2024-01-08 22:06:14
by PIER PAOLO PORTINARO
From 10 January on newsstands for a month with the newspaper “Il futuro della democracy” in which the philosopher, who passed away in 2004, had clearly indicated the serious threats to the Western model posed by oligarchic tendencies and occult powers. Here we anticipate the preface
The 20th century was the century of democracy, in its various meanings including plebiscitarian and representative democracy, competitive and deliberative democracy, participatory and constitutional democracy. In a well-known book by him, Samuel Huntington placed the second and third waves of the democratization process which redefined the institutional profile of the Western world in the twentieth century. Bobbio’s work, which the «Corriere» brings to the attention of the public, developed by reasoning on the challenges that marked that double wave of political civilization.
We should add, she is the daughter of what another great intellectual of the same era, Ralf Dahrendorf (and see, to underline the many affinities with Bobbio, his Erasmiani. Gli intellectuali alla prova del totalitarianismo, Laterza, 2007) , called the “social democratic century” – a century that had sought and, up to a certain point, found (at the cost of many compromises and some hypocrisy), a solution to the dilemma of the conjugation of constitutional democracy with capitalism. But that century is over and the undisciplined and anarchic capitalism of globalization appears much less available to compromise and subordination to the imperatives of (constitutional) democracy.
In particular, if the last decade of the 20th century had opened under the sign of what many interpreters thought was a turning point destined to have unprecedented consequences on the spread of democracy in the world, the first fifteen years of the 21st century were enough to cool the enthusiasm, make many hopes vanish and inaugurate a new season of concern for the fate of the democratization processes in the most populated regions of the planet and for the involutions taking place even in countries with consolidated democracy (this was already reported by Eugenio Somaini in 2007 in his Geography of democracy, the Mill).
Precisely in the light of these transformations, it may be useful, in order to attempt a balance, to return to the considerations made forty years ago by Bobbio in his essay The future of democracy (the key text of this collection) in which the Turin philosopher questioned the « broken promises of democracy.” The first of which had to do with the fact that the corporatism of groups and the “revenge of organized interests” had prevailed over the egalitarianism of the “society of individuals”, putting the ideal of political representation, understood as the representation of the general interest (the second broken promise). The third was indicated in the “persistence of the oligarchies”: the number of voters with universal suffrage had grown considerably, but not so much the weight of their vote. The fourth promise concerned the failure to extend democracy (from the political sphere to that of other social spheres), as businesses and administrative systems had not (nor could they) emancipate themselves from the traditional hierarchical logic. A fifth disappointment concerned the permanence of the “invisible power”, which democracy as the government of the public sphere should have eliminated: behind the formally constituted powers, the “strong powers” continued to operate, based on non-transparent logics (the cliques of interests , once also the parties) and the “hidden powers” (the secret services and parastatal security agencies removed from popular control). Finally, the sixth promise concerned the lack of education of the citizen, which should have resulted from participation in the vote and progressed with ever greater involvement in deliberative processes through public debate: instead, the spread of political apathy, the prevalence of the exchange vote over opinion voting, the growing compliance with messages and offers of a populist nature.
Placed in the context of economic, social and legal globalisation, that reflection appears today more than confirmed. Recent literature has only highlighted how a) the tendency towards the colonization of the democratic process by private and particularistic interests has been accentuated, leading to a condition of “post-democracy”, b) a opposite populist spiral of chasing the “square”, which ended up determining a decline towards plebiscite democracy. (…)
Should we therefore say that, despite all its anxieties, Bobbio’s theory of democracy belongs to a bygone era in which the West still believed that the political project of modernity could be universalized within a process of globalization under its hegemony? Many signs today indicate that the West is losing confidence in itself, in its unity, in the ability and legitimacy to govern the world (for this I refer to the beautiful book by Andrea Graziosi, Occidenti e modernità, il Mulino, 2022), fueling within it the propensity for self-flagellation or, on the contrary, the search for third ways, for hybrid models between democracy and authoritarianism (of which Russia and China are macroscopic examples). A pessimistic diagnosis based on facts, to which Bobbio’s realism was inclined with good reason, would lead to these conclusions. And the philosopher today would have a good hand in pointing out that certain unheard predictions, dictated by that realism, could have at least slowed down institutional degradation (often fueled by facile illusions). Shortcuts and alchemy of palingenesis are however not visible. For this reason, despite the change of era, meditation on these pages remains an unavoidable task for those who care about the fate of the Western model of democracy.
The title on newsstands for 8.90 euros
Norberto Bobbio’s book The Future of Democracy will be released on newsstands with Corriere della Sera on January 10, and will remain on sale for a month at a cost of €8.90 plus the price of the newspaper. This is a collection of essays, published in the original edition by Einaudi in 1984, which we now propose again with the preface by Piero Paolo Portinaro, a summary of which we publish above. In this volume the Turin philosopher, who passed away twenty years ago on 9 January 2004, defends a procedural conception of democracy, based on respect for the rules of the game, and expresses strong concerns for the future of representative systems, undermined by a vast series of inconveniences. Bobbio focuses on the relationship between representative democracy and direct democracy. He addresses the thorny problem of “invisible power”. He re-proposes the ancient dilemma between the government of men and the government of laws. He analyzes the question of how the democratic principle can (or rather, in the current state of affairs, cannot) be enforced at an international level. Born in Turin on 18 October 1909, Bobbio began an academic career as a young man. Professor of Philosophy of Law at the University of Siena and then at that of Padua, during the war he participated in the Resistance in the ranks of the Action Party. In 1948 he was called to the University of Turin, where he also taught political science. Author of numerous essays, between the 1950s and 1970s he was the protagonist of an intense debate with communists from liberal socialist positions. He signed for the «Stampa», in 1984 he was appointed senator for life by the President of the Republic Sandro Pertini.
January 8, 2024 (modified January 8, 2024 | 9:04 pm)
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