Dalla postdemocrazia all’identità. Spunti per una critica tra sociologia e filosofia politica

The paper explores the current crisis of the modern western democracies from the point of view of Colin Crouch's work. Through the lens of his post-democratic diagnosis, the democratic crisis appears to involve the relationship between the public function of the States and the private organization of the economic power and, consequently, the relationship between the national management of power and services and the trans- or inter- national extension of the economic forces. The social and political measures suggested by Crouch as possible remedies for reacting against the democratic crisis are analyzed and put under criticism in the second section of the paper. The critical assumption is that Crouch’s proposal, regarding the top-down constitution of trans- national democratic institutions, on one side, and the bottom-up mobilization of local and party identities, on the other, risk of being as post-democratic as the problems they want to address. By highlighting this point of view, the paper focuses on the necessity of re-integrating in the political discourse the categories of sovereignty and conflict as ineliminable components of each political order. In the same frame is also considered the need of enlarging the political spectrum of political identities in order to reactivate genuine political forces against a-democratic powers.