A Morbid Democracy: Old and New Populisms 9782875742339, 9783035265057, 2875742337

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The crisis of democracy in Europe and the inability of the political parties and élites to adequately meet the challenges of globalisation exposes the increasingly fragmented middle classes to the temptations of Euroscepticism, and, in some cases, xenophobia. This appears to be a portrait of contemporary reality, but the current crisis has deep roots. The Spanish thinker José Ortega y Gasset described the pathologies of the mass man and of the nascent democratic system as far back as the beginning of the twentieth century, in a significant text entitled Una democracia morbosa, which appears to foreshadow the present state of affairs. The crisis of the average man, the degradation and devaluation of culture appear to be the distinctive traits of the new, post-ideological democracy of our times, known as “audience democracy”. The political parties, faced with this profound crisis, in some cases seek dangerous shortcuts through demagogic and rhetorical use of the term “people”, while the charismatic figure of the leader gains in prestige as a reference model. Resentment, caused by lack of representation of the just demands of the citizens, can turn to anger and destabilise the institutions of democracy. There is therefore an urgent need for an inclusive Europe with a renewed welfare system, based around the citizenry and not the masses. Monica Simeoni is Assistant Professor of Sociology, at the Sannio University (Benevento, Italy) and Assistant Professor of Sociology of Religion at the Ecclesia Mater Higher Institute of Religious Sciences, Pontifical Lateran University (Vatican City, Rome). Her most recent publications include Una democrazia morbosa. Vecchi e nuovi populismi, 2013; Big Society. Contenuti e critiche, co-authored with Franco Vespasiano, 2013; Europa/Europe, Conversations with Alberto Martinelli, Nadia Urbinati, Vittorio Cotesta, 2014.

Human Right Studies

P.I.E. Peter Lang Brussels

A Morbid Democracy Old and New Populisms

P.I.E. Peter Lang Bruxelles Bern Berlin Frankfurt am Main New York Oxford Wien 

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Monica Simeoni

A Morbid Democracy Old and New Populisms

Human Rights Studies No.3

We would like to thank the Università degli Studi del Sannio for its financial support.

Original title: Una democrazia morbosa, vecchi e nuovi populismi, English translation by Kay McCarthy.

The book was subject to a double blind refereeing process. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photocopy, microfilm or any other means, without prior written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.

© P.I.E. PETER LANG s.a. Éditions scientifiques internationales

Brussels, 2014 1 avenue Maurice, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium [email protected]; www.peterlang.com ISSN 2034-9610 ISBN 978-2-87574-233-9 e-ISBN 978-3-0352-6505-7 D/2014/5678/108

CIP available from the British Library and from the Library of Congress, USA. Bibliographic information published by “Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek”. “Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek” lists this publication in the “Deutsche National-bibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at .

Table of Contents Acknowledgements................................................................................. 9 Preface.................................................................................................... 11 Introduction........................................................................................... 15 Part I. A Morbid Democracy 1.

Ortega y Gasset’s Mass-man....................................................... 33 1.1. Ortega y Gasset. The Revolt of the Masses and the mass-man .................................................................. 33 1.2. Ortega’s aristocracy and elitism............................................. 39 1.3. Morbid Democracy................................................................ 45 1.4. Ortega’s State, Nation and Europe ........................................ 51 1.5. Ortega and Simmel................................................................. 58

2.

The Hetero-direction of Crowds.................................................. 65 2.1. Gustave Le Bon: The Psychology of Crowds......................... 65 2.2. Beliefs and opinions of the crowd.......................................... 70 2.3. Riesman: The Lonely Crowd.................................................. 73 2.4. Canetti: The Masses and Power............................................. 76 Part II. Right Wing and Left Wing Populisms

3.

Democracy: Evolution or Involution?........................................ 83 3.1. A “totalitarian democracy”?................................................... 83 3.2. The Origin of Democracy...................................................... 87 3.3. “Audience Democracy” ........................................................ 92 3.4. A Populism that comes from Afar.......................................... 96 3.5.
 Modes of Populism.............................................................. 100

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4.

Populism: From the Origins to Post-modern Times .............. 105 4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 4.4. 4.5. 4.6.

Russian Populism................................................................. 105 American Populism.............................................................. 107 Argentinian Populism........................................................... 110 A Populist Europe?............................................................... 113 A Populist Italy?................................................................... 120 The Second Italian Republic and a number of populist features .................................................................. 126 4.7. The Movimento 5 Stelle [the Five Star Movement]............ 130 Conclusions.......................................................................................... 135 Bibliography........................................................................................ 141

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Acknowledgements A book is never a solitary effort. For this one the reflections, ideas and opinions of friends and scholars who helped me on my way have proven extremely significant. I am particularly grateful to Professors Roberto Cipriani, Ilvo Diamanti, Luigi Gui, Alfio Mastropaolo, Enzo Pace and Franco Vespasiano. I am indebted to Pietro Biscuso for the research he carried out for me on the web. I am particularly grateful to the Università degli Studi del Sannio for having contributed towards funding the original publication.

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Preface The English-language edition of this book comes out almost two years after the original one in Italian. In the course of these twenty-four months “the situation of democracy” does not seem to have improved. On the 1st March 2014, the title on the cover of the Economist recited, significantly, What’s gone wrong with democracy and how to revive it. The recession which struck the USA first, Europe later, has aggravated the problems affecting western political systems more than ever. The recent European elections of spring 2014 have confirmed the advance (more evident in some countries than in others) of the Euro-skeptical and xenophobic parties. The economic crisis, for example that of Italy and of the southern European nations who are finding it very hard to recover, has been further exacerbated by the overall European political scenario. To the East, in Crimea and the Ukraine, certain areas have become the theatre of armed strife, by no means easy to resolve. To the West, the democratic states are questioning welfare policies no longer seen as acquired rights, on the grounds that Europe and its institutions are the main cause of the present crisis. Nationalism and claims of independence (the cases of Scotland and Catalonia are emblematic) are impacting on the international political scene which seems less and less capable of fostering the unity of political and democratic institutions. Analyses of populism, from its origins in nineteenth-century Russia and USA to its numerous Latin-American variants, are still topical. In actual fact, over the years, the political debate regarding twenty-first-century democracy, and the changes that populist modalities are undergoing, continues to be of vital importance when seeking to understand society and its actors1. Democracy is a relentlessly fluctuating system, very difficult to represent statistically. It regards real people who experience more and more complex, varied and rapidly altering situations. The decisions and procedures required to apply the system and the very bases of democracy itself are undergoing a profound sea-change. The political parties and other agencies of intermediation, the backbone of the traditional democratic model: the trade unions, movements and associations; are all in a state of crisis. The hegemony of the “homo videns”, the medialization 1

Urbinati (2014), Democrazia sfigurata. Il popolo fra opinione e verità, Egea, Università Bocconi Editore, Milan.

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A Morbid Democracy

of the public and private lives of the élites (and not only those in government), are generating a kind of “hybrid democracy”: less and less representational and direct, where old and new alternate2. Internet, the new technologies and the social networks, have contributed to the birth, in Italy for example, of new political movements, difficult to interpret according to the traditional political categories. Public opinion is one of their mainstays, but not in the positive, pluralist and independent sense envisaged by the sociologist Jürgen Habermas3. The contemporary reality risks descending gradually into forms of plebiscitarianism with strong claims of executive power. This would mean the defeat of democracy, and politics would experience a verticalisation of consensus4. Public opinion is increasingly distrustful of democracy as shown by the European Social Survey (involving 29 member countries), carried out periodically since 20015. In minimal terms, democracy is a government with institutional checks and balances chosen freely by the citizens: this from a liberal perspective. An important characteristic, and one of its fundamental constituent traits, is the welfare system, born of the development of the modern state in Europe and aimed at protecting and integrating citizens. This system is experiencing a grave crisis at present, due to a lack not only of resources but also of planning. Furthermore, research confirms the existence of an enormous gap between the northern and southern countries of Europe, the latter especially weary of democracy: Italy more so than Kosovo or Albania. But what is common to almost all the nations of the Old Continent is dissatisfaction with social policies, which have undergone cuts practically everywhere. And so we witness the advance of antipolitics and anti-democracy, ambiguous and ambivalent terms described by the French political scientist Pierre Rosanvallon6. And so, power is put on trial, on flimsy simplistic and demagogic grounds, that tend to weaken rather than salvage democracy. The line of demarcation is thin; this state of affairs requires true vigilance on the part of a public opinion free from political conditioning. Furthermore, contemporary representational democracy is moving more and more in the direction of charismatic leaderism, which seeks to monopolize proposals and decisions: a tendency requiring further study and in-depth analysis. 2 3 4 5

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Diamanti (2014), Democrazia ibrida, Laterza la Repubblica, Rome-Bari. Habermas (1971), Storia e critica dell’opinione pubblica, Laterza, Bari. Urbinati, op. cit., pp. 6-9. Archibugi (2014), La democrazia in Europa. Italiani sempre più sfiduciati dietro il th Kosovo e l’Albania, in La Repubblica, 15 September 2014. Diamanti, op. cit., pp. 63-68.

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Preface

These topical issues are closely associated with considerations regarding the European project, which needs to be re-motivated and rewritten so as to overcome the increasingly grave national dramas and divisions that are taking place at present7. Europe appears to be ensnared; its salvation might well save the democratic institutions of the member countries that determine it too8. All these questions will be addressed in another volume, departing from an in-depth study of the project for political (not merely monetary) union, which has backfired to date, but which may revive and overcome the present dramatic crisis.

7 8

Martinelli (2013), Mal di nazione, Università Bocconi Editore, Milan. Offe (2014), L’Europa in trappola, Il Mulino, Bologna.

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Introduction We live in brazenly vulgar times. Totally shameless. But every generation has its own plebs. Imbeciles have always existed, everywhere, amongst the old and the young alike. (Interview with Vittorio Sermonti, in La Repubblica, daily newspaper 7/4/2013, pp. 52-3)

1.  The centrality of the middle classes. Ortega y Gasset The crisis of democracy, the inadequacy of political parties and representation, the Italian (and not only) élites incapable of answering the challenges of globalization, an increasingly more narcissistic, withdrawn and self-obsessed middle class, a Europe no longer capable of finding common economic and political solutions to tackle the dramatic effects of economic recession. These seem to be some of the main problems that society in Italy and in Europe need to address, alongside the “rebirth” of new varieties of populism. This is how the media and many contemporary scholars and political scientists define proposals made by “old and new” present-day political organisations which appeal, in order to legitimise themselves, to the power of the people who have elected them or, to those who, according to the opinions polls, intend doing so. The Spanish sociologist José Ortega y Gasset in his essay Morbid democracy published in 1917, a crucial date in European history with its leftist and rightist totalitarianisms, sought to warn us of the dangers of “an exasperated and insane democracy”, which, devoid of guidelines, might deteriorate into a disease detrimental to society (Ortega y Gasset, 1979, pp. 401-6). In 1929, in a subsequent publication called The Revolt of the Masses, he provided a more in-depth and detailed account of the risks that the middle classes, lacking adequate guidance, might give way to: totalitarianism and a democracy dangerous to governments and even the citizens themselves. In the past few years, in Italy, we have witnessed and continue to witness a growing tiredness with politics; trust in political parties has reached an all-time low, rated at between 3 and 5%, as political scientist

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A Morbid Democracy

Ilvo Diamanti informs us (see Diamanti, 2012b, pp. 1, 27-9; 2012c, pp. 1-2)1. In the present post-ideological era, the identity-seeking individual triumphs. Ideology has been supplanted by identity: a complex, fragmented, narcissistic identity2. The post-materialist values that prevail today (as Ronald Inglehart pointed out as early as the 1950s) are associated with life-quality, freedom of speech and the action of the individual, leading social actor in a world quite different from that of a century ago. The sociologist Raymond Boudon has shown how western society has made individualism stronger and stronger by rationalising certain values and highlighting the importance of single human beings and their dignity. This is typical of a post-ideological kind of society like the present-day one. Surveys involving the young3, Italian religiosity and shared values, confirm the fact that family, friendship and belief in God continue to be the central foci of people’s lives, in Italy, even if experienced in different ways compared to the past and presenting different characteristics from generation to generation (Cartocci, 2011)4. The Iard Report on young people defined as “restricted sociality” the decrease in the importance attributed to the role of work and politics as priorities. Family has remained central, alongside health considered the prime value. But relationships between the public and private spheres have changed. Robert D. Putnam, in a study of American society emphasises the fact that in the New World, unlike what happened in Tocqueville’s age, there is a decline in togetherness and in practices that induce citizens to participate in collective, voluntary social activities; a decline which impoverishes the social capital of a nation. The title of the book in question is, not surprisingly, Bowling Alone: the 1

2 3

4

Diamanti in his articles for La Repubblica strives to interpret Italian political trends also by analysing election results. He was one of the first scholars to investigate the Northern League and malaise in the North-East of Italy. In his essay Gramsci, Manzoni e mia suocera (2012a) [Gramsci, Manzoni and my mother-in-law], he examines “the personalisation of democracy and relations between the person, the people and public opinion”. See also Festuccia, 2012, p. 7. The journalist analysing the Eurobarometre data drawn up by the David Hume Foundation, points out that appreciation of political parties stands at 4%. See Lasch, 1992; Cesareo, Vaccarini, 2012. Buzzi, Cavalli, De Lillo, 2007; Garelli, Palmonari, Sciolla, 2006. The former is a set of essays comprising the Iard report on young people, a circumstantiated key which enables us to read within different ambits and analyse youth values also with reference to the adult world. The second, while somewhat different from the former, examines the concept of socialization in a “peaceful family environment, well suited to the generational truce we have witnessed over the past thirty years or so” (op. cit., p. 21). The geography of religiosity in Italy, of the contemporary secularization of the country and of the values shared by the various generations on the basis of territory and region.

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Introduction

Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000): bowling alone has become typical of contemporary American society. Putnam reflects on this evident decline in the American esprit de corps, a form of social capital that has diminished, a concept of reciprocity that has almost vanished: doing something for others that will be returned with a view to creating a community. A partially pessimistic thesis, but one which also provides an escape-route, by means of a new youth culture, open to the social and a new kind of civil society in the making5. The society of the USA is, obviously, different from that of Europe, but some tendencies are comparable. Again it is Boudon who points out how values emphasising personal autonomy have become increasingly significant while those favouring the submission of the individual to institutions and principles enjoy less and less consideration. The French scholar agrees with the analysis of Durkheim and Weber which maintains that the rationalisation of the individual is a characteristic of modern societies. The right of the individual has become a central aspect of relationships between the citizens and the State, a thesis sustained also by the French philosopher Marcel Gauchet, in his analysis of the crisis of democracy. It is demonstrated that democracies, even at the height of their triumph, with the sacralisation of human rights, have entered a state of crisis, because individuals, with their strong sense of narcissism, have “privatised” its ideals and values, making them less social and community-oriented6. It is true that we live in an era with a growing number of democratic countries and one in which the modes of democracy are changing and being changed. A sole model of democracy seems to prevail: the western one which must be accepted by and imposed on all countries. This also explains why there have been so many military interventions in Europe, the Balkans, in the 1990s; the campaigns aimed at “exporting democracy” to Asia, opposing terrorism, the wars against tyrants and dictators in Africa, in Libya and Syria. Of the many comments on this point, the words of Ulrich Beck are particularly clear. This German scholar declares that the purpose of the war on terrorism has brought the “depletion of democracy” in its wake, (Beck, 2010, p. 19), and globality has come to be seen as an experience that cancels the plurality of distinctions between peoples and states. This is not true globalization, 5

6

Putnam’s essay has been criticised for its excessively pessimistic view of the American reality, although his observations were not always intended to be negative. It is important to recall the role of television which has, in part, while numbing individual consciences, made politics and democracy one of the main themes of political scientists who speak of the “audience democracy” both in Italy and abroad. Diamanti, Sartori, Manin, Mény, Surel. Gauchet, 2005, p. 254: “Individuality, inevitably, becomes self-referential with regard to the nation, the State and anything else previously referred to a common future”.

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A Morbid Democracy

which is inevitable: it needs to be guided in a different manner. One must construct and organize cosmopolitism, it too a reality of the contemporary era. International and super-national organizations (the International Monetary Funds and the World Bank) need to be managed according to accepted principles, recognized and shared by the greatest number of people possible, by people who are elected and not chosen by any leader. This is the problem of representation, a much-discussed issue at present, also due to the fact that politicians appear to be incapable of selfreform. Matters are delegated to the most competent, the most capable. Politics thus recognises the fact of being no longer capable of managing complexity and knowing how to make cognisant choices. In this epoch of individual rights, in this era of globalization, relations with the Other have become central and mandatory to all subjects, but the Other is “experienced” as a competitor for one’s own rights, someone actually capable of hampering and jeopardising one’s style of life, even democracy itself, the hard-won fruit of effort and sacrifice. There is no longer any difference of status in this post-ideological era. The malaise is common to all; even the popular classes have entered the arena, prompted by strong feelings of xenophobia against immigrants and foreigners, while the middle classes do not wish to forfeit their acquired advantages (Taguieff, 2012, page 50)7. The clash is not between the rich and the poor but between those capable of obtaining and gaining rights and those who remain on the margins and, for this, considered dangerous for the community and its fragile equilibrium. Considerations regarding the crisis, the “morbidity” of democracy, emerged, therefore, in modern times, when the middle class became aware of its own centrality to democracy. Modern democracy, the outcome of three revolutions, the English, American and French, have turned the civilized citizen into the protagonist and leading social actor, the “masses” (Ortega y Gasset, 1974) into the main subject of history, a governing “majority” (Tocqueville, 1974), which may, also, jeopardise the democratic institutions of a nation. The aim of this two-part volume is to reflect on the crisis of the average or mass man and the middles classes, by examining, in particular, Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses, a work of great importance; by studying the new “nascent democracy” of the masses (who, for the first time after the French Revolution, won and claimed their rights) this essay opened up the debate concerning the so-called “totalitarian democracy” the brainchild of Rousseau’s concept of “general will”. Present-day 7

Already from the title of the French sociologist’s work it is clear that he considers neopopulism an inadequate and problematic response, a danger to a democracy incapable of understanding the globalized society.

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Introduction

democracy is gasping for breath or, as the political scientist Colin Crouch puts it, present-day post democracy (Crouch, 2003) is in great distress, due also to globalization which has not only failed to solve problems but has, in some instances, actually exacerbated them. So, new populist trends are emerging among the traditional political parties, especially within New Right organizations, which are also feeling the brunt of the crisis. Due to over-simplification, on the part of the press too, the present crisis of democracy is ascribed, in all instances, to this reality, without a competent analysis of the true origins and meaning of the term, without any effort at identifying the problems of this new “audience democracy”, so unlike the democracy of the past. This aspect will be examined in the second half of this volume, by means of an analysis, via the web-site contents, of the most significant European (and Italian) political forces, with occasional reference also to the USA. In his essay, Ortega acknowledged, with the advent of the new modern society, the emergence of a “depersonalized, de-idealized and conformist” individual. The irruption of the masses into the liberal democracies of the twentieth century changed and transformed the history of the democratic institutions themselves. Individualism has flourished in contemporary society, thanks to the inevitable advance of modernity, but, if it is not properly guided it may produce totalitarianism (Pellicani, 1986). Ortega, as early as the 1930s, detected some important features of the new mass society then emerging. In a manner quite unlike that of Tocqueville, he grasped the risks inherent in excessive protagonism on the part of the new social actors central to the contemporary history of democracy. He pointed out the risk, for the masses, devoid of a solid and competent guidance, of consequences that would prove dangerous to the democratic solidity of a country. The danger lay in the lack of a plan for the institutions and the life of the community, often considered an indistinct and anomic set of individuals. Ortega, a complex and complete scholar, has been called the “enemy of the masses” because he rejected the traditional economic and political distinction between the people-masses and the oligarchic government majority (op. cit., p. 121). The division of society into majority and minority is not determined by social class but by people, their abilities and education. The distinction is moral and intellectual, not ideological. Ortega does not agree with the classical political juxtaposition, born of the French Revolution, of rigidly marshalled right and left. Provokingly, using a language that needs to be contextualized within the particular period of Spanish history he belonged to, he writes that opposition between left and right is a sign of stupidity because a revolution is always followed by a counter-revolution. 19

A Morbid Democracy

To corroborate this thesis, he describes the years of the French Revolution and the authoritarian periods that followed it. Failure is the inevitable destiny of every revolution. His reflections on Europe, the intellectual and moral energy of certain countries, France and Great Britain, for example, and on the construction of a trans-national political community: the United States of Europe. The topic of Europe, at this particular moment in time, is addressed from a number of standpoints, including that of welfare, by all the democracies of the “Old Continent”, but also by the USA, where the issue of welfare gave rise to one of the most heated debates ever between Republicans and Democrats during the 2012 Presidential election campaign. What is the European dream? Is it possible to create and foster an egalitarian society, where citizens are enabled to achieve their life projects and where a second chance is offered those who fail, so that nobody is condemned to a destiny of poverty? These questions are inevitable not only for those concerned with welfare but for every single social actor who lives responsibly within contemporary society (Therborn, 2011, p. 448)8. Among the population of Europe as well as within the “old and new political parties”, a strong sense of anti-Europeanism is increasing. The economic recession, which has affected all the European countries except Germany (for the moment), generates and feeds widespread populism, although the term is often abused and misunderstood. The true heart of the problem is the grave crisis contemporary democracy is experiencing because the parties and traditional politics are incapable of reading the situation and designing new guidelines for a Europe globalized only on maps but not in reality.

2.  Democracy and populism Many scholars of democracy question themselves about the present day and the complexity of the contemporary political situation, denouncing its considerable inadequacy and, often, the incompetence of its élites. This topic will be treated in depth in the second part of the book which will also provide a historical account of the concept of populism. 8

In this essay, the Swedish sociologist outlines a detailed comparative historical picture of the modern societies of Europe examining the social, cultural and political features of the single nations In the final part of his work, beginning with the Scandinavian experience, one of the regions with the most highly developed welfare system, he asks a number of questions and endeavours to provide convincing answers concerning the future of Europe in the new millennium: the problems, the reality, the integration of the new immigrants, the new European citizens; the rights of workers in a more flexible and less guaranteed labour market; integration between the young and the old (an everincreasing part of society). See also Habermas, 2012; Rusconi, 2012.

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Introduction

Concerning the term populism and its reality, the observations of two Italian political scientists, Alfio Mastropaolo and Ilvo Diamanti, are significant. Mastropaolo, in a political-history project carried out at the beginning of the 1970s to investigate the European political parties both north and south of the Old Continent, provided a picture of the political and cultural changes of modernity. His research confirmed the role played by vindications of individual rights, as noted previously, and the fact that the advent of the post-industrial society gave rise to new leftist (New Left) and rightist (New Right) parties. Populism is simply the flipside of democracy, the reality is rather more complicated to analyse, and risks over-simplification (Mastropaolo, 2005, pp. 86-9). Could the spread of neo-right and traditional leftist notions, stigmatized as populist, be considered, therefore, as an erroneous response or a failure to respond on the part of politics and the traditional parties unable to cope with the post-ideological global world? This would seem to confirm the thesis, of those who, without attenuating their words, state that the élites of right and left alike have abandoned the people, the plebs, the workers and the salaried class. They have no interest in them (Taguieff, 2003, p. 12). Populism is becoming an excessively inflated term, used with reference to all kinds of situations; overuse causes it to lose much of its descriptive value and precise analytical weight. The risk is that of simplifying and banalising analyses. The term populist is used to classify extreme-right European politics but it is also applicable to the left. Populism has become the style and the language of contemporary politics and neo-populism the malaise of representative democracy. It is important and vital to read Ortega’s essay in depth to truly understand the advance of modernity and its contradictions, including those accruing to politics, because the Spanish thinker had grasped the complexity of the new “mass-man” who was becoming the protagonist of history. A protagonist full of lights and shades. Ortega recognised the centrality of the average man within the scenario of the new modern democratic system that was taking shape, but he was also keenly aware that unbridled impulses and emotions, unguided by a proper education, might degenerate. For the Spanish scholar the most important and urgent reform required was that of social education. Is it possible to reform the institutions without changing people culturally and socially? How important is education to community change and transformation? Political reform should depend on educational reform. True changes are carried out within structures and institutions, but they require a moral and educational reform of the people, of the social actors, the protagonists of civil and political society (Morin, 2011, p. 25). 21

A Morbid Democracy

Ortega’s position, very “un-ideological” and highly “philosophical”, has been criticised by many, as an expression of “conservation”; he wrote during the Franco period in Spain when the differences between those who supported the dictatorship and those who opposed it were quite distinct. With reference to this point, Raffaele Simone considers Ortega as one of the most important exponents of liberal-democratic thinking (Simone, 2010, p. 166)9. In an analysis of why the left fails to understand the changing West, making observations that are not ideological but analytical, like Ortega, Simone writes that a democratic left should not demonise the adversary, but seek to understand his needs. This was Ortega’s position, not that of a socialist but of a classical liberal. One needs to live with the enemy or, better still, with a weak enemy. Antagonism is not useful; it is not educational, unless it can lead to change and improvement. The Spanish scholar also provides a vision of the state not as a closed centripetal community but as a centrifugal one open to diverse experiences: a community of languages, cultures and traditions capable of enriching the national identity, a reality quite similar to the intercultural milieus of the modern societies in which we live today. Ortega understood advancing modernity, he did not fear it, but sought to guide it, to give it direction. In this he agreed with the Frenchman, Ernest Renan, who saw the nation as the outcome of continuous plebiscites, something the citizens might identify with and in whose aims take a shared interest. Alongside Ortega’s reflections regarding the average man one needs to refer to some other important texts, which, though in different ways, help us grasp the concept of the masses (here intended as the indistinct crowd) as protagonists of society. In his essay Psychology of the Crowd, Gustave Le Bon, the French medical doctor, anthropologist and positivist, explained how the passionate crowd, a prey to its own emotions may, at times, change the very course of history. It was in France, in fact, that the populist literary movement took root with authors like Hugo, Zola and the Manifesto of the populist novel by André Thérive and Léon Lemonnier (Bongiovanni, 1996, p. 708). This literature sought to foreground the precarious living conditions of modern life, but without passing ideological judgement. It was important to describe the New World of the people that was emerging with all its contradictions. 9

In this cultural, not political, analysis, the author seeks to explain the inadequacy of leftist, ideological, often abstract politics, and how it often fails to understand the “modern masses”. The “mild monster” is the ideal modern type which has conquered the West, the culture of the New Right (with populist aspirations) that has pervaded our world. This transformation was understood and explained, though in different terms, by a conservative like Ortega y Gasset and an American sociologist like David Riesman.

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Introduction

Populism is, therefore, a “variegated kaleidoscope” (Merker, 2009, p. 8)10, a concept and a reality with a form and a content analysable in all its aspects. However one may intend it, by making the people protagonist, it will become the inevitable constant of democratic systems. We are destined, therefore, to cohabit with populism, which is most likely to rear its head in moments of crisis, as an expression of civil and political society’s malaise. The interpretations of the principal French sociologists on the matter appear, therefore, to converge (Mény, Surel, 2009, p. 282). One must pay attention not to use the term, whether negatively or positively, in a simplistic manner: the reality is far more complex and the possible interpretations manifold (Crispini, 2011)11. Parties and élites may find it useful to appeal to populism to avoid facing up to their own deficiencies. Populisms, interwoven with nationalist and xenophobic types of thinking, also help nourish rejection of Europe and its union (Reynié, 2011, pp. 113-21), at a moment when Islamism and the presence of foreigners are seen as an obstacle to the acquired rights of resident citizens and generate “welfare chauvinism”: the position whereby social benefits should be granted to residents only, that is, to citizens born in the State where they reside. This is the position of the new xenophobic Greek party, Golden Dawn, for example. Alongside the studies and reflections of Ortega concerning the new middle class as protagonist of contemporary life, another important contribution was made by Riesman, a twentieth-century sociologist, who, in The Lonely Crowd (1976), saw in hetero-direction one of the characteristics of modern society. A modality of social change, like Durkheim’s transition from mechanical to organic solidarity, transformation from community to society (Tönnies). Riesman does not 10

11

The Italian scholar claims for philosophy, his own discipline, an important approach to in-depth study of the origins and development of the concept of populism. The birth and development of this reality owes much to the French Revolution and the debate that followed, which also involved conservative thinkers like Burke and De Maistre. Of no less significance is the contribution of German philosophers from Fichte to Hegel and Nietzsche (elitist populist). The latter is often compared to Ortega y Gasset. The text is interesting because it confirms the idea that the concept of populism is polysemic, complex, multi-facetted and impossible to pin down to any simple, linear definition. From a conceptual point of view, the author examines, in depth, the term populism and its many specific connotations, even the most complex. He confronts his ideas with those of the French authors who have written most on the topic, Taguieff, Mény and Surel, for example, but also refers to the studies of Laclau, the Argentinian political scientist who analyses the thesis of populism from a particular stance, seeking to go beyond the Marxist concept of class struggle. Populism is, thus, identified in positive democratic antagonism, the vehicle of political claims, above all in Latin America: a thesis and a reality indicating a different use of the term populism compared to that of Europe and our western democracies.

23

A Morbid Democracy

criticise modernity, he does not judge it, but grasps its importance and how it transforms the role of the modern social actor. This is a step further forward after Ortega on the issue of modern individuality. The American sociologist represents the liberal conscience of the New Deal which dominated post-war culture in the New World: he is an upholder of the American way of life. He accepts modernity, avoids radicalisations of right and left, which might be ascribed to an ideological choice. His was a progressive reformism, devoid, however, of moralism and nostalgia. Another way of overcoming ideological counter-positions, already present in Ortega, starting with the American experience, he provides points to ponder and analyse when studying the present globalised society too. When examining the change the mass media induce in the “well informed”, that is in the middle classes, Riesman anticipated a number of more specific ideas adopted later by contemporary political scientists. He believed that the middle classes might be more sensitive to the way the mass media presented events (in years when TV was not as preponderant as it is today and the social networks did not even exist). Furthermore, he made a distinction between the “well informed” for whom the mass media were masters of tolerance, and “aspirant moralizers”, who, on the contrary, believed that the means of mass communication could lead to intolerance (Riesman, 1976, p. 227). The first part of the essay concludes with a brief reference to Mass and power by Elias Canetti (1981), one of his most significant works. His study, fearless and unprejudiced, sought to investigate the variegated world of the masses, and offered a very accurate and attentive chronology of the birth and development of this reality, of its metamorphoses and its relationship with power. Unlike Ortega, Canetti considered the masses a short-lived phenomenon, linked to an end, from which, however, single individuals might escape and recover their dignity: a position totally unlike the ideal type envisaged by the Spanish scholar, but very useful to understand the concept of mass from a different angle.

3.  “Totalitarian democracy” The second part of the text investigates the concept of democracy, goes deeply into the issue of the social malaise and unease the present crisis produces and the kind of democracy, characterised by strong internal populist tensions, it generates in today’s modern, globalized society. The tensions in question risk destabilizing the democratic institutions and parties themselves. Of the many definitions of democracy available, one might opt for one of the clearest, that of the law philosopher Luigi Ferrajoli, which states that democracy is determined by the power of the people to make public 24

Introduction

decisions directly or though representatives (Ferrajoli, 2010, p. 25). It is important to examine its formal or procedural character. Alongside this, there are also other substantial modalities of content regarding what needs to be decided and on which constitutional basis decisions may be reached. These two aspects of democracy, formal and procedural, are supported by a reflection on the constitution and the fundamental rights of citizens in a system assuring the greatest possible guarantee. One of the most important theses discussed today not only regards passivity and the scarce attraction towards politics felt by people, but also un-politics (Rosanvallon, 2006, p. 28)12 a term used to indicate a lack of global comprehension of problems regarding the organisation of the world we live in. This brings citizens to appeal to a kind of “counter-democracy” which takes the form of surveillance by public opinion over what those who govern do. This is one of the modalities of democratic participation of which there is a great deal of talk in recent years. The aim is that of creating open discussion platforms regarding issues of great importance to citizens, capable of generating public maturity. This might prove to be a means by which to safeguard minorities when dealing with problems regarding all, whether represented by the parliamentary majority or minority. Continuing along these lines, as the average mass-man becomes the new protagonist of the modernity acquired thanks to the French Revolution, ideologies multiply and greater front-stage importance is claimed by the issue of the rights of man within political, even personal, decision-making ambits. One witnesses a decline of the concept of status, condemned as the cause of privilege, while individualism becomes stronger, implying its “totalitarian potential” (Talmon, 1967, pp. 11-4). Rousseau’s “general will” becomes a powerful, determining aspect of “totalitarian democracy”, with all its contradictions and antinomies. The new citizens of the Revolution are those who accept and participate in the new Republic: individuals who identify with the very essence of the general will. The only democracy recognised is direct. The importance of Rousseau in determining the concept of modern, liberal democracy, including its future ambiguities, is recognised by many Italian scholars and political scientists who reveal the totalitarian nature of Rousseau’s democracy (Bedeschi, 2012)13. No one contests the importance of his 12 13

See also Pazé, 2011, p. 128. The philosopher Bedeschi emphasises the important role Rousseau continues to play three hundred years after his birth by quoting many scholars from Salvemini to Croce, Cerroni to Colletti, who have pondered on his concept of democracy and civil society. He refers in particular to the observations of Luigi Einaudi in Prediche inutili, concerning the “different disturbing aspects of Rousseau’s idea of “general will”. Those who disagree with it must yield to it, admit they were wrong, must recognize the Truth. Rousseau theorized a totalitarian state, with ruinous consequences”.

25

A Morbid Democracy

thinking, but frequent reference is made to its risk of becoming extremist. The debate is still open and arouses great passion more than three hundred years after the birth of this Swiss thinker14. Within the ambit of this discussion it is interesting to take a look at the position of Benjamin Constant, who, after the French Revolution, while comparing the freedom of the ancients and moderns, added a number of new elements to analyses of post-revolutionary democracy. With evident realism, he wrote that the freedom both of the ancient and modern populations, interwove and compensated each other (Constant, 2011, p. 7). To considerations regarding democracy we need to add, therefore, populism, the expression of “hyper-modernity”, where this term indicates the new cultural, political and economic transformations taking place in a country, a transition to new forms of modernity in an era of multitudes; a new mode of change. One needs to recall, however, that during a certain period in history, populism took root in Russia: the term derives, in fact, from the Russian народничество (narodničestvo) which, in turn, derives from народ, (narod) people. From this stems the term народник (narodnik) populist (Bongiovanni, 1996, p.  703). Here the reference is to those specific political and cultural movements which emerged under Tsar Alexander II, during the second half of the nineteenth century, after the spread of rumours of the imminent liberation of the peasants from the yoke of slavery and the subsequent distribution of the land to all. At that time, in around 1860, a succession of revolts and incendiary attacks took place in the Russian countryside, but the protagonists of Russian populism were the students, who with their professors (at least in the early years), helped establish populist ideas. The aim was to reach the people, to promote a popular kind of education, classless and universal. Avant-garde groups of students travelled into the countryside to speak to the peasants and incite them to revolt. One of the most interesting figures of the period was Alexander Herzen, the Russian writer and politician who continued, even during his exile in London, to influence the student revolutionaries through his writings. 14

The Italian scholar Nadia Urbinati criticises the potions of Talmon and others underlining the ambiguity and dangers contained in Rousseau’s concept of totalitarian democracy. See Ocone, 2012. In an article this author provides a very accurate account of interpretations of Rousseau, from the Marxists to the liberals and republicans. The studies of Talmon and Isaiah Berlin discuss, in liberal terms, the totalitarian implications present in Rousseau’s thinking. Referring to Urbinati, Bedeschi writes, “most probably for Ms Urbinati direct democracy, almost a form of democratic centralism, is important. One must recall that Rousseau’s State is that of the small nations, of small municipalities like Geneva, where people all know each other and make it, therefore, easier for legislative power to coincide with the general will”.

26

Introduction

The European revolutions of 1848 and the writings of the French revolutionaries helped, therefore, to promote Russian populism. Nascent European democracy impacted on this first truly populist political current which was bent on creating a type of economic and political equality close to Socialism. Later on, during the complex course of Russian history, with the October Revolution and its ensuing political divisions, the history of that particular democracy took a different route. The second significant populist reality was that which established itself in the United States of America after the War of Independence. This was the People’s Party, known later as the Populist Party, founded in Cincinnati, the outcome of the reaction of farmers and landowners against the excessive power of the US banking and high finance systems (op. cit., p. 706). The similarity between those events and the contemporary Occupy Wall Street revolt against the banks and multinational finance, accused of being responsible for the present recession, is interesting. During that period of American history, between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, the USA experienced a major moral and social crisis, above all in the South, with a huge agrarian protest caused by the Great depression and the fall in the price of agricultural goods. Furthermore, the great American melting pot, that is, that multi-ethnic USA that was emerging, due to the presence of ethnic groups of all origins, in the cities (as well as in other areas), favoured feelings of frustration and xenophobia towards the Other, towards whoever was culturally and ethnically different. The history of US democracy is interwoven with nineteenth-century religious ideas rooted in the Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment, especially pietism and rationalism, which played a fundamental role in the history of the United States. The Populist Movement was born, initially, in the north western part of the New World but it soon spread westward due to the fight against paper money, a medium of exchange which came into use during the War of Secession. The idea was to return to the use of gold or silver, a safer currency and one offering greater guarantees to small farmers. Even the leaders of the Democrats backed this position and the People’s Party merged with that of the Democrats and, so, disappeared from the scene. Their claims, including some of their more radical ideas, emerged again recently not only in the politics of the States but also in that of Europe, for example in the present opposition to the use of the Euro seen as the cause of the present recession in the Old Continent. The Tea Party movement in the USA has backed theses of an extreme nature as far as welfare and the economy are concerned. The Italian political scientist Piero Ignazi has pointed out, quoting the Euro-barometer, how never before in the history of the EU have “the 27

A Morbid Democracy

citizens ever felt themselves more distant” from the Union. Today, those suffering from nostalgia for the various national currencies total 40% of the population. The two faces of Euro-scepticism do not represent, therefore, the same kind of threat to the construction of Europe. It is rightwing national populism that is the most dangerous enemy, also due to its anti-Semitic impulses” (Ignazi, 2012b). The history of populism in the USA and in Russia is quite different both from new European forms of populism and from Argentinian Peronism. The problems concerning Latin America are discussed in the studies of Ernesto Laclau and Gino Germani. The contemporary reality of neo-populism, as defined by numerous scholars and opinion-makers, in an effort to understand the reason for so many New Right parties in Europe, in Northern Europe too, is, perhaps, rather simplistic. Present-day democracy, quite unlike that of the past, including antiquity, is more and more personalized and medialized, more and more an “audience democracy”, a phenomenon Riesman called heterodirection, even if the US scholar does not seem to have fully grasped the importance of the media and the transformation of the political parties. The weakening of the mass parties also weakens a proactive response by politics, which fails to understand the new that advances. Ortega’s reflections are, therefore, topical: the average, mass man, in particular the anomic middle classes, lacking in reference values, may demonstrate and openly declare their unease towards democracy and that of its élites, incapable of solving the problems of a society profoundly unlike that of the past. For this reason, if we examine the transformation of democracy and its parties and simply stigmatize them as mass neo-populist (the New Right in Europe, Italy included) we fail to recognise the fact that the true problem is not merely and solely the malaise of democracy (in a period of mass rebellion). A deeper analysis might reveal, perhaps, that one important source of the present unease is the behaviour of those who run the democratic institutions, as shown by reaction to the recent, scandalous thefts and misappropriation of public money on the part of Italian Regional and Provincial institutional representatives. Answers are sought by invoking an absolute demos; direct democracy by the people appears to be the only sure and trustworthy reference, the sole antidote to a complex and complicated state of affairs. Thus, the dangers to democracy come from within, when individual freedom fails to strike a balance with that of the collective institutions and becomes self-referential (Todorov, 2012). A positive future for a “re-conquest” of democracy, free from interference from the media and guided by a responsible and competent élite, favouring the concrete bottom-up 28

Introduction

participation of citizens and civil society, requires the solid education of the average man. Ortega’s teaching remains important and meaningful; institutions can change if those who animate them change too. There is a need for free and responsible choices on the part of individuals, for a new society where people are willing to risk something of their own and have the courage to question themselves, in order to bestow new meaning and sense on new processes of social construction.

29

Part I A Morbid Democracy

1.  Ortega y Gasset’s Mass-man 1.1. Ortega y Gasset. The Revolt of the Masses and the mass-man Ortega y Gasset was a complex and eclectic scholar, not only because of the variety of his writings, which ranged from philosophy to sociology, to theatre and art (including a study on Goya), but above all because of his political positions and theses, often severely criticised. It was during the Franco era in Spain when opposition was fierce, that Ortega, with his conscience-driven criticism of the West, refused to take ideological sides within either the “official field of the left” or that of the right. He preferred, rather, to carry out a deep and serious analysis of the new middle class which was becoming the protagonist of civil society in Europe. He approved its nascent democracy but, at the same time, he understood how the complexity of a social actor who, without responsible and competent guidance, might turn democracy into a danger rather than an opportunity. Many authors have found a parallel between the analysis presented in The Revolt of the Masses and that of Tocqueville who, a century earlier, in Democracy in America, had pointed out the risk that a democratic majority, once it had gained power, might betray the self same ideals of freedom and merit for which it had fought. The two historical contexts were different, however. Ortega’s analysis was undertaken during a very particular moment in European history, at the time of Franco, of fascism and the Russian revolution. Both rightist and leftist totalitarianisms seemed to prevail. It was a period of collectivism, as Ortega himself recalled in a note to the above-mentioned essay, at the beginning of the first chapter and entitled The phenomenon of the agglomerate (Ortega y Gasset, 1974, pp. 9-10). Using a highly charged vocabulary, unafraid of criticism, the Spanish thinker emphasised “the abstract divinisation of collectivism”. The inevitable socialization of humans had lead, he held, to “a homologation of taste, ideas: almost like a herd. Seeking to imitate the sheep with its bent head. In Europe many countries seek only a shepherd and a hound” (op. cit., p. 11, note 2). Hard but clear words that did not stem from any overflow of emotion but from precise and circumstantiated analyses. At the beginning of the chapter he underlines the fact that public life is not only political but 33

A Morbid Democracy

intellectual, moral and economic. Every expression of collective culture, even personal taste, bears testimony to the soul of a people (op. cit., p. 9). This situation marks the advent of the masses who have conquered social power; a common occurrence in history. This is The Revolt of the Masses. And so the title of Ortega’s work is born and destined to become, later on, an ideal type in many philosophical and sociological analyses of the average, mass man and all his positive and negative characteristics. It is hard to define Ortega, as is the case with all greater thinkers, as he was not a specialist in one field only; from these few lines of ours, it emerges that he was a scholar with two main vocations, philosophy and sociology. He also paid particular attention to history and its events, a priority in the case of the social sciences, as the US sociologist Charles Wright Mills writes in his The Sociological Imagination (1970, p. 153). He emphasised the fact that biography, history and society are the most opportune fields to approach in order to study real people who live in society and are its protagonists. These are the characteristics of sociology and its analyses. Ortega sought to unite all these features, while carrying out a philosophical examination of the individual; this is why his sociology is so closely intertwined with the philosophy of history, why he strove to avoid ideological positions that might falsify historical events themselves. Civilizations create multitudes, that is, “agglomerates”; a term used by Ortega to define the minorities that takes possession of the new places in society; minorities that become masses; the average man who no longer differentiates himself from others “but repeats himself as a generic type” (Ortega y Gasset, 1974, p. 13). How can one fail to recall Marc Augé’s non places1? Ortega’s topicality emerges right from the very first pages of his essay when he makes a distinction between majorities and minorities, not between status-based rich and poor, but between the empowered and those forced to obey. The distinction goes even deeper, as it is, at once, philosophical and sociological. Not a hierarchy but “a distinction between men”: a very modern and topical expression. And that is why it may be interpreted in so many ways. Thus, membership of the masses (the majority) or of a minority becomes a relative and not an ideological issue: it depends on cultural and historical conditions2. 1 2

Augé, 1993. Herrero, 1979, p. 274: “Para Ortega nem a cultura é un privilégio de minorias, nem a cultura de massas é una anticultura. A critica orteguiana dirige-se para outro campo: para o fenómeno de desintegração social que pode depender tanto de um aristocrata solitário da ciência como do homem multitudinário dos estádios desportivos”.

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Ortega y Gasset’s Mass-man

The Spanish thinker insisted quite a lot on matters concerning majority-minority relationships. He held that majorities (and therefore, the democracies of the past) were truly liberal because they followed the norms of law. Liberalism, a specific aspect of democracy, is not devoid of rules, but, on the contrary, it depends on internalization of all that helps to make democracy more complete. This means that the inclusion of an educational aspect which becomes cultural is a vital characteristic of Ortega’s thought. He holds that there can never be a democratic reform without a new educational culture capable of transforming the hearts and minds of people. The modernity and topicality of Ortega’s philosophy is contained in the lines quoted below where he claims that, while in the past democracy and the law existed in synonymous, “legal cohabitation”, today, on the contrary, we are experiencing a situation of “hyperdemocracy”. Material pressures have become fundamental: “the commonplaces of the café and of vulgar souls who dare vindicate and impose the rights of vulgarity” (Ortega y Gasset, 1974, p. 17). The term hyperdemocracy is extremely modern, topical and may be associated with another term, postdemocracy, a term mentioned above. It foregrounds and underlines a modality that ought to be a characteristic of people’s “rational actions”. Reflection and competence are characteristics essential to human action. But Ortega’s intention was “la crítica a la Modernidad en uno de sus elementos característicos como es el subjetivismo que se encuentra detrás de cualquiera de las formas de idealismo filosófico, sea éste teórico o práctico” (Suay, 2003, p. 171). In “Revista de Estudios Orteguianos”, published by the José Ortega y Gasset Foundation, Madrid, points out how his thinking was liberal but with important philosophical traits: the reference is to Husserl. Individual conscience is awareness of the Other. An important concept that, as a sociologist, he was to underline later, in Man and the populace: “So we build – as it is not a question of something evident, but of a construction or interpretation – the image of a world which is neither only mine or only yours: it belongs, rather, to everybody, it is the world. It is my sociality or social rapport with others which makes the manifestation, between them and me, of something similar to a common objective world, possible” (Ortega y Gasset, 2005, p. 101). It is an attempt at mediation between irreconcilable modalities: Weber’s sociology of action and Durkheim’s holistic interpretation, something Talcott Parsons had already attempted. Ortega identifies “a third personage”: the cultural tradition acting as “a connective bridge” between the individual and society. The internalization of rules forges society (Parsons), determines fashion, a social language. 35

A Morbid Democracy

Individualism and collectivism do not cancel, do not contradict each other but are complementary: that is why the Spanish scholar rejected extremism and positions characterized by strong ideologies. The reality is, philosophically and sociologically, much more complex than one might wish and the human being cannot dissolve into the community, let alone into the State. The individual should participate in the construction of society and the institutions, not be annihilated by them. This is the case of the masses, who, by acting emotionally, avoiding whatever is different, complicated, diverse, “impose vulgarity as a right, believing themselves excellent” (Ortega y Gasset, 1974, p. 65)3. The vulgarity on which Ortega insists is not only real but also symbolic. It is the presumption of believing we can make decisions about anything and everything without listening and going into depth, without reference standards. And so, we enter barbarism. The Spanish scholar writes: “The traveller who arrives in a barbarous country knows that in that land the principles to which we refer do not apply. Barbarism is the absence of standards and their possible appeal” (op. cit., p. 66). One must recall the strong criticism expressed concerning the Spain and Europe of the early decades of the 1900s. In the text España invertebrada, dating 1922, he upbraids his own country, and Europe in general, for the lack of values and morality which was causing laxness in behaviour and culture. Decadence experiences phases of expansion and contraction. The masses no longer follow the minorities, they have become selfreferential, they have rebelled: the average man, the mass-man has taken over (op. cit., pp. 22-3). We are in the presence of an anthropological mutation of humanity, an inevitable process of homologation to be analysed, from a linguistic point of view too. His study of the transformation of Latin into the vernacular in Prologue for the French, the introduction to The Revolt of the Masses, published in 1937, is of great interest and significantly integrated by the Epilogue for the English (1938). The first of these two texts was written in the Netherlands, the second in Paris. The simplification of the language too is a sign of the superficiality and trivialization of modernity4. The breakup of the Roman Empire begins with its language; the Tower of Babel 3

4

See also Cassano, 2011, p. 88, who points out how today’s society consists in the supremacy of the worst and a spread of vulgarity recalling what “Ortega y Gasset, in The Revolt of the Masses, prophetically said of the vulgar soul, which, recognizing vulgarity, has the audacity to assert the right of vulgarity and impose it everywhere.” Campa, 1984, p. 245: “Language, Ortega y Gasset wrote in May 1937, in the prologue to the French edition of the Rebelion de las masas, does not serve to express what each of us wants to say, it reveals, however, and cries out, regardless of our will, the mysterious condition of society that speaks.”

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Ortega y Gasset’s Mass-man

advances! Once again it is easy to find a comparison with the present day. Ortega’s reflections on vulgarity may be associated with a number of observations about the élites that represent our country at the moment, including its frequently ostentatious use of dialect, or the scandals that came to light in the summer of 2012 regarding the squander of public monies on vulgar and distasteful parties. A kind of federalism considered too often as an expression of the selfishness of the rich, without carrying out any true, in-depth historical and cultural analyses of the territories in question, so different in language and tradition. This reflection on the vulgarity of language recalls, although the context is quite different, what Hannah Arendt (1997) wrote in an essay on the meaning of politics, showing, by reference to the classical period and Homer5, how, in ancient times, the value of words was sacred. There was no distinction between speaking and acting. Reference may also be made to the prologue of the Gospel of John the Evangelist, where the logos, the word, is made flesh. Words are life and action. The trivialization and misuse of terms by contemporary politics, reference to words that have little to do with concepts that should clarify things and not confound the electorate, help to further endorse Ortega’s thesis. By way of example it suffices to recall the Democratic Party’s primaryelection debate (Italy, December 2012) and the generational clash between the mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, and the then secretary of the party, Pier Luigi Bersani, and the misuse of the term “scrapping”, which, in the recent past, was referred to car-industry sales policies whereby the scrapping of old cars entitled one to a large discount when purchasing a new one. In politics, this implied the self-exclusion and non-candidability of older MP’s. And, therefore, the term “guaranteed second-hand”, borrowed also, it would appear, from the car-sales ambit, was used as a retort and meant to indicate the candidacy of an older, more experienced person for the post of secretary, someone more reliable than the newer “rookie”, Renzi. The use of correct, appropriate words, that do not confuse the voter or, worse still, banalise democratic competition by underestimating it, is not a matter of mere form but also of substance. We need to help the country and encourage the electorate to reflect seriously on the issue of representation, and even more significantly, on the proper relationship that ought to exist between different generations and bring young and old 5

Arendt, 1997, p. 37: “In Homer no such a distinction between speaking and acting appears; those who perform great deeds must always utter great words, not only because magnificent explanations need to accompany great deeds not only because, if mute, they would fall into oblivion, but also because speech itself was considered an a priori mode of action.”

37

A Morbid Democracy

alike together in order to contribute to the rebirth of the nation. We need to pay attention to the language we use and not see it as an instrument to be used in the logic of opposition as if others, those different from us were obstacles, because of poverty or age, of their being immigrants or jobless. We must be careful not to fall into the scapegoat trap, because “audience democracy” also changes the modality of messages. Therefore, the elites need to show greater respect towards each other but also towards the civil society which elects them. This way it is possible to “capitalize” on a different but equally useful commitment, a bottom-up representation which may take a meaningfully active part in the primaries and help to “refound” politics at a time when legitimacy is going through a serious crisis. The Spanish scholar’s analysis is not political. His discourse concerns the modern, civilized man: the reflections are different from, but, in some cases, similar to those of other sociologists and scholars of modernity. The German thinker, Norbert Elias, in a detailed fresco-like account of civilization, a psychological and anthropological representation of Western civilization, shows that during certain moments of historical transition, human sociability may grow more vulgar and less rigorous6. History is never linear, it does not follow a predetermined straight line: it is an obstacle race, and often its future course cannot be planned. Vulgarity, thus, becomes the dilation of the present: the inability to provide informed and responsible answers to today’s problems. It is acceptance of the existential loneliness of the individual (from a psychological point of view)7 and for politics it means surrender to the present, without a plan for the future. It is a clear manifestation of the crisis of a democracy unable to establish a purpose. Ortega’s analysis blends the philosophical perspective with the sociological: it does not refer only to the particular moment in history when he wrote, but may also be usefully applied to the present. Ortega was an interpreter of decadence (he referred to the period between the two world wars), but situations repeat themselves, although with different modalities. Because of this, his vision of political reform was, essentially, “a programme for the reform of human life” (Cangiotti, 1972, p. 154). 6

7

Elias, 1987, p. 418: “Forms of entertainment and socializing became less rigorous, and grew vulgar in part. The strictest middle-class taboos surrounding certain spheres of behaviour, especially money and sexuality, spread, in different degrees, to a broader circle, and when this equilibrium between tensions died down, after an alternating of relaxation and rigidity that saw now the one now the other prevail, certain elements of the code of conduct of both spheres merged, giving rise to a stronger code of conduct”. Campa, 1984, p. 255: “The mass-man experiences the dilation of the present, his anguish is his lack of response to loneliness. The solitude of Schopenhauer and the anguish of Kierkegaard chain the mass-man to the seriality of mechanical products.”

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1.2.  Ortega’s aristocracy and elitism Given these premises, Ortega’s ideas on democracy (by many scholars considered elitist) when referred to classical sociological elitists like Mosca, Pareto and Michels, may also be interpreted as aristocratic (op. cit., p. 176), but not classist or status-bound. The majority-minority rapport is educational because politics without morality generates the homologous, isolated, anomic average, mass-man who is a danger to democracy. This thesis is corroborated by Tocqueville’s observations: majorities as such are not sufficient to determine the democratic nature of political processes. It is quality that determines democracy, not only quantity. This is why real or perceived populism (quoted for convenience), by appealing to an often non-existent people can contribute in times of crisis, like the present, to confuse, fragment and disorient the middle class, the backbone of a democracy (Lasch, 1995, p. 33). If Ortega’s analysis is inevitably rooted in ethical thinking, life is moral and Ortega himself explains the meaning of the term moral, as philosopher Ignacio Sanchez Camara8 explains. The medium through which to affirm the morality of human existence is authenticity, the ethics of vocation, Weber’s Beruf. Man’s awareness is attained through progressive rationalization of existence: happiness in life is the outcome of the effort invested in vocation (Camara, 1986, p. 42). The difference, therefore, is between those who are able to discover and practice their Beruf, and those who fail to do so. In this lies the true distinction between minorities and majorities, the core of Ortega’s aristocracy, which we might also compare to Nietzsche (op. cit., pp. 201-3). If “la teoría de la élite es esencial para entender la Sociologia de Ortega” (op. cit., p. 79), we need to specify the modes and meaning of his elitism: the difference between his social and political approach. Also because the theorists of élitisme, except Pareto, attributed specifically political significance to the concept. Ortega used it, but from his own very particular point of view, to provide a philosophical rather than a political explanation of civil society. In The theme of our time, Ortega, always scathing and critical of his contemporaries, confirms the fact that it is not politics that makes his views different from those of his fellow citizens, “but the very principles of thinking and feeling” (Ortega y Gasset, 1985, p. 80). The fundamental difference is between those who continued to entertain the 8

Cámara, 1986, p. 41: “Afirma Ortega: ‘Me irrita este vocablo moral. Por eso yo prefiero que el lector lo entienda por lo que significa, no en la contraposición moral-inmoral, sino en el sentido que adquier cuando de algie se dice que está desmoralizado’”.

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ideas of the 1890s and those who, with enormous difficulty, tried to reach beyond stereotyped concepts of liberalism or reaction, in an effort to understand the present in all its complexity and diversity compared to the past. The strong presence of mass parties and the extension of the franchise in the past led to the hetero-direction of citizens, to influence exercised by other institutions and organizations: the “iron law of oligarchy” (Salvadori, 2009 p. 49). The elitists understood this, especially as Michels noted, since “organization is in itself the cause of the prevalence of the elected over the elector, the delegate over the delegator” (ibid.). Once again, the mass, in Ortega’s words “came into the world to be directed, influenced, represented, organized” (op. cit., p. 30). So, perhaps, it is necessary to redefine Mosca’s elitism, shifting the emphasis from the political to the scientific and the cultural: it is training and education that may help reduce the hetero-direction of “audience democracy” (op. cit., p. 81). Here the aristocracy and elitism of the Spanish scholar emerges again along with his distrust of the individual who, when devoid of competent authority and guidance, fails to become a “person”, remaining mass. It is opportune to point to another problem highlighted by Ortega and by other researchers (who referred to the issue in relation to the field of medicine): the risk of excess specialization, a characteristic of mass society that contributes, in many cases, to a lack of responsibility on the part of the single individual. The Spaniard writes, “The specialist is well acquainted with every tiny detail of his own universe; though profoundly ignorant of everything else” (Ortega y Gasset, 1974, p. 105). This new man is not wise because he knows nothing beyond his own area of specialization, though, at the same time, he is not ignorant because he knows every aspect of his own discipline. The Spanish scholar observes, with an intuition useful to our age, how the specialist, despite being profoundly ignorant in the arts, social customs, science and politics, expresses his opinion “as a mass-man, devoid of qualities on matters regarding almost every sphere of life” (op. cit., p. 106). Globalization and the new media have helped to increase our knowledge. The “audience democracy” poses many questions to which we are often unable to respond. The superficiality and, often, the trivialization of knowledge impose barely adequate answers on us. As if each of us, and perhaps even those who are specialists in one area only, were able to answer, find solutions to problems in fields beyond their competence. This is characteristic not only of the political élites but also of members of civil society. Often the media broadcast interviews with singers or actors concerning political or scientific issues of which they have no expert knowledge. 40

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Each of us performs different roles in life; we are, above all, social actors and citizens, but out of respect for competence, science and politics, every­one should cultivate his own Beruf. This too is one of the modalities of the vulgarity of our day, as described so effectively by Ortega: “The most immediate result of this uncompensated specialisation is that, today, just as there is a greater number of men of science than ever before, there are also fewer cultured men than in 1750, for example” (op. cit., p. 106). These reflections and observations apply also in medicine, which, in recent years, is perhaps one of the areas of science which has specialized and “broken up” most. Karl Jaspers, a physician and philosopher, has repeatedly highlighted the great progress of contemporary scientific medicine which has often overlooked, however, the need for doctors to be humane (Jaspers, 1991, pp.  2-3). If specialization is an irreversible, positive and necessary aspect of modernity this does not mean that science should not be accompanied by an understanding of the sick. Men are mere cogs in a wheel; they also need to develop rational (and emotional) interpersonal relationships, in the case of medicine, with patients and their families. Even more critical is Gilberto Freyre who makes a comparison between medicine and sociology because both, he claims, by dealing with the “social man”, cannot afford to entertain a particularistic kind of vision. Fragmentation is related to the environment; the modern physician, like the sociologist, cannot escape specificity. For this reason he must beware lest he lose sight of the whole9. The risk of the “mechanisation” and depersonalisation of the massman, of his becoming an artificial fragment, a machine, is the “barbarism of modernity” indicated by Ortega. The Spanish scholar D’Ors writes that “la consecuencia es que el especialismo ha creado una casta de ombre mediocres. Con calabra de Ortega habremos de decir que es un sabioignorante” (D’Ors, 1986, pp. 4-7). And so, mediocrity and ignorance are added to vulgarity, providing a picture of a certain kind of contemporary politics. D’Ors uses the term “intellectual vulgarity” to indicate a new feature of modernity. And this leads back to the aristocracy, rather than to the elitism of Ortega: 9

Freyre, 1975, p. 38: “Neither sociology nor medicine can indulge in excess specialization without losing their sanity or their authenticity. They both need to address the social man, come to grips with the total social man, rather than consider him merely and strictly from this or that particular angle. There is no contemporary medical doctor, no present-day sociologist, who can avoid being a specialist. But they should avoid that their specializations be of such a nature that the general practitioner in him lose sight of the whole, of the sets, of the complexes”.

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the fundamental problem of modern man is the lack of the pressure and fatigue that the pursuit of true knowledge requires. Nobles are not those considered such because of status but those who acquire nobility, those who transcend the masses. Contemporary man is satisfied with the way he is: he is indifferent to what happens around him. The special, first-rate man follows a superior norm: “La nobleza se define como exigencia por las obligaciones, no por los derechos. Goethe decía: vivir a gusto es de plebeyo: el noble aspira a ordenacíon y a ley” (op. cit., p. 7). Rationality, the value of rules, respect for the institutions, a sense of duty, before claiming rights of any kind, are, according to Ortega, the characteristics the truly democratic man should possess, the signs of that nobility of spirit so difficult to acquire. The complex historical moment that Europe and Spain are going through is, first of all and above all, a moral rather than a political crisis. The historical crisis of civilization is turning into that of the individual. This is the main key to an understanding of Ortega’s The Revolt of the Masses and of his elitism. Comparison of sociological and philosophical theories of elites is the result of a notion of democracy as a phenomenon based on public opinion. But, as Cuevas too points out, the social process of forming a public opinion, an indispensible aspect of modernity, is essentially aristocratic (Cuevas, 2004, p. 304). Ortega must be considered personalist for he is certainly neither a positivist nor a materialist. Life, for him, is creation, personal fulfilment. With regard to this, the writings of Habermas (1971) and Lippmann (2004) concerning the education and the criticism of public opinion are of great important and significance to the history of sociology. The work of the German sociologist in particular, which, as he himself writes in the foreword to an essay, provides a sociological and historical analysis of “traditional policy”, beginning with the Mediaeval European bourgeoisie, with particular reference “to the structure and function of the liberal model, its origins and transformation” (Habermas, 1971, p. 8). The point that interests us most here is the extent and the nature of the impact that the average citizen, and public opinion have on liberal democratic processes. We can identify six theoretical perspectives concerning the formation of public opinion (Barisone, 2011, p. 573). Those closest to the position of Ortega are the first two: the Social tribunal and Public debate (op. cit., p. 574). The former refers to Tocqueville and Rousseau. It envisages a public opinion seen as a people’s tribunal, based on the customs and practices of a nation and a State, which, on the strength of the majority, establishes basic norms of behaviour as a model. Tocqueville’s concept of the “tyranny of the majority” returns again updated by the German sociologist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1984), who points out how all behaviour, even that which appears irrelevant because personal 42

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(fashion, dress), even non-participation in politics, are really aspects of participation and conformity. All goes to make up public opinion: people are afraid of remaining isolated. The media, especially television, provide models which people find it hard to evade, so they conform in silence, for fear of expressing a different opinion. This is the “spiral of silence” as dangerous as, if not more dangerous than, blatant opposition. This is the homologation of the conscience and, as Ortega wrote in the opening pages of The Revolt of the Masses, people prefer “to be sheep”, become majority, lose themselves in the crowd, rather than belong to the thinking, reflecting minority, something which requires considerable effort. This is Ortega’s aristocracy, at times, overly pessimistic and dismissive of people’s potential. It is, however, the key to understanding his agony and his condemnation of a society that had lost its core values, that has failed to find a way to react against a modernity that was descending into rapid decline, first moral, then political. Positive public opinion ought to favour clear and open discussion of issues of importance to the citizen and become a political force. But, as Habermas writes in the final part of his essay, public opinion has changed in modern times; advertising and the media have changed it, broken it up into different fragmented splinter groups (Habermas, 1971). Politics, thanks to the new media and polls, tries to intercept these groups and manipulate them. It is the more and more invasive and persuasive power of advertising, of hetero-direction (this will be discussed when analysing Reisman’s text) and of the social networks which have grown so important in recent years. Thanks to the “audience democracy” the difference between the publicus and privatus, typical of Roman law, has disappeared. Nadia Urbinati (2011) insists on this issue also citing a number of other authors who have discussed the issue. The sociologist from the Columbia University is highly critical of “audience democracy” and explains, in agreement with Bernard Manin (one of the first scholars to introduce this concept (Manin, 2010, pp. 2445)10 why it is increasingly difficult, in this post-ideological era, when the mass parties are undergoing a crisis, to distinguish between individual and public opinion. So, from being the positive concept that it was (Habermas’s forum for discussion and exchanges of ideas, important and meaningful events that determine politics and policy, a concept close to Rosanvallon’s counter-democracy), public opinion is sliding 10

Regarding “audience democracy” the author writes that “In democratic countries there is a trend towards the personalization of power. The media, nonetheless, favour certain personal qualities: the victorious candidates are not local notables, but what we might call mediatic figures. ‘Audience democracy’ is the government of the media expert.”

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faster and faster down the slithery slope of anti-politics and populism. These positions, so distant historically too, from Ortega’s, are, however, meaningful and provide suggestions for an understanding of today’s crisis of democracy, its “ailment”. The Spanish scholar’s view on public opinion, as Suay (2009) recalls, cannot but be associated with the educational function of politics underlining its pre-political role. It is necessary, of course, to contextualize Ortega’s thinking. Spain at the time was deaf “al sentir de la nueva política, a los nuevos impulsos que, de hecho, piensa que están naciendo” (op. cit., p. 230). Public opinion did not perform only one function, it was mirrored in the different positions within the parliament, in the fruitful debate it might generate. Ortega’s concept of nacionalización, underlining the dual task of his country’s greatest public institution, is also interesting. A compromise, a strategy was required to accommodate the divergences within the Spanish public opinion. It was vital to avoid, however, an “excluding” nationalism which might favour particularisms and fragmentations with concrete risks of populism and the possibility that the masses might impose their opinions on every sphere of life. The Revolt of the Masses brings one risk in its wake: a statism that is the complete opposite to the protagonism of public opinion (op. cit., p. 231). Let us consider for a moment, within the scenario of contemporary Spain’s recession, the “centrifugal force” of one of its wealthiest regions, Catalonia, which already enjoys considerable fiscal and legislative autonomy and the vast majority of which pronounced itself in favour of independence during a consultational referendum held in November 2014. The liberal mind of the Spanish thinker expressed a further worry, that concerning an invasive and totalitarian statism capable of preventing a healthy, aware public opinion from carrying out a political programme grounded in the aspirations and feelings of the citizens. Once more, the philosophical position precedes the political one. According to Ortega there are three principal modalities of public opinion. The first is the expression and comparison of significant ideas which may become political proposals. Later, if they achieve consolidation, they may become norms, rights, principles. Finally, they may actually constitute a veritable life project based on shared values regarding justice and truth. Thus, public opinion becomes an element capable of constituting the nation, the outcome of confrontation between the diversities present within the country. Public opinion interacts with political power but unlike other aspects of elitism, “el depositario de la opinión pública es el Parliament” (ivi, p. 240). 44

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There can be, therefore, a close nexus between society and government even if the liberal Ortega makes a clear distinction between legislative and executive power. It is not possible to exploit the public will as if it belonged to this or that particular government. The Spanish scholar provides the following example of despotism with reference to the history of Spain, “el caciquismo en la aplicación de leyes como expresión de intereses particulares: era un estado sin leyes” (ivi, p. 241). The good politician is he who is capable of interpreting the intentions of the people but also of educating it. Politics without education can achieve nothing!

1.3.  Morbid Democracy Ortega uses a significant adjective when explaining the “radical democracy” of the mass-man: morbid, indicating a kind of social illness “born of resentment and leading to barbarianism” (Cuevas, 2004, p. 305). It means the degradation and underestimation of education and culture, the crisis of the university, of politicism and of “hyperdemocracy”. The Spanish political model is quite different from the liberal-democratic one. Banality, mediocrity and the cancellation of all spiritual authority have taken hold of the mass-man. One ought to explain the terms hyperdemocracy and morbid democracy, as both are key concepts of Ortega’s philosophy and necessary to understand the connection with the present-day crisis. The New Right’s populist drift, but also that of some radical leftists, confirms Ortega’s intuitions. The average, mass-man’s crisis and his mediocrity determine modern post-ideological democracy, the democracy of the parties which no longer represent the masses, let alone the middle classes. This is precisely why they use the term people inappropriately: like a mirror in which to reflect themselves, narcissistically. This reveals their limits and their personal ambitions. Obviously not all Ortega’s reflections still apply, but some of them are useful for understanding contemporary modernity. A democratic theory is heir to its own historical and cultural context. “El concepto de hiperdemocracia, que es coherente con una valoración negativa de la situación social y política de aquel momento, caracterizado por la emergencia de las masas” (De la Vieja, 2001, p. 136), writes a scholar of the Spanish sociologist. He holds that for quite a long time the prevailing thesis was that Ortega was an elitist, defender of aristocratic ideas within the social and political institutions. Maybe he went beyond that. He did not slavishly adhere to Plato and Aristotle, favouring a government of philosophers. The correct and most plausible view, is that of an Ortega who is “no necessariamente elitista de la hiperdemocracia” (op. cit., p. 137). The intention of the Spanish thinker was to direct 45

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the majority-minority relationship, a purely political concept, towards a personal and ideal-citizen mode. The aim was to transform the concept of democracy: no longer seen as a way by which to achieve “majorityminority policies”, but as a “deliberative democracy”, more attentive to implementation procedures. An undoubtedly relevant concept, it is much discussed in this period of “sick democracy.” Today is not 1917, when Ortega wrote the essay Morbid democracy: the mass ideologies of the right and left, have no longer the same weight. Some traits and analyses may prove useful, however. Today we face a democracy that seems to retreat before the emotional political response of the citizens, no longer represented by the traditional political parties, more and more divided and inclined to improvise, without a plan, without a programme except negative sterile criticism of the present, and incapable of finding ways of bringing politics back to life. Ortega’s minorities, for the reasons indicated above, need not occupy posts of responsibility in government places, but can actively promote change in the institutions and in civil society in other ways. The pathology of mass democracy, of the average man, which the Spanish scholar called morbid, clarifies the terms of the question, which do not concern only the era of the great mass ideologies when Europe suffered, in the 1920s, from a diminution of her importance, a vulgarity spreading through all its countries, first of all, Spain. It is a people that feels flattered “by adopting a plebeian position just like a sick body enjoys lying as it wishes”: with these words Ortega’s reflection begins (Ortega y Gasset, 1979, p.  401)11. The populace is triumphing all over the world, tyrannizing Spain; one must have a revolutionary attitude (in this case the author considers the term favourably) to counter “the worst of tyrants.” We are obliged to associate these words with Tocqueville’s “tyranny of the majority”. They are not a condemnation of nascent democracy, as one might be led to imagine. The analysis is far more complex. We are witnessing a triumph of democracy, but next to this “noble idea” the public consciousness is harbouring low, mean elements too. Ortega recognizes (he cannot but do so) the positivity of democracy, but at the same time (this is the problem and the drama), democracy has grown exasperated, has permeated every sphere of life; like a disease attacking the surrounding cells, it has infected the body of society. The sociologist’s sanguine, Mediterranean language should not deceive us. His is no momentary, emotional cry of pain. It is a denouncement 11

Ortega’s essay, Democrazia morbosa was published in 1917 as part of a collection called El Espectador.

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of the omnipotence of a concept and of a reality, democracy that, if it becomes all-pervasive, will sicken the body that hosts it. With his usual sagacity he provides clear examples aimed at avoiding an invasive attitude; in sociology one might apply the expression hypersocialization of democracy. It is like the instance of a vegetarian who because of his respectable personal culinary position rejects anything that does not coincide with his own peculiar position. So, if one claims being a democrat, above all, this makes no sense. It trivializes the meaning of the word. It empties, from their heart’s core, a concept and a reality, which remain, in any case, important. Today, there often seems to be a competition under way for the appropriation of the term people, which is used, abused and debased for utilitarian ends of all kinds. There is no politician or journalist who has not used it at least once: populism seems to be the leitmotif of all civil society’s many actors. It is a question of hiding behind a word because one is unable to see the real problem, or perhaps because one seeks to hide because of being incapable of providing appropriate responses. The people seem to have splintered into myriad fragments, at loggerheads with each, unable to unite and find positive solutions to a complicated situation. Democracy is ill; because the disease that afflicts it is attacking all its tissues, even the healthy ones, we need to provide clear, prompt answers. Is politics, the politics of our day, and the current parties able to do so? What are the answers provided by Ortega and can they be of use to us? We may follow his reasoning, even in places where his obvious aristocracy (even the pessimism of the human soul) bothers us, but it can undoubtedly act as a stimulus, in any case. As a provocation, the Spanish thinker states with great confidence that “it is not lawful, first of all, to be democratic, because the plan referred to by the democratic idea is not mandatory, not a priority” (op. cit., p. 402). This might appear to be an elitist position but the author, at a later stage, makes it perfectly comprehensible. Politics cannot be our prime concern, just as technical perfection (an important and decisive element) cannot be the ultimate end of our existence. The individual, one might use the term person (Group Spe, 2004), should be allowed a wide margin of action: politics should not be all-invasive. The same is true, as already mentioned above, of excess specialization which leads man to forget his humanity. Ortega’s concern, always awake to the liberal spirit, is that no reality should annul the person by threatening to homologate man and cancel diversity, at the risk of collectivism. The democracy born of lofty principles aimed at “lifting the populace out of its low condition” (Ortega y Gasset, 1979, p. 403) ends by sympathizing with the very plebe from which it sought to distinguish 47

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itself. This is a reference to the socialist creed. One should recall that the year in which Morbid Democracy was written was 1917, that of the October Revolution in Russia. The use of the term plebs may be annoying, may give rise to misunderstanding, but if one continues the analysis, some of the observations can help us to understand the grave malaise of contemporary democracy. Attempts have been made to eliminate juridical inequalities due to birth, considered rights during the ancien régime, but which, in actual fact, were privileges. The task of democracy is, therefore, that of cancelling privilege not levelling rights. For this reason (this is Ortega’s second provocation) he claims: “it is not licit to be only democratic” (op. cit., p. 404). The Spanish sociologist agrees with the elimination of privilege but he worries, and here is the rub, that “Whoever is irritated at seeing equals treated differently, but does not react to the different being treated equally, is not democratic but plebeian. What today goes by the name of democracy is the degeneration of the heart. We owe to Nietzsche the discovery of the mechanism that operates within the degenerate public conscience: he called it ressentiment” (ibid.). This is one of the main points that can help us understand the aristocracy of Ortega’s thinking, his elitism; we must know how to stand back from it if it appears dangerous. One must recognise, however, the profundity of his analysis, his non-banality and recall the European context in which he lived; a time when democracies were undergoing crisis, the middle classes which, while demanding their rights, and justly so, in many countries, actually contributed towards replicating extremisms and dictatorships they claimed combatting. The concept of resentment cannot be examined in this context from a philosophical point of view, but maybe from a sociological perspective like that of Robert Merton who considered it an anomie, a sense of “relative privation”, what occurs when a person compares his own situation to that of a group unlike his own. A fairly common situation. It is a question of “anticipated socialization”, where the individual, while interiorizing the values of a reference group, may fail to achieve them, and thus, become anomic and deviant. The difference between the deviant subject and the conformist is not all that significant. In many situations the non-achievement of a goal can cause frustration, anger, maybe even the resentment the Spanish sociologist refers to. Ortega’s position, therefore, resembles, to some extent, that of Merton. He tried to explain what he meant by risentimento. He refers to the famous fable of the fox and the grapes. Unable to reach the grapes because they are up too high we may be brought to assume a position totally opposite to the initial one and invert our scale of values: the fox prefers 48

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the bitter grapes closest to her to the ripe ones beyond her reach. The second example Ortega provides us with regards the French Revolution and appears in his The Revolt of the Masses, published almost ten years later; here he explains how revolutions led to counter-revolutions. In France, after the Paris Commune, came the Napoleonic Restoration. He tells of how a charcoal burner, at the beginning of the Revolution, seeing a Marchioness seated in a sedan chair, hoped for a change in his social condition, but the resentment of a “petty revolutionary lawyer” spoke of a different reality where all would be charcoal burners. What teachings are contained in these two stories, therefore? Do they condemn democracy as over-egalitarian? Should one prefer an aristocratic regime with inevitable personal differences? Maybe the second question contains an element of truth but one must continue to read the text to arrive at a correct appraisal, while keeping the period in which it was written in mind as before. The central point of Ortega’s thesis is that the equality to which people aspire and which they demand is not that “before the law: they want the declaration that all men are equal in talent, sensitivity, delicacy and spirit” (op. cit., p. 405). This is the point: it is this resentment that makes creatures plebeian. It is “a corrosive frame of mind”, which deceives man himself, “it raises its head particularly where it is harder to hide lack of quality. Is there anything sadder than a writer, a professor, a politician without talent, without feeling, without character? Journalists, professors and politicians without talent comprise the Chiefs of Staff of envy. What we call public opinion and democracy, today, is practically the purulent secretion of these envious souls” (op. cit., pp. 405-6). Statements of this kind if taken literally can perplex us, but we are aware that the language Ortega used with his contemporaries and to express his criticism of them, earned him much hostility. He was an awkward person who did not like to take sides and be exploited on any account. His love of the classical world, at such a dramatic historical moment for Spain and for the whole of Europe, seemed excessive to some. The priorities were others! These observations contain some truth, maybe. But it is equally true that some of his insights are relevant to all moments in history; today, perhaps, even more so than in Ortega’s own lifetime. The essay winds up with words relating public opinion to democracy: very often the envy of people is one of the main thrusts behind requests for democracy. Sometimes, confrontation with the Other hides our envy regarding what we would like to be or have, but cannot. Our (legitimate) demands for a democracy closer to the people are not always clear: they may be confused with a fad and the “approval of the public” closest to the plebs. Ortega understood this even before media and advertising experts 49

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formulated their analyses. So it is possible to use and manipulate the concept of people for one’s own purposes and not, certainly, to improve an ailing democracy. Without reference to Ortega, deliberately polemical towards certain social categories of the time, it emerges that the process by means of which public opinion is formed, is complex and even dangerous, especially in an era when the media are so important to democracy and its development. Contemporary politics are in very obvious difficulty, and equally serious issues relating to “self-re-foundation” affect the political parties, unable to respond to the populist thrusts and mass plebiscitary drifts of the fragmented, disoriented middle class. One of the principal issues is to try to understand the will to reestablish a kind of politics capable of meeting the demands of the citizens, of being aware of their needs, of planning for the common good which not only considers particular, individual exigencies but also those of all the actors in society. It is mandatory, therefore, to avoid what Ortega called risentimento, something very difficult to achieve in an audience democracy like the present one. We must learn how to distinguish between just observations and coherent proposals and the “false needs”, created by the media, and between positive values, capable of improving the quality, and frustration which, on the contrary, generate that Mertonian kind of anomie related to “induced needs” that have nothing to do with responsible, participatory democracy. This is why one must avoid falling into the trap of those political parties, even new ones, that seek to heal ailing democracy by administering drugs that may prove unsuitable when not downright dangerous. It is not by favouring the inevitable emotivism of human nature that one may best respond to the complex problems of globalization. Simplification and trivialization of the answers, grasping only some of the myriad aspects of the ailing democracy, aiding and abetting present-day populism with verbal violence that often indulges in personal insult, are clear manifestations of the resignation of democracy. It is this which confirms the poor state of health of democracy, not the will to recover, however slowly and wearily. Weber’s Beruf (vocation) seems so remote. It would be important to recognise the fact that if all the generations joined forces, with the help of new technology and the social networks, it might help to change opinions and find solutions for all, without excluding some in favour of others. Thus, the masses would gradually become responsible people, willing to play the game. In some cases even risking their own comfort zones to contribute towards the common good in favour of all social actors not only a few. One example might be that of the 2012 US Presidential Elections which brought Barack 50

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Obama back to the White House. Many post-electoral analyses confirmed the fact that, besides votes from an ever more significant part of the ethnic minorities, the scientific, even invasive world of IT, that helped to outline the possible electoral target, contributed towards the victory. So, a “made-to-measure” electoral message for potential Obama voters was formulated. Thus “exasperated” technology was accompanied by bottom-up action involving all the players in the field, young and old alike, all united in striving for one aim, that of getting citizens to vote. Maybe the old American community spirit, which the sociologist Putnam auspicated as one of the New World’s positive resources, emerged again. Obama’s challenge, one of the most difficult to face, is that of trying to “reassemble”, as far as possible “the shattered pieces” of everyday life, that is too difficult to put together again, conciliate the different generations and the various ethnic groups within a community that, in order to save itself, needs wholeness, not particularity. The European reality is quite unlike that of the USA but our future is not so far behind their present; by observing and understanding some of the underlying workings of the USA we may be able to comprehend the European reality. 
Politics is becoming, and not only in Italy, but also in all Western democracies, a vindication of personal rights, many of them justified; this can often mean losing sight of a complete and proactive common goal in favour of all. This is the era of personalized rights. In the past, perhaps, traditional ideologies often forgot “real” concrete people. Now the tendency seems to be quite the opposite. If previously “everything was political”, “above all political”, as Ortega pointed out, now, to the contrary, the individual has become the main public actor. People risk forgetting relationships, fail to make long-term plans and seek guidelines to plot a purposeful route alongside companions with whom to share the journey.

1.4.  Ortega’s State, Nation and Europe Ortega’s ideas regarding Europe may be considered almost “prophetic” because the present situation confirms the inadequacy of the contemporary political class, incapable of planning a common, inclusive route for the Old Continent’s different national communities. This inclusive plan should regard all aspects of civil and political coexistence between the states. The economic aspect, in a period of grave recession like the present one, is certainly one of the chief priorities of all community policy, but it should not be separated from a common management of many important issues that need to be addressed: a common UE legislation governing immigration, for example, a reality that no single nation can or should be required to handle alone, unaided by the other member states, a common fiscal policy to avoid social dumping in favour of some nations which boomerangs against those who create it; policy-sharing based on 51

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commonly shared ideas of the common good and unwaiveable (in some cases reformable) welfare benefits, without forgetting, however, the hardwon benefits achieved in the past. The risks are those of national egotism and increasing “privatization” of the services no longer seen as an asset for the whole community but only for some who become the “benefiters” of a particular sector of the welfare system. Ortega hoped for a Europe where a philosophy of a “quest for a superior instance” might be established, by which each one might understand and achieve his vocation and thus raise himself up above the mass-man: “the only thing we can really call rebellion is not accepting one’s destiny, rebelling against oneself” (Ortega y Gasset, 1974, pp. 109-10). The rebellion of the mass-man should not recur to violence, a characteristic not only of the Spain and Europe of the 1900s but also of our contemporary era. The Spanish sociologist’s rebellion is, first of all, moral, against the annihilation of the individual who fails to find identity, the strength to react against and emerge from contemporary homologation, within himself or in the fundamental values of life. In his Prologue for the French and his Epilogue for the English, both published with The Revolt of the Masses in a recent edition (Ortega y Gasset, 2001), Ortega clearly states his position regarding a Europe whose values and culture he recognises, but which, like the mass-man, needs to learn how to react and demonstrate its capacity for meaningful action. His idea of a new inclusive Europe is akin to a redefinition of the idea of nation as a basis for the construction of a democracy suited to the Old Continent, one capable of helping peoples and citizens (Ortega y Gasset, 1998)12. The 1920s and 1930s, as the Spanish sociologist sustains, were not linear, but discontinuous, subject to “cycles of history”, as G.B. Vico might have put it; Ortega held that one should not be overcome by dejection, despite many reasons for being so, as in the present period: “The air is becoming unbreathable. Do you know of any place on earth where intelligence exists?”, writes the usually provoking Ortega, quoting Job (Ortega y Gasset, 1974, p. 15). And with his usual pessimism he states that it is impossible for men to understand others, thus, condemning themselves to solitude. Often the Ortega who reflects upon the human condition seems to have little hope, unable to find a way out of a difficult, complex historical period not only like the present but also like the epoch he lived in. This is the inevitable existential dimension of humanity. 12

This text contains a collection of Ortega’s writings about Europe, a study of his on the subject dated 1949 and four conferences held in 1952, 1953 and 1954. It provides a picture of the great changes that have occurred in contemporary society and discusses the idea of nation as fundamental to a New Europe.

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And so he seeks refuge in the idea-type of the virtuous, lone, cultured man, capable of guiding the ignorant (in the etymological sense) masses towards a positive renaissance. A position, which he himself recognised as akin to that of the philosopher, Nietzsche. This is why he is accused of conservatism, elitism or, worse, of being a reactionary when the world was rebelling against dictatorship and Franco. Furthermore, the heterogeneousness of the Spanish thinker, classicist, scholar of theatre, literature and painting, made it difficult for his contemporaries to fit him into any precise disciplinary area, capable of defining his thinking, even his political and doctrinal positions. It was of no avail to seek in his writings a clear condemnation of the ideology of the right which, at that time, made the air unbreathable. His position was different. He shunned ideological positions which might oblige him to chose one side against another and which would have deprived him of the freedom to examine the human soul, free of preconception. This should help us consider some of his observations which can prove useful to us today, because they delved into the intimate recesses of the soul, the depth of the human conscience, revealing their limits too. Furthermore, as stated above, he sought to plot a virtuous route for those citizens and nations who never renounce planning positively for a better future. Here, Ortega, his pessimism and his existential aristocracy provide us with acceptable indications and plans applicable in this post-modern world of ours too. He recognises the fact that Europe has been in a state of continuous war from the Middle Ages on, due to a difficult cohabitation between cultures and countries with different habits, customs and laws. The distinction he makes between society and association (its opposite) is interesting. Society does not stem from a simple accord of wills. It is much more complex. It is the accord between wills that presupposes and determines the existence of society. It presupposes and sets down the modes of cohabitation that come before all else. The European peoples have been societies for a long time: with many of the characteristics that they entail. Unity of state exists within Europe. Ortega uses the term, often availed of in our day, although with little success, United States of Europe, although he recognises the fact that it may be a fantasy or, worse still, a gamble, although an unavoidable future prospect, regardless even of the present setbacks, the economic egotism of some states, excess rigorism as an end in itself, Great Britain’s usual Euro-scepticism. The words used by the Spanish thinker to define the complexity and pluralism of Europe are interesting: “a Chinese pigtail jutting out of the Urals or a shudder of the grand Islamic magma” (op. cit., p. 19) are of great interest. They prophesize an intercultural European society already present in history, even if one does not wish to see and accept it. He agrees that it is difficult for European culture and tradition to grasp the advancing 53

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dynamism of a balance of powers (as defined by the US government). The comparison Ortega uses for the Old Continent is interesting, “Europe is effectively a swarm: many bees and one flight” (op. cit., p. 20). One might add that the flights have multiplied and often seem to bump into each other but, they must recompose themselves and recognise the fact that plurality is no obstacle to union, that the Spaniard’s prophesy may become reality. Undoubtedly a complex reality, which will have to go through many historical phases with populist drifts that simplify and trivialise complicated matters. We live in an accelerating global world that separates communities and divides nations into opposing rich and poor, distinguishing between those who have gained much, including rights, and those who seek if not to annul, at least to diminish them, because resources are no longer sufficient. The multitude of European worlds we live in should not lead to homologation; here Ortega’s old fear returns, a massification of a State than cancels personal individuality, a true liberalism which is not that conceived by collectivists (a critical point the Spaniard frequently makes). One sees in Ortega an advocate of international and super-national communities which do not, however, cancel particular identities but integrate them, rather (Cangiotti, 1972, p. 181). A proper relationship between the European countries should not be characterised by exasperated nationalism, but by the ability to consider it a positive and dynamic aspect of a State. The Spanish scholar avails of a specific term: “hiper-nacionalismo” (Medina, 2002, p. 115). Ortega also refers to the German scholar Berlin who had conceived nationalism, with its lights and shades, one of the root causes of contemporary Europe but also of the wars and divisions between the national states when referring to the German scholars Fichte e Herder. He advocated, instead, (departing actually from claims to nationhood, the sum of the cultures, the languages and customs of a people) the transformation of the nation-state into a new entity, a Europe conceived as a super-national political institution. In a number of cases the very concept of nationalism has experienced dangerous drifts: communist utopia and anarchism or the idea of race as the basis of national unity. In another text of his, Ortega specifies the correct meaning of patriotism: not a reference to a non-existent past, but the tradition of a people projected towards the future (Ortega y Gasset, 1985, p. 47). It could not be otherwise in Ortega’s view of things. His reference, quoted below, to Germany, its ideal romanticism that ought not to remain anchored in the past, is interesting. Negative nationalism feeds on resentment generated by offence to dignity or an exasperated desire for recognition. A risk that some have called national and “romantic populism”, an aspect of German tradition and culture (Merker, 2009, p. 42), which combined with the insult the German people suffered after 54

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the First World War, after the extenuating Treaty of Paris. For the Spanish scholar, it can be avoided by the “invención de una entidad política supranacional” (Medina, 2002, p. 115). Many of the scholars who invoke a Europe as a sum of peoples and cultures complain, at the same time, of the lack of a democratic constitutional project capable of federating the new states. The Old Continent has also failed, from an economic point of view, to harmonise the national economies; the adoption of the Euro was more a ratification than an actual economic plan. The citizens were not responsibly involved in the decisions concerning them and their daily lives as far as matters of economy, energy, immigration, law and order and taxation were concerned (cf. Habermas, 2012). Furthermore, there is also the question of a European demos, that is, a people as political subject which also recognises an ethnos with particular socio-cultural peculiarities (Rusconi, 2012, p. 33). It is important that Europe’s inevitable underlying differences do not divide it more and more and prevent agreement, but that the divergences favour the creation of cosmopolitan citizens rather than of a set of particular nations, unable to decide on complex world matters. It suffices to recall policies regarding the on-going, never-ending Arab-Israeli struggle, attitudes towards the complexity of the new democracies emerging from the North African “Arabian Springtime”, growing Chinese power in Asia and Africa itself. These are all issues that the single European nations cannot think of addressing alone; only a united political and economic front can be incisive. Certainly many of the countries are jealous of their foreign policies, especially when economic and strategic issues are at stake, as in the case of countries like France and Germany. Some believe that a European Parliamentary President with greater powers, elected by the people, or by the national governments, might turn the European question into a national electoral issue (and not only with reference to the Euro, scapegoat of the Old Continent’s recession) while also favouring a new approach to the management of global matters, ranging from common economic, defence and energy policies capable of promoting a sustainable future. For Ortega the nation is a positive entity because it is the result of a cultural and political heritage that should not be wasted or thrown away. Language, beliefs, customs are cultural elements which that distinguish a nation. But how can we avoid Europe’s having little say at world level? It is certainly not a question of military power alone but also a cultural and social issue: it is no coincidence that, in The Revolt of the Masses Spengler is quoted along with his famous thesis on decadent Europe, but Europe was already undergoing a crisis before the German philosopher pointed it out. It is interesting that the Madrilenian sociologist pointed 55

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out and recalled that the positive nationalism referred to above, “is not this frenetic panorama of nationalisms offering themselves on all sides” (Ortega y Gasset, 1974, p. 126) which is its decadence. It is the massman who has failed to raise himself up and thrown away his chance, his historical heritage, shared experiences and norms. He also makes a distinction, and rightly so, between nationalism and nationalization. The latter is a comprehensive concept, that includes and plans a new community. Europe “should launch itself in a grand unitary enterprise” (op. cit., p. 168). It is the conservatives who oppose this process, as in the past. How can we fail to remember Roman law and the organization of polis in Athens and Rome? It is the global world, according to Ortega’s usual pessimistic view, that suffers from “moral decomposition”. The principles have been forgotten and the young live precariously, that is, they lead a life devoid of commitment. A present without a plan is their reality. To command, Ortega points out, means indicating a route and a destiny without “dissipating” energies, wasting resources. His references to Russia and American hold that these are not nations prepared for command, capable of replacing decadent European power. Russia still needs a century or so because it has no principles of its own, she acquired them from Marx, and America is too young, even if it has the technology and practical attitude of a young community. It lacks having suffered, a characteristic necessary for command. The latter point is rather significant, from many points of view, last but not least, psychological. When the Twin Towers were attacked in 2001, many observers pointed out that that was the first dramatic moment in which America understood the death of innocent victims and realized it was vulnerable. These significant and important realities have changed the attitude of the USA towards the world and generated a new kind of world balance (or imbalance). Effectively speaking, American power has decreased significantly: new nations and new continents, for some time now, have come to the fore on the world stage, and Europe is not among them. Maybe, in this case, the optimistic words of Ortega might be a good omen for the future: “Maybe this apparent decline be the benign crisis will permit Europe to be, literally, Europe?” (op. cit., p. 131). The lines that follow this comment refer, and not by chance, to three European countries, England, Germany and France, recognising that the intellectuals of these three nations feel hemmed in by their parliaments, but that there is no other institutional place where they can express their dissent and unease. It is not the institutions themselves that do not function properly in Europe, it is the fact that they have undertaken tasks that do not regard them. Might this comment not apply today too? It is a question that is still applicable to the sick democracies of the West, and also to Italy. It is important to reform Parliaments, not suppress them; 56

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the Spanish sociologist goes on to insist that whoever proclaims its inefficiency (as we must today) should also envisage a way out, find a way of improving it. Complaint alone is unproductive: the Parliamentary State was the nineteenth-century’s best creation. It goes without saying that, then as now, it urgently needed reform. But a certain degree of attention should be paid to the modalities. In this case, Ortega understood the danger of the situation, because, after the First World War, weakness and European provincialism led to the collectivism and fascism that Europe was experiencing. A sterile, destructive complaint is just as dangerous as a-critical reliance on inconclusive and inefficient policies. The Ortega who outlines helpful perspectives and seeks to revitalize and re-motivate people is significant and helpful even today because he indicates ways out of the “night of democracy” into which we seem to have tumbled. The classicism of the Spaniard, his constant reference to the Greek and Latin polis (not to be considered as “accidental” to life and the social reality, but as existentially positive experience) should not be forgotten. The State is not given to us once and for all, it is reformable. We need to work hard to improve it, run risks, assume responsibilities, gain credibility, in order to achieve that. “The state begins by being a work of the absolute imagination. A people is capable of creating a state insofar as it knows how to imagine”, Ortega states (op. cit., p. 145). The Spanish scholar goes even further: it is the electoral process that ensures the health of democracy. The establishment of rules and procedures for electoral competition is not an irrelevant matter. That is why choosing a good electoral law is crucial for a country because it can determine the authority of the institutions, not just of those who govern us. And for the sake of the institutions themselves, the Spaniard’s elitism says that they require a “prince” capable of guiding them, but not in the way intended in Roman times. He might be an ordinary citizen, like the figure indicated by Cicero or Sallust, a worthy person invested with superior powers capable of regulating the institutions properly. There can be no doubt about Ortega’s democratic, maybe monarchic intentions; they were certainly not reactionary, as some critics have suggested. His useful, positive proposals are still capable of stimulating our sick democracy and healing it: we simply need to discard those which appear equivocal and unacceptable. The Spanish sociologist is highly critical of jus sanguinis as a characterising trait of a national state: blood, language or territory in themselves ought not create barriers and exclude others. Many would-be secessionist federalists would not agree with these words of his: “One needs to be determined to seek the secret of the national state in its own special inspiration as a state, its politics, and not in extraneous principles of a biological and geographical nature” (op. cit., p. 157). 57

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We also know, besides, that the federalism of the founding fathers of Europe, but also of the U.S. and other nations, did not envisage a Union that dissolved national identities in a continental super-state, but a bulwark capable of preserving and respecting identities and differences13. European federalism was born also as a response to the tragedy of the Second World War, caused, in the opinion of some, by an excess of nationalism on the part of some nation states. The state is a set of men who share a project, a past aimed at designing the future. It must be democratic because it combines the diversities and differences found within a government. How can we fail to recall, therefore, one of the democratic fathers of European republicanism, a man who lived in postrevolutionary France? Ortega cites Ernest Renan and his famous definition of a nation as an “everyday plebiscite”, that is, common membership of a unifying past, but also a determination to do great things today. These are the essential features that make a great people. The Spaniard, in agreement with the French thinker, but surpassing him, holds that everyday plebiscite must be a project for the future: the past no longer suffices. He adds, “it was not patriotism that made nations” (Ortega y Gasset, 1974, p. 161). Renan too is convinced of this: and this must be confirmed with authority. This is, perhaps, one of the most modern of Ortega’s statements. It continues to appear in his elitism when it adheres to plebiscites based on planned co-existence; something new compared to the past. It is in this that he surpasses Renan. We need to overcome plebiscites that look to the past: it is preferable to change the meaning and think of a nascent nation instead. The Frenchman was heir, perhaps, to a more positivistic mentality; he could not “advertir que el aspecto temporal del que depende el dinamismo de la nación no es el presente sino el futuro” (Medina, 2002, p. 120). Ortega’s idea is that of a life shared by people and peoples. Building up a nation is reality in progress: it is the history of relationships.

1.5.  Ortega and Simmel In this essay we cannot forget the influence Simmel had over Ortega. For the German sociologist the concept of culture in particular, in all its aspects, was highly significant when explaining changes in society and 13

Among the many texts on federalism see Elazar, 1987; Cattaneo, Bobbio, 2010. In particular, from the second it emerges that national unity was never questioned by Italian federalists and Cattaneo, one of its founding fathers, believed that the United States of Italy would have been better suited to the various identities and traditions of the peninsula.

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is one of the main traits of modernity (Simmel, 1985)14. This is identical to Ortega’s thinking. The Spanish scholar Juan Manuel Monfort Prades goes even further when he holds that The Revolt of the Masses may be seen as a deeper analysis of modern culture, referring to Simmel (Prades, 2011, p. 173). The author is amazed that this evident rapport was not previously pointed out by those who studied the Spanish thinker. In actual fact there are many points of contact between the Spanish and the German sociologists. In particular the philosophical language Simmel uses in his Concept and tragedy of culture is very well suited to Ortega; for example his statement whereby the individual reflections and spiritual needs of a social actor sees his subjectivity as a bridge and seeks to marry the outside world with the spiritual reality (Simmel, 1985, p. 201). Another important symbol is that of the door separating human from natural space, creating a threshold which brings the subject into contact with nature while, at the same time, protecting him from the other elements of life. Man is a social animal always on the move: his ability to relate or his Geselligkeit, the term used by Simmel, is his chief trait. Culture, for the German sociologist, experiences this ambiguity typical of it. It has an inner life of its own, an existential past, projected towards the future: “culture is the way out from the closed to the open unit through unfolded multiplicity” (op. cit., p. 190). His language is akin to that of Ortega: it envisages a future prospect, is not immobile or rigid but open to the creation of a positive future reality. It is true culture, and here the agreement with the Spanish sociologist is evident and the approach is the same, it is unlike the cultured man who fails to elaborate subjectively on the reality of experience. Culture is the synthesis and transformation of values that from being objective become subjective and personal. It is only this way that bridges and relations with others may be established, that there will be open and closed doors, depending on necessity, leading to the future. Culture is never personal: one cannot be saved alone; furthermore, culture is never a matter of specialization because if it were it would not be able to perform its function “which stands at infinity because the use of objective instances for the completion of the personal can never be considered concluded” (op. cit., p. 201). These words of Simmel’s recall Ortega’s even stronger language against specialization, a modality typical of modernity, which, however, cancels individuality, shutting it up in a narrow place, where it is unable to communicate with the rest of the world. 14

His Concept and tragedy of culture, the closest to Ortega’s, is significant in that it pays great attention to the individual and psychological aspects of culture. See also, Simmel, 2001, 2011.

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All told, specialization means waiving involvement, and renouncing attempts to build a future, by accepting only the present, making it absolute. This is the tragedy of culture: an excess of specialization that impedes human development. On the contrary an excess of cultural elements that become “mass” stifle human creativity. Simmel is very clear: “those who belong to over-wealthy, weighty cultures are habentes omnia, nihil possidentes” (op. cit., p. 209). The aim of the spirit is that of surpassing the object, and, by working upon itself differently, of growing richer; it is worth risking this to become truly oneself and accepting the danger that culture may change both its contents and itself. Science, and above all contemporary technology are the protagonists of our society today: they increase and amplify not only our abilities but our contradictions, or problems too by including those related to ethics and philosophy. The two Kantian categories of space and time, especially because of mew media technology, place our traditional cognitive relations in critical difficulty. It is opportune to recall the theses of the US sociologist, William Ogburn (1922), who in the 1920s drew up the theory of cultural lag, according to which it is possible to distinguish between material, technical advancement which takes place much more rapidly than adaptive, immaterial development, which must, in fact, adapt to, catch up on the former. By this second kind of culture he intended ideas, feelings, values and also institutions. His view was certainly quite unlike that of Ortega and Simmel. There is, however, one aspect they all share, once we have taken some of the differences into due consideration. This is the need to understand that modernity and the inevitable specialization it involves, because of excess simplification, do not, at the same time, increase our capacities and our philosophical understanding but simply make them more intricate. We need only think of the field of medicine which becomes more and more specialised and creates problems of bioethics for believers and non alike. Think also of the new media, the social networks, which are changing the terms of private, public and political communications. Audience democracy is becoming increasingly more unmediated, a word which indicates the inevitable access by all to all available information data during election campaigns, for example, making it possible to understand and even “file” potential voters. This happened during the latest US elections, which led to the coining of a new term, Big Data, a cross of demographic information based on data from Facebook and other media (Danna, 2012). Furthermore, referring to another essay by Simmel, we may find a parallel with Ortega, when discussing the new leading role the masses 60

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play in history. In The Metropolis and Mental Life the German philosopher discussed modernity as an expression “of self-awareness of the crisis of western culture” (Simmel, 2011, p.  19). In this short but significant work the German sociologist states that inevitable changes in modern society reflect on culture, creating, in large western cities, a blasé, bored, disenchanted man, already tired of everything, indifferent to all novelty, incapable of imagining or planning anything that does not exist already. Individuality is a metropolitan reality, with a teeming cosmopolitan humanity favouring personal freedom. This freedom is, however, ambiguous and ambivalent: it is capable of producing a culture that may overpower all personal elements. For this reason, Simmel continues, extreme individualists, including Nietzsche, hate the city which they love as unheard prophets. One needs to harmonize these two aspects, these two fundamental poles of individuality, its subjective and objective aspects, because both of these represent the spirituality of the universal human being. The same concept reappears in another essay by the German sociologist: On Individuality and Social Forms (Simmel; Italian translation, 2001) Individuality springs from spiritual-existential duality. To make his concept even clearer, Simmel compares classical art with that of Rembrandt. The classicists represented the form found in the phenomena of life, the Dutch painter, on the contrary, turned this perspective on its head, making the form of phenomena determine life. But synthesis is not only possible, but also mandatory. The German sociologist concludes with an observation expressing great respect for diversity: differences are sources of wealth for and of stimulus to European culture. The Latins and the Germans have managed to create, in different ways, an individual with a sole responsibility linking the ego and the world. Maybe the whole of Europe, amid thousands of difficulties of all kinds, may fall on its feet again. It is necessary to defeat the Old Continent’s sense of demoralization. Ortega’s words may prove prophetic: “Europeans do not know how to live unless launched into a grand community undertaking” (Ortega y Gasset, 1974, p. 169). This theme of his essay, almost a hymn in praise of Europe, appears at the end of his book, alongside his remarks on the “demoralization” of the Old Continent, when, once more, he insists on the dangers of the provisional, on excess recourse to sport (how can we overlook the extremism of present-day competitive sports among children and adults?), on violence in politics. These life modes are experienced not as a facet of everyday life, with an aim and an end, but as a provisional aspect of the immanent, with no prospect or plan for the future. 61

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The real problem, denounced with great determination, is a massman who has foregone morality, a prey to dictatorship and a youthism claiming only rights and not duties. Europe has decided to forget her roots and now has only her social and cultural, before her political, irrelevance to offer. When all comes to all, Ortega’s words are a cry of pain, but of a constructive positive pain because he strives to get to the heart of the problem of the decadence of the European citizen who no longer feels himself such. Of the so-called Anglo-Saxon world, in Epilogue for the English, published at the end of The Revolt of the Masses, the Spaniard expresses his appreciation of Commonwealth legislation, the importance of the law, and above all, the construction of peace. Ortega writes, “It is a good thing that the peaceful man commit himself directly in order to avoid this or that war, however pacifism does not consist in that, but in the construction of another form of human coexistence which is peace” (Ortega y Gasset, 2001, p. 225). Today there are many analyses and reflections regarding Europe available, from economic to social and political. Some are close to those of Ortega, presented above, to a request for greater democracy among the European peoples, and a nationalism that does not exclude but includes different cultures and languages in a common project. The sociologist Alberto Martinelli (2012) explains this clearly and explicitly. We need to build a supranational union beginning with the nations, but “without nationalisms.” This was one of the points made by the Spanish sociologist. A more complex problem, however, is that of yielding a part of national, political economic sovereignty in favour of a European, democratically elected, institution capable of involving as many citizens as possible. He recognizes the existence of a populist drift in Europe. One way to defeat this, he claims, is to strengthen the institutions of the Old Continent. For this reason it is important to promote a commonly structured European school and a university and a multi-linguistic mode of education. Attention should be paid also to the electoral rules: “we need to introduce direct election of the leaders of the European government, first of all, the president of the Union” (op. cit., p. 35). National parties should become more European beginning with the various European nationalities. This was one of the basic concepts of the founders of Europe, and, above all, of the union’s Federalists. Certainly, at the moment, Europe seems to demand only sacrifices and appears to forget that the welfare state was born within its borders, in Britain and Germany. The ordinary citizen associates the Union with the dictates of the European Central Bank, the budget parameters of Maastricht and the balance that, in times of recession, hampers growth 62

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and diminishes resources. Is it Europe that requires it of us or are national parties exploiting the end of ideology because they are no longer capable of drawing up a visionary and proactive political plan, and are waiving governance in favour of the technicians? (see Canfora, 2012). This is, in fact, an observation that may be associated with a broader vision. A sick, defeatist, democracy is betraying itself and its fundamental principles. It is hiding behind the smoke screen of the people because it is incapable of providing adequate answers. There are, however, positive signs of bottom-up political participation, as in the case of the Italian Democratic Party’s primaries, held in 2012 and 2013. We must wait to see if a new reality will emerge, one capable of transforming the political parties, for the better, or if the whole thing will prove to be simply a flash in the pan.

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2.  The Hetero-direction of Crowds 2.1.  Gustave Le Bon: The Psychology of Crowds The observations and studies of the controversial but important French scholar, Gustave Le Bon, provide suggestions concerning the psychological and emotional consequences of crowds. In one of his most important works he offers us a number of in-depth considerations, different from those of Ortega and set in a different context, which can help us to understand the importance of the phenomenon (Le Bon, 2004). Le Bon lived at the end of the nineteenth century, in France, in a period that influenced not only positivist sociology but also the other social sciences. A military doctor and anthropologist, like Lombroso, Le Bon shared the positivist theories typical of those times whereby human behaviour was determined by social context. Inheritance, even in its criminal aspects, became an expression and the basis of a lifestyle inspired by Spencer’s evolutionism and reflected concretely in the psychological, medical, psychoanalytic populist Paris of the 1870s (Van Ginneke, 1991, p. 121). Post-revolutionary France which had consecrated the crowds as new social protagonists of history had, however, also divided scholars. In particular, the riots, revolts and revolutions that made the history of those years and created France a country and a democracy quite unlike the other European nations of the time, were examined. In 1884, universal male suffrage was introduced and relationships between the elites and masses became an important element for political scientists to analyse (op. cit., p. 135). Paris was a huge “social laboratory”, a term used by the American sociologist Robert Park, to indicate the melting pot of the nascent Chicago, an important new-world metropolis. For Le Bon men were not born equal, but he held that a constant struggle between the upper and lower levels of culture led to the victory now of the one, now of the other; he also claimed that suggestion and hypnosis determine the social protagonism of crowds. In medicine and psychology at that time, two schools of thought, that of La Salpêtrière in Paris and that of Nancy in the provinces, opposed each other regarding the importance of hypnotism and suggestion to the human mind.

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In medical studies, the way hypnosis and suggestion might determine behaviour, a positivist modality, influenced scholars like Le Bon, who sought to explain and understand the actions of social revolution. The violence of the Paris Commune in 1871, the anarchist and socialist revolts in the years that followed, helped frighten the French intellectuals (but not only them). Once again, modernity bewildered French scholars, citizens and intellectuals. Hippolyte Taine, historian and author of an important study on the origins of contemporary France, questioned himself regarding the violent change his country (unlike England, where the revolution had been more gradual) had known. One of the causes he indicated was “the psychology of crowds”. The year that had seen the moral and political degradation of France was 1789 when the Revolution had not only dissolved a government, but had also changed an era. In addition, after the defeat of Sedan, 1870, numerous revolutionary struggles, the Restoration, it was necessary for France, its intellectuals and scholars (see Durkheim) to cultivate a new desire for rebirth aimed at rescuing culture and politics and rebuilding the country, especially its government élites. New free universities of political science were set up (Taine was a scholar there, along with Renan, though both in different ways) “to distance themselves from radicalism and to be reconciled with conservatism” (op. cit., pp. 43-5). Men were born differently, inequality was hereditary and the elite should govern. Otherwise, the common people, the ignorant and rude populace, the crowd, would take over power. Taine became a teacher, whom, not only later and contemporary thinkers, from the Italian to the French elitists (Mosca, Pareto, Sorel) and Max Weber, acknowledged for the subtlety of his interpretation of the events of the French Revolution (op. cit., p. 46). France represented an ideal type for the different positions characterising nascent modern democracy. The ideologies of the left and right were asserting themselves, then. Modernity, with its contradictions, as already shown by Ortega, was marking the beginning of a new historical era. Reflections considering the individual and the person, the indistinct behaviour of the crowds enriched, from a different perspective, the insights of the Spanish scholar and helped make his analysis of the new protagonists of European history, the masses, even more meaningful. Within this context it is worthwhile to reflect on Le Bon’s ideas concerning the psychological aspect of crowds, overlooking their ideological, anti-socialist aspects and his occasional scientific inaccuracies. The greatest contribution made by this scholar to the understanding of 66

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modernity is the emphasis he placed on suggestion and how psychology reflects on politics1. In the Preface to his book, Le Bon openly declared his positivist approach when he stated that the common characteristics of the environment and heredity determined the soul of a people and race. He misused the terms race, adopting it instead of ethnicity to define the characteristics of a culture, but he was one of the first scholars to understand that “the present age is one of those critical moments that change human thinking” (Le Bon, 2004, p. 32). The end of religious beliefs, disenchantment with the world, new scientific discoveries and the power of crowds were impacting upon the new era that was dawning. The reflections of this French thinker are in some respects similar to those of Ortega: the entrance on stage of the populace and its transformation into a ruling class were the characteristics of the time (op. cit., p. 33). Contemporary history, for Le Bon, had lost its moral fibre and its power: the crowds had broken down all the barriers that held it back previously and assumed power. These words are reminiscent of those of the Spanish scholar when he spoke of how the masses without guidance might endanger democracy. There is, however, a significant difference. The Frenchman’s analysis is often ideological, influenced by a fear that socialism and radical ideologies might undermine the nascent French democracy. The positivism of the period, determined his study of crowds, whom he defined as the “the disappearance of cerebral life in favour of bone marrow” (op. cit., p. 45). These highly charged words, that need, however, to be contextualized historically were a first a serious attempt at analysing a new reality that was becoming the protagonist of history. The crowd may become, at once, either heroic or criminal. This observation, which may appear provoking, recalls Robert Merton’s theory of deviance. Anomie often arises from frustration caused by nonachievement of set goals. The borderlines between normality and deviance are very slim. The issue that Le Bon insists on is the annulment of the personality and of all individual critical sense of responsibility when the crowd blunts the individual turning him into an automaton, that is, an instinctive “barbarian” (op. cit., p. 55). The same word was used by Ortega to indicate the ignorance and the danger of the amorphous, uncultured masses. The observations of the Spaniard were certainly more analytical and interested in issues of individual cultural and social responsibility. 1

Laclau points out how “the nineteenth century relegated these new phenomena of mass psychological to the ambit of pathology; on the other hand, however, they exhorted us not to see them as contingent aberrant phenomena destined to disappear, but as aspects of modern society destined to remain. The key to an analysis of Le Bon’s is the notion of suggestion” (Laclau, 2008, p. 21).

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The French scholar, however, from a positivist psychological perspective, focused more on the emotional character of the crowd, which waives rationality and is guided by unconscious and acquired impulses. A characteristic, this, peculiar to Latin crowds (op. cit., p. 63). Here too we recall Ortega who insisted on the goalless “policies and politics of the here and now”, typical of Mediterranean peoples (Ortega y Gasset, 1974, p. 46). The crowd is gullible, inclined to give way to collective hallucinations (a reference to the positivism of those times) to legends and beliefs that spread in no time at all. How can we not refer these reflections to one of the most controversial phenomena of our era, the Internet and to all the news, that, whether it be true or false, spreads at lightening speed from continent to continent, often without any proof or confirmation, favouring extremely emotional behaviour and immediate reaction? Le Bon’s insistence on the idea that suggestion can produce “collective hallucinations”, while citing specific instances, including those of some positivist psychologists, is extremely interesting. One may not always agree with his assumptions but some of his conclusions are useful and topical, especially when examining “morbid democracy”. The emotivism of people is becoming a prominent feature of social action and the crowd has, according to Le Bon (2004, p. 75) “the dual character of simplicity and exaggeration.” The crowds can also prove authoritarian and intolerant though inclined to be servile towards the powerful and consider goodness a weakness. A characteristic common to many, perhaps. The French scholar noted that in some cases the crowds could also act morally as in the case of the Crusades. He also pays attention to simple language which may be easily translated into images. A characteristic, this, not only of crowds, but also simple people who live in isolation2. This observation is quite topical and is a feature of “audience democracy”. During the recent Italian elections the leader of the PDL party, Silvio Berlusconi, said more than once that his party’s electorate consisted in the poorly educated, incapable of understanding complex and difficult messages. This ex-Knight (“ex-Cavaliere”) of the Italian Republic has also altered the language of politics: using simple, clear, even the language of football (as soccer is the most popular sport in Italy). He calls his politics “entry into the field,” his party a “team.” This particular bipolar scene, with its two poles of reference, right and left, and 2

Le Bon, 2004, pp. 88-9: “I’ve noticed some highly educated Indians, educated in European universities, with more than one diploma. […] Ideas cannot be grasped by the crowds unless made very simple in form – they must often undergo total transformations before becoming popular.”

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a frequently wavering centre (which allies with the one or the other of these two poles) has contributed to the creation of a new Italian political language. According to the French scholar the reasoning of crowds is low-brow, uncritical, so that, very often, a “clamorous crime, a single catastrophe may be of great impact, even if the consequences are far less serious than those of the sum of the hundreds of small daily incidents” (op. cit., p. 97). We might relate this notion to the language of television. The frequent repetition of a piece of tragic news may strike the viewer emotionally while being transmitted, although later it may become routine. Emotions are forgotten because they are followed by fresh ones, in a cycle that becomes normal. As pointed out earlier, Le Bon had been deeply affected by the behaviour of crowds during the French Revolution. He expressed his opinion in highly critical terms: the consequences were terrible and the achievement of social equality impacted on people for over twenty years with disastrous results. The leaderism of crowds he said (again recalling the Revolution and its excesses) was also capable of assuming religious connotations “the hero the crowd acclaims is certainly a god for it” (op. cit., p. 101). Historical references are not lacking. In ancient Rome and Greece, the emperor was worshiped as a god; in more recent times Napoleon and boulangisme were clear manifestations of how alive the religious instinct of the masses is3. The Saint Bartholomew’s Eve massacres and the Terror were, for Le Bon, two instances where popular feeling was fired by religious sentiment. It is possible to compare M. Weber’s analysis of different modalities of power, and that of charismatic leaders who enter the political arena. This is even more apparent in an “audience democracy”, where nearly all parties are led by “charismatic” people.

3

The episode involving General Boulanger took place at the end of the nineteenth century on France. This is also analysed by Le Bon as one of the first examples of the mass phenomenon. Boulanger reorganized the armed forces and introduced technical innovations into army barracks, making them known though the press. This created many enemies for him, and the left, which previously had supported him, abandoned him. In the spring of 1888, he was first suspended, then dismissed. Later, with strong popular support, he was elected to represent the Seine district, and was escorted to the parliament by a cheering crowd. The new Minister of the Interior decided to get rid of this dangerous character by trying to impeach him because of his sexual life. When his lover died, he committed suicide on her grave. This episode was one of the first instances of manipulation of the masses characterised by nationalist and extremist tendencies. See Van Ginneken, 1991, pp. 138-45.

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2.2.  Beliefs and opinions of the crowd The second book of the Psychology of crowds seeks to explain the ways in which the opinions and beliefs of the populace are formed. The first reference concerns race. In this case the scholar, influenced by his positivist approach, exasperates the hereditary cultural and artistic characteristics of some peoples, claiming that these inevitably mould the nations and their souls. The task of a people is to preserve the traditions of the past and change slowly. The institutions are neutral and they certainly cannot transform a nation. Le Bon, like Ortega, expresses a preference for a British kind of democracy, which, unlike the French, he claims, changed democracy more slowly and less violently than elsewhere. He also insists on the diversity of the Latin American states which, “regulated by republican constitutions, are subject to more serious forms of despotism. The fate of the nations is determined by their character, not by their governments” (op. cit., p. 119). This statement is acceptable only in part. The rapport between the two is reciprocal: the relationship between social actors and citizens change both. Present-day notions of types of government or electoral systems, retain that the choice of a model: presidential or parliamentary, majority or proportional; can affect democracy itself. One interesting chapter in Le Bon’s book is that on education. Is it true that it can improve people and make them equal? The French scholar’s answer is controversial and quite different from that of Ortega who saw in knowledge and the development of critical sense a sure response to the homologation of the masses. For the Frenchman it was necessary to distinguish between a concrete practical professional training and a classical education which, by creating expectations people might fail to fulfil, might lead to frustration or worse, to requests for state welfare. And the reference is to Taine. It is true that education improves the soul of the populace but it can also create a mass of malcontents, revolutionaries and anarchists and “prepare the Latin peoples for hours of decadence” (op. cit., p. 132). Le Bon’s conservatism and strongly reactionary stance prevent him from carrying out a detailed and positive analysis, with which to agree and find relevant to the role of education and instruction today. Culture and knowledge are not only the natural humus required to nourish democracy but it is also vital to make the individual directly responsible for the society and the environment in which he lives. The frustration of many young people who cannot find employment capable of meeting their expectations and their qualifications, in recent years, in Italy too, is tantamount to the defeat of the entire community and a welfare model no longer able to promote generational social mobility. This is a true sign of the decadence and downfall of a nation. 70

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Le Bon pays particular attention, when examining what determines the beliefs and opinions of the masses, to the meaning of the words and the images they evoke in people. He analyses the two terms democracy and socialism and, following the same logical lines as before, compares the Latin and Anglo-Saxon models. The first, which inspired the French Revolution, he holds, imposed democracy “as an annulment of individual will and initiative in the face of the State” (op. cit., p. 141). On the contrary, the British and the US concept of democracy has guaranteed the development of the person and a decrease in the power of the state. Ortega also insists on this point: the truly liberal spirit guarantees the personality of individuals and does not cancel it with exasperated statism, a source of homologation rather than of freedom and equality. The position of the French sociologist is certainly more rigid than that of the Spanish scholar: Le Bon analyses the human unconscious and some of the ways in which the feelings and opinions of individuals may be impacted upon making their personalities fade into the crowd. From this perspective, many of his observations are plausible and they enable us to understand present-day development politics which often avails of persuasion and suggestion to convey its messages. The crowd inevitably seeks a head, like the flock a shepherd; the ways in which the chief wins authoritative trust are very clear. Declaration, repetition, contagion are, according to Le Bon, the characteristics of the true leader. Napoleon considered repetition the most powerful figure of speech, because, afterwards, it becomes belief and contagion. For this reason a political message needs to be short, concise and repeated. It is also necessary to have prestige and achieve success because the emotions and passions of crowds refuse defeat: “believers always smash the statues of their ex-gods with great fury” (op. cit., p. 175). Crowds are erratic because their views, which are not strongly rooted, can change quickly and statesmen, as Le Bon demonstrates, often adapt to the changes thus renouncing to lead the nation. Therefore, politics is swayed by the opinions of the masses, not by the projects of those who should guide them. Think of the power of present-day opinion polls to which all politicians and parties recur more and more, not only to grasp the humours of the people and potential voters but also to choose the topics of their election campaigns. The following phrase of the French thinker might have been written the other day: “spying public opinion is now the chief concern of the press and the government” (op. cit., p. 189). The French sociologist concludes his analysis in the third volume of his work by classifying crowds in a way that smacks strongly of his positivist stance. The division into sects, castes and classes is the outcome of the homogeneousness of crowds. All other social, economic, cultural 71

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analyses are the result of the “positivist” determination of race: “the factor that contributes most to determining the actions of men” (op. cit., p. 197). Le Bon’s approach is undoubtedly debatable, also because this position generates others including the opinion that criminal crowds can be analysed on the basis of heredity of conduct or emotional suggestion. All investigation of social and cultural context is missing. The most interesting points are those regarding the electoral and parliamentary behaviour of crowds. First of all, as the voter wants to be courted and flattered, this means that the candidate can make the most outlandish promises. Furthermore, a political programme should never be too specific because there is the risk that those elected may not be able to put their promises into practice. It is important, however, “to be aware of the fascinating seductive powers of words, formulae and images” (op. cit., p. 234). Another provoking affirmation of Le Bon’s, though only partly true, is, that concerning Parliamentary Assemblies: very often the success of a speech is determined by the prestige of the speaker rather than by his reasoning. Once again, feelings and emotions are fundamental to psychological analysis. At the end of his book, Le Bon concludes that society has taken a certain direction. Isolated individuals are now part of an insecure crowd, without perspectives, on the road to barbarism. The people’s dream has vanished: this is the bitter conclusion of the French sociologist. The reflections of Le Bon concerning crowds permit us investigate more deeply the psychological and emotional masses that have become the protagonists of modernity. The French positivist sociologist, was misled by his approach. The crowd is such only if it possesses a clear psychological characteristic (Park, 1996, p. 31). As stated above, investigations of the human behaviour of individuals in a crowd, unable to make personal and critical choices, are of great interest. Lack of rationality and excess emotion also render the people in crowds manoeuvrable, especially when it comes to politics. Le Bon was one of the first to emphasise this point. The social networks have made these aspects of “audience democracy” even more significant (Castells, 2012). The use of the media and new technology has made the old-style election campaign, held in the streets and squares of towns and cities, obsolete. Or, to be more precise, alongside these traditional modalities, recourse to the web and TV has turned the political parties into “information agencies” to which leaders must adjust. More and more it is means that is the message, but individuals, or at least many of them, react to political proposals in the manner described by Le Bon at the end of the 1800s (McLuhan, 1986), also because feelings, suggestions and fears are becoming part of our identity and condition our behaviour.

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2.3.  Riesman: The Lonely Crowd More recently, US sociology has shifted the emphasis more and more towards the lonely individualist man. Modernity has altered people. Ortega’s intuitions have come true. The masses have become more and more an indistinct crowd. The US scholar David Riesman, author of The Lonely Crowd, was one of the first, in the post-war period, to point out how mass society had changed, and become increasingly exposed to heterodirection. Modernity tends to de-responsabilize the individual and, as a result, decisions are imposed more and more or are influenced by other social actors, from peer groups to the mass media. Before stressing the importance of the American sociologist’s views, which add to Ortega’s reflections on crowds, a brief reference to the work of Frenchman Gabriel Tarde on the crowds is opportune. With greater force than Le Bon, he emphasises the social and cultural aspects of the popular masses, anticipating the interactionist theories of George Herbert Mead and the approach of Park’s Chicago school of sociology. European sociology has had a great influence on American scholars. Analyses of the masses and crowds, with the birth of the concept and reality of public opinion, regardless of different points of view, help to clarify the study of a modern society and democracy where the masses, with all the pros and cons of the case, take centre stage. Tarde, a contemporary of Durkheim’s, in Opinion and the crowd continues Le Bon’s investigation of the psychological and emotional nature of crowds though he underlines their social role more, in disagreement with Cesare Lombroso. Tarde relates the crowd to sects and once again anarchists and socialists frighten scholars and become the negative idealtypes of all that might cause tumult and revolt in the country. Emulation was, for the Frenchman, one of the modes typical of the popular classes; Le Bon had already claimed this, but Tarde, placing greater emphasis on the socio-psychological bases of society, contributed to the birth of the US interactionist school (Van Ginneken, 1991, pp. 200-1). The French sociologist indicates the difference between crowds and audience or public. The former are dominated by biological and physical traits, the latter has its roots in the various aims and beliefs of people, the ideas and views of others. These are aspects that will, later on, help to forge the American sociology of action. Furthermore, in Paris, during the decades before the First World War, there was a rapid growth of the spread of tabloids which considerably broadened the horizons of the average citizen by a creating a non-elitist mass opinion: this was also a first step, however, in the direction of an increase in sharply differentiated positions, also in the wake of dramatic events like the “Dreyfus Affair”. This was the case of a Jewish French army officer accused of treason 73

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against the state. The country was divided dramatically between those who believed him guilty and those who held him innocent; the press too took sides in favour of the one or other position, as nationalism and antiSemitic racism swayed the crowds and contributed towards the formation of these stridently opposite positions. The mass society studied by Ortega, especially in its social and cultural implications, was dominated more and more by emotions and feelings, at the mercy of conflicting views. In addition, the new democracy, born of the French Revolution and modified by later popular insurrections, confirmed the leadership of a new social class which presented many of the features outlined by Ortega and other positivist scholars. Riesman’s observations, which appeared some years later, confirm them and add further details relevant to the present-day social reality. The US scholar’s analysis refers to the society of the New World but some of the considerations were applicable to many European countries too. Individualism was already a feature of modernity. If we compare the thinking of Riesman to that of Ortega, we find that they have several points in common, although there are many differences too. As mentioned more than once above, the Spanish scholar was opposed to assuming any ideological position, either right or left, and his criticism of the mass-man, the new protagonist of modern history, was predominantly philosophical and cultural. Ideology might prove an obstacle to analyses that ought to go beyond the contingent historical moment, strive to be universal and aim at grasping the essentials of humanity, instead of being more and more bewildered and lacking in significant references on which to base its actions, like present-day Europe, more and more powerless and lacking in projectuality. Riesman too realises that society and people are changing, but his emphasis is more on the relational individual. Like Ortega he accepts modernity. For him American democracy is the best model for contemporary society and he does not agree with the criticism of liberal scholars like WrightMills (Riesman, 1976)4. Some of Riesman’s ideas are shareable and of use even today, above all when referring to transition from self-direction to hetero-direction: something that can affect every social actor. He explains, once again, the mechanisms that determine the modern personality, the often isolated and anomic individual, devoid of critical sense but also lacking in regret for the past which no longer exists. Riesman’s conclusion is positive: “if a hetero-directed person managed to discover how much useless work he performs, if he could realise that his own life and thoughts are just as interesting as those of others, that loneliness in a crowd of peers cannot be mitigated any more than sea 4

See A. Cavalli’s introduction to Riesman, 1976, p. vii.

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water can quench thirst, then we might expect to pay greater attention to our own feelings and aspirations” (op. cit., p. 366). It is possible to trace briefly the social processes that led modern man to hetero-direction and its most significant modalities. Unlike the positivists, Riesman, from an interactionist point of view, related character to society, also citing Fromm. In traditional societies every single person internalised norms and behaviour (this sociological interpretation recalls Parsons’s structure of social action) before personalising it. Thus, people are “guided by tradition and the society in which they live like society depends on the guidance of tradition” (op. cit., p. 13). Self-direction means awareness of individually interiorised and directed choices aimed at specific goals of various kinds, from money to knowledge to fame. With the development of society and with the passing of generations, we are heading inexorably towards hetero-direction, typical of the new middle classes. It is change in society and a different kind of analysis of mass society that enriches the Ortega of The Revolt of the Masses. The agencies of socialization are expanding, from the family to the peer group, in a cosmopolitan reality: the stranger is becoming an integral part of our life experience (op. cit., p. 33). Riesman examines the society of the USA, its development and, in particular, its big cities. In the US and Europe, in the country and in the provinces, self-direction survives, but in the greater U.S. cities and in those of the Old Continent it is hetero-direction that prevails. These two lifestyles can clash, making it impossible to understand advancing novelty and prepare for change in people’s characters. Furthermore, society grows more bureaucratic and the mass media are the protagonists of hetero-direction alongside schools and teachers who maintain traditional authority but which they must share more and more with the other agencies of socialization. The comments of this American sociologist regarding different modes of socialization and the roles of its protagonists can be useful today and help us understand how the family, the school and education are changing. Hetero-direction affects people but it changes society too. Riesman in his book cites the scholar Thorstein Veblen, who in his The Theory of the Leisure Class, presents, and not without bitter irony, the ideal type of the new American consumer, rich but uncouth and, in part, hetero-directed by new cultural and social models. Every aspect of life changes from food to sexuality to popular culture (books or young people’s magazines). Hetero-direction also changes attitudes towards politics. Riesman’s analysis is interesting because, while studying the US in particular, it also reflects on modern politics in general. In the nineteenth century, when people were self-directed, the prevailing objective was the moralisation of society, especially as stipulated by the “founding fathers” in the Federalist Papers (op. cit., p. 211). Politics did not invade the private 75

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sphere: it had well defined interests and was defined as “moralizing”, and could count on “enthusiastic”, people, that is, on those capable of establishing ideal goals, almost to the point of righteousness and intolerance. With the spread of hetero-direction the perspective changed. The moralizer became “well informed”, more realistic, less utopian about what might really change society. He himself adapted to the changes underway. Here Riesman cites Tolstoy and Harvard University studies concerning the attitude of the new Russian middle classes: more realistic than their forebears, they change their opinion more easily than the moralizers. This thanks also to the influence of the media which “are perhaps the most important communication channels linking the hetero-directed actors on the political stage and their audience. The mass media criticize the actors and their performance in general, and, both directly and indirectly teach the public the techniques of political consumption” (op. cit., p. 229). These words remind us of the present-day “audience democracy”. We have entered a new phase; the media have transformed the use of free time but also approaches to politics. Riesman also emphasis the positive aspect of hetero-direction, a tolerance devoid of emotion and passion which might lead people towards extremism. Hetero-direction offers the individual the chance to develop his independence, but in relation to compliance. A “hypersocializing” position, maybe, close to that of Parsons. Too positive to be critical of hetero-direction, which in the years that followed revealed all its contradictions and its dangers. The American sociologist concludes with a reflection that underlines modern man’s positive possibilities. Men are different and should not seek homologation, that is, they should not strive to resemble each other. Their autonomy, which is more likely to be achieved now, thanks to hetero-direction, is a reachable goal.

2.4.  Canetti: The Masses and Power The concept that has just been expressed can be modulated in different ways, with references to the everyday history, religion and life experiences of people. Hetero-direction is not merely a negative aspect of human experience, it may also prove positive; human commitment can, at times, change the course of history. In the light of this it is possible to interpret The Masses and Power. Hetero-direction for the Nobel Prize-winner, Elias Canetti, is an enigmatic, complex and universal phenomenon. This 50-page study published in 1960, after almost forty years of research and reflection, addresses the theme of the masses, investigating, in depth, aspects of the question ranging from history to religion and power. It is the interpretation of a great writer who does not allow himself to be influenced in any way by ideological prejudices, preferring to examine the phenomenon as a whole without dwelling on the single individual. 76

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A perspective unlike those applied previously in other works on the masses which Canetti observed from a historical point of view, and which he had experienced in his own life, for example, when in 1922, in Frankfurt, as a seventeen-year-old student he took part in the demonstration following the assassination of Walther Rathenau, the Weimar Republic’s Foreign Minister, and again, in Vienna, in 1927, in the great procession that led to the fire of the Palace of Justice. His personal re-examinations of these events led him to examine universal phenomena from every point of view, including that of the economy (inflation and the masses), to confirm the fact that it is impossible to analyse modernity and the protagonist new middle classes, without a study of the masses that will later impact on public opinion. Even democracy, so closely related to the mass-man, has changed, in a dynamic that has always moved in the direction of the public, a democracy that is now the “hostage” of emotions and feelings, and which, together with the media, are the leading actors of a new kind of socialization, which have transformed the political parties too. The masses, Canetti writes, have a propelling power which makes them the protagonists of society and may be open or closed. Inside them people feel secure, unafraid of being harmed; in the crowd distinctions are cancelled along with fear of diversity. Some of these observations are certainly autobiographical, but they provide a precise explanation of the unconscious and emotional mechanisms involved: “many do not know what happened and are unable to answer the questions; though they hasten to be where the majority is” (Canetti, 1981, p. 19). The masses, free from limitations and constraints, feel new. They want to develop and also feel the urge to destroy the old; they want to forget the past because now there is something new (op. cit., p. 23). And this also happens in the case of religion. The new ones turn to the crowds in the open air, in contrast to the people closed inside the temples. This was the case with Christianity. Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, addressed the crowd in the open, using new and revolutionary words, aimed at transforming the old religion. In the same way Saint Paul went beyond the Jewish religion in an attempt to found a universal faith. Crowds may be classified according to the characteristics indicated, among others, by Ortega and Le Bon. Equality (never questioned), common concentration and direction, a goal to strengthen it. Many references are made to communities and ethnic groups (like the Maori) where group dancing simulates the contrast and identifies an opponent “because everything happens on the assumption that it is visible: the enemy looks on. The intensity of the common threat is the essence of the Haka (the Maori dance in question)” (op. cit., p. 40). The massman needs an opponent, even if symbolic: this strengthens his sense of identity. Furthermore, in the created world, and likewise in the afterlife, 77

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there is no empty space. An ancient Hebrew text underlines the fact that between heaven and earth there are hosts of angels, but negative creatures too. There are those who seek war and those who desire peace; some choose good, others evil. Nothingness, the void, does not exist. Even the invisible (in real life and religions) fills space. Solitude is frightening: it annuls the individual. The mass always needs to be protagonist. This is what happened when Christ was condemned to death. His crucifixion was chosen by the mob, the same crowd that only a few days previously had saluted his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Jesus had become a scapegoat, the sacrificial victim of evil, so, with his death, he redeemed the crowd. The crowd contains friends and enemies, men and women, the living and the dead. Crowds represent the entire population. The masses tend to perpetuate themselves, even in war, because the individual fears solitude and prefers to die in a group, with others (op. cit., p. 87). Canetti’s ideas are an interweave of sociological, psychological and historical analyses, like ideas concerning some of the chief nations of Europe. For this Bulgarian writer, England, dominated by the sea, remains the European country with the strongest civic sense. His observations regarding the French masses are also interesting. The Bastille, the Marseillaise (the French national anthem) and freedom experienced as an annual ritual, are elements that characterise the French. His considerations regarding Italy are also acute; he calls this country a nation whose cities are too full of history and memories to allow it to unite. Italy endured too many invasions and “when the enemy remains too long in a place, all the people create a similar image of their condition, weakening their mutual union in many ways” (op. cit., p. 211). For Canetti the attempt at imposing national unity on Italy has failed. The two cohabiting Romes, the Vatican and the Italian State, in all their greatness, while integrating have, fortunately, maintained their distinct traditions. This writer’s cultural considerations are in strident contrast, however, with the institutional weakness of this country which is reflected in the poor sense of the state among Italian citizens, one of the causes of the crisis democracy experiences here. Canetti also comments on relations between the masses and the economy. This is the case with inflation which Canetti acutely considers as important as wars and revolutions: “the upheavals that it produces are so profound that the choice is to hush them up and forget about them” (op. cit., p. 218). Highly topical words at a dramatic time like the present recession. Money is a combination of psychological and economic factors, hard to disentangle from each other. Historical analyses confirm this; Hitler’s tragic persecution of the Jewish people, was preceded by a devastating devaluation of the Weimar Republic’s German Mark. In the second part of his book the Nobel award winner continues by examining the rapport existing between the masses and power, indicating the many 78

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traits that characterise power, including positive aspects, like pardon. Power avails of might and its accessories (firearms), as it does too of command. Its relationship with responsibility is interesting. When people are accused of horrible crimes they often justify themselves by claiming not to find within themselves “traces of that action”. This is H. Arendt’s The Banality of Evil (1964): “Command, has become today the most dangerous single element of the collective life of men” (Canetti, 1981, p. 403). Like the conductor of an orchestra, standing there alone, in charge of the orchestra. He is the leader for the audience in the concert hall too. There is a way of attacking power: to look it straight in the eye, unafraid, and find ways of defeating it. The same works in the case of death. This is the moral disobedience of every man and woman. This is the positive conclusion reached by Canetti. Ortega, Le Bon, Riesman and the writer Canetti are all scholars with different outlooks, but their analyses coincide in that they manage to explain modernity. The mass-man has become its protagonist. Alternating the good and bad of a more and more complex reality, a tremendous mass resembles the mob at times, at the mercy of emotion and feelings that cancel its critical powers. Sometimes there are people who “do not wish to obey, but serve, do not want to be governed but tyrannised” (De La Boétie, 2011, p. 6). One of man’s greatest dangers is habit, the prime basis of voluntary servitude (op. cit., p. 28), a quest for homologation, anonymous tranquillity, ignorance, lack of curiosity, failure to discover reality. Knowledge, education and the effort to understand are the response of the individualist who can, thus, become a person who together with others, in a community based on sharing, seeks to construct a common citizenship. Ortega, more than anyone else understood this: the crowd should become public opinion not submit to it. This is how the ailing democracy may recover, refusing to be a mob or the plebe but seeking, instead, positive responsibility.

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Part II Right Wing and Left Wing Populisms

3.  Democracy: Evolution or Involution? 3.1.  A “totalitarian democracy”? The crisis of politics and of the traditional parties has remote origins, not only here in Italy but in the whole of the Old Continent, including Northern Europe, traditionally liberal countries, founders of modern welfare. The reasons are complex, and the features that characterise it numerous. The very concept of democracy was the brainchild of the late eighteenth-century French Revolution. Revolutionary France and Rousseau’s ideas laid the basis not only of modern philosophy but also of modern politics. They created the premises for the sociological, cultural and political transformation of the new society that was taking shape. The bitter and violent struggles that followed over the years and which led eventually to the Restoration, impacted upon the social tissue not only of France but that of the rest of Europe too1. In those years, a slow, but continuous march towards individualism began along with a change in personal claims of a political nature too. Sociology, from its origins in the mid-nineteenth century, availing of philosophical categories, portrayed reality in two distinct modes: the holistic and the individualistic, which have recently been combined. The former, essentially Hobbesian and pessimistic as far as human possibilities are concerned, favoured a rigid system of coercion aimed at creating social order, underlining its reproducibility (positivism) (Cesareo, 1993, p. 62). The latter, thanks to Rousseau, emphasised the idea of natural liberty, original to man, who, as protagonist, impacted on society through direct participation. This is the positive affirmation of social action. Later on, Weber’s comprehensive sociology and Boudon’s methodological individualism shifted the analytical emphasis closer to the subject as the protagonist of social interaction. The principal enemy is determinism accused of “sociologism” (Izzo, 1990, p.  11). Social conditioning, in defining human behaviour, is no longer considered as influential as in the past. Human rationality does not necessarily contain germs of selfishness; altruism is treated analogously (Marletti, 2006, p.  48). It suffices to recall what Weber says about the relationship between action and values. Herbert George Blumer’s symbolic internalization and that of 1

Furet, 1998, p.  6: “1789 marked the birth, the year zero of a New World based on equality”.

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Mead later (though slightly different), confirm the tendency to shift the emphasis from material values, wellbeing and economic security, to postmaterialist values, the quality of life, a phenomenon studied many years later by Inglehart, which also helps explain disaffection and withdrawal from politics (op. cit., p. 104). It might be said that the Enlightenment puts an end to the religious interpretations of the world (disenchantment) and places man at the centre of the social reality and, that, in the nineteenth century, “ideology” having become the new “secular religion”, assumes the role of lead actor in Modern Society (Gauchet, 2005, p. 94). So, the individual becomes central to all social analyses. At political level the path of individualism starts with the French Revolution: the religious ethos of the past is replaced by a secular, social type of morality with the state as its sole guarantor. The concept of status diminishes and “the concept of abstract man, independent of historical classes to which he belongs”, is declared, (Talmon, 1967, p. 19), as the base of modern individualism. Rousseau’s “general will” rotates around man, a messianic man, the protagonist of the society of the future capable of achieving happiness on earth, also by transforming society. Liberty is associated with morality; this is “leftist totalitarianism”; that of “the right”, on the contrary, underlines the intrinsic pessimism of man who is weak and corrupt. Strength is necessary in both cases. In the case of the left it is required to accelerate the way to progress and perfection, in that of the right to bring order to men’s mediocrity and ignorance (op. cit., p. 15). The eighteenth-century ideas of Rousseau and of other philosophers of the period like Morelly, Helvétius, Condorcet as well as those of the utopian socialists, insisted on the intrinsic morality of human nature in its quest for happiness2. Not individual happiness but that achieved in harmonious association with others. The virtuous man cannot but be happy and it is the task of the legislator to unite personal and general wellbeing. The institutions, laws and education are the main means by which to achieve this individual yet general happiness, availing of a particular system of rewards and punishments. The citizen, so that he may be a wise and virtuous man, needs to participate in the construction of a positive kind of society and share in the happiness resulting from education. Insistence on happiness is one of this study’s central concepts; it will return, later, when examining the American Constitution and the modern narcissism we find in contemporary democracy. Education and knowledge were focal to Ortega too; they were necessary for the defeat of the mass-man’s ignorance and foolishness. Education 2

See also Martino, 1978.

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was seen as a slow gradual and continuous individual pathway. Almost a kind of self-awareness and a rediscovery of one’s own personality. A transition from individual to person by means of socialization not imposed from above or by a coercive state but thanks to our determination not to be homologated and to possess a critical mind. This is one of the main differences between Rousseau and Ortega who was critical of the consequences of the French Revolution. For Rousseau a sovereign may alienate a citizen’s rights for the common good and the benefit of social order. This way freedom is not limited; on the contrary, it is safeguard more thanks to the “general will”. Man is not forced to obey an external concept; individual freedom resides in the social contract. The “general will determines the nature and extent of all our duties” (Talmon, 1967, p. 61). Diversity of opinion, of political parties, of the characteristics of modern democracy, are excluded from this model. The people become the absolute dominus, the new protagonist of a self-representative direct democracy. The French thinker had probably not imagined creating the bases for a latter-day Leviathan capable of crushing his own creatures (op. cit., p. 69). Politics associated with a morality which invaded every sphere of personal and social life, might well result in the morbid democracy described by Ortega. No authority can be superior to the population that identifies with the citizen; this marks the birth of the “general will” (Riverso, 1977, p. 55). It limits the will of the individual, but according to the French thinker’s messianic or mystic vision, the citizen ought not to consider himself limited, aware of the fact that it was for the good of the community. Rousseau’s model was the small city-state where it is easier, when making decisions, that a majority oblige the minority to follow it. The ideal type for him was the Swiss city of Geneva. For the Swiss philosopher the law was superior to the person; when it depends on men, however, it means slavery (Sartori, 2011, pp. 160-6). Sartori, in a chapter of his book devoted to democracy, writes “Rousseau’s laws are Laws with a capital letter: few, extremely general, fundamental, ancient and practically unchanging supreme Laws” (op. cit., p. 162). The general will is the supreme law, free from all “subjective contingency”. The popular will is annulled by the general one. The conclusions Sartori reaches coincide with those of other scholars: “Rousseau actually gave birth to an omnivorous, totalitarian Jacobin democracy” (op. cit., p. 166). Man’s natural freedom becomes “civil”, and that of the citizen is limited by the general will. From the moment that, in direct democracy, the only form foreseen, the vote, decides who is the majority and who the minority, the citizen who finds himself in the necessary minority accepts the general will of the majority. This is the supreme Law to which one must adapt: otherwise

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one betrays freedom (Rikker, 1996)3. This road leads inevitably, to hypersocialization: “the total citizen” (Belardinelli, 2013, p. 108). This is the pivot of “totalitarian democracy” which, probably, leads to consequences unsought by Rousseau (op. cit., pp. 2423)4. In the debate following the French Revolution, Robespierre pointed out that “the virtue of the people is a barrier against the vice and despotism of the government” (Taguieff, 2003, p. 103). These brief remarks on the origins of totalitarian democracy – which had to be completed, in France, during the debate that followed concerning as a mode of being based on wealth, gender, and social class – are useful in themselves to confirm the appropriateness of Ortega’s insights into the mass-man. The Spanish thinker had grasped the explosive novelties of mass democracy that was ushering history in. He shared the idea that democracy was a modality with contents. Man, the only true leading social actor capable of implementing it, needed, however, help and knowledge to render it operative. He obstinately refused an ideological approach to the problems it involved. He made a very clear distinction between those who seek knowledge and critical sense as a way of life and of existential commitment, and those who, on the contrary, prefer “agglomeration” and the indistinct, waiving thought and in-depth investigation. Others will decide and choose in the stead of the mass-man. He will not accept and share the general will as auspicated by Rousseau but submit to it, as is often the case with contemporary audience democracy. This is the risk of democracy, today, as Ortega saw it. His reflection is enriched further with other elements inherent to democracy: absolutism and authoritarianism. Rousseau’s thinking laid the basis. The problem is the self-referentiality of the demos: if democracy absolutises authority, 3

4

Rikker, when interpreting the populist vote, writes: “For populists, freedom and selfgovernment through participation, therefore, are achieved by embodying the will of the people in the actions of politicians in office. This conception, in its basic terms, dates back to Rousseau at least. There is a social contract, which creates a “moral and collective body” that has a “life” and “will” of its own: the famous “general will”, the embodied will of the people, the Sovereign. For Rousseau and other populists, individual freedom coincides with the participation of the citizen in this sovereignty. “Freedom,” writes Rousseau, “is obedience to a law that we prescribed in our own interest,” implying of course, that this prescription is achieved through the acts of the anthropomorphized Sovereign” (Rikker, 1996, p. 14). Sartori writes quoting J. L. Talmon’s Totalitarian Democracy: “Talmon blames Rousseau for having been the prophet of “totalitarian democracy”; if this is so, it is because the outcome betrays the intentions and the result does not comply with the prevision that Rousseau’s faults are due above all to his interpreters, to a Rousseau distorted out of all context. Rousseau asked direct democracy to act in the place of liberal guaranteeism and the fact that Rousseau’s solution was unfeasible does not change the fact that he obsessively pursued freedom, freedom within the law” (Sartori, 2011, p. 243).

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it becomes totalitarian, even populist. It remains a prisoner of the people which it should serve and enhance. A “totalitarian democracy” is more dangerous than a charismatic dictatorship, in the Weberian sense of the term. A popular uprising can topple a dictator, but how can a totalitarian demos be opposed?

3.2.  The Origin of Democracy Democracy is a human construct, historically set in an increasingly globalized world. It is a polysemous word, complex, not easy to define. Is democracy univocal or are there many rules for its application? The answer is not easy. One must, initially, distinguish between a prescriptive and a descriptive definition which need to integrate (Sartori, 2011, p. 12). Democracy is an ideal that describes but also requires a method for its implementation. Etymologically it is the power of the people, the demos of the Greeks, the Roman populus, a legal concept more than anything else. The former was restricted to the few, a very small sector of a small community; women, children, slaves were excluded. The latter extended outside the city and coincided with the res publica. It appears for the first time in Herodotus, but between the third century BCE and the nineteenth century CE, the word democracy has followed a rather uneven course (Sartori, 1992, p. 742). The concept was born in Greece, in the polis, but the Athenian democracy was very different from that of the present. A thorough explanation is provided by the classical scholar Luciano Canfora, who, cutting the myth down to size, writes, “For opponents of the political system who rotated around the popular assembly, democracy was a liberticidal system. That is why Pericles, in the official and solemn speech Thucydides attributes to him, sought to put the scope of the term into proper perspective, stepping back from it. We use democracy in our political system simply because we are wont to refer to the criterion of “majority”, yet there is no freedom here” (Canfora, 2010, p. 13). In actual fact no Athenian authors use the term. In the past, until practically the nineteenth century, the term res publica – the thing belonging to all – was preferred (Sartori, 1992, p. 742). When speaking of Greek democracy it is more correct to use the term isonomy, true equality of rights: the possibility to exercise the same civil rights within the community (Riverso, 1977, p. 10)5. Later, Thucydides will try to explain how democracy, the power of the people, of the mass, without rules, if absolute, can lead to misunderstanding: isonomy is introduced to avoid the power of one, or all, without rules (op. cit., p. 12). Athenian 5

See also Manin, 2010, and Sartori, 1992, p. 745.

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democracy centred around election by lots of those who willing to be elected, once only, and assume institutional roles: the boulé. This is how Manin explains the concept of Athenian democracy: “Democratic freedom meant obeying not oneself but obeying, today, someone in whose place one might find oneself tomorrow” (Manin, 2010, p.  33). Political professionalism was considered negatively, because it might privilege the few over the many. There were also other institutional positions to which it was possible to be elected. There was a combination of the two modes, direct election by lots, and indirect representative election. Aristotle saw in the first a more democratic situation, in the second an oligarchic and aristocratic choice. The debate also examined the concept of equality: arithmetic or geometric. Arithmetic equality, the basis of election by lots, indicated the total equality of equal parts; geometric equality, the basis of indirect election, was proportional and depended on merits and virtues. Aristotle preferred the second mode because it safeguarded the concept of citizens being born free despite inevitable differences among men. Athenian democracy, the isonomic demos, following infighting, plummeted “at the height of too much politics” (Sartori, 1992, p. 745). Participatory, direct democracy, applicable in small communities, inevitably leads to an excess of democracy: this point was highlighted by Ortega in his Morbid Democracy. In short, it is possible to state that from its very birth democracy was complex, and very different from what we know today. It belonged to a particular historical context. Representational democracy, as we know it today, was considered an oligarchic, undemocratic modality compared to direct democracy. These two fundamental aspects that represent it, are the necessary hub of every study seeking to understand the weaknesses of current democracy. Even the historian Montesquieu, one of the founders of modern liberalism, agreed that suffrage by lots was a characteristic of democracy, while election by choice was a trait of aristocracy (Manin, 2010, p. 80). Rousseau believed the same: using lots, the people were sovereign and government at the same time. They made the laws and applied them. Election by lots expressed no particular will capable of contrasting the general will, the real danger according to the French thinker. Once Athenian democracy had imploded due to the rivalry of the demos, many centuries later, Locke’s contractualism and, later, the French Revolution, led to discussions regarding the modalities of representation. The principle of majority was an acquired characteristic of popular power. The debate focused on the issue of who was entitled to elect representatives to Parliament in Britain, France and the United 88

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States of America, the three countries which had experienced modern revolutions. In England, election was to be reserved for those who could not be influenced by the English Crown. For this reason it was proposed that “only landowners and residents with an annual income of £200” should vote (op. cit., p. 109). The problem was the same in France: in 1789, the Constituent Assembly decided, by law, that the vote should be exercised only by landowners and by those who could pay a silver mark, equal to 500 days of work. In the New World too, the situation was no different. During the Philadelphia Convention, Madison, one of the founding fathers of American democracy, favoured granting the vote on the basis of property. The problem was complex also because there were divers economic situations in the new American Republic. There were significant differences between Northern, Southern and Central areas of America. The choice of a policy that preferred one of the country’s productive sectors would mean discriminating against the others, like the small farmers, large landowners or craftsmen6. Another, equally significant problem was the debate between federalists and anti-federalists. The U.S. Constitution is federalist and the choice of this mode of government was by no means easy. The positions were divergent, especially as far as representation was concerned. For the federalists those elected might not represent voters’ instances fully: they had a large margin of freedom because the elected were, necessarily, more competent than their voters. The anti-federalists held the opposite view. They believed that representatives were such because they resembled their voters. They were more radical than the federalists and reproached them for being aristocrats, not due to property but to acquired wealth: the current plutocracy (Salvadori, 2009, pp. 66-80). A similarity of mandate, it was believed, might afford them greater protection. It was decided to hold elections frequently. A mode typical of the United States, aimed at furthering the interests of the people and not their representatives. This helps to explain the checks and balances mechanism, that is, the balance of power. The American president, even if elected by the people, must answer to Congress, whose members are elected every two years and may block presidential decisions. To avoid authoritarianism, no constitutional power can prevail over the other, even at the risk of exhausting compromises, as we have often seen, in recent years, during Obama’s Presidency. 6

Manin, 2010, p. 119. “The absence of property and wealth requirements in the constitution of 1787 was not the outcome of principle, but of necessity. The delegates were actually in favour of property and wealth requirements, but were simply unable to agree on a uniform limit capable of producing the desired result for the states of the North and South, the agrarian West and the richer mercantile states of the East. So the absence of reference to property requirement for representatives in the constitution should be considered unintentional.”

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The debate on the representative weight of mandates shifted, as a result, to the size of the constituencies. For the federalists a large constituency would prevent direct contact between voters and elected officials, providing the latter with greater freedom of action and independence. A small constituency, which the anti-federalists preferred, was synonymous with greater parity between voters and representatives, also in the defence of rights. Both groups, however, were convinced that both positions contained aristocratic elements within themselves, because they meant choosing from among a select number of candidates. It was difficult to determine which of the methods was best. Representation did not eliminate the problems of direct elections, but actually complicated them in part by preferring some people to others. It is important to note, when considering the developments of the French and the American Revolutions, the differences foregrounded by Alexis de Tocqueville. His countrymen had sought and put into practice a liberty born of dramatic and bloody struggles, from the Constituent Assembly to the Jacobin Terror. The American case was quite different, less dramatic because society in the US was already a community of equals. There was no need for class struggles (Ciliberto, 2011, p. 29). For Tocqueville, the two revolutions, in different ways, had each produced a dangerous despotism, “The European one was characterized by the prevalence of administration over politics, the American one by the prevalence of politics over the life of the country, through the clear, enveloping, predominance of people at the level of legislative power” (op. cit., p. 44). It is the necessarily ever-present risk of the “tyranny of the majority” which the French scholar believed had to be curbed in order to favour the institutions and community structure, associations capable of forwarding social and political citizenship within civil society. What ancient democracy, that of Greece in particular, lacked was, however, a feature of American democracy (op. cit., pp. 49, 50). Once again we note that democracy is accepted as the best possible form of government, though it requires some corrections in order to avoid totalitarianism which might damage it from the inside. The direct democracy of the past, unlike the representative form of modern times, was described accurately in 1819 by Benjamin Constant in his famous essay (2011). He confirmed the thesis of the close relationship existing, in the nineteenth and in the twentieth centuries, between liberalism and democracy (Salvadori, 2009, pp. 8; 26). Constant reproaches Rousseau, and one of his successors, like the Abbot Mably, for having reduced man to slavery, in order to free the people (Constant, 2011, p. 32). The enemy was individual freedom. We now live in a different historical era and we cannot cancel our rights like they did in the past. Constant says: “Freedom will be all the more valuable to us, 90

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the more time the exercise of political rights we will leave us for private interests” (op. cit., p. 45). Moreover, the institutions, here the hallmark of liberalism, should promote the moral education of citizens while respecting individual rights, leaving them time for other occupations (op. cit., p. 49). There is a strong appeal to the citizens to exercise their sovereignty and take an interest in public affairs, a feature of liberalism. All this should occur, however, in a state at the service of citizens, not the opposite. A limited, controlled, constitutional and liberal state (Sartori, 1992, p. 747). This confirms the thesis whereby there was a close relationship, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, between democracy and liberalism (Salvadori, 2009, pp. 8 and 26)7. These brief reflections, shared by different countries in different ways when they were moving toward liberal democracy, confirm that it is a modality and a project; a project that contains in itself elements which, while mostly democratic are also oligarchic and aristocratic when democracy becomes representative and the problem of mandate arises. Elections are ambiguous, with a majority that decides and a minority that obeys; and it is this very aspect that causes its stability (Manin, 2010, p. 174). It is precisely through representation, however, that the people from one “side” become universal and acquire citizenship (Galli, 2011, p. 24). This is the representative principle of rule of law. The course of democracy has always been complex, as shown here, and has by no means reached its destination. Even Schumpeter, the economist, may be numbered among the elitists (Pareto, Mosca, Michels) because he holds that democracy, representative government, is the institutional means by which to determine the policies through which individuals may acquire power by means of the popular vote (Manin, 2010, p. 180). The elites thus elected do not resemble those of a direct democracy who would not be obliged to submit to the electoral market. Some adjustments are required to improve the democratic method; what is needed is a “non-competitive and not overly pluralistic system; a select ruling class, from which to choose rulers; competent bureaucracies to support and guide them; severe restrictions on the scope of political decisions” (Mastropaolo, 2011, pp. 123-4). The position of the constitutionalist Hans Kelsen was quite different and clearly democratic; it recognized the value of representational, majority democracy, and highlighted the central role of the parliament (op. cit., p. 122). 7

In the first chapter the author writes: “Democracy is considered the sister of freedom, the fulfilment of equality and the foundation of human dignity and inalienable human rights. In combination with liberalism that gradually realized itself in the nineteenth and twentieth century liberal democracy was born, assuming the guise of a system finally providing a formula capable of offering representative parliamentarian institutions and the universalization of civil and political rights” (Salvadori, 2009, p. 3).

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Contemporary populism, in its leftist and rightist versions, on the contrary, highlights the “redeeming”, almost “messianic” role of direct democracy. It does not accept the mediation of the traditional parties, remnants of a no longer proposable ideological past. The message is direct, clear and simple and should coincide totally with the popular will. The people are the only true representatives of power. On the contrary, representation, the result of discussion and strong opposition, accepts that the elected representative will inevitably have a degree of freedom and, though in a general way, represent the nation. This was what was established in England, France and the USA. This to safeguard the independence of the elected (op. cit., p. 181). Constitutionalism, separation between powers and liberalism, not to be confounded with economic liberalism, belong to and are at the basis of modern representational democracy. They are modalities of civil society aimed at limiting the excess power of the people and providing for better governability, even if they contain within themselves, as already pointed out, inevitable traces of oligarchy. The formation of minorities, the political class which rules over disorganized majorities, is characteristic, according to the classical elitists, of twentieth-century governments. Élites detain power. Robert Michels, in a detailed study of the excessive bureaucratization and ossification of the German Social Democratic Party, expresses an even more pessimistic view. Once a young left-wing activist, he later adhered to fascism. For this Italo-German scholar the masses and parties inevitably need a hierarchical organization that represents them. This is a specification of Mosca’s theory, in part contemptuous of the people and its inability to be free. Aristocracy and oligarchy are necessary to an otherwise useless and ineffective democracy. As we recalled in Part one of this book, Ortega was accused of being elitist but we also made it clear that his differed from the classical elite. An ideological diversity: the Spanish thinker was interested in investigating man and his nature in general. The pessimism that sometimes emerged was the result of existential observations concerning human behaviour, but Ortega had a plan for the improvement of the human condition. The lack of trust some of the elitists had in politics and, which at times caused them to embrace to right-wing ideologies, led to a profound distrust in democracy and acceptance of dangerous ideas during years which proved highly difficult and dramatic for the European nations.

3.3.  “Audience democracy” The brief considerations regarding representational democracy confirm the fact that majority decisions are a public modality through which the people choose to be governed. Democracy is a compromise between the 92

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different positions and different choices, which, in the history of nations and peoples, change constantly. It is subjected to many pressures, has obvious limitations due to being obliged to choose a side when striving to represent the whole. Many scholars consider this position aristocratic and oligarchic. If it sought, however, to represent the totality of all the positions in the field, without arriving at a choice, it would be doomed to inefficiency and ungovernability. If, on the contrary, by imposing coercive and ideological acceptance of the decisions of the majority on the minorities it would convey the idea of being ​​a “totalitarian democracy”. There should always be room for dissent and manifest diversity of thought and opinion. Democracy is, therefore, a work in progress, in constant tension between the achievement of a complex ideal that clashes with the tensions of civil society and its lobbies. Democracy is uncertainty; it is never given once and for all. It requires watchful and responsible citizens who are aware of its limitations but also of its opportunities. One may agree, therefore, with Winston Churchill for whom democracy was the worst of all systems except for all the others (Mény, Surel, 2009, p. 28). Ortega’s ideas and reflections concerning the masses, their potential, but also the risks involved, are topical at this point in time when democracy and the traditional parties have changed but have not disappeared. They have followed the new trends of society. The fragility of democracy, subject to constant compromise, is also its strength, however (Linz, 2006, p. 41)8. It imposes on its actors and protagonists a wakeful awareness capable of defeating the apathy, fatigue and mistrust of the middle classes less and less trustful of their own ability to solve problems. A middle class, increasingly tempted by populist sirens offering salvation to it and its numerically limited members; that nepotism and familism characteristic of Italian society, but also of other nations, of which scholars including Ortega have spoken when referring to the Mediterranean countries9. The transformation of contemporary democracy, with the traditional parties less and less ideological and more dominated by charismatic leaders, has undergone profound changes that have many causes. One of 8

9

In the introduction, Marco Tarchi writes: “Democracy does not appear in the guise of a panacea for the ills that afflict humanity or the revelation of a higher ethical principle, but is more realistically considered the best possible political compromise” (Linz, 2006, p. 41). “All this, I think, shows clearly enough what a superlative abnormality the “mister contentment” ideal is. He is a man born to do as he pleases. Indeed, this is the illusion of the “wellborn child.” And we know why: within the family circle, everything, even the greatest crimes, can remain ultimately unpunished when all comes to all. The family environment is relatively artificial, and tolerates within it many acts which in society, in the open, would lead to disastrous consequences for the perpetrator. For this reason this kind of person believes he can as he likes. A great misconception!” (Ortega y Gasset, 1974, p. 97).

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the key changes, not only for the Old Continent but for the New World too, was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. A historic event that changed the history of the last century, followed by the attack on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001. Furthermore, globalization has made traditional distinctions between right and left obsolete. It was decided too hastily to overcome them, in the name of ideologies which seemed out-dated. They were felt to be ineffective when representing post-modernity. In addition, the strong expansion of the media, social networks, further changed democracy and politics. A new expression was coined: “audience democracy”10. Representation becomes a matter of exchange between leaders and “public opinion”. The media are the new protagonists, are often one-sided and comprise the new agenda setting, a term used in communications to indicate priorities. It is no coincidence that during election campaigns, parties use the term “agenda” and that the word “programme” has disappeared. The latter term appears too close to the ideological past to help you forget. What matters is the present and the word “agenda” represents it adequately. An agenda is easily browsed; the entries are few, short and concise. Other elements have contributed to the transformation of the old mass parties into charismatic post-ideological ones. With the fall of the old opposing post-war right-wing and left-wing blocs, at least formally, national boundaries have expanded, stretched. A 27-nation Europe (with all the difficulties that entails, its welfare system in difficulty, its very legitimacy questioned) has failed to reach an agreement concerning the economic, political and cosmopolitan welfare to implement. The single states and national policies count less and less: finance and the economy seem to be the only credible answers available. The recession which took place within finance, forgetful of the real economy, has hastened the breakdown of the middle class, which having grown increasingly fearful has fallen a prey to populist emotions and feelings. The “new pathologies” of post-ideological modernity, identified by Marcel Gauchet, brings our analysis closer and closer to the individualistic, emotional, self-absorbed, narcissistic social actor (Gauchet, 2005, pp. 211-3). There is no further identification with the myths and ideals of the past: “De-identification comes from de-idealization” (op. cit., 10

As already mentioned, one of the scholars who has helped to establish the semantics of new democracy was Manin, 2010, p. 245. Media experts fix the new forms and modes of political participation and party leaders have to adapt them. Public opinion dictates the rules of an unmediated democracy, another contemporary definition, highlighted by Diamond, 2010, p. 58, to explain the changes taking place within the traditional parties.

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p. 213). Contemporary narcissism is the result of a simplification and a superficiality that focuses on appearance rather than on substance (Cesareo, Vaccarini, 2012, p. 112). The spiritual dimension is considered less and less important: the centre state is occupied by consumption, messages conveyed by the media. The citizen is such because he consumes. Contemporary civilization promotes self-interest, the pursuit of happiness (Bauman, 2010, p. 31), a kind of happiness that is not the outcome of a positive process of affirmation and development of personality, as hypothesised by the U.S. Constitution. Narcissistic happiness is something different: it is simple enjoyment11. A type of happiness devoid of a more complex vision capable of unifying the human person, and making him more cosmopolitan and open to others. Contemporary minimalist happiness is self-obsessed: Others are an obstacle to achievement, not a help. Current narcissism, in its mediatic form too, focuses on the individual obsessed by the cult of physical beauty, youth, with no plans for the achievement of physical and emotional maturity12. In this case too it is opportune to recall Ortega’s words regarding the mass-man: “This refusal of all obligation partly explains the phenomenon, somewhere between the ridiculous and outrageous, of the present-day platform of “youth” as such” (Ortega y Gasset, 1974, p. 174). A more accurate observation is, though, that regarding the disappointed goals of youth experienced only as physical and not spiritual beauty. It is inability to understand, at this particular stage of life, one’s personal project, obligations, alongside the rights that life entails. It is a disease where action is preferable to thinking, reflecting, planning. Another feature of present-day political democracy is its progressive shift towards issues of human rights that “have become, due to an unpredictable evolution of our society, the constitutive principle of the collective consciousness and the sole yardstick of public action” (Gauchet, 2005, p. 246). In fact, the long journey of democracy began with the “modern natural law theory” and continued with the French Revolution. The subjective right of the individual become the protagonist of social legitimacy. The ideology of the left and right, born and developed in France in 1789, contains in it the germs that, over the following centuries and within a profoundly changed kind of society, turned the modern individual into the principal actor of civil society. 11

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Cesareo, Vaccarini, 2012, p. 117: “It is a conception of happiness that, as Lasch points out in The Minimal Self, reflects the survival mentality in which the minimalism of the narcissist manifests itself.” Simon, 2011, pp. 46-7: “It is within this terrain that the present figure of the “global baby” has grown and whose most disturbing trait is precocious and brazen emulation of the adult: affluent consumerism in opposition to grownups. Ortega y Gasset pointed to the first signs of this process as far back as the 1920s” (in La rebelión de las masas).

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In a globalized, post-ideological world, vindication of personal rights has become the “agenda” of many political parties, both old and new. The law has become protagonist, and the tutelary deity of application for citizenship by new minorities, transversal to all the traditional political parties. This happens in every sphere and increasingly affects post-materialistic values and well being, independently of traditional ideologies. This epoch-making transformation of society contributes even more to the crisis of political parties. These are unable, in many cases, to interpret the New World, trapped as they are in the ideological logic of the past. The populist message skips the mediation of political parties and ideologies to unhinge obsolete logic. It risks becoming the main mouthpiece of those who, for more than one reason, no longer recognize old politics, while unable to draw up new forms. Emotion becomes a privileged mode of analysis. It is a fundamental aspect of our identity, but should not be divorced from rationality it too a basic trait of personality (Moïsi, 2009). Alongside the apathy emphasized by Ortega, feelings of fear, anxiety and distress seem to prevail, spread also by the Web Emotions experienced as shortcuts to judgment and opinions that are difficult to identify.

3.4.  A Populism that comes from Afar The crisis of politics and of the traditional, mass political parties which has marked, democracy in general, not only in Italy but also in other nations, has remote roots. Many contemporary scholars and political scientists ascribe to degeneration of democracy itself and of its institutions, the populist drift that seems to have become the protagonist of politics, or rather of contemporary anti-politics. It has been emphasized that this is a simplification of a more complex phenomenon, already latent in democracy itself. It took root and emerged with the full-blown crisis of the political parties, and the ruling elite, in the 1980s (Prospero, 2012, p. 61). Parties have become synonymous with an ideological past, unfit to understand the profound changes taking place in society. A civil society that vindicated a proactive role in the community, in opposition to the old apparati, often corrupt and inadequate and unable to respond to the new demands of the middle classes. Christopher Lasch (1995), departing in fact from Ortega’s The Revolt of the Masses, highlighted in the title of his text that the revolt was not of the masses, but of the elite. The characteristics which the Spanish scholar attributed to the masses, lack of autonomy and willingness to follow whoever held power due to apathy or habit, have become the traits of the managerial class which has concentrated economic 96

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power and political decision-making in developing countries, significantly lowering the standard of living of the middle class (op. cit., p. 33). Lasch refers to the 1990s. Of interest, and still valid today, are his comments on the dangers of a middle class in difficulty: “The developed sense of local roots and respect for historical continuity, two signs characteristic of bourgeois sensitivity, are all the more appreciated today when middle-class culture is everywhere in decline” (op. cit., p. 46). The historical context and times are different but since then the situation has not changed that much. In our country, as well as in others, malaise, fear and the economic recession have helped forget the efforts made in the past to achieve and establish values ​​and institutions no longer shared. Think of the welfare state and the opportune debate for its renegotiation, not elimination (Ferrera, 2012). Remember too the secessionist not federalist forces at work in many European nations. They strive for a federalism quite unlike that of the USA, as stated above, which, while safeguarding local communities aims at the unity of the state, so as not to disrupt but unite the nation: “federalism as a form of unification” (Urbinati, 2011, p.  198)13. Now, however, selfishness prevails, that of the few and the rich against the many, the weakest and poorest, who pose a danger to what has been won, gains not to be shared with others for the common good. Given the situation, there is individualism among the working class too, which has for some time now lost representativeness and centrality within society and the labour market which has also helped to weaken the middle class which shifts more and more towards third-sector consumption (Lasch, 1995, p. 50)14. The observations of the American scholar, contained in a chapter of his book entitled Communitarianism or populism?, revealed that the latter had its roots in the eighteenth century, and the beginning of the nineteenth, when it intended to protect small property holders (op. cit., p. 80). He also mentioned the US People’s, which founder elements of populism on the New Continent. Lasch openly and severely criticised the liberal ideology which had failed to combine “faith in progress and a belief that a liberal state exempting one from the obligations of civic virtue” (op. cit., p. 81). Once more it is opportune to recall that civil commitment as constant, convinced, forward-looking adhesion to “active citizenship” suggested by Ortega. Too often people forget it or erroneously take it for granted. The 13

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“Federalism is not withdrawal into littleness but a strategy by which the many peripheries may better communicate and cooperate with each other and the world, to transcend the boundaries between them. Federalism as a form of unification, aims, therefore, at avoiding that people remain buried within the walls of their own homes” (Urbinati, 2011, p. 198). “For commentators closer to the left, the inability of the labour movement to launch a frontal attack concerning issues of inequality betrayed the persistence of the influence individualistic ideology” (Lasch, 1995, p. 50).

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present general sense of insecurity, now affecting large segments of the population, should favour national cohesion, not to guarantee individual salvation but for the common, even cosmopolitan good, involving all the social actors in society (Bauman, 2001), young and old, locals and foreigners alike: everyone who lives and is part of a community. Social malaise has its roots in the 1960s in Northern Europe, in those Scandinavian countries which had established welfare as a form of democratic warranty and a way of redistributing wealth among citizens. Later an idea destined to become a constant with many right-wing but also left-wing parties was the accusation that the welfare system was wasteful and inefficient, even as far as matters regarding the safeguard of the population were concerned. In Denmark, in 1972, a tax lawyer, a newcomer to politics, led the Progress Party which protested violently against the IRS, to gain 16% of the vote, becoming the second national political party (Mastropaolo, 2005, pp. 9-24). The revolt continued in the following years in Norway, where Anders Lange founded a party for demanding reductions in taxation, social contributions and public intervention. In France, in 1972, Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the Front national with the clear intention of bringing fringes of the extreme right together in a single nationalist and authoritarian party. It is now led by his daughter, who, in the 2012 presidential elections managed to combine current resentment against Europe (responsible for the present recession), with fear of foreigners. Non-EU immigrants are accused of being unemployed and to pose a threat to law and order in cities. In many other European countries, not only in the North but also in the Mediterranean areas, as far back as the 1970s and 1980s, reactionary nationalist parties, though rightist obtained votes from the left. The working and the post-ideological middle class, more frightened and insecure than ever, have become the protagonists of a harassed democracy (Taguieff, 2003, pp. 140-52). In Belgium, within the traditional contrast between Flanders and Wallonia, we find the secessionist party led by Vlaams Blok, in Britain the British National Party, especially in city slum areas where unemployment is high. New-right parties are active in many other countries: the Lega dei Ticinesi in Switzerland, the Republikaner in Germany. In Italy too, with the fall of the First Republic resulting from the Tangentopoli investigations, most of the traditional parties changed and new ones were founded: the Northern League, Forza Italia and, recently, the Movimento 5 Stelle. These will be discussed in greater detail below. The traditional ideologies become more difficult to locate. The traditional right, but also the left, had to adapt to the changing times. For the former a number of values ​​like family, religion and the nation are still fundamental. They claim a native ethnos, often mythical and imaginary, and express a strong anti-Islamic fear that the 98

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9/11 and Taliban attacks have exacerbated. They advocate a “chauvinist welfare”, that is, state benefits for residents only. Resources are scarce; the numbers of those demanding citizenship is on the increase, although it is granted to very few and is exclusive, not inclusive. The New Right, thus identified, is not so ideological as in the past and cannot be stigmatized as simply extremist. It even shares many of the instances with the opposing camp (Mastropaolo, 2005, pp. 39-47). The New Right has been accused of being populist but the issue is quite complex. As we saw above, the democracy of the ancients and moderns alike was the result of two different but complementary types of choice: one direct and the other representational. The latter is, due to its very nature, an oligarchic option because it is based on the principle of majority rule, but, associated with liberal constitutionalism, it envisages, because of this, that many other rights be fulfilled. The danger of the democracies of the New Right is separation between from the direct and representational modes. The latter, with the promotion of referenda or other types of popular representation, leads to “hyper-politics in a much more risky way than conventional political actors” (op. cit., p. 75). An unmediated noncomplementary democracy in place of a representational one. A demos which considers itself a loser within the ambit of globalization, deprived of reference points. Populism should not, therefore, be considered as the other, inevitable face of democracy (op. cit., p. 89). It has wedged itself into a space left vacant by the traditional parties, due to their inability to provide adequate responses to emerging problems. Furthermore, in the mid 1970s, a report on the state of democracy, promoted by a Trilateral Commission, involving authoritative personalities from the world of politics, economics and finance both in the US and elsewhere, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, opened up a significant debate on the specific question. To emerge from the complex problems of democracy and a state weighed down by matters of administration, the commission proposed delegating tasks that public offices were no longer able to handle to other institutions (op. cit., pp. 101-2). It also proposed national governance agencies and international authorities, independent of political parties to avoid former waste and to guarantee increased performance efficiency. The public thus became, and in some cases rightly so, a negative kind of ideal type fighting against waste and inefficiency, while welfare came to be considered not an institution but an acquisition to be reformed, at times, even demolished. Even the left, having reviewed ideological themes that it could no longer advocate and shifted its focus towards issues that concerned the mainly post-materialistic values ​​of wealth, good living, healthy eating. Civil rights began to appear in electoral “agendas”. What was lacking was a view of the whole, an internal programme where 99

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even individuality might find a programmatic place. A perspective that can no longer mean the old ideology or even its obliteration. It needs to be pointed out how in the Weberian conception, initially, bureaucracy represents development and a transition towards modern society. Its proper functioning makes it the “social cement” capable of making citizens the protagonists of a community. It is these, with private associations and institutions that determined the whole of society. They should foster that class pride important to Weber, that feeling of belonging to an institution that belongs we all share and which is capable of promoting a democratic and pluralistic state (op. cit., pp. 170-1). This finds confirmation in the observations of the political scientist Norberto Bobbio, “the democratic and bureaucratic state are historically much more closely interwoven with one another than their opposition might lead one to believe. All states that have become more democratic have, at the same time, more bureaucratic” (Bobbio, 1984, p. 22). Degeneration and waste are issues that need to be tackled with great determination to restore dignity and pride to a bureaucracy that should not act, as often happens, against the citizen, which it ought to guarantee and safeguard. The error of the past, but also of the present is that of distancing people from the state, by promoting independent management by the parties instead of by traditional democratic politics. External management of welfare has been favoured but the managers have been appointed by the politicians and the political parties. Waste and inefficiency have not diminished but actually increased also due to lack of control. It is necessary to foster a civic culture, especially in a country like ours which lacks it historically and traditionally, by creating an ambit where public and the private sectors are not at odds. The one and the other should help cure this sick democracy, restoring dignity and authority to a middle class that feels bereft of a State that does not belong to it and to which it does not belong.

3.5.
  The characteristics of populism Populism, a greatly abused term (but one to which many scholars refer in order to explain the difficult evolution of contemporary democracies) has grown in use in recent times. Already in 1999 the French sociologist Alain Touraine, while writing about the return of “the social actor”, underlined a number of the characteristics of modern populism (Touraine, 2000). He speaks of the direct, unmediated rapport existing between the demos and those legitimised not to represent it but to guide it, a mediatic unmediated, kind of politics, strongly critical of intellectuals, where the simple, common people are those who appear capable of understanding the problems of the people. There is no need for the mediation of the 100

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traditional apparati and parties. Populism may be conjugated with nationalism, but in the positive sense of the term. The situation is one of ad excludendum: it involves shutting oneself up in one’s comfort zone to fight against those who threaten one’s conquests and interests. The independent and separatist spirit of Italy’s Northern League, one of whose fundamental political hobbyhorses based, not surprisingly, on the fight against taxation enjoys the favour of three out of ten citizens (data 2014). Its request is that of leaving 75% of tax revenue produced by the North in the North, a difficult proposition for some constitutionalists to apply. It will pose a major problem in the future and is already an important issue today. The nationalism of populism mythicizes the demos, which inhabits both a real and an imaginary place: the heartland and the homeland (Taggart, 2002, p. 13). This is an unreal fatherland, which responds to sentiment and emotion during periods of crisis rather than attempt drawing up to a feasible plan for the concrete reality. The words of populism need to arrive straight at the people, they are words that anyone can understand. Simplification, a few messages capable of striking an image of things that may become reality, especially in a time of scarce resources like the present one. For some, populism also spells demagogy, which shares the root demos with democracy. The actual implementation of the proposals is of no importance. In years such as these sentiment and emotion have practically replaced rationalism; the myth and the dream of what may never come true are fundamental. Politics has ceased to propose shared ideals, and the messianic populist has entered the vacated space. The demos is sacred and is associated with ethnos. Populism sediments more effectively whenever ideologies appear to have vanished and when it is claimed, dangerously, that they have actually disappeared. The demos and the middle class, which are the constituent parts of it, failing to find someone capable of representing them, share in this Cinderella situation, as Taguieff called it when commenting on Berlin (Taguieff, 2003, p. 187)15. Populism is the glass slipper whose owner Prince Charming continues to seek until, at last, he finds someone it fits. Research into the votes given to populist parties like Le Pen’s Front National in France, and Jörg Haider‘s FPÖ in Austria, at the end of the 1990s, confirmed the fact that opting for the populist right-wing parties probably indicated “a vote of no confidence against the rules of the political game and the traditional élites, in particular” (Mény, Surel, 2009, p. 267). Those who vote these parties support the idea that a strong man, capable of reaching decisions more quickly than the Parliament, is preferable. In addition, they believe, direct regular proclamation is 15

See also Taggart, 2002, p. 10.

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better than voting every four years. This means, once more, pitting direct democracy against representation. One may recall Silvio Berlusconi’s frequent, recent appeals, against wasting time in parliament and hindering government decision-making, or the proposal that party whips should vote, excluding the deputies and senators. Modern populism, if we accept this connotation, is anti-liberal, in stark contrast with constitutionalism, one of the modalities of contemporary democracy. The logic comes from afar, as stated above, from the populism born of Rousseau and Robespierre’s French Revolution which Tocqueville contested (op. cit., p. 281). Another characteristic of populism, shared by Russian, American and Argentinian history, is its tendency to crop up at times of historical crisis, when society tends towards modernity (Taggart, 2002, p. 28)16. The people are the masses, no longer ideological, no longer divided rigidly into classes. A people without representation, acting almost individually, as Canetti stated in Crowds and Power. A people entrenched inside its own territory, its community, afraid of bewildering globalization. A people that takes refuge in an excess of radical environmentalism and vindicates a natural lifestyle, not the artificial one of the metropolitan areas17. The traditional ideologies of right and left are no longer necessary, populism has surpassed them. As the class struggle is no longer necessary, social and economic inequality is seen as something caused by the institutions to be opposed. Modernity, not that of the web or of the social networks, is the enemy, like liberalism which has led to this form of representational democracy to be fought against. One of the greatest scholars of populism, Margaret Canovan, expounds the complexity of a similar concept, and reality. The main nuclei are: appealing to the people and distrust of the elites, but many other situations “may both combine and separate the categories” (Taggart, 2002, p. 40). Populism is a blend of sometimes contrasting positions but which follows an interpretative line. One of its most dangerous aspects is strong opposition to the party system. The current problems of the latter cannot and may not be solved by the populists. They do not enter into a relationship with the institutions: institutions that are the ideal type of the distance between old politics and the demos. The real problem emerges when they effectively impact on society: will they be able to solve the problems of 16

17

Bonomi, 2010, p. 91: “Today’s populism is different from what we were used to in the last century; it is different, above all from that image of an extreme right-wing wave which seemed to obsess the media. Populism is an expression not of the pre-modern but of the hypermodern: it is politics undergoing transition in this era of multitudes.” Op. cit., p. 101: “A mix where a defence of the role of small artisan producers or farmers like José Bové pitted against the power of large transnational concerns, where radical ecologism is intertwined with glamorous lifestyles characterised by the artificially constructed possibility of a cheap exodus from the alienation of the metropolis”.

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a morbid democracy? The challenge has been launched but no concrete solutions only slogans, sometimes spectacular and, in part, acceptable, have emerged to date. The solutions to the problems are, however, quite complex. A more aware and less reluctant elite is required (Galli, 2012). A fresh interpretation “of elitism in dialectical, no longer positivist terms, within a historical-philosophical framework” is necessary (op. cit., p. 71). One needs to oppose the Rebellion of the elite described by with competence, responsibility, as suggested by Ortega: “it is by no chance that an elitist like Ortega y Gasset drew up the exemplarity/docility conceptual couple, meaning that the masses will follow the élite as long as they are capable of providing a civil and cultural model” (op. cit., p. 76). Parties are necessary and functional for a true democracy aware of its purpose (Ignazi, 2012). In this lies the challenge of contemporary politics: complex, not easy. In “audience democracy” one must pay attention lest a citizenship sap the vital lymph of a populism which tends to subvert democratic ideals and processes (Rosanvallon, 2006, p. 247). Populism turns the people into a judge against the state and the institutions that have become the enemy. Many of its forms were well described by Canetti. It is led by emotions, feelings, as Le Bon intuited. Public opinion should watch over all the participative rights of citizenship available to citizens, including the positive possibilities the network and the Internet have to offer. The important thing is that “counter-politics (or counter-democracy) does not run the risk of becoming anti-politics” (Urbinati, 2010, p. 551). The distinction may be difficult but it is clear and net. The former requires critical conscience, a non-trivial, non-superficial analysis, a project, reasoning. The second, anti-politics, feeds on populism and ambiguity, avails of a mediatic leader, a paternal lord-and-master to act as a judge-destroyer. A virulent destructive force that does not confront representation, but simply eliminates it (op. cit., p. 552). It uses an easy, simple, accessible language, which may even express malaise; what it lacks, however, is propositional strength. The will to build. It remains downright destructive. We need therefore to form a “vigilant citizenship”, by staunchly rejecting the sirens of the “citizen destroyer.” It is necessary to educate people to critical, serious and responsible participation, avoiding shortcuts that delegitimize democracy.

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4.  Populism: From the Origins to Post-modern Times 4.1.  Russian Populism Historical populism was not born in Western Europe but in nineteenthcentury Russia, thanks to small groups of young students and intellectuals. The word itself takes its origin from the Russian narodničestvo which, in, derives from narod, people. From this the term narodnik, “populist” (Bongiovanni, 1996, p. 703). With the ascent to the throne, during the middle of the nineteenth century, of Alexander II, rumours went around that the land would be distributed among the serfs who believed that they might become free farmers at last. In their thousands they flocked to the cities looking for confirmation of the news. Revolts and disorder followed because very few knew how to interpret the Tsar’s proclamations: illiteracy was rife. The serfs refused to work the land of the nobles. The strikes escalated into clear, violent refusal (Venturi, 1972, p. 25). The student movement, which provided populism with its first substantial support, came out in favour of the serfs. The students, taking advantage of this air of revolt coming from the country, claimed more open access to the universities, hitherto limited almost exclusively to those destined to become state officials. Everyone else, peasants, bourgeois, soldiers, merchants, were excluded (op. cit., p. 32). Moscow and Saint Petersburg were the main centres of the revolt. The government made some concessions but the upheavals and revolts spread to the countryside too with the support of the students’ avant-garde movements and a handful of professors. One of the most representative figures was the intellectual Aleksandr Herzen who, from his exile in London, incited the students to revolt: “Every man worth anything, wherever he arrives, will bring science with him, not the science of the state whose purpose it is to instruct, but living science, the purpose of which is classless, universal, popular education. We need travelling teachers To become free one must go among the people” (op. cit., p. 48). Populism was born then; it intermingled with the popular traditions of the peasants, those of Russian folklore. It thrived on the revolutionary French and philosophical German texts the university students read (op. cit., p. 54). The Europe of the revolutions of 1848 brought about avant-gardes of cultured, politicised students who set out 105

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to vindicate freedom and participation. Populism led also, however, to nihilism: clandestine groups of di intellectuals, Zemlja i volja [Land and Liberty], who read the works of revolutionaries like, Vico, Herzen and Mazzini (op. cit., p. 90). Land and Freedom was their slogan. They challenged the centralism of the state and of Saint Petersburg. Local traditions and communities were to be privileged. Within these revolutionary and populists groups during those magmatic years, there were many different, even conflicting positions. There was “Young Russia”, a popular, clandestine paper, which advocated, inspired by Mazzini and the Jacobin tradition, “land-sharing with the redistribution of land decided on according to general rules applied by the community and village assemblies” (op. cit., p. 162). Opposed to this was Herzen, in the name not of a Russian Jacobinism but of a populism rooted in Russian popular tradition. It is interesting to note that the link with the American Revolution and the debate regarding federalism also led Russia into nihilism. There were regionalists who wanted a Russia divided into several states, including Siberia; there were also the pure revolutionaries, more interested in social and peasant revolution. Many populists groups assumed, later, terrorist positions. Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by some of these, in fact. From these summary historical data it is possible to reach a number of conclusions. Is it possible to compare the original populism of the student avant-gardes with those of the present? Or, more appropriately, with all those demonstrations of “totalitarian” or morbid democracy, denoting the grave representational crisis our country and many other European countries are experiencing? Naturally the historical and political contexts are profoundly different. There are some points of contact with present-day neo-populism: refusal of representational democracy a direct link with the people, sharp opposition to traditional ideology and intellectualism, even if, in reality, the student avant-gardists were well educated and had read the French, Italian and American revolutionaries. The populist and nihilist groups within them were highly fragmented and divided. Some refused ideologies; others were closer to socialism or anarchism. The Russian Revolution of 1917 further complicated the situation. The historical and ideological context as well as the prospects were, however, very different from the polysemic and diverse world of the contemporary populist. The Russian Populists had a precise project, which, when it failed set the stage for the October Revolution. They thought they could solve the social feudal Russian question. Some carried a positive, optimistic message, the hope of being able to achieve a social goal to be shared for ​​ the good of the community. Recurring to a contemporary expression, Russian populism, in some of its manifestations, held a 106

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humanist and reformist position (Taguieff, 2003, p. 45). A position quite unlike that of the often vulgar slogans howled in our faces by some of our contemporary charismatic leaders, from Silvio Berlusconi to Beppe Grillo. There are many of them. More evident are the references to the vulgarity Ortega spoke of. A vulgarity haranguing the demos in relation to the present, which fails to plan a future except in demagogic terms. Even the heartland it proposes is a haven within a closed community, for those with property and wealth they do want to share with others. Its rejection, in many instances, neopopulist, of representational democracy, aims at selfish conservation of their own status hindered, as they see it, by excess mediation. That is why business people and representatives of some categories who do not feel sufficiently safeguarded, take a direct part in politics, rejecting traditional representation. This is one of democracy’s weak points. It is very difficult for the part to represent the whole. A mandate, as we have seen, cannot be direct and particular, but must be general and universal. At least that is what it is meant to be. Especially in the “audience democracy”, where the message has become, more and more, the means.

4.2.  American Populism The second significant populist reality is the American kind which took root in the United States in the nineteenth century just after the War of Independence. The People’s Party, known later as the Populist Party, founded in the North-West of the US in Cincinnati, Ohio, was the outcome of the reaction of farmers and small landowners against the excess power of the banking system and American high finance (Bongiovanni, 1996, p. 703). American Populism shared with the Russian variation the idea that salvation resided within the people. A people that, initially, was not reactionary or conservative but “democratic, with progressive and reformist tendencies” (Taguieff, 2003, p. 112). It was a part of the constitutional debate concerning federalism: a reaction against the excess weight of a centralist state in the name of local, community autonomy. This position was totally different from that of the centralist, all-including state of the French Revolution. The difference between France and the United States of America lies exactly in this point, which stems from the different histories of the two countries. The French violently struggled against and overthrew the privileges due to the status of the few who enjoyed all the rights. The Americans, on the contrary, sought to safeguard their independence and autonomy from the Europe, with the State as guarantee of its unity. As already mentioned above, with its policy of “checks and balances” the American Constitution partially rebalanced the power of the people through the indirect election of the President of the Republic, by electing the 107

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Grand Electors, to represent the federal states. The Populist Party, however, managed to include at the beginning of the Constitution the highly significant words We, the People, words which President Obama repeated several time during his inauguration speech at his swearing-in on the 21st of January 2013, in Washington, after his re-election to office. The whole political organization of the US is a mix of American constitutional elements that seek to balance the characteristic dualism existing between the power of the people and that of the state, a necessary, non-intrusive unifier of individual autonomies. This also explains the frequent use in the federal states of referenda and forms of direct democracy relating to various topics, used to understand trends in public opinion. In the past, one of the fundamental characteristics of American civil society was associationism, mainly of a religious nature which explains why Tocqueville preferred American democracy although he warned against the “tyranny of the majority”, in order to avoid the already noticeable risks of a totalitarian democracy. The importance of the Christian religion, especially its Protestant form, but also Catholicism, lies at the basis of the New World. The “Pilgrim Fathers” who founded the United States after sailing from Great Britain on the Mayflower, during the first half of the seventeenth century, were Protestants. Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers of American democracy, in an essay in the “The Federalist” a collection published in 1788, aimed at convincing members of the Assembly of the State of New York to ratify the US Constitution, expressed himself in the following regarding the French Revolution: “Re-examining the disgusting spectacle of the French Revolution, it is difficult not to notice those factors which reveal a plan aimed at overthrowing human reason in itself while, at the same time undermining the venerable pillars that sustain the edifice of civil society. The attempt on the part of those who govern a nation, to destroy all religious beliefs and pervert an entire community by directing it towards atheism is a phenomenon of dissipation aimed only at consume the infamy of the reformers of amoral France” (Hamilton, 1995, p. 87). The difference in approach towards religion which characterises the USA since their foundation, and that of France, may be ascribed to religious freedom (Diotallevi, 2010, pp. 57-139). The First Amendment, introduced into the American Constitution, guarantees a number of individual rights. No state religions may be established nor can religious practices or convictions be hindered. This is how Diotallevi distinguishes American secularism from French laïcité: “The religious clauses of the Bill of Rights are, historically, an integral part of the design and implementation of a political system centred on the rule of checks and balances” (op. cit., p. 62). The sources of the founding fathers were Locke and Montesquieu, and Diotallevi points out how far “James Madison was from Rousseau’s approach” (op. cit., p. 65). The three revolutions, English, French and 108

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American, which founded modern democracy, established the bases for a different relationship between people and power. It is confirmed that an absolute demos, that is, one free of all control, may be dangerous, because it is self-referential. However, also a demos which does not consider the state as part of itself within a community, and shuts itself into an exasperated, excluding localism, is highly negative. The problem is how to find the proper balance between the people and the institutions which should represent them, in a democracy that does not claim being exhaustive. One of the fundamental causes of US populism was the dramatic depression that struck, at the end of the nineteenth century, especially the southern and mid-western states. The populists opposed the monopoly of the railway companies, the protectionist tariffs that were harmful to smallholders. They also opposed gold as the sole currency and wanted to return to silver which had been used in previous years. Just as today some parties advocate a return to the local currency (blaming the Euro for recession and making it one of “populist causes”) so also back then, the banks and Wall Street were held responsible for the economic crisis. Another populist fear was the nascent American melting pot (Bongiovanni, 1996, p. 706). Foreigners, different ethnic and religions groups were seen as an obstacle to national unity. The populism derived from the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, especially pietism and rationalism, became a web of meaning that underscores the word “Americanism” (Taggart, 2002, pp. 48-9). Religion had always been important to the American Republic, since its foundation (Tonello, 2007, p. 48). After the disappearance of the People’s Party and, later on, during the “cold war”, instances of populism mingled with the most reactionary and conservative positions of the Republican right. The latter did not hesitate to exploit the thinking of a well-known American philosopher, Leo Strauss, who proposed an increasingly rightist nationalism opposed to any kind of government intervention in matters of education and health (op. cit., p. 53). To understand the brief course of American populism, which intertwines with the country’s republican history, it is useful to read some of the observations of the American political scientist, Robert A. Dahl. The author of many texts on democracy, it is to him that we own the origin of the term polyarchy, used to explain developments in modern democracy. This term indicates a political order characterised by at least seven aspects (Dahl, 1990, pp. 334-5). Free and fair elections, with representatives elected by universal suffrage. In addition, to promote real alternative information, free and independent associations of citizens; the political parties which should also play a decisive role. Polyarchy would thus establish a direct link with democracy. The situation today 109

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has changed since the time of the founding fathers, of the constituents who established the democratic, even that of the republican rules of the American Constitution (Dahl, 2003). The American scholar highlights an interesting fact which helps explain how democracy and a republic may represent different and distinct concepts. They can, however, be integrated to improve the workings of a democratic parliamentary system. Dahl recalls that the constituents wished to create a republic, not a democracy, as Madison wrote in the 10th number of “The Federalist” (op. cit., pp. 113-4). By “republic” is meant “rule through representation.” Otherwise, “democracy”, as stated before, recalls the French Revolution, with its inefficiencies but also the tragedies and dangers of “direct democracy”. By means of an accurate historical reconstruction, the American political scientist indicates some of the mistakes made and the inefficiencies produced, like “the Connecticut compromise” (Piazza, 2011, p. 33). The smaller states, especially those of the South, managed to impose the principle whereby they were allowed the same number of representatives in the Senate as the larger ones. In case of the defeat of their proposal they threated to make themselves independent ​​ of the Federation. A situation of  “inequality of the most extreme. It is surpassed only by Brazil and Argentina” (Dahl, 2003, p. 36). Dahl also recognizes the loyalty of the people to American republican principles: “a ‘civil religion’ in support of democracy” (Piazza, 2011, p.  43). These are interesting observations made by a scholar of democracy in an attempt at understanding how to combine it with globalization. It is necessary, however, to ask just how democratic international institutions may be. He explains how and why democracies, including American democracy, can and must reform to produce a more participatory citizenship, both in the New World and in Europe. An economic plutocracy and concentrations of the media are only some of the risks for a polyarchy which experiences greater and greater difficulty. Dahl’s observations claim that democracy, even that of one of the founding countries, should always be subject to verification. Citizens should never feel smug regarding how it operates but they must be heedful and pay attention to ways of improving the way it works.

4.3.  Argentinian Populism The history and dramatic events of Argentinian Peronism belong too to a populist picture. The historical interpretation of these events, however, is contradictory and more complex that that of Russian and American populism. Among the most significant analyses, those of Ernesto Laclau and Joseph Germani1 are the most significant. 1

Laclau, 2008, Baldassari, Melegari, 2012; Laclau, 2012-13; See also Germani, 1975.

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Laclau, an Argentinian political scientist, calls himself a postMarxist and, compared to the other interpretations presented above, his view of populism is quite different. Already from the title of his book, On Populist Reason, he expresses his difference in a positive key. Society is not a compact and solid entity; within it there are various forms of discursive antagonism and dialectics where social demands prevail, even those expressing dissatisfaction regarding the state and its institutions. The people represent instances of populism: they emerge from within the social field. That is why, in his analysis, Laclau also recalls the psychology of crowds of Le Bon, one of the first to highlight psychological phenomena as “permanent aspects of modern society” (Laclau, 2008, p. 21). Furthermore, Freud’s psychoanalysis can help us enter more deeply into the human soul of that crowd and the masses that have become the protagonists of modernity. This scholar of populism is the one most attentive to this psychological, partially positivist aspect, recalled during the first part of the text. He acknowledges the fact that the French scholars were the first to grasp the evolution of the individual, especially in his psychological and emotional aspects. Populism is part of the dialectics of politics. It deals with leaders and heads. It appears “as a real possibility, always present in the structure of political life”; it cannot be exploited ideologically; it should be considered in its historical and political context; it has a reason and rationality all its own (op. cit., p. 14). Laclau goes on to say that the relationship between democracy and populism cannot be confrontational, “the construction of a people reveals the conditio sine qua non of the workings of democracy” (op. cit., p. 160). The democratic identity becomes popular identity. The latter is not rigid, it can change, as in Latin America, thanks to populist movements. Unlike US populism, which defended the average man against the big landowners, corrupted by the financial oligarchy, Argentinian Peronism was a predominantly urban phenomenon. It became a regime in the 1940s and 1950s, and rotated around the relationship between the leader, Juan Domingo Peron, and the masses. It was a case, nevertheless, of the rise of the middle and popular classes which had crystallized unanswered demands for political freedom as well as issues concerning the redistribution of land. The people also associated around the idea of a national state, against the oligarchic powers (op. cit., p. 184-5). Latin American Populism was statist, unlike the more communitarian European and U.S. versions. These remarks confirm the observations of Margaret Canovan: populisms are historically and geographically different. The contexts are dissimilar: for this reasons analyses may differ but also compensate each other. Peronism cannot be stigmatized simply as either a rightist or leftist scheme because within it, at different times, there were elements of both. 111

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The history of its founder, Peron, confirms this. Argentinian, a native of Buenos Aires, he entered military school as a young man and his career was very swift. He acted as military observer in Italy at the end of the 1930s, adhering to the fascist ideology. The generals, who, with Peron seized power in Argentina were initially oriented towards fascism and Nazism (Germani, 1975, p. 85). The Italian scholar Germani’s analysis is interesting because it includes authoritarianism and fascism, as separate but comparable realities, significant new elements, in a study of populism. The origin of these movements, the importance of class and social stratification periods of social transformation and transition to modernity, emerge. His hypothesis is that, during processes of growing secularization of modernity, it is necessary to maintain reference values and elements of integration. Authoritarianism might have been one of these values (op. cit., p.  17). The social mobilization of large numbers of people, with their “re-socialization”, contributed considerably to enhancing the support given to change and the new Peronist regime. The crisis of 1929, also at the root of US populism, was one of the reasons that favoured the new regime with the affirmation the elite of the Creoles, descendants of Europeans who lived mainly in the cities. The upper-middle class, with the help of mestizos and lower classes, was the protagonist of the revolution. They were also the people who had read the authors of the Enlightenment, of the French and American Revolutions; they brought the culture and history of Europe to Latin America. “Local caudillos”, often of mestizo origin, Indio or coloured, who came to the fore, in their own way, “represented an elementary form of democracy” (op. cit., p. 55). It was an authoritarian democracy, with symbols of mixed origin based on European democracies and the absolute governments of South America. It was a relatively enlightened version of the traditional authoritarian regime. The ideology of the new social classes that were emerging was difficult to identify. The traditional European distinctions between right and left were unsuitable to identify the new Latin American democracy that was taking shape. Elements of both positions contributed to the creation of a “new crucible.” These movements, as Germani sums up so well, were characteristic not only of the Argentinian reality but also of other Latin American countries like Chile, Brazil and Colombia. After the Second World War, Argentina was divided into two main zones: the more developed centre, with its large cities and its advanced process of modernization, and the outlying regions with their large population excluded from the modernization that was taking place. Only when the rural immigrants reached the cities did they enter into contact with modernity (op. cit., p. 82). National-populism, the Latin-American variant of traditional populism in its specifically Peronist version, succeeded in uniting the urban proletariat and the new industrial bourgeoisie. This occurred also during the Second Peronist revolution in 1973 when Peron 112

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regained power with the support of the working and middle classes. After the Second World War, the Argentina experienced further migrations. The foreigners had left and the rural proletariat, quite unlike those of the previous European urban migrations, moved to the cities. Peronism tried to unify this second new-born Argentina, using the specific techniques of an authoritarian regime, exploiting mass rallies and the media, especially the radio, which propagated the charismatic figure of Peron as a man trying to help the poor against the rich and powerful (op. cit., p. 157). The trade unions were expected to help workers, but only those of the regime were recognized. An attempt was made also to counter the large estates, but without any significant results. The outcome was a form of National Socialism, typical of Third World countries, on route to modernization, availing of totalitarianism, something already witnessed at the onset of fascism and Nazism (op. cit., p. 163). This brief account of the history of Peronism confirms that the characteristics of modern populism (if one so wishes to call the democratic transformation of regimes or democracies in some of its modalities) need to be contextualized in their relative historical periods. Every country or nation has its own particular history, which one cannot ignore. In the analysis by Germani there is a note explaining why the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian democracies have remained alien to these realities of “delayed modernization” presenting populist tendencies (op. cit., p. 203). Some of Peron’s reforms were positive like the introduction of a family wage for civil servants and sickness and maternity benefits. The aim was to defend workers against employers by means of a trade union, similar, however to that of fascist regimes, totally answerable to the State “to which it owed obedience and which expected it to eliminate dangerous plurality of tendencies and ideas” (Tranfaglia, 2010, p. 43). Peron also nationalized some vital areas of the state: from the railways to the public service, in opposition to the classical liberal model. The popularity of his second wife, Evita, also helped to fuel the myth of the “new Argentina” (op. cit., p. 45). Latin-American populism and Peronism, in particular, with all its lights and shadows, helps confirm the thesis of the Argentinian political scientist Laclau. Populism is a complex reality. In some contexts it may be considered an aspect of positive, even necessary, transition, only if it provides positive responses to problems that for many years now seem unsolvable.

4.4.  A Populist Europe? Europe is experiencing a grave period of crisis. The Euro, the single currency according to the expectations of the promoters and founders of the European Union, was expected to solve the economic problems of countries in difficulty by defeating inflation and promoting growth. It is 113

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accused, instead, of being the cause of the present recession. The fiscal compact, a balanced budget which some governments, including our own, have included in their budgets, divides the opinion of economists. Some argue that it limits development and growth in a dramatic moment for employment and enterprise like the present (Brancaccio, Passarella, 2012). Others, including the former Italian prime minister Mario Monti, an economist and former president of the Bocconi University, claims, instead, that it is a useful means by which to reduce the public debt and help countries to invest in a more virtuous kind of expenditure. There is also the issue of the conflict between the countries of Northern Europe, more rigorous and careful in spending, and those of the Mediterranean area, including Italy, accused, for quite some time now, of “happy-go-lucky finance” and of being economically unreliable. The counterpoising of rigorous Germany and the rest of the Europe, means that the other countries consider themselves the hostages of the ECB (European Central Bank) which they see not as a safeguard of the nations but as the severe watchdog of a heartless, soulless kind of rigour. The European leaders do not seem to be able to reach agreements, and the usual Eurosceptic position of Great Britain, reinforced by the Conservative Cameron administration, due also to internal electoral motives, poses an obstacle to many decisions. Even when planning for the future economy. All this increases the distance between citizens and a Europe which appears to be increasingly distant from the concerns and fears of a fragmented and rudderless middle class. Hostility towards globalization is also experienced as a result of the recession. So, many ask themselves whether the EU is a solution or a problem. In such an exasperated climate, in many European countries, both North and South, some traditional parties, as well as some new political movements, are becoming increasingly “Eurosceptic”, espousing populist theses having the traits mentioned above. Populist simplification rails against the immigrant, preferably Muslim, or even the stranger from the neighbouring town accused of stealing residents’ jobs. In addition, the parties and their technocrats become the cause of the recession. Financiers and governments are capable only of imposing taxes, without finding solutions to the problems of a costly and inadequate welfare. Contemporary populism transforms real and concrete problems into hatred and resentment towards the institutions, governments and the political parties. This dangerous oversimplification risks wiping out not only traditional politics but democracy too. One of the countries which often reveals “populist tendencies” that seek to exploit economic problems and emergencies against the traditional caste of the political parties, is France. Jacobin orientations emerge again almost like underground rivers, on important occasions like presidential elections or other decisive moments for the nation, to clash 114

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with “old politics”. “All of this happens at particular historical moments”, as scholar Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt points out, “The French case shows that under this kind of pressure, pluralistic trends and decisions do not easily develop. The weakness of their growth process generates, in turn, that institutional tumult of which constitutional democracies may be the protagonists” (Eisenstadt, 2002, p. 113). One may recall the poujadist phenomenon (1953-56), named after its founder, Pierre Poujade, a stationer from the French provinces who opposed tax inspection of his shop and urged artisans and merchants to rebel against taxes. The protest was directed also against the Parliament and the State, accomplices of taxation, the enemy of the people. The protest contained many typical populist modalities: anti-Semitism, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism. During the 2012 French presidential elections, Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National, expressed her party’s resentment against Europe as follows, “Today it seems that the democratic functioning of our Republic is severely impeded. The submission of our laws to the undemocratic European authorities causes drifts in the exercise of power that reinforce this democratic deficit even further”2. After the massacre of Toulouse, perpetrated by a Muslim in a Jewish school in March 2012 and which led to the killing of children and military personnel of North African origin, fear of Islam was strengthened and manipulated with the following highly charged statement by Le Pen, “You claim that a multicultural nation can live in peace. I do not think it will ever happen.”3 Immigration, she holds, also causes unemployment, “We are in France, if we count all the categories of unemployment, we can say that about five million of our compatriots are looking for a full-time job. Immigration is exploited to lower the wage-levels of French workers following low-bid dealings used by the capitalists to generate evergrowing profits in agreement with our leaders.”4 A two-round majority electoral system, the direct election of the President of the French Republic and French-style semi-Presidentialism, provide, however, an institutional stability capable of governing and controlling populist tendencies that might otherwise destabilize it. This appears to confirm the idea that the proper functioning of democracy may also depend on a good electoral law guaranteeing stability and governability. In Greece, one of the Mediterranean countries which is suffering most due to the recession, rightist and leftist movements, during the national 2

3 4

www.marinelepen2012.fr/le-projet/refondation-republicaine/democratie-institutionset-morale-publique/. www.agoravox.it/Strage-di-Tolsa-Marine.Le.Pen.html. www.lemonade.fr/elections-regionales/article/2001/02/02/la-religion-musulmanedoit-faire-en-sorte-de-ne-pas-choquer-le peuple-francais.

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elections in June 2012, openly criticized Europe. The Old Continent is accused of having caused the dramatic economic situation in which the nation finds itself. The neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, with 18 elected MPs, is now the fifth Greek party. Its statute admits only those of Aryan blood and Greek descent. For this it has been accused of anti-Semitism. The party has promoted, in recent months of dramatic poverty and youth unemployment, initiatives that may well be defined as “chauvinist welfare”, to help with the distribution of pasta and other food, only to white citizens, resident in Greece. This recalls, similar post-war episodes in Naples when electoral candidate Lauro distributed pasta to those who pledged to vote for him (Tarchi, 2003, pp. 95-102). The recent Greek case has been described by some Italian newspapers as follows, “In the line for pasta and olive oil we find the inhabitants of the historical centre of Athens, in tens, starved by the crisis, besieged by migrants, driven into the arms of the far-right Golden Dawn party” (Coppola, 2012, p. 18). The party has also proposed a new social programme called Doctors with Frontiers, a probable parody of Medicines sans Frontiers. The Spanish daily El País wrote: “Tras los repartos de comida, el Banco de Sangre y el Trabajo para Griegos, sigue la obra social de ad en el ámbito de la salud y la atención médica, dirigida exclusivamente a griegos” (Sánchez Vallejo, 2012, p. 7). Golden Dawn’s position is typical of New Right populist parties: rejection of the foreigner, the immigrant, the scapegoat of unemployment and recession, a return of nationalist pride in a country with closed borders, a quasi “autarchy”, reminiscent of fascism. There are also allegations against international finance and the news media. These theses may also be read on the web in English, “The national resistance of Golden Dawn against the bailout-junta will continue too. Both inside and outside the parliament. We will continue the struggle for a Greece liberated from global speculators. For a Greece independent and proud. For a Greece that will not be a social jungle because of the millions of illegal immigrants they brought into our homeland, without asking us. The victory of the Golden Dawn is a victory against the dictatorship of the mass-media”5. There is little difference between these and the theses of Northern European New Right parties. In the Netherlands, one of the political figures that triggered off the greatest uproar was Pim Fortuyn, a member of the Socialist Party before leaving to found a liberal-conservative populist movement. He was killed by a left-wing activist in 2002. His conservative and reactionary view of religious was also significant. He accused the Dutch Catholic Church of a modernism also characteristic of Protestants and the Muslim world that “severs our bonds with a 5

Kitmantv.blogspot.it/2012/05/greece-golden-dawn-nikos-michaloliako.html.

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rich, centuries-old tradition; they have taken the path of a doctrinaire and dogmatic ecclesiastical magisterium, unable to consider tradition as a living cultural phenomenon that must be passed down intact, and if possible, imposed on the living” (Fortuyn, 2007, p. 87). Another important Dutch right-wing populist is Geert Wilders, who was elected to the Chamber of Deputies beginning with 1998 and founded the Party for Freedom. In the elections of September 2012 the party lost votes and was obliged to enter the opposition. It is interesting, however, that his statements reaffirm many of the extremist concepts already reported above. In a speech in 2009 in California this is what he had to say: “Freedom of speech no longer exists in Europe. I would like to say a few things about Islam and sharia. The Koran calls for submission, hatred, violence, murder, terrorism and war. Moderate Islam cannot exist. Muhammad was a man of war, a conqueror, a paedophile and a mass murderer. I do not consider Islamism a religion; it is essentially a political and totalitarian ideology. It is not compatible with our Western civilization. Now Muslim fundamentalists want to impose the Sharia law on Western society. Sharia is the exact opposite of democracy. We have no alternative. We must stop the Islamization of the West. If we continue as we do, we are heading toward the end of European civilization. We must never submit to Islamic totalitarianism”6. In 2009, in Rome, he confirmed his theses when he stated, “Oriana Fallaci is one of my heroines and, following in her footsteps, I want to warn you of a great threat: it is called Islam. The Koran considers Jews as monkeys and pigs. Islam is the Trojan horse of Europe. We must protect our values and freedom, our civilization. If we do not, Europe will become Eurabia”7. In Denmark too, the leader of the People’s Party, Pia Kiaersgaard, continues along the same lines as other populist parties, by demonizing Islam, as shown by an interview in 2010 aimed at preventing broadcasts by the Arab television channels Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, accused of spreading hatred against Western society8. Immigrants are considered as predators of the welfare system, who make no contribution to the improvement of Danish society9. The interview continues by proposing a “chauvinist kind of welfare” meant to help only the locals. Resources are limited and foreigners, especially Muslims, are our new enemies.

6 7 8

9

Gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2009/04/geert-wilders-in-beverly-hills.html. 16/12/2010. www.alleanzaperlaliberta.it. www.isalmophobia-watch.com/islamophobia-watch/2010/10/31/pia-kursgaard-caalsfor-ban-on-arab-tv-channels.html. Alex-1.blogspot.it/2007/11/-wirh.paia-kjaergaard.html.

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The situation in Finland is not all that different. The rightist True Finn Party expresses similar extremist positions against Europe as those cited above. In the more developed countries, the Old Continent is seen as a central super-state that squanders the productive resources of those who have been parsimonious. Once again the concept is that of a prevailing laxity of the Mediterranean countries compared to the rigour of the Nordic nations. Some analysts interpret these behaviour patterns in terms of religious difference: Catholics vs. Protestants. There may be an element of truth in this. We have seen how religion acts as an important variable in the United States but also with regard to some of the extreme positions of the European New Right parties. In some cases, there is an instrumental reference to religion and the Catholic Church. Timo Soini, the most voted Finnish politician in recent years, with 10% of the votes, a deputy of the European Parliament since 2009, a Catholic Christian, is one of the most significant representatives of the True Finn Party. His statement on Finnish milk, a symbol of that welfare available only to native Finns, states, “The Finnish cow should be milked in Finland and the milk should not be sent abroad as a gift.”10 His position on Europe and the banks appears clear: “Our political leaders always borrow more and more money to pay the banks, which return the favour by returning the money to our governments. We have made a solemn promise to oppose the bailout of the Member States. Europe suffers from the economic gangrene of insolvency, both public and private. It has been decided to transfer the losses to the taxpayers via loans, guarantees and opaque constructs such as the European Financial Stability Facility. The money did not go to help the indebted economies. Why did the Brussels-Frankfurt extortion racket force these countries to accept the money along with the recovery plans that would inevitably fail?”11 Soini also recalls his conversion to Catholicism: “I am a convert. I began my journey of conversion in Ireland, in 1987. I had thought of conversion before, because John Paul II was so brave as to talk about the sanctity of human life and against abortion. After Ireland, I attended a eight-month course in Finland and entered full communion with the Catholic Church in May 1988”12. In Sweden, the extreme-right Swedish Democrats party, with its leader Jimmie Akesson, in 2010, also claimed that Islam was the greatest threat to the country: “Today’s multicultural Swedish power-elite is totally blind 10

11 12

www.upi.com/Top_News/Special/2011/04/Finland-hands-anti-EU-party-shot-at-govt/ UPI-80561303139702. Online.wsj.com/article/09/05/2011. Vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/homepage/world-news/detail/articolo/finlandchristians-7735/.

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to the dangers of Islam. As a democratic Swede I see this as our greatest external threat since the Second World War”13. Hungary is one of the countries, that, from a political point of view, with its Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has pushed extreme right wing, populist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic positions furthest. In April 2010, the Fidesz party, the Hungarian Civic Union, won a two-third majority in Parliament. The government is authoritarian with punitive laws against information and the judiciary. The Constitution is nationalist, the Constitutional Court may object only in form, but not in substance, regarding any future amendment. Freedom of opinion and expression may be curtailed “if one injures the dignity of the Hungarian nation” (Tarquini, 2013, p. 36). A very ambiguous and dangerous state of affairs from a legal standpoint. Orban also sought to limit the autonomy of the Central Bank of Budapest. In addition, he insists, in extremist and reactionary terms, on his Catholic Christian confession: “Hungary is a Christian country. Christianity is the tide. The Hungarians are pro-freedom individualists. But freedom is not the exclusive property of the liberals.”14 In an interview with German newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” in 2012 returns he harps on Islam and a Europe that has lost its roots, “I see on this map a weaker and weaker Europe. We are continually losing importance and we are in decline, numerically, compared to the world population and that of Europe before. Our share of world trade and the world’s GDP continues to decline. The majority of European leaders have lost faith in what made Europe great. We fail to realise that those who are coming now come to defend their own spiritual identity. The Islamic peoples refer to Islam, the Asian peoples to their Asian traditions and their spiritual systems. It is not only a question of God, but also of the cultures that have been influenced by their traditional beliefs. Furthermore, who elected the European Commission? Where is its democratic legitimacy? And who is accountable to the European Parliament? Very serious problems facing the construction of a new Europe. I want to be the one responsible for the destruction of the left; I would consider it a mark of personal success15”. These brief observations on some of Europe’s New Right parties, that show populist tendencies, provide scope for observation and analysis. In many nations of the Old Continent increases in the tax burden, the dramatic recession, fear of strangers, even of one’s neighbour, hatred of 13 14

15

www.thelocal.se/22738/20091019. www.politica.hu/20120407/freedom-is-not-the-property-of-the-liberals-interviewwith-viktor-orban/. www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2012/03interview-with-viktor-orban-a-majorityofeuropean-leaders-have-lost-their-faith-in-what-made-europe-grat/.

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traditional politics, all help to increase withdrawal and protest. A strong wind of change is likely to carry off the traditional parties, incapable of renewal; the new that advances is an unknown. The Italian February 2013 elections confirmed this. Even in Germany, a country that is more solid than ours due to its history and institutions, the wind of protest began to blow as early as 2011, in Berlin, during the regional elections involving the German, capital with the relative success of the Piraten who also won consensus in Saarland and Schleswig-Holstein. Not attributable to the right, this new post-ideological movement, largely composed of young web-surfers, obtained almost 8% of the vote. They may prove to be the competitors of the Greens, territorially more rooted and present for many years now in Parliament. They identify neither with the right nor the left and were able to establish themselves as new compared to the traditional German political parties16. Now, however, according to recent polls, while still being relatively strong in Berlin, in the other Länder they would not reach the minimum threshold of 5% required to enter Parliament. Clashes and disagreements have favoured internal rivalry and hostility among members. The problem with many of these unstructured populist movements, based only on direct democracy, is the same as that of the ancient Greek polis; they fail to guarantee stability and are unable to draw up plans for the future. They attract protest, even that of a legitimate nature but they seem unable to channel them in a constructive, positive way so as to foster a renewal not an annihilation of democracy, along with its institutions. This is the real challenge for populist movements. It does not suffice to provoke fitting demands for renewal, it is necessary to create and promote true alternative possibilities of government, not only of opposition.

4.5.  A Populist Italy? The Italian parliamentary and regional elections of 2012-2013 confirm that a populist wind is blowing here too, and, which, for the sake of semantic simplification, we might call a tornado threatening to wipe out not only our morbid democracy but also the fragile institutional fibre of our country. Like that of the rest of Europe, Italian populism comes from afar, has remote roots. It is proof of the tortuous and uneven history of democracy in this country. Recently acquired, national unity is only 150 years old, and is not yet solidly fixed in the minds of Italian citizens. Regionalism has failed to integrate local differences and diversity and make them an opportunity for cultural and economic growth for all. The 16

See Germania, verso il flop il “miracolo” dei Piraten, in “l’Unità”, 28th November, 2011, pp. 1-16.

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productive north with its small and medium-sized industry, even if the crisis has badly hit its economic fabric, feels economically and fiscally responsible for the South accused of squandering resources and of being unable to renew itself. The most worrying and anguishing idea is another, however. Historically, the north and south have never known how to share an idea of a state capable of uniting opportunities of growth and maturation by finding common goals and drawing up a common plan. Our welfare system, is certainly in need of considerable refurbishment, but it should be placed in a position where it can create an inclusive citizenship for both natives and foreigners fostering integration into an inclusive, not an exclusive, community. A strong contrast between public and private institutions still exists and appears to be increasing. The former are accused of inefficiency and uselessness. Education, too, where less and less money is invested in schools and universities and funds for more deserving students are cut, does not seem to be a priority of recent governments. Moreover, the public opinion seems to agree with these views and the authority of teachers is dwindling critically. Culture, instead of being an asset to be capitalized on, is seen as ballast sinking the coffers of the state. Germany and the United States, despite their different economic situations, have chosen education and culture as a priority, also with a view to boosting the economy. The increase in taxation, that is, the redistribution of resources in favour of those who have less, affects more and more the disoriented middle class, which sees welfare no longer as a benefit but as a mechanism that squanders assets belonging to the citizens. Furthermore, the increase in life expectancy and low birth-rates in Italy, have created a marked generational divide with young people in precarious, temporary jobs, and older workers obliged to remain at work longer. This is a fracture that a carefully planned political and educational project ought to resolve for the common good because the issue regards all the generations. To this regard the words of Raffaele Simone are significant: The fall of the principle of authority has severed the bond between the young and old, which had been active for thousands of years. The old have ceased to be the easily accessible source of that “portable” heritage of knowledge and experience to transfer to the younger generation; they have become the unconscious counterparts, extraneous insufferable killjoys, in short, a burden to be shaken off. Each generation prefers virginal rebirth, oblivious almost as the day of creation considering the views and knowledge of their predecessors contemptible or irrelevant (Simon, 2010, pp. 95-96). This has helped, not only in the labour market but also in politics, to create a void between the young and the general interest no longer felt as such. In the Italian elections of 2013, many of the young chose the 5 Star Movement for both its proposals, but also for its approach. 121

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The web, Internet, the social network against the old apparati. A second generational divide to add to the previous one. And this explains why, in times of crisis like the present one, strongly critical feelings against the traditional parties explode in votes of protest, as happened in Italy. For many years now the traditional parties have underestimated the political education of citizens, favouring ignorance of the institutions which now emerges as a destructive force threatening to overwhelm everything. In addition, entry into Europe and the Euro have not been understood by many citizens, have not been properly explained to them. Now Europe itself is accused of being the cause of the recession. The social model of the past with its social progress and permanent work has broken down, unlikely to return. The French political scientist Dominique Reynié thus explains the Italian vote of 2013: “The catastrophic outcome of the Italian vote confirms a hypothesis that I have expressed in my work, that is the disappearance, in the future, of left wing governments in Europe. The left makes sense if promotes social and protective processes. Under present conditions this is impossible, all that can be done is to stay on a moderate course at first, but inevitably, recourse to austerity will be required later” (cit. in Montefiori, 2013, p. 22). It is difficult to foresee the future but some of his analyses are interesting. It is possible to avoid the risk that the protest may reward, as in other countries, xenophobic and racist parties. The traditional parties, if renewed, however, might be able to provide credible and appropriate answers to the demands of citizens, often summarily and hastily stigmatized as anti-political (Spinelli, 2013, pp. 1-41). This is urgent. It should be noted that democracy (and the parties including the new ones are a part of it) “is a highly complex practice that rejects improvisation and is a very delicate mechanism, which breaks down at the slightest knock” (Bobbio, 1976, p. 47). Present-day events seem, dramatically, to confirm these words that the political scientist Norberto Bobbio, wrote in the 1970s. The Italian political crisis is attributable to historical and cultural reasons. The anthropologist Carlo Tullio-Altan recalls some of them in his texts. Italy has not had a linear, uniform history; it has always been divided into states and municipalities, under different dominations. A rich culture without common links. Canetti said the same when explaining multiple identities. Unlike France and Germany, nations with different histories which managed to find common values ​​and ideals, Italy is peculiar because of a merchant class that failed to create an alliance and solidarity because its cities were at loggerheads, in a state of continual antagonism and fighting, “Italy never experienced transition from a feudal society to one based on the primacy of the absolute state” (Tullio-Altan, 1975, p. 102). 122

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Our country has never established a common ethnos, but only utilitarian, “amoral” familism, already emphasised by Leon Battista Alberti in the fifteenth century (op. cit., pp. 105-6). It may be said that Italy has failed to build up a political ideology capable of uniting it, as Giustino Fortunato wrote in the 1920s: “The new Italy arose and took form due to a series of fortunate events, with the help of a tiny minority of intellectuals. Thus, one of the most troubled states in the modern world came to light” (Tullio-Altan, 1989, p. 35). Guicciardini’s man, attentive towards the “particular” rather than the general interest, has continued to characterize the typical Italian. The complex history of Italy grew within this political and cultural humus. Foreign domination was undergone and resisted, even with violence, but using the myth of the people as “the only elementary form of legitimacy for the exercise of sovereign power in the modern nation-state” (op. cit., p. 55). Mazzini and Gioberti presented two different images of the people: the former was of Jacobin inspiration and the latter neo-Guelph and confessional. The French and, later, the Russian Revolution, arrived in Italy, involving both the intellectuals and the Catholic world (op. cit., p. 55). These Italian characteristics, considered by many scholars as negative traits that have hampered the civic sense of the Italians, may also prove to be a positive resource. The sociologist Mauro Magatti says so when recalling the federalist Sturzo, who sought to highlight the value of Italian municipalities and local communities. To unite and not divide the nation. Accustomed to being dominated by foreign armies, the Italians mastered the art of going it alone, regardless of the powers of the moment and their institutions. Municipalities continue to be the most dependable source of identification capable of involving the citizens and the institutions. The very idea of being ​​ Italian needs to be mediated by local identity. Sturzo’s idea of federalism enhanced the local dimension with a view to producing a clear global projection (Magatti, 2011, pp. 50-51). A proper kind of federalism, whose values, starting from the bottom and the local community, capable of launching it into an international dimension, might be the right response to globalization no longer seen as a limitation of and an obstacle to local identity. Fascism, another historical period of the last century that dramatically shaped our country, inspired also by the theories of Le Bon, became for some the emblem of a populism blended with “squadism” (op. cit., p. 211)17. For the English scholar, Lyttelton, the absence of a homogeneous and unitary bourgeoisie, a unification imposed even by means of recourse to violence and never truly internalized by the people, a fragmented, non-cohesive civil society, did not produce a unifying 17

See Lyttelton, 1982.

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civil culture, but kept the country in a state of the cultural backwardness (op. cit., p. 221). In this kind of cultural, rather than political, milieu, fascism did not take long to establish itself; it sought to reach “the people” by encouraging the myth of “youth” and “wildness”, that of the “Strapaese” [ultracountry] versus the “Stracittà” [ultracity], to oppose corrupt modernity that was cancelling the tradition (op. cit., p. 241). Not even the intellectual class escaped a progressive kind of populism, which sought to reach the people, like the Russian avant-garde student movements had, according to the scholar Alberto Asor (1979). Italian populism, therefore, has remote roots. It is far too simplistic and short-sighted to attribute it elusively to a recent reality that is emerging, dramatically, in many European countries. Some similar, some different aspects unfold within the history of each nation. One should approach this magmatic phenomenon, which is developing rapidly, by means of in-depth, non-ideological analyses. Modern neo-populism is a postideological reality, enlarged by recession, globalization, and the dramatic crisis of the political parties and representational elites. We live in a jaded democracy which has lost all its vital momentum. Suddenly, although the symptoms were present for many years, we have realized that democracy, taken mistakenly for granted and acquired in its various forms, is seriously ill and might infect other healthy organs, including the civil institutions themselves, which are the democratic backbone of a nation. One should recall the Italian Uomo Qualunque (Everyman), experience, that of a political group founded in 1944 by a Neapolitan playwright and filmmaker, Guglielmo Giannini, who also founded a satirical weekly by the same name. In the elections of the Constituent Assembly, in 1946, this party won 5.3% of the vote and 30 seats. Even in the local elections it obtained positive results, which it subtracted from the Christian Democrat party. In the 1948 elections it obtained 3.8% of the vote and 19 seats. Giannini intended to defend the “ordinary people” from the parties deemed incapable, because of their traditional ideologies, of defending the rights of the citizens. Hence the use of the term “everyman”. He also published a text, The crowd, where the author blamed the war, in which he had lost his son, for being the cause of the ruin of Italy. Furthermore, he held, the professional politicians had led the nation to disaster. Giannini, with his tirade against the traditional parties has been compared, recently, to Beppe Grillo and 5 Star Movement [Movimento 5 Stelle, M5S]. This time it is the young who are the protagonists of this movement; the web is their primary ambit; the Uomo Qualunque was an inter-class movement, like M5S. This is what Giannini wrote, “What could the party do when only a few knew how to 124

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read, write and do arithmetic? Look for men who knew how to do what very few could. What, practically speaking, does it do and intend doing today? Look for a thousand people out of forty-five million, to appoint as deputies and senators. Let us choose from among ourselves, quietly, and without hassle, those thousand deputies and senators that we need” (Giannini, 1945, p. 281). Once more, direct democracy (through election, like in the ancient polis) became the mirage to prefer to representation. It is interesting to trace the route of the professional politician, when he arrives in Parliament. He is the honest professional politician, about whom nothing else may be said other than his being a “professional politician.” When, following a popular revolution, after a war has been won or lost, his colleagues and he they come to Parliament and assume the posts of minister, new men, uneducated to the hypocrisy of the environment, hungry and ragged, in need of everything, things happen as in this episode of the fascist period. An old railway brakeman, who had become Minister for Communications, called the general manager of the railways and ordered him to buy a million sleepers, besides providing for the usual series of promotions, recruitments and decorations (op. cit., p. 255). This might sound like a present-day critical picture of the traditional politics that led to the outcome of the 2013 Italian elections: some comparisons may be made. As M. Tarchi writes: “And although we cannot say that the Italian populism of the 1990s is the child of indifference, there is no doubt that between the one and the other there are many recognizable similarities in form and substance” (Tarchi, 2003 p. 91). History does not repeat itself with the exact same modalities even if the situations may be compared and it is precisely analysis that highlights the similarities and differences. Before going on to mention the 5 Star Movement, a “galaxy” rather than a traditional party, it should be noted that this movement is a part of contemporary globalization. We live in a “fragmented”, historical moment of heterogeneous generations. Communications between parents and children have, apparently, broken down. The traditional social classes exist no longer, therefore the middle classes, the cornerstone of democracy, are gasping for breath. The vote felt the brunt of emotion, the entry of the new media and social networks into the political arena. Television is still crucial for a part of the population, the over-65s and those with a lower education level. Personal relationships, however, appear to be more and more significant. There are many citizens talking about politics and influencing each other. In an analysis of his, the scholar Luigi Ceccarini underlines the fact that “the relational sphere is believed to have an explicit influence on the vote” (Ceccarini, 2013, p.  31). Today’s vote is post-ideological and much more “fluctuating” than in the 1950s and 125

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1970s. One may even choose whom to vote for at the very last moment. A substantial part of the Italian electorate, roughly one in five, did so at the general elections of 2013, which meant that nearly 16 million votes were displaced. A huge difference compared to the past, when the traditional ideologies and the traditional parties prevailed. Back then the vote was more predictable and stable. Alongside “audience democracy”, the homo videns, as Sartori defined the phenomenon in the 1990s, we find “the homo loquens and civis.net. A citizen who stands behind, and beyond, video politics” (op. cit., p. 38). Politics and electoral choices are increasingly the result, and the sum of different worlds. The parties will have to adapt to this complex reality, and make choices that are not easy to pinpoint. Also because the Italian situation, as Almond and Verba (1963) had already stated in the 1950s, is still characterized by a lack of a civic culture and “the Italian party system remained essentially unchanged until the 1990s.”18 This inability to self-reform is one of the reasons for the explosion of the M5S.

4.6. The Second Italian Republic and a number of populist features To conclude the analysis of the crisis of democracy and the impact it has had on our country, especially following the elections of February 2013, one cannot fail to refer, briefly, to Forza Italia [Forward Italy], the political party founded in 1994 by Silvio Berlusconi and which he later merged with the Popolo delle Libertà [People of Freedom] party which was the principal novelty of the Second Republic, a term indicating the political and cultural renewal that followed Tangentopoli which had virtually wiped out the traditional parties. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 helped weaken the traditional ideologies and conflicts between right and left. The new Forza Italia and the Northern League containers reaped consensus, and the expectations of a middle class, always hostile to the left, hoped for a “liberal revolution”. It was accompanied by claims on the part of Northern Italy that no longer considered itself represented economically or socially. These were the medium and small companies, “the VAT-number people”, that no political party had managed to intercept; not even the left that, even if it had begun to renew itself, and with great difficulty, could answer the demands of the Northeast, which it simply accused of tax evasion, without trying to communicate with the most productive part of the country. Many analyses of Forza Italia and Berlusconi’s party have been carried out. Seeing that history is a continuum, sometimes at the cost of violent lacerations, the present-day 18

http://www.sociologia.unimib.it/DATA/Insegnamenti/3_2242/materiale/ democracy%20e%20populismo.pdf.

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situation, may mean that the past is being partially surpassed, though along a pre-established pathway. The “cavaliere”, Berlusconi, accused of populism, in some cases even of plebiscitarian drifts, changed, and renewed the political language of Italy. He rejected traditional ideologies, opposed communism, often using rather violent language; a feature of modernity that Ortega mentioned frequently. Communism: an ideology no longer found, at least not in the guise of the past, among the parties of the new left. By continuing to refer to it almost daily in his debates and in public, and combining this with accusations that the left is the traditional party of taxation, Berlusconi has made Communism the ideal type of a no longer presentable past, he claims it is still present in Italian society. Furthermore Berlusconi, by using the kind of language we have already examined, that typical of New Right parties, has simplified the use of words significantly. As a media expert and founder of commercial television he believes his potential voters to be very pragmatic people, aware of the complexity of practical problems, but ill-informed as far as politics is concerned, television viewers rather than newspaper readers, with a low educational level. Berlusconi has reminded his party candidates of this more than once. Some have even defined his policy that of the “great seducer,” of the powerful, rich public man, loved, in this age of narcissism by the narcissist. A model in which to reflect oneself just like Narcissus. In addition, for some, he is a man who has managed to unmask the ubiquitous State which people, both North and South, and for various reasons, do not love (Belardelli, 2012, p. 40). Even religion in the traditional sense as form and not as an expression of inner belief, is exploited “as a social cement” in the Durkemiano meaning of the term. “We believe in freedom, in all its forms: freedom of thought, of opinion, of expression, of religion, all religion, all those faiths which urge men to improve and strive to ‘ascend’” (Marinelli, Matassa, 2006). Here are the words Berlusconi pronounced during a rally in Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano [Saint John Lateran Square] Rome, in March 2010: “We will achieve the religion of freedom: Long live Italy, long live freedom, long live the government of action and the People of Freedom. We will vote for a country that knows how to anchor itself in the tradition and the roots of Christianity in order to advance together towards that one centuries-old religion that belongs to all people and all ages: the religion of freedom. In the election campaign of 2006, Berlusconi confided being the Jesus Christ of politics, sacrificing himself for everyone. Ironically, in 2009, he had called his party the party of “love”, in opposition to “hatred.” The candidates for election as regional governors, in 2010, were called the “missionaries of truth and freedom” and using a quasi-religious type of language, like the Creed recited during the Mass, again during the public rally in Piazza San 127

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Giovanni, had asked them, hand on heart, to recite in chorus: “before the people, as representatives of all the moderates in the name of freedom, I solemnly commit myself to achieve, in my region, in line with national government policy, all the points of the Pact for Italy presented here today by party President Silvio Berlusconi”19 (Severgnini, 2010, pp. 50-1). This insistence on the love/hate, simplicity/complexity, freedom/ communism dyads is typical of the immediate, clear simplicity of the language of which Berlusconi is master and which reaps him success (Tarchi, 2003, p. 63). The family too is one of the values ​​manipulated by the leader of the People of Freedom. In 2006, once more in Piazza San Giovanni in Rome, he spoke at a rally against taxes, “We are here because we do not like the mentality which debases ​​the family founded on marriage, on the love between a man and a woman. Our idea of the politics is fully secular, but it also contains something sacred: ‘He who believes is never alone,’ said the Holy Father during his trip to Germany. When we talk about our future, we must always remember that the voters, our people, our women and men, come first. Today, in this square, we wish to repeat what the protagonists of the American Revolution said at the end of the eighteenth century, in Boston, No taxation without representation: No taxation without representation. Then the thirteen colonies rose up against the taxes imposed on them by London and by a government that did not represent them. Today, in Italy, we are in the same situation. Here there is a government that works against its citizens. Furthermore we propose a society based on the values of ​​ Christianity.”20 Here the themes of the New Right: hostility towards taxes, the manipulation of traditional values of the family ​​and religion, are repeated. It is interesting to note that the observations regarding no taxation without representation do not apply to legal immigrants who pay taxes but cannot vote even in local elections, as they can in many countries of Northern Europe. On this issue, the right has always opposed laws that might give them the vote. The Northern League is the second largest New Right reference in Italy and presents many of the features typical of the other rightist parties described above. The latest analyses have confirmed it as “the party that shifted most towards rightist positions. The Northern League will therefore enter fully into the family of parties of the “new” far right, present in many European countries” (Passarelli, Tuorto, 2012, 19

20

Berlusconi’s speech in piazza San Giovanni, Rome, on the 20th March 2010, in http:// qn.quotidiano.net/politica/2010/03/20/307589-piazza_carica_mila.shtml. Berlusconi’s speech against taxation, 2nd December 2006, in http://www.google.it/ search?client=safari&rls=en&q=discorso+berlusconi+2+dicembre+2006&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF-8&redir_esc=&ei=_whGUbv1C6Kp4AtciYDoDQ.

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p. 10). It is important, however, to discuss the fluidity of the League’s vote, a characteristic of these post-ideological years (op. cit., p. 102). The results of the February 2013 general election have confirmed that many of the League votes went to the M5S. Today, the League, led by Maroni, the new secretary after Bossi, governs one of the richest and most productive regions of the North: Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto. Paradoxically, however, the League is no longer the first party of the North. While still leading many municipalities and provinces, during the general election of 2013 the party did not obtain more than 4% of the vote. The words of former Secretary Umberto Bossi during a convention in Venice in 2002, reveal the populist, federalist, autonomist character of the party, with much confusion and overlapping of terms, however, “It is up to us, proud of the folk tradition and of common people, to build a new country. The peoples of the Po Valley, with the 15th September 1996 Venice Declaration began to recognize each other again, to talk about the freedom they took away from us. We share a common interest in rejecting the excuses of centralism, delays and resurgence. In the spirit of the Po Valley, the first liberal civilization was born then. The technical reasons that demand a territorial reform of the state, and the need to quell the autonomist-nationalist impulses that characterize the various nations that belong to the state, suggest a federalist solution. Here in Venice and the Po we proclaimed the secession of Padania from the Italian State. The government programme should have been the consequence of direct top-down contact with the will of the people through devolution, federalism, regionalization of the Constitutional Court, the Federal Senate, the coordination of the family of the Regions. Everything is immobile, due also to the will of our coalition. The population returns to the streets to accelerate the federalist revolution that boyars threaten. We act to restore our soul amid our people, at a moment in time when globalist powers discourage all the “isms” in favour of a sole larger “ism”, globalism. Fundamentalism, fundamentalism, nationalism, secessionism, everything is forbidden. Long live free Padania in a Federal Italy”21. Populist traits are also shared by movements that refer to the left, like Italia dei Valori [Italy of Values] whose leader, Antonio Di Pietro, a former magistrate, during the general election of 2013 was not reelected to Parliament. His party is no longer represented there. In an interview with the historian Nicola Tranfaglia, a scholar of populism, “Di Pietro stated, ‘Of the League I have the worst possible opinion. It is a dangerous force for the country, an anti-south secessionist party’. With 21

Speech by Northern League leader, Umberto Bossi in www.prov-varese.leganord.org/ articoli.asp?ID=419.

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Di Pietro and Berlusconi it has one feature in common: populism” (Privitera, 2011, p. 9). The exploitation of religion is one of the characteristics “of contemporary fundamentalist movements” (Eisenstadt, 2002, p. 65), its use is beneficial not only to New Right parties, but also to those of the left. So, Di Pietro wrote in his blog, “I think that today there are more Christian values ​​in the political thinking of Italia dei Valori ​​than in that of a senator sentenced to nine years for collusion with the Mafia. The ecclesiastical hierarchy, especially for the Catholic citizens, reminds us that Jesus Christ invited us to turn the other cheek but not to close both eyes when a Premier, who claims being close to the values ​​of the Catholic religion, violates its principles daily.”22 Another new party of the Second Republic, an offshoot of Oliviero Diliberto’s left, presents some populist traits too. The sociologist Aldo Bonomi, referring to Nichi Vendola, governor of Puglia and founder of the leftist SEL, Left, Ecology and Freedom, describes him as a sweet, “mild” populist, “a possible way out for the left from its cupio dissolvi into which it seems to have slipped for some time now” (Bonomi, 2009, pp. 115-6). Sweet populism, a different way of defining this chameleonlike reality of modernity, aimed at the re-conquest of local communities, a bottom-up openness aimed at opposing top-down counter globalization. For example, a green-based economy might provide a new chance of stemming the ever-present danger of a merger between demos and ethnos (op. cit., p. 118). Some of the old and new parties of the Second Republic present a number of traits ascribable to populism as a shortcut to an increasingly gasping democracy, likely to escape its protagonists too. That is what happened in the February 2013 elections.

4.7.  The Movimento 5 Stelle [the Five Star Movement] The new technologies, the web and the social networks, having transformed the economy, are now also changing politics and democracy. The success of Italy’s Five Star Movement at the February 2013 general elections and previously during the local elections of spring 2012, confirms this. “Italy has established itself as a European testing ground as far as relationships between politics and the web are concerned,” Canadian, massmediologist, De Kerckhove, former director of the McLuhan Program in Culture & Technology of the University of Toronto declared in an interview with an Italian newspaper (Occorsio, 2013, p. 3). The result obtained by the 5 Star Movement, close on 25% of the national total, confirms a trend in recent elections in Italy. The right and 22

www.antoniodipietro.it/2009/09/cattolici-a-parole.

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the left have ceased to be the preference of many of the electorate, which, having become more and more fluid, is prepared to vote differently from the past, even if the “political agenda” is not so satisfactory. Nowadays, it is even possible to decide how to vote at the very last moment. The vote is increasingly less ideological, more fragmented and spread more over the social classes and generations, among the self-employed and employees. Youth jobs are less permanent and there are many unemployed, the middle classes no longer feel represented. The elderly are protected by the pension system but their incomes are uncertain, even reduced in buyingpower, due to new legislative measures and failure to adjust to the costof-living increase. This picture of the Italy of the recession is what emerges from the polls. An Italy that was, perhaps, only to be expected, but one which has changed and compromised politics, although it is, difficult to guess what future developments may bring, including those regarding the democratic institutions, they are beginning to creak. The neologism, Second Republic, has lost its impact; it no longer represents the new, magmatic reality, still in motion. A social reality that is increasingly fragmented and whose identity it is difficult to pinpoint. The sharp shift of votes from both right and left to the 5 Star Movement, in a number of Italian cities, confirms the fact that this new movement, that has established itself at national level, is post-ideological23. Furthermore, the borders between society, politics and the territory have vanished. An interclass modality, characteristic of our country is establishing itself (Diamanti, 2013, pp. 1-9). In the north of Italy, the Five Star Movement stole votes mainly from the left and the League while in the South, in Reggio Calabria and Catania, the votes were mainly those of the right. Even the Northern League (Lega Nord) has contributed towards the success of the Five Star Movement, above all in Brescia and the NorthEastern provinces. It may be said, for the moment, that the “landslide” of the League has led to this vote of protest. Or perhaps, more correctly, that small business owners, artisans and the self-employed, with which the left failed once more to establish contact, have entrusted their requests to Beppe Grillo’s Movement. A survey carried out by the artisans’ association, Confartigianato, confirms this. The demands are always the same: reduction of the high tax rate, simplification of the bureaucracy regulating business start-ups, the payment of the debts the State has with many companies: over 50% of them are owed money by public bodies. In this modern kind of society, a strongly post-ideological pragmatism and a clear practicality emerge, also with regard to political demands. The individual has regained centrality with specific demands 23

www.cattaneoflussi.pdf.

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for self-representation. So, entrepreneurs, the self-employed and professionals are all demanding a direct mandate, no longer mediated by the parties or by traditional forms of representation. Political but also Church movements, are the new representatives of this altered situation. With all the lights and shadows of the case. The Five Star Movement vindicates a direct democracy, a characteristic of movements rather than of parties. The debate regarding the French Revolution and the opinions of Rousseau, already discussed here regarding this aspect, can undermine a democracy and the traditional parties, who find it hard to adapt to change. It is significant that the new MP’s of the Movement reject this title, preferring to be called “citizens”, like the members of the Paris Commune (Fornaro, 2013, p. 30). Furthermore, Beppe Grillo has repeatedly criticized article 67 of the Italian Constitution, which provides that the MP’s exercise their functions without a binding mandate, worried, perhaps, that as he is not in Parliament himself, he may not be able to control his “grillini”. It should be noted, however, that exemption from this bond a feature of all parliamentary democracies, acts as a guarantee of independence and freedom of the elected representatives. They are not supposed to represent cliques, lobbies or pressure groups. The debate on this issue, between federalists and antifederalists, during the drawing up of the American Constitution, was exemplary. The novelty of Grillo’s Movement lies in its having obliged the traditional parties to take stock of a change occurring in the country and among the citizens. The citizens are tired of inefficient politics impervious to change and to requests coming from the citizenship. The protest was channelled into the web, into the social networks, simply, and availing of slogans. Almost as if the competence and in-depth investigation of the topics under discussion belonged to a past to be wiped out. The candidates, later elected representatives, were chosen through the web, via Internet. An absolute novelty not only for this country but for other countries too. This is one of the aspects of populist simplification: rejection of traditional mediation, defeat of the “caste” and the intellectuals responsible for damaging the country. One means one is a catch cry of the “grillini” parliamentary representatives: nobody can reach decisions decided on by others. For this reason the Movement claims that referenda should be availed of when making laws and choosing measures to be approved in Parliament. In a 2012 newspaper article here is what Grillo says: “We have nothing to do with ‘Uomo Qualunque’. We are not traditionalists. We want to move forward, to change. We are a movement of citizens who want to make politics work differently. In other countries, the vacuum is filled by the brown shirts, we bring a Boy-Scout version of politics. Decent 132

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people. Graduates. Clean police records. Cultured, curious. I am not anti-political. I am against the parties. There may be another form of democracy. A hyper-democracy without parties. We create democracy from below” (Stella, 2012). In these words of Grillo’s we find some of the themes already foregrounded above: the contrast between direct and representational forms of democracy and refusal of the traditional elites and parties. This position is reiterated in the text written by Grillo with Gianroberto Casaleggio and Dario Fo: “We are the spokespersons of a movement that is taking shape. Leaders are expressions of political parties and we would like to see parties disappear radically and establish new community rules” (Casaleggio, Fo, Grillo, 2013, p. 79). A hyperdemocratic community reminds us of the fears and observations made by Ortega concerning a morbid, all-encompassing democracy, capable of wiping out dissent and diversity of thought. A totalitarian democracy. The refusal of Grillo and his parliamentarians to talk to the media is the result of an astute choice by a person who achieved fame with and through the media. Grillo is a product of television and knows how to exploit the medium cleverly to play from the fence (Santoro, 2012, p. 34). This Genoese actor and comedian, like Berlusconi, has built up a positive image thanks to television, only to reject it, knowing he has become a personage it can no longer afford to ignore. In this, Grillo is a kind of continuation of the “cavaliere”. He has outstripped politics and the traditional parties in a simple, clear, direct, violent manner, at a time when citizens feel most exasperated. He seeks to represent those who cannot protest: the “digital youth”, who, though they have a university degree are unemployed. The M5S is an inter-class movement that is not concerned with affiliations and ideologies that represent the past. They consider themselves the future looking for hope. With everyone and anyone. This explains the movement’s availability towards the extreme right Casapound organisation which led to protests and subsequent denials (Giusberti, 2013, p. 9). How should one consider this new movement? It is all too easy to stigmatize it as populist. Populism may be considered a characteristic of modernity, a modernity that is as yet unable to find the guidelines for action directed towards a new future. Gino Germani understood this and the fact that it did not regard the countries of Latin America only. His analysis may also prove useful when trying to understand this complicated contemporary political epoch. There are also other elements that have contributed significantly towards the success of the M5S. This particular historical period of grave economic crisis threatens to undermine the expectations and hopes of a whole generation of young people, who feel they have been abandoned by the traditional parties and ideologies they no longer consider representative. For this reason neo133

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populism, as defined by the scholar Canovan, has become a feature of many contemporary leaders of political parties and movements, rightist and leftist alike. It finds it easy to attack ideology and speak on behalf of and for the people. From Thatcher to Giscard d’Estaing, to Walter Veltroni in Italy (Santoro, 2012, p. 46). It is a form of anti-politics that, in actual fact, is politically, carefully thought out and detailed. It members refuse meeting the media to make further news. Paradoxes and simplifications are used to arouse violent reactions that arouse emotion in people. They choose simple themes that have an immediate impact on citizens. Populism is a syndrome, not a doctrine, as claimed by some scholars (Corbetta, Gualmini, 2013, p. 209). It is the fever temperature of a sick body, of a morbidity, which, if not treated, may spread and damage other organs. “Grillismo” might achieve positive results if it helped renew the sclerosis of the old parties, too long ignorant of new instances and demands of civil society. The risk is that “upward” transition may shatter the movement and with it, the democratic institutions (op. cit., pp. 213-4). Transformation is the salient feature of a democratic regime and it is very difficult to predict the future, especially the evolution of magmatic movements like M5S, especially during periods of severe economic and generational crisis like the present. In the 1980s Norberto Bobbio claimed not knowing how to respond about the future of democracy because the task of the scholar, as Hegel held, is not to be demagogic and prophetic (Bobbio, 1984, pp. 3-4). It is already difficult to study the present and try to identify on-going trends.

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Conclusions The crisis of democracy and its institutions is due to the parties which fail to self-reform and only seek to do so under obvious pressure from movements and civil society, weary of promises that are continuously postponed and never implemented. It is perhaps this, caused also by the success of the M5S during the Italian February 2013 general elections, that has obliged some of the traditional political forces to change their political approach. A glimmer of light shines through the fog of traditional politics that, until recently, seemed quite impervious to change. The road to be travelled down is, however, still quite long. Criticism of the parties does not seem as yet to be accompanied by concrete and comprehensive solutions capable of responding to a model, the traditional party, which should not be criticized only. Proposals for government should also be forthcoming, not only oppositional criticism of the destruens variety. Recession and economic crises wait for no man and they risk, from a cultural point of view too, destabilizing this Europe of ours, incapable of providing credible answers. In the first part of the text we highlighted the fact that the middle classes, the democratic backbone of every society, had won for itself, in the age of modernity, a position of centrality of action and thought, full, however, of numerous contradictions. The Spanish scholar Ortega y Gasset pointed this out, while also suggesting some solutions. The risk of approved “pensée unique” and “spiral of silence” (Noelle-Neumann, 1984) coexists in an “audience democracy” which makes democratic participation apparently clear and obvious. Very often, however, it is theatrical fiction that tends to prevail. But what really matters is what happens behind the scenes. What is emerging is a new, horizontal, bottom-up, “digital democracy”, which, in our country, has unhinged the traditional rules of democracy by undermining the traditional parties and making withdrawal from those ideologies of both the left and right, that were so familiar to us before the fall of the Berlin Wall, even more apparent. Even the premise, however, that ideologies have disappeared is ideological and ambiguous (Bobbio, 2009, p. 21). We need to reformulate the differences between the two schools of thought, in a modern globalized, post-ideological society. The cancellation of diversity is not realistic and, moreover, it risks simplifying the democratic message which, however, should be reiterated. The present difficulty involves being able to maintain a democratic and institutional skeleton within our 135

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highly complex contemporary society. There are certain risks. One of these is “the transformation of politics into technocracy”, thus ousting politics and the parties (Ferrajoli, 2012-13, p. 13). This way, the markets and economy, disjointed from their social context, would have the upper hand: there would be no control by political parties, civil society and parliaments. This would add, too, to the political crisis, already in progress, and marked by populist tendencies that contribute to weaken not only the political but also the democratic institutions, already in grave difficulty. It would help estrange citizens, more and more, from responsible involvement in the res publica. There are also other dangers and simplifications that might further weaken the already fragile democratic fabric of our country: the growing power of the judiciary and the “multiplication of the independent authorities, neither representative of nor answerable to the principle of majority” (Mastropaolo, 2011, p. 168). The judiciary should not be seen as a “redeeming shortcut”, a corporation at the service of some but not of all civil society, endowed with the different roles characteristic of an authentically liberal society (Ferrajoli, 2013). We are in an anomalous situation: “a technocratic forward or a populist backward thrust” (Donolo, 2012-13, p. 24). Both are risky situations. In constitutional democracies institutions are such because they have rules that define and legitimize them (Eisenstadt, 2002, p. 19). The movements, if they accept the democratic norms of representation, like election to Parliament, should also participate in the ensuing political debate in order to contribute towards a logical alternation between a majority that governs and an opposition that controls. These are the characteristics of every modern democracy. One cannot reject party logic and then agree to enter its democratic institutions. In the light of this, a discussion on the changes and transformations the parties are undergoing is both timely and necessary1. The thinking of an enlightened entrepreneur, a “humanist”, Adriano Olivetti, founder both of the industry that bears his name and of the Edizioni di Comunità, may be useful to refer to. He was also an Italian MP, elected in 1958. In an essay on the purpose of politics dated 1949, he denounced the political reality of his day, one of “party-rule by a hidden and complex mechanism of interests and personalities. It is the culmination and the beginning of the decline” (Olivetti, 2013, p. 26). His, however, was not a destructive 1

Regarding the public financing of the political parties in Italy and their role in society today and the interesting debate between the two different positions of Ignazi, in favour of a closely checked form of public funding, that of Revelli is more critical. st See also the two articles in the “Republic” of 21 March 2013, p.  55: P.P. Ignazi, La democrazia aperta a tutti; M. Revelli, Ma quei soldi sono una droga. See also Ignazi, 2012a; Revelli, 2013.

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criticism, as Italian jurist Stefano Rodotà writes in the introduction to a book of his (op. cit., p. 19). His position cannot be considered, in any way, anti-political; on the contrary, it calls for an “integrated democracy”, refers to the community and to the requirements of that civil society mentioned in Article 3 of the Italian Constitution. Everyone should feel himself or herself a part of society, including the workers, by contributing to the political, economic and social organization of the country. A serious attempt at recovering and regaining the confidence of every component of the nation needs to be made. To achieve this, the traditional ideologies, left and right, can and should be revised. They are the bedrock of intention and attitude, as Norberto Bobbio recalls in an essay published in 1994, now in its latest 2009 edition2. The rightist is, perhaps, he who looks to tradition, the leftist he who is projected towards the future. The present situation is, however, more complex. The guiding “star” of those who refer to the reformist left is “an egalitarian form of politics, characterized by a tendency to remove the obstacles that make men and women less equal, as stated in Article 3 of the [Italian] Constitution” (op. cit., p. 117). This is something that might start, for example, with an overhaul of an increasingly struggling welfare system which fails to outline a new project for itself, within a rigorous Europe of markets. The absence of a line of policy, of a programme, but also of ideology, are causing the political parties “to neglect their main task, as leaders of a strategic vision envisaging a well-ordered society, namely that of educating their electorate” (Offe, 2012, p. 923). These are the words of the German sociologist Claus Offe, used to address his own country too with regard to the slow decline of a soulless, aimless Europe, the prey of populism and plebiscitary drifts. The reasons Ortega gave for refusing to side with either the rightist and leftist ideological positions, a priori, are not in real contradiction with those of Bobbio. The two perspectives are simply different. Ortega adopted a more philosophical and educational approach to everything that concerned man and his investigation of humanity. He identified, with the utmost accuracy, the risks the mass society that was becoming the protagonist of modernity, ran. He understood the limits of the human soul, of men who, if not educated and guided through socialization, risked remaining ignorant (lacking knowledge) of society, of its complex 2

The Italian political scientist Salvati (2013), director of “Il Mulino”, in a long article on the distinction between right and left, refers to representational democracy. He also quotes Gauchet (1994) considering his treatment more exhaustive than that of Bobbio. In the conclusion of his article, Salvati states that “as long as our democracies remain anchored to the great cultural tradition that brought them to life the left / right distinction will remain the main axis of democratic conflict” (Salvati, 2013, p. 2).

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democratic mechanisms that might easily degenerate. He was critical of the Enlightenment, he was aware of some of the risks it entailed and which the painter Goya had portrayed in his works, which the Spanish thinker examined accurately (Ortega y Gasset, 2007). In the preliminary note to his text, Ortega highlighted the originality of the Spanish painter in representing “the monstrous and awkward.” A characteristic typical of human beings who seeks to “depart from tradition to venture out, suddenly, into regions which did not seem to exist previously” (op. cit., pp. 9-10). In the acquaforte The Sleep of Reason (one of his Caprices, a series of drawings by the great Spanish painter, who lacked neither irony nor depth of analysis), Goya portrays a man sleeping on a table on which the phrase that is the title of the work is written. In the background as in the foreground, owls and bats fly round. The interesting symbolic interpretation of the picture coincides, to some extent with Ortega’s observations concerning the masses. When man forgets who he is and renounces being a person capable of thought, Descartes’ cogito ergo sum can fall a prey to monsters and dangerous situations that jeopardize existence itself. One ventures into new unpredictable, complex situations. Goya tries to describe the relationship between the “populism and traditionalism” of the average Spaniard at the end of the eighteenth century (op. cit., p. 10). An ambiguous relationship with many unknowns, just like those of the present era. To some extent, this is the risk contemporary society is running: a situation where strong emotivism, that prevents serious analysis of the social, political and cultural reality, prevails (Costa, 2012). Furthermore, the quest for novelty, which is often accompanied by incompetence, in politics too, now seems to have become almost a value, while rejecting and ignoring our history. Only a thorough knowledge of the past, capable of helping us to discern between what is still useful and what may be surpassed, might help mend our now seriously damaged social and democratic fabric. History does not repeat itself, but situations may be compared, analysed and examined. The historical period Ortega lived in was very different from ours. The ideologies of that period have almost disappeared but now there are others that are no less significant and, in some cases, equally dramatic. The insights and analytical observations of the scholars we mentioned above (not only Ortega, but also Le Bon, Canetti and Riesman) remain topical and up-to-date. Modern man, who acts more and more as a social subject, is disoriented by economic and cultural globalization, feels helpless when seeking strategies to reacquire centrality of action. It has become easier to follow in the pathways already traced by others, as in the case of Ortega’s “flock” theory. The new technologies, social networks, Internet, have become the new idols that direct our lives 138

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even from a political point of view. What determines our democracy and “the public” is a “digital democracy”, equally dangerous as, maybe even more dangerous than, that which went before. But people, today as in the past, are open to the same stimuli that the various scholars analysed. Only the modes and processes of implementation have changed. Hetero-direction is increasingly present and influential in the lives of individuals. It avails of many more enticing modalities than in the past; ones that are difficult to avoid and which need to be defeated. In the society of the unmediated, the immediate, the speed with which all takes place, has acquired a kind of here-and-now sacredness, which fails, however, to give us enough time to internalize what we are experiencing; it is necessary to find time again for thought and analysis, as suggested by Ortega and some of the other scholars examined here. Education is one of the keys on which to insist in order to reconstruct the kind of democracy capable of finding the energy (and the skill) to get well. We need to encourage and nurture a shared feeling of Republican union between the state and the citizen, not something separate from, but a part of him. The public and private sectors together, not in opposition. Instruction and education are two distinct matters. The former, instruction, is the duty of the State: it should be a priority, even in times like the present when resources are limited. The latter, education, should be encouraged by society and by all the components belonging to it, without the pursuit of the ethical state sought by the Jacobins (Mauro, Zagrebelsky, 2011, p. 175). This danger is always present, even in the populist shortcuts that simplify and trivialize both the message and the solutions. So, others may choose and decide for us, emptying our lives and our actions of responsibility. It is important to overcome facile protest and uproar that prevent us from listening and seeking reconstruction patiently and continuously, in order to avoid the danger summed up in the famous phrase of Ecuadorian President José María Velasco Ibarra, democratically re-elected five times and deposed several times by the army: “Give me a balcony in any country and I will be president” (Roy, 2010, p. 2). The individual is the new political subject who, in a post-social society like today’s, as sociologist Alain Touraine (2012, p. 113-28) put it, is capable of rebuilding society from the bottom up, even from an ethical point of view; he is a horizontally, well-organized protagonist, aware of his rights and duties, who surpasses the parties and trade unions, thanks to a public opinion, well-informed by the media and the Internet and, in this case, capable of avoiding a second danger, that is lurking and already present in many of the new political movements; this is the 139

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populism of the web, the offspring of that democracy which, in turn, is heir to “totalitarian democracy”. A final observation concerning Europe, not that of the markets and finance, but the Europe of peoples, quite unlike the populism we find in many countries today3. This Europe is not merely monetary, a union that generates drama and recession, but a great nation, the United States of Europe, to which the founding fathers of the Old Continent aspired, characterised by a “pluralism that has always been the basic concept of European freedom. Today, it is this which is in danger and which we must try to preserve” (Camus, 2012, pp. 48-9). Ortega was a convinced European, because he thought that dictatorships and extremisms, whether leftist or rightist, might be defeated only through a federation of the nations, that united instead of dividing. Here are the words he pronounced in 1949, at the Freie Universität Berlin: “I do not remember any civilization ever having died from an attack of doubt. I can recall, however, civilizations that have died due to a petrification of their traditional beliefs.”4 A warning that still holds today.

3

4

See the special issue on Europe, Eutopia, in the “Paradoxa” magazine, No. 4, 2012 and the many articles on this subject by the sociologist Diotallevi, the political scientist, Fisichella, the philosopher Valenza and the welfare expert Ferrera, who offer a comprehensive, critical study of the problems of contemporary Europe. In particular, see sociologist Diotallevi’s position regarding the United States of Europe; he warns us not to “keep quiet or even forget the national interests in the name of a Europeanism which, being as empty as it is ostentatious, makes no contribution, therefore, to the Europe of the future”, p. 43. Wikipedia, org. Ortega y Gasset.

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151

Human Rights Studies Among the broad structural transformation processes at the global level, the international legal recognition of human rights occupies an exceptionally prominent position. The dimensions of this process include standard setting, the functioning of sophisticated machineries for the promotion and protection of human rights, the development of a specific international case-law as well as new priorities of the political agenda. The human rights paradigm is at the heart of a new set of interrelated principles, which are equally valid at both the domestic and the international levels – such as the rule of law, democratic principles and the responsibility to protect – and of great strategic visions, as human development and human security. New functions, such as human rights monitoring, election observation, fact-finding and inquiry have already been admitted to international practice. This series intends to foster the publication of volumes that investigate the multiple facets of a strongly evolving reality, and stimulate the production of new and innovative ideas. It offers to highlight how the human rights paradigm is at times used and at times disregarded or exploited in cases and situations that regard among others those belonging to vulnerable groups (immigrants, asylum seekers, persons with disabilities), NGOs and human rights defenders’ advocacy, intercultural dialogue, governance of world economy, bio-technologies and peace operations. Those studies which adopt inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches, in accordance with the fundamental principle of interdependence and indivisibility of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, will be favored.

Editorial Board Léonce Bekemans, University of Padua Bojko Bucar, University of Ljubljana Gabor Halmai, Eötvös Lóránd University, Budapest Jean-Paul Lehners, Université du Luxembourg Gianni Magazzeni, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner Marco Mascia, University of Padua

Antonio Papisca, University of Padua Stelios Perrakis, Panteion University, Athens Ugo Villani, LUISS University, Rome Peter G. Xuereb, University of Malta

Peter Lang—The website Discover the general website of the Peter Lang publishing group: www.peterlang.com