Abstract

The people have disappeared, replaced by the mass – generally undifferentiated and passive –, by a pervasive middle class, according to some by a discount “neoproletariatµ that aspires to the superfluous, according to others by the apathetic “bourgeois-massµ today at the center of the “ democratic totalitarianismµ. Work continues to support the economy but has radically changed its face, becoming unrecognizable. The factory has decentralized across the globe, material work is replaced by immaterial work, where the main productive force becomes information: “things are no longer sold but ideas and lifestylesµ (Giuseppe Montesano). End of politics? Extinction of democracy? Disappearance of thought itself? It would be absurd to deny the current processes, and the corrosive crisis to which “humanismµ is subjected. Yet within the crisis of the West a countermovement is generated: alongside the mass man (to whom conservative populisms are aimed) the individual emerges again – autonomous, sometimes hypercompetitive, other times reflective and cooperating – lost in liquidity, not totally defined by the relationship with work, but unruly and capable of a new “actionµ within a micro-community dimension