Liberalism and liberal, we have confused concepts with words
We live in an era that, with extreme superficiality and complacency, is connoted as post-ideological, instead we believe that it is necessary to emphasize the interest in political thinking that has roots and foundations in the tradition of the great historical strands of cultural reflection and, in particular, of political philosophy.
Let us take, for example, liberalism which, even as a result of confused uses and inappropriate appropriations of the term liberal, makes us feel the need to use more concepts and fewer words freely. It should be obvious that the adjective liberal, used in political language, needs to give a content that is substantiated in the noun liberalism and, therefore, in a specific vision of politics.
A quick consultation of any dictionary sheds light on the term liberal which, beyond the proper indication of the adjective (generous, magnanimous), is configured as belonging to or marked by liberalism as a pertinent thought or doctrine. Liberal, therefore, as an advocate of liberalism.
Nicola Matteucci, heretic in the cultural panorama and within liberalism itself, already in the first half of the nineties, in its volume Liberalism in a changing world, he warned of the need to redefine this worldview. The Wall had fallen three years ago and for it large spaces of affirmation and opportunities opened up, unfortunately, not seized for various reasons, not least for undue appropriation of the semantic significance of the term liberalism.
Matteucci found that it is confusing the constituent structure of liberalism with liberal movements and parties, most of the time liberals only for self-certification. The classics have been interpreted and used for the sake of modest and irrelevant political tactics. We have confused, in fact, concepts with words, a culturally noble vision of the world with interests of political and non-political workshops.
An abstract pragmatism with no cultural background made us accept the nonsense of the politics of doing, of acting in the absence of a system of thought capable of giving meaning, coherence and perspective to our choices and our beliefs. A bad interpretation of the theoretical structure of liberalism, as a conception of an open society, has favored the birth and compulsion to repeat many misunderstandings. Certainly, liberalism is not an ideology, in the sense that its conceptual system, which is not totalizing, is ill-suited to be the foundation of party or institutional platforms.
Indeed, if liberalism places the centrality of the individual and his natural freedoms as the cornerstone of its interest, it is evident that privileged political subjects cannot be the State, the Party, the Institutions or the Class. The relationship to be monitored is always that between the individual and power, any power; the defense of freedom is always from public and private monopolies.
And it is still a misunderstanding that generates a constant and omnipresent indictment: any type of crisis is brought back to an indefinite neoliberalism, even the pandemic and its effects are presented as spoiled fruit of a system of thought that places the individual, look chance, and its freedoms at the top of an axiological scale. And then the rhetoric about the growth of inequality, the refrain consists in the obsessive reaffirmation of never having reached these levels.
False historical and old liturgy
Just think of the living conditions of the Chinese and Indian subcontinent just a few decades ago. George Duby in his History of the Middle Ages recalls that the kings of France at the time of their coronation in the cathedral of Reims they promised the people to oppose rapacity and iniquity, ensuring fairness and mercy in the trials.
A millennium of ancient promises for ever new rhetoric
The theoretical structures of political thought as a whole cannot be ignored simply by defining them as abstract ideologism. Ideologies have delimited the boundaries of our various worldviews, of our choices, of our expectations. Believing our post-ideological societies explains the confusion and often the bewilderment of politics and for politics.
Accept this umpteenth with intimate complacency new novism it also means not understanding that the post-ideological is, at the same time, the premise and consequence of even post-cultural societies.
* Free Society Director
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