NOTE SULLA CRISI DELLA DEMOCRAZIA RAPPRESENTATIVA
Umberto Curi
Few remarks about the concept of representative democracy, from its very beginning, in Athens of the fifth century before Christ, up to its various forms of existence in the contemporary societies. It is well known that democracy does not enjoy an excellent reputation by some of the greatest philosophers of the Western thought. Just to give some examples, even if with different arguments, Plato and Aristotle, Marx and Schmitt, underline the limits of the concept itself of democracy. In addition, an etymological examination shows that the term implies a kind of violence (kratos indeed means not just power, but above all “power with force”). Furthermore, only a small part of population – i.e., the demos – without women, foreigners and slaves, get access to civil rights. After the collapse of communism at worldwide level, the crisis of representative democracy has become more undeniable. Special attention must be reserved to the analysis of the Italian political system. The distinction among the three powers (legislative, executive, judicial) has come to a head. More generally, all the main institutions of the representative democracy are now devastated, so that the Constitution approved in the 1948 is totally wriggled out. Consequently, there is no relationship anymore between the so called Konstitution, that is the Constitution in a formal sense, and the Verfassung, that is the actual form of the Constitution in a concrete sense. Maybe the new experiences of civic aggregations could allow to get out of this difficult and dangerous situation.