Diritto Pubblico Comparato ed Europeo

Sommario

1. Premessa. – 2. Il paradigma «democratico». – 3. Il paradigma «postdemocratico». – 4. Verso un paradigma «neodemocratico» (I): il ritorno della filosofia pratica. – 5. Verso un paradigma «neodemocratico» (II): la democrazia deliberativa. – 6. Verso un paradigma «neodemocratico» (III): dalla deliberazione all’associazione. – 7. A mo’ di conclusione.

Abstract

The main reason why institutions and norms regulating democratic regimes are rewritten or reinterpreted is that the ways of conceiving, narrating and interpreting democracy itself are subject to change or new points of view reshape its common sense perception. Of course, this kind of transformation is mainly a consequence of social change, but it is also very often the upshot of an autonomous evolution in theoretical thinking and in the learned discourse on democracy. From World War I to the present, democracy has been construed essentially in two different ways. First, in the light of what we might call the «democratic» paradigm, inspired between the Thirties and Forties by Hans Kelsen, with the key contributions of J.M. Keynes and T.H. Marshall. Secondly – beginning in the Seventies – in the light of what might be called the «postdemocratic» paradigm, inspired by the pioneering theory of J.A. Schumpeter and developed by «social choice» theory. After reconstructing these two paradigms, this paper tries to draw a map, certainly an incomplete and selective one, of present reflections on democracy. Has a third new paradigm, maybe a «neodemocratic» one, come into existence, which might inspire, at the beginning of the third millennium, a new transformation of democracy? Or is it perhaps being currently elaborated? And Which might be its main features?