracy.
I have a feeling, but I could be wrong on this, that the inability to conceive of politics as a place of self-realization and public happiness and not only of corruption, in short, as a place where individuals can flourish, may prove to be a pernicious habit in the long run.
In other words, I do not believe that to imagine democracy as an apolitical, almost mechanical, form of collective self-rule is the best way to revitalize democracy today and compensate for its disappointing Pyrrhic victory. Per una nuova politica Milano: chiarelettere Costa, P. Taylor, La democrazia e i suoi dilemmi Reggio Emilia: Diabasis , pp. Elkins and A. As this panoramic history poignantly reminds us, the choices we make going forward require us first to come to terms with where we have been.
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Finley —86 was the most famous ancient historian of his generation. His unmistakable voice was familiar to tens of thousands of radio listeners, his polemical reviews and other journalism were found all over the broadsheets and weeklies, and his scholarly as well as his popular works sold in very large numbers as Penguin paperbacks.
Yet this was also a man dismissed from his job at Rutgers University when he refused to answer the question of whether he was or had ever been a member of the Communist Party.
This pioneering volume assesses Finley's achievements and analyses the nature of the impact of this charismatic individual and the means by which he changed the world of ancient history. Authoritarian leaders use the state to successfully reaffirm sovereignty, despite international integration; democratic movements abound but often serve only to reinforce the regimes they contest.
Is there an alternative? Do we need to reconceive the phenomenon of state, with a view to the future? These are the questions that an international group of scholars explores and answers in this groundbreaking book, drawing on the history of political thought, continental philosophy, and contemporary political examples. They engage the dialectical tradition broadly understood, including phenomenological transcendentalism, the political philosophy of French public law, and German twentieth-century political philosophy beyond Weber.
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