Abstract

At the beginning of the 1990s, Norberto Bobbio trusted that in the 21st century the «Age of Rights» would take place, that the model of constitutional democracy would be the political form of almost all of mankind. Thirty years later, we find ourselves witnessing the aggressive presence of those political regimes that Western political thought has defined, beginning with Aristotle, as forms of «Oriental despotism». This essay tries to critically reconstruct the heuristic capacity of this «recurring theme», with particular reference to the case of Russia