Abstract

The crisis of representative democracy has to do with the legitimacy of public institutions. Therefore, such crisis entails the necessity to deal with the legitimacy of the democratic form of government. The models of democratic governance show an inadequate answer in relation to the scope of the question of legitimacy implied by the crisis of democracy. Such inadequacy is one of the main causes of the recent downsizing of governance practices. Indeed, the crisis of legitimacy of democracy is more and more evident and urgent, and the rhetoric of governance has probably created the illusion to ignore, or to remove, the problem of the origin and of the justification of political and legal power without suffering relevant consequences