Democracy "concept is so obscure, uncertain and controversial that it is rarely used without a qualifier. The adjective - popular, totalitarian, direct, socialist, pure, temperate - then becomes more decisive in indicating the noun 'the thing' dream or as indicated realtà.Eppure, stretched in every direction, bent to a thousand interests, "democracy" remains in contemporary political discourse in a steadfast position of centrality. No politician would think reasonable to declare, publicly at least, anti-democratic: it is then possible to think that democracy, beyond the infinite possible qualifications, represents a definitive achievement, something that now has to do with the world of introjected and universally shared values \u200b\u200bsuch as " Natural?
If we look beyond our historical experience of direct Italian beginning of the XXI century, if we try to grasp the enduring features of the democratic system practiced or imagined, the answer can only be very doubtful. Democracies (or those systems of political organization commonly recognized as such) have been based on exclusion, not inclusion. The Athenian democracy, the ideal and prototype center, worked because women, slaves and free men for various reasons they were not excluded. But the reflection of the Greek philosophers who have shaped our political vocabulary and imagery, including the much-mistreated Plato, found a good and a bad democracy and good democracy tied to the idea of \u200b\u200bfreedom:
"We begin So with being free, and the city becomes full freedom of actions and words, and there it is right to do what one wants [...] A nice form of government, anarchy [...] distribuente equal to a certain extent also equal and unequal "(Republic 557 bd).
Although founded on the exclusion of the majority of the population, this good democracy to recognize and appreciate the variety of customs and attitudes, seeking to draw away via a decision responding to the common good. And Aristotle, not a "dangerous subversive like Plato, regarded the polity, the most perfect form of democracy, as it was founded on the twin criteria of wealth (che garantiva l'esclusione dei non-degni) e sulla libertà.
Sul reciproco bilanciarsi e scontrarsi di questi due criteri si giocò la storia dell'idea di democrazia dall'apogeo classico sino al suo ritorno nell'età moderna, in parte sull'onda della riscoperta rinascimentale dell'antichità, dei suoi testi, dei suoi ideali di vita e di religione; in parte sulla riscoperta della libertà che era riuscita a sopravvivere, nelle forme più diverse, all'azione livellatrice delle grandi monarchie tardo medievali e dei nuovi apparati statali dell'assolutismo.
Tornano allora, in particolare nel corso del Settecento, le parole-chiave tradizionali the democratic system with a renewed strength, because they refer to democratic reality in an attempt to understand the operation and projects of democracy that is the pursuit of achievement. It is, then, between Corsica and Poland, Philadelphia and Paris, that our confused, uncertain, all-encompassing notion of democracy was actually formed in contact with the crashes, not only of ideas, and created democracies.
Montesquieu and Rousseau represent the two poles of this appropriation and re-creation of contemporary democracy. Montesquieu, attentive to the virtue of patriotism, the mechanisms of participation in the defense and land up to write that "it is because it is a citizen soldier that we do temporarily "(Spirit of Laws, V, 19), Rousseau's general will theory, skeptical about the possibility that a true democracy, the people in permanent session to deliberate, can really work, but convinced "If there were a people of gods, it would govern democratically" (Social Contract, III, 4).
Within this eighteenth-century discourse on democracy, its limitations and its mechanisms, the experiments took the form of argument of creation: the democracy of the Republic of Corsica clan Polish nobility, the monarchy, the republican federation of thirteen American colonies founded con alchimie istituzionali delicate (e, bisogna pur dirlo, di eccezionale resistenza), sino allo scandaglio più profondo e radicale delle potenzialità creative e distruttive insite nell'homo democraticus, tentato dalle sezioni giacobine parigine.
In questo discorso sulla democrazia si muovono i confini tra esclusione e inclusione: sempre più si include, sempre meno si esclude nelle democrazie otto e novecentesche, ma sempre più si fa presente l'incubo di Rousseau: che il corpo politico non esprima una volontà generale nella quale si identificano serenamente tutti i cittadini, ma oscilli continuamente in balìa dei grandi manipolatori e corruttori.
Il lack of inclusion has become a time in a ipodemocrazia iperdemocrazia, where the masses are needed, they deny the value of law, deny the value of the common good as the supreme criterion? Ortega y Gasset in 1930 said yes, and invented (without much luck) the period iperdemocrazia. But what happened in Europe after 1933 shows that the position of the aristocratic English philosopher was legitimate. One could go further and wonder if our forms of democracy have still substantial elements in common with the models, although quite different, of classical and modern Europe, or whether, on the contrary, the core of democratic orientation in which There is now acknowledged is expressed in forms and on the essential problems different, even compared to the concerns that ensured representation Ortega y Gasset.
The acceleration of history brings clear conceptual discrepancies. We take only two questions, which highlight the difficulties of democratic procedures.
The first is the rise of democracy: the agora was restricted to discussion of class professional, age group, neighborhood, community, virtual, where it exceeds the size of strictly local and strives to achieve the ' commitment to inclusion, it ends to coincide with the television medium that by its very nature excludes the interaction, dialogue, reasoned response and mobilizes mindless behavior, the result of the repetition of statements.
The second is the ability to maintain, through the succession of strategic decisions, respect for the chain of generations, this concern for future generations a livable environment and sufficient resources to maintain a standard of living that we ourselves consider decent.
The absence of a place of collective revision brings with it a number of decisions, formally took on the lines of institutional democracy, making abstraction from long-term and the complexity of social positions and that in fact injure the deep concern for the city "full of freedom of acts and words "that was so dear to Plato.
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