Year LXVII, 2025, Single Issue, Page 24
Crisis or Transformation?
Notes on Intermediary Bodies
and the State of Society*
GIULIO SAPUTO
Defining the Present: Digital Space and the End of Grand Narratives.
For several decades we have been living in a ‘risk society’,1 in which the development of modernity has produced unintended negative effects capable of threatening the very existence of humankind irrespective of ethnicity, nationality or borders. In this ‘cosmopolitan drama’,2 humanity emerges as so interdependent that it becomes difficult to find new categories allowing identity to be redefined according to the classic ‘us’ versus ‘them’ divide. We are witnessing the contradictions produced by the formation of history’s first global civilisation—a civilisation held together by major urban centres and the information- and knowledge-based economy, and founded on mobility, interconnectedness and the first indications of a global public opinion shaped by a veneer of shared cultural experience. Our species seems to be moving towards a single destiny, but this unification does not yet imply either equality or political convergence: we are witnessing a new fragmentation of the planet, often manifesting tragically regressive patterns. Nearly all the traditional ideological compasses have lost their credibility: one by one, they have revealed the limits created by the lack of a clear plan for governing globalisation and addressing the ‘dissymmetry’ between global issues and the institutions’ embeddedness in national frameworks.3
In the course of the crisis of the ‘western-centric’ order, a gap has also opened up between interpretations of reality, individual experience and the necessarily now global spheres of action. In the wake of the post-modern attempt to deconstruct and analyse complexity, we now lack effective symbols for narrating reality. We are incapable of breaking free from a linear and mechanistic conception of becoming, and thus of explaining the still incalculable elements of our lives.4 Whereas first modernity suppressed growth of the self in favour of the community, second modernity coincided with the individualisation of life, detaching it from blood, geography, gender, kinship, social class and religion, and ultimately giving rise to a society of individuals—alone yet hyperconnected. As the cornerstones of certainty crumble and waves of information flood the new digital space, everything in society now needs to be revised, renegotiated and rebuilt. And yet, it remains necessary, in fact paramount, to bring some order to this reality, perceived as devoid of points of reference. We live in ‘the desert of post-ideology’5 in which the individual is emancipated but not truly free, and in which humankind’s use of science to control reality, reason and even human instinct is purely instrumental.
Today, we are witnessing an explosion of storytelling, but there are no grand narratives to be found. Traditionally, stories build communities, yet modern storytelling is merely a commercialized version of the concept, oriented towards consumers. The digitalisation of society is accelerating the process of emptying it of narratives, because while information may accumulate, it does not carry meaning. Nowadays, we are better informed, yet we are adrift in a reality flattened by the accumulation, control, and instant transmission of data. The problem is that the complexity of life and reality cannot be conveyed through a mere collection of quantifiable events. In today’s disenchanted world, community without communication is giving way to communication without community, without hope and without a future to imagine.6
A story, like a syllogism, is a form whose conclusion enlivens a closed order, providing meaning and identity. Populist, nativist and fundamentalist narratives—including conspiratorial ones—are a cheap and easy way to respond to this need, a mechanism helped by the unbridled development of new technologies. Data that were once used to improve the quality of internet searches have become the raw material for a market in which digital corporations are monopolists, reluctant to accept any limits on their activities. Users are no longer an end in themselves, but rather a means to achieve the goals of others. Surveillance and manipulation of online behaviours have become the new currency of an economy built on the ability to generate unprecedented profits and predict users’ future behaviours.
In particular, the concept of ‘surveillance capitalism’7 gained traction within federal agencies as well as within the broader apparatus of the United States’ no-holds-barred war on terrorism. To safeguard their privileged position and fight any legislation aimed at protecting users’ personal data, digital corporations pour tens of millions of dollars into lobbying activities every year. Their aim is to make it ‘inevitable’ that technology evolves too fast to be regulated and should therefore escape political control. The result is a sort of ‘neo-feudalism’8 characterised by the consolidation of an elite that operates above the rules of democracy. In this context, the idea of equivalence is sold as equality, while democracy is undermined due to a weakening of the individual’s capacity to make conscious choices: the aim is to make people predictable and indifferent to the very power system that controls them. In the instrumentalised society described, there is no room for autonomous thought and no time for politics: everything is hyperconnected, and this hyperconnectivity drives the societal transition towards an organised and predictable swarm of individuals.
With the rise of artificial intelligence and the gradual erosion of rights across digital platforms, we are no longer faced with just one ‘Big Brother”, but rather with an array of interconnected devices that together constitute a system of ‘mass self-communication’.9 Individuals themselves voluntarily supply their data, which are then employed in different ways of which they remain unaware. In democracies, this system entails a decoupling of political power from the power of surveillance, since the latter is no longer exercised by public authorities but by private actors such as multinational corporations or specialised agencies. In authoritarian states such as China, the technologies for digital surveillance and control are in the hands of the state, paving the way for a dystopian regime capable of creating a society that, based on automatised behaviours, lacks the capacity to challenge the existing power structures.
The challenge of interpreting complex reality in today’s digital world has led to the collapse of the last bedrock of certainty: truth no longer exists, only the power of the ‘plausible’, which requires interpretation. There are no longer any events that escape media coverage. Social media themselves, by providing symbolic interpretations of time and space, now play the role once filled by cosmologies and worldviews. We thus live in an ‘infocracy’,10 a form of dominion in which information and its dissemination, mediated by algorithms and artificial intelligence, decisively shapes social, economic and political processes.
In cyberspace, identities are shaped without public oversight, while algorithms foster echo chambers in which similar ideas and behaviours reinforce each other. Selective exposure to and propagation of information, together with the polarisation of groups, are the most common effects of these communication bubbles which, functioning as digital replications of Plato’s cave, reject all truth or rational-scientific reasoning. From a societal perspective, while the sense of deprivation felt by the marginalised is often nurtured in isolation, it frequently gives rise to collective reactions in desocialised digital spaces, where these individuals vent their resentment and seek easy targets to blame. Social media are increasingly strengthening the idea that language is not mere representation (an intermediate stage between symbol and meaning), but rather the very foundation of reality.11 Through personified abstractions, metaphors and allegories, public language can shape and condition thought, distort truth and reinforce power.12
With the myth of the irreversibility of liberal democracy, capitalism, etc., now shown to be false, public debate, oscillating between the evocation of ever-new risks and calls for new protective measures, has been drawn into an endless spiral.13 Ordinary citizens find themselves at the mercy of outside forces: from disinformation propagated by autocracies to the adverts tailored to our specific interests that, in Orwellian fashion, constantly stalk us. The horizontality of the internet—illusory, since it is virtually monopolistically controlled—openly conceals an obvious fact: nowadays, ‘social disciplining’ is carried out mainly by a small number of private entities that collect information and use it to govern, thereby stepping into a political, institutional, social and ideological vacuum.14
In this way, the values transmitted are effectively commodified and reified: by purchasing a given product or following the example of an ephemeral idol, we are seeking to reposition ourselves, albeit temporarily, in the world and in society. Through the process of product mediatisation, members of the consumer society themselves become consumer goods, and it is precisely this characteristic that makes them part of that society. This unfortunately marks their transition from citizens of society to the increasingly precarious identity of fickle consumer citizens,154 who accept diminishing horizontal rights and huge vertical inequalities as ‘normal’.
The very concept of citizenship is being pulverised, leaving a mass of self-centred individuals concerned only with their own future and oblivious to any common interest, except insofar as they are ‘taxpayers’ to whom political proposals can be sold. Not only have we allowed objects to take on the value of symbols of our lifestyle, our societal identity and our deeper sense of self, we have also permitted brands and their producers to wield more influence than ideologies and civil struggles. Corporations, far beyond simply offering patronage, are occupying the void created by the crisis of narratives. Major brands are chasing public opinion, giving it what it wants in order to optimise profits while stripping ideas of their transformative power. Consumption designed to satisfy moral impulses knows no bounds: in principle, anyone can have everything if they can pay for it. The result is commodification of the emancipatory power of human imagination, in both the present and the future. For this reason, the status quo remains unchanged while ethical messages are dismantled and diluted.16
As the individual’s control of the world shifts to the world controlling the individual, and the teleological link between scientific, material and moral progress crumbles, we once again find ourselves faced with the ‘end of modernity’. If the propagandistic rejection of progressivism and the future, framed as a reactionary or identity-based response, is succeeding, it is because the struggles for civilisation have been ‘hijacked’ by the supranational economic world, and are thus often perceived as associated with the ‘evils’ of globalisation. The reification of these ideas has helped to legitimise a common narrative in which a false, nationalist-framed naturalisation of tradition is defended against a form of progress that is perceived as ‘external’ to popular culture. Essentially, this progress is seen as promoted by non-political actors and accessible only to those equipped to ‘understand’ it, effectively turning progress itself into a privilege for the few. All of this results in a divided and impoverished world in which the future is foggy and we, being disoriented, struggle to understand where we came from and where we are headed. Hope in the possibility of great change disappears, replaced by retreat from the failure of globalisation.
The Decline of Institutions and the Society of Uncertainty.
Today’s national and supranational institutions are incapable of resolving the fundamental problems of domestic and international politics, in other words of guaranteeing economic growth and the security of citizens, in both the civil and social spheres.17 National politics is no longer capable of regulating the tech and communication giants, financial markets and multinationals, or even of responding to terrorism, pandemics and international crime. By contrast, actors including NGOs, religious institutions, and political and public opinion movements, along with individuals such as social media personalities and tech oligarchs, wield influence that cuts across society as a whole.18
Our world today is one of ‘complex sovereignty’, in which state power is asymmetric and dependent on the specific areas and policies in question, in which spatial and temporal boundaries are relevant only up to a certain point, and in which the state itself is only one of the social organisations active in the political arena19. The concept of the ‘crisis of the nation-state’ has long highlighted the incompatibility between the structure and scale of this type of state and both the evolution of the forces of production and the maintenance of the international equilibrium.20 Whereas the progressive development of democracy and of the great progressive ideologies has been guaranteed within state boundaries, externally, in the absence of an established legal order, interactions in the realm of power politics remain governed exclusively by the logic of the state of nature and the law of the strongest.
After the Second World War, thanks to the states’ prioritisation (for the first time) of social policies, much of the Western world could be sure of living in a ‘society of equals’—a community of people sharing a finite set of resources and rights, and thus existing in a state of interdependence rather than dependence.21 The welfare state functioned as a buffer against individual and collective risks. However, as the nation-state increasingly struggled to maintain its role as a regulatory authority, the economic system we know today began to emerge, incentivising deregulation, re-individualisation, destandardisation and flexible labour. While trade unions and other forms of worker protection continue to operate mainly within the framework of national democracy, the economy has, in the meantime, become globalised. Those unable to adapt to the ‘biographical model’—meaning those with no guarantee capital or collective protection—are excluded from the market.22 Power and politics are now separate, while a new and unprecedented directness characterises the relationship between the individual and society.
First, national institutions are not managing to gather resources that might be reinvested to promote some measure of social equality between citizens. Second, national ideology is unable to offer a framework of meaning capable of resonating with and engaging the new groups in society who, as a result of the migratory flows linked to globalisation, now find themselves living in or passing through other countries while remaining in daily contact with their communities of origin. These combined failures are driving the disintegration of society, leaving it increasingly divided into groups that, left to their own devices, are incapable of reorganising on a broader basis—hence the growing calls for protection. This fragmentation23 leads to a state of conflict that sees everyone set against everyone else; it also generates a condition of permanent fear that makes caesaristic, isolationist and authoritarian ‘solutions’ look highly appealing. Presented as a new defence of one’s own group or interests, these solutions also exploit a growing sense of disillusionment over the perceived broken promises of a world that no longer exists.24 We have moved from an ordered society, a ‘distributor of wealth’, to a divided one that is a ‘distributor of risks’—a society in which individuals are unable to govern their own existence, master the present, or positively anticipate, imagine or plan for the future.25
As a result, insecurity 26 has come to dominate the whole of political debate. In particular, social alarm over crime or directed at ‘others’ reinforces community bonds and sharpens social boundaries, while also encouraging communication with institutional authorities.
We are now seeing the European welfare state becoming a security state27 that celebrates a return to law and order, while the social problems linked to insecurity persist. This new mode of legitimising national institutions does not draw on the traditional belief in the capacity of democracy to plan for the future through the welfare state; rather, it relies on the persistence of a self-reinforcing cycle in which appeals to order and security become the sole source of institutional legitimacy.
28 Through a radical distancing from the European social model, this emphasis on control opens up the possibility of a scenario of ‘authoritarian democracy’29: as the protection of the vulnerable is abandoned, citizens are driven to seek new sources of legitimacy, based on defence of their own tribe.
The Collapse of Politics and the Rise of Tribalism.
Democracy is in crisis because it is ‘suffocated’ within national boundaries and overwhelmed by a new populist model of governance that no longer recognises democratic rules, the legitimacy of opponents, the norms of civil political competition, or freedom of information. This modus operandi strips electoral legitimacy of all meaning except its purely plebiscitary value and uses it to gradually undermine constitutional constraints.30
For all those who have found themselves without the means to reskill in order to become more employable, populism provides a genuine response to the impact of globalisation. At the same time, it represents a Manichean simplification of the identity crises of social classes, filling the gap left by the absence of coherent narratives. Furthermore, the epochal transformation of communication brought about by the rise of social media has made it possible to bypass the traditional channels linking citizens with authorities, intensifying the phenomena of disintermediation and social and cultural dissociation.31
Disintermediated societies have no need of intermediaries, as the leaders and the people communicate directly. Within the framework of this emerging ‘populocracy’, leaders accept no constraints on their power and display dangerous authoritarian, anti-expertise and often antiscientific tendencies. In particular, the decline of political parties as intermediary entities has been accentuated by the advent of social media, which allow real-time interactions with ‘digital communities’ through slogans that require no well-established cultural foundation. As a result, political parties are increasingly abandoning their role as mediators of citizens’ needs and demands in favour of a growing symbiosis with the state. Both the role and the perception of these organisations are changing, and this is leading, more broadly, to a shrinking of the very idea of representation; at national level, competition between parties has become less intense, while political elites are witnessing an erosion of the social foundations of their legitimacy. In this way, they are becoming part of the establishment, as well as self-referential, collusive and technocratic. Occupying public institutions, they manage power and resources without actually governing public policy.32
Therefore, in contemporary society where everything must move quickly, the balance between rationality and efficiency is being lost as politics becomes preoccupied with managing one crisis after another, with no time for deliberation. The importance of executives grows, while parliaments and courts become mere ‘obstacles’. Politics has become a permanent state of emergency in which there is no room for compromise and any dissent is treated as a betrayal of the community’s interests. Politics by citizens becomes politics over citizens, the latter characterised by an intense pressure to conform.33
All this has been accompanied by the establishment of a ‘technopolitical’ framework34 in which the void created by the crisis of traditional social mediators is filled with constant recourse to surveys and opinion polls, used not as instruments of citizen participation, but as a means of gauging and then shaping the fluid consensus of voters through the accumulation of data. The type of party best equipped to express itself in today’s ‘public democracy’ is the ‘professional-electoral party’, an evolution of the catch-all model. Whereas the internal selection process used in mass parties was linked to party-based and ideological activism, the benchmark now is managerial expertise. From this perspective, politics becomes an ‘electoral market’—an extension of the consumer sphere treated much like the market for goods and services—whose strategic focus is the moderate vote. With politics incapable of finding the tools needed to genuinely address contemporary risks, what emerges is a kind of self-reinforcing reflexivity, in which purely cosmetic measures are produced to sustain a system where opinions are justified unconditionally and information is exploited for electoral ends.35 It is all about appealing to base emotional impulses, focusing on individual personalities within the public sphere, and fostering ‘consumer citizenship’,36 while the machinery of state essentially continues to run itself within the constraints of bureaucracy and international law.
This whole scenario creates ample space for demagogic formations serving as containers for widespread unease. Since there is no capacity to plan for the future, preventive action or radical change is never considered; instead, we see an exacerbation of the general confusion in which everyone—scientists and anti-scientists, experts and non-experts, politicians and anti-political actors—is considered to have an equal voice. On the battlefield of liquid politics, all victories—pursued in the spirit of today’s quest for individual happiness—are inevitably temporary. Politics permeates the private sphere, rendering it deeply unstable and creating a situation in which opponents are never acknowledged and victory goes to whoever is least willing to listen.37
The reality of ‘politics as spectacle’ fuels a simplistic, Manichean vision of the world in which political leaders themselves are turned into figureheads engaged in confrontation. ‘Guides’ claiming to offer interpretations of current affairs are increasingly in demand, yet quickly ‘consumed’ and discarded by a volatile electorate lacking firm ideological commitments and expecting the impossible: immediate solutions to complex problems. In today’s world dominated by immediacy and in which the present prevails, there is no room for trust in slow, gradual work. As a result, participation has become mere spectatorship. In a kind of distorted formalism, democracy is reduced to a ‘machine’ or to a mere set of rules to be repeated by rote, like a mantra. We are witnessing a metamorphosis of the language of politics—a simplification that turns it into little more than a struggle between two opposing poles, leads to fantastical recipes for ‘saving the country’, and allows a continual shifting of the invisible line that determines what can be deemed admissible.38 This results in a schematised notion of political representation, characterised by attachment to solutionism, the undermining of intermediary bodies and the exaltation of a leader-cum-saviour entrusted with absolute power to solve all problems.
The idea of the ‘masses’ has lost its twentieth-century relevance due to the emergence of a new actor—the ‘public’ composed of today’s vast television audiences. Triggered by social media, this ‘public’ has fragmented into numerous separate segments, each lacking roots in a shared sphere of communication.39 Everyone exists in their own atomised bubble, engaging only with the like-minded. When interactions with differing views do occur, opinions are asserted as markers of identity, fuelling polarised clashes in which there is no possibility of assuming intermediate positions. This leads individuals to seek, more than anything, the validation or approval of their group. This atomisation of the masses is also marked by a shift in political horizons from the collective to the individual, that is, from collective responsibility for the common good to the dominance of private interest.
Because of these dynamics, the efforts of civil society organisations risk degenerating into mere power struggles in a context where power is perceived as driven by individual ambitions within a political class that no longer leads but seeks to dominate. Moreover, stripped of its values, the essence of power degenerates from legal (underpinned by the rationality of shared social norms) to traditional (‘this is how it has always been done, so this is how we must carry on’) or purely charismatic (founded on the personal devotion of individuals chosen for their loyalty to the leader). The result of all this, in the eyes of the citizens, is that civil society loses not only a value system deemed credible externally, but also all capacity to plan for the future. In this framework, any pretence of selecting new cadres based on merit or values is abandoned; instead, they are chosen solely for their ability to assertively implement the directives of whoever is leader. In the absence of ideas, all that remains is a dogmatic materialism that conceals the ineptitude of a sclerotic leadership class clinging to a formulaic ideology that is brought to life only through the formal repetition of rituals emptied of any capacity to induce catharsis. Activism thus ends up becoming the preserve of a handful of ‘experts’ far removed from the shared sensibilities of ordinary citizens—a form of acquiescence or a way of being and acting adopted merely to acquire a label and secure a small share of the power that has already been eroded by the decline of intermediary bodies. The defence of privileges becomes confused with the defence of rights in a political dialectic perceived merely in terms of rival power pyramids and corporate interests, which self-perpetuate within a corrupted or distorted understanding of politics. Having lost their moral compass and finding themselves unable to read reality or build alternatives, the forces that claim to be ‘progressive’ are often the very ones that pursue nationalist, security-focused and xenophobic policies.40 Individualism, egocentrism and narcissism, at both the individual and group level, reign supreme, leaving us entirely incapable of thinking in historical terms about the future. Progressivism itself becomes not just part of the establishment, but also defence of the status quo: a new form of conservatism that can easily be attacked by national-populist forces casting themselves as champions of radical change.41 In today’s individualised society, tribalism prevails, driven by a new need for community that desperately seeks to escape the breakdown of the idea of unstoppable and boundless progress. Increasingly, people remember the past not ‘as it was’, but as they would like it to have been—unmistakably ‘ours’, with no ‘theirs’. Almost the whole of current public space is occupied by a boundless and overbearing presentism42 that lacks stable principles of authority and, amplified by the megaphones of the internet,43 is assuming increasingly vast proportions. Deprived of its power to shape the future, politics thus tends to move into the readily manipulable space of collective memory.44 History itself can be shaped, and as such endlessly recreated (and reinterpreted), becoming a commodity and a tool in identity struggles. Everyone has their own ‘truth’,45 and listens to others only when doing so will help them to demonstrate their own wilful misrepresentation of reality. This even gives rise to paradoxical situations whereby people do not always vote in their own interests but rather to support an interpreted sense of their own identity, and it results in leaders without parties, parties disconnected from society, personalist parties and a weakening of democratic participation. Thus, individuals’ daily lives become arenas of ‘life politics’ where lifestyle choices intersect with novel, intermittent and ad hoc forms of political engagement.46
All of this has shaped the emerging challenge of embracing ‘intimate’ citizenship, a concept theoretically grounded in the view—part of a normatively oriented framework in which life is conceived as liquid and society as fluid—that the personal aspects of an individual’s life also have political significance, resulting in a blurring of the boundaries between the private and public spheres.47 This phenomenon leads to a splitting of civil society, which, no longer structured within politically and socially defined groups oriented around specific thematic areas, becomes transitory and intermittent activism, arising in response to single events (the NIMBY groups) or issues (gender identity and dietary choices), or taking on the veneer of the global identity associated with ‘emancipatory catastrophism’ (Fridays For Future).48
As a limited response to the structural crisis of the political system, political representation, and the capacity of politics to be effective, we are also seeing a shift of power from the ideologically driven oligarchies of traditional politics to technocratic elites entrusted with ensuring the functioning of the political apparatus. Thus, in many countries the ‘efficiency myth’ has gained ground—that is, the idea that institutions ‘work’ only if they can decide quickly, possibly by sidestepping debate. This relative depoliticisation49 of policymaking has become an art of government that, through diverse strategies, tends to render its political character less visible, resulting in ‘rights without democracy’. In these circumstances, citizens retain the right to vote, yet the central issues affecting their lives remain outside the spheres of public debate and discretionary decision-making by elected representatives, being instead concentrated in the hands of ‘experts’. Grounded in bureaucratic mediocrity and entirely devoid of radical or idealistic impetus, it is a response incapable of consolidating consensus. The main advantage of this mode of government is that it allows the decision-making process and its stakes to be framed as technical matters of no or little political significance, in an attempt to limit or channel social conflict. Aimed at removing the divisions—based on identity and on ethnic, cultural and class-based membership of specific groups—that structure the belief systems underlying politics, it is, however, a process that leaves ample room for resurgences of populism.50
The common good is the result of a complex operation: a synthesis that safeguards the freedom of all. Instead, we are witnessing the progressive disappearance of narrative complexity, replaced by an emotional relationship between leaders and followers—a relationship essentially grounded in contradictory narratives that tends to privilege the affective dimension of the public sphere. As such, it is antithetical to the preservation of a shared space for communication, that is, a public sphere conceived as a unified locus for social discourse. In this context, the identification of an ‘enemy’ to be set at a distance, and even legitimately hated, becomes central. Nationalism, undergoing a dangerous renewal, is able to offer bewildered postmodern globalised individuals a totalising identity—a clear vision encompassing the individual, the family, society, the state, economic and international relations—while readily switching between enemies to be targeted: Europe, people of diverse gender identities, environmentalists, NGOs, feminists and, invariably, foreigners.51
To react effectively and break out of this spiral of hatred, a radical new proposal for political struggle and the future is needed—one that represents a systemic revolution, deterritorialises politics, thereby freeing the state from the shackles of nationhood, and gives institutions new meaning. In brief, federalism could provide a key enabling us rethink our communities and save both democracy and globalisation.52
* This is an adaptation of an address given at the meeting How to Save Liberal Democracy by Building a Federal Democracy Come salvare la democrazia liberale costruendo una democrazia federale, organised by the Debate Office of the MFE and held in Naples on 18 October, 2025.
1 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, translated by Mark Ritter, London, Sage Publications, 1992.
2 Ulrich Beck, La società cosmopolita, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2003.
3 Arjun Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition, London and New York, Verso Books, 2013 and Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, New York, Columbia University Press, 1998.
4 Gianni Vattimo, A Farewell to Truth, New York, Columbia University Press, 2011.
5 Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, London and New York, Verso Books, 2012, p. 47.
6 Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration. translated by Daniel Steuer, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2024.
7 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, New York, Public Affairs; London, Profile Books, 2019.
8 Vittorio Bertola and Stefano Quintarelli, Internet fatta a pezzi, Turin, Bollati Boringhieri, 2023.
9 See Manuel Castells, Communication, Power and Counter-Power in the Network Society, International Journal of Communication, 1 (2007), pp. 238 ff..
10 Byung-chul Han, Infocracy: Digitization and the Crisis of Democracy, translated by Daniel Steuer. Cambridge, UK and Medford, MA, USA, Polity Press, 2022.
11 Federico Boni, Etnografia dei media, Bari, Laterza, 2004 and Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Cambridge, MA, USA and Oxford, UK, Blackwell Publishers, 1996.
12 Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon, Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation, Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, USA, Polity Press, 2013.
13 Alessandro Colombo, Il governo mondiale dell'emergenza, Milan, Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2022.
14 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Oakland, University of California Press, 1978.
15 Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 1999.
16 Ulrich Beck, Power in the Global Age: A New Global Political Economy, translated by Kathleen Cross, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press; Malden, MA, USA, John Wiley and Sons, 2005.
17 Mario Albertini and Sergio Pistone, Il federalismo, la ragion di Stato e la pace, Ventotene, Istituto Spinelli, 2001 and George Monbiot, The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order, London, Flamingo, 2003.
18 Alberto Melucci, Passaggio d’epoca. Il futuro è adesso, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1994.
19 David Held, Models of Democracy. 3rd ed. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, USA, Polity Press, 2006.
20 See Sergio Pistone, Federalism and Raison d’ État, The Federalist, 44 n. 3 (2002), pp. 235 ff..
21 Léon Bourgeois, La costruzione della solidarietà, Soveria Mannelli, Rubettino, 2011.
22 Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester, Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2001.
23 Federica Martiny and Tommaso Visone, Ripensare l’Europa, Campospinoso Albaredo, Altravista, 2019.
24 Giovanni Orsina, La democrazia del narcisismo. Breve storia dell’antipolitica, Venice, Marsilio, 2018.
25 Robert Castel, Incertezze crescenti, Bologna, Editrice Socialmente, 2015.
26 Robert Castel, L’insicurezza sociale, Turin, Einaudi, 2011.
27 Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia, Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, Polity Press, 2017.
28 Danilo Zolo, Globalizzazione. Una mappa dei problemi, Bari, Laterza, 2004.
29 Ulrich Beck, What Is Globalization?, translated by Patrick Camiller. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, Polity Press 2000.
30 See Benjamin Moffitt, How to Perform Crisis: A Model for Understanding the Key Role of Crisis in Contemporary Populism, Government and Opposition (Cambridge University Press), 50 n. 2 (2015) pp. 189 ff., published online by Cambridge University Press on 29 May 2024.
31 Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, New York, Crown, 2018.
32 Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, London and New York, Verso, 2013.
33 Jan Zielonka, Democrazia miope. Il tempo, lo spazio e la crisi della politica, Bari, Laterza, 2023.
34Stefano Rodotà, Tecnopolitica, Bari, Laterza, 2004.
35 Manuel Castells, Communication Power, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009.
36 Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy, Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, Polity Press, 2004.
37 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Fear, Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, Polity Press, 2006.
38 Paola Di Lazzaro and Giordana Pallone, Com’è successo, Rome, Fandango, 2022.
39 Damiano Palano, Bubble Democracy, Brescia, Scholé, 2020.
40 Giliberto Capano and Alessandro Natalini, Le politiche pubbliche in Italia, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2020.
41 Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia, op. cit..
42 François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity; Presentism and Experiences of Time. Translated by Saskia Brown. New York, Columbia University Press, 2015.
43 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, London, Michael Joseph, 1994.
44 Adriano Prosperi, Un tempo senza storia, Turin, Einaudi, 2021.
45 Wolfgang Reinhard, Storiografia come delegittimazione, Scienza e Politica, 14 n. 27 (2002).
46Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1991.
47 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, Polity Press (in association with Blackwell), 2000.
48 Luigi Ceccarini, La cittadinanza online, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2015 and Ulrich Beck, The Metamorphosis of the World, translated by Patrick Camiller, Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, Polity Press, 2019.
49 Ernesto d’Albergo and Giulio Moini, Politica e azione pubblica nell’epoca della depoliticizzazione, Roma, Sapienza Università Editrice, 2019.
50Zygmunt Bauman, Un mondo fuori asse, Bari, Laterza, 2023.
51 Alessandro Dal Lago, Non-People: The Exclusion of Migrants in a Globalizing World, translated by David Broder, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2009.
52 Giulio Saputo, Il federalismo contro la paura, Campospinoso, Altravista, 2025.
