Abstract

The Rawlsian theory of justice has represented perhaps the most comprehensive and successful effort ever made to integrate, in a single coherent vision, a foundational theory of the social contract that forms the basis of our political and legal system, with an impartially justified view of its basic principles, rational and respectful of human autonomy. Fifty years later, the theoretical landscape appears literally upside down, as the theoretical force of the dominant concepts of Rawls’s approach has been completely overwhelmed by the enormous impact of the «digital revolution», of neuroscience and cognitive psychology, to the extent that new techniques of social control, grafted onto the very conviction of the inconsistency of human rationality, are obliquely producing today heteronomous forms of control, for the most part extra-legal and completely removed from political discussion