La democrazia e il nemico. Saggi per una teoria realistica

[Autom. eng. transl.] In the coming years, the research on the political transformations we are experiencing will not be faced only with the unknowns of a "multipolar" or "apolar" system that has no historical precedent. An equally important problem is the rethinking of the analytical categories forged during the twentieth century. After the conclusion of the "American era", many of the theoretical tools used by political scholars are likely to lose much of their usefulness, if not to represent distorting lenses. And the very concept of "democracy" - chiseled by more than half a century of tireless intellectual work - ends up revealing itself as perhaps the most susceptible to be transformed, from a precious instrument of investigation, into an obstacle for those who want to decipher the design of contemporary transformation. A new 'realistic' theory - to which this volume seeks to make a contribution - must instead pursue the objective of removing contemporary democracy from that post-historical and post-political horizon in which the Western imagination has based its stylized outline on it . In other words, it must recognize that contemporary democracy is a historical fact, the product of an "armistice" forged in the climate of the "world civil war", redefined in its planetary borders by the rise of American hegemony, shaped by the "space revolution »Twentieth century and inevitably subject to radical changes. In fact, by following the path that leads to a new 'realistic' theory, we can in fact regain the tools to truly understand the pitfalls of the 'post-American world'. And, perhaps, only by following this same path, it is also possible to get out of the vicious circle of the 'post-historical' Western imaginary. An imaginary that - while it finds in the present the definitive form of the Universal History - cannot but conceive any change differently from a catastrophe, from a degeneration, from an apocalyptic threat. An imaginary that - while celebrating contemporary democracy as the immutable form in which the ideological evolution of mankind ends - is destined to constantly relive the nightmare of terrifying, elusive, multiform aliens. And to transform the struggle for democracy into an endless war of extermination against all the "enemies of the human race".