Abstract

The essay, starting from the debate on existentialism that developed in Italy in the 1940s, focuses on the features of the crisis of civilization that the catastrophe of the Second World War placed at the center of the debate. The war required a radical rethinking of the principles that had constituted the nation-state. The democratic cultural orientations, which emerged in those years from the reflections on the crisis, reached a point of convergence with the concept of person-value.