Abstract

The rise of Mr. Berlusconi (Mr. B) and "Berlusconism" has much to do with the new styles of social control that started developing, in Europe and more specifically in Italy, between the 1960s and 1970s. In spite of the ideology of those years, that saw social control as the resultant of some form of "repression" especially sexual repression according to the Freud-Marxist Vulgate, the social control pedestal on which Mr. B built his power should be understood as a variation on Marcuse's idea of repressive desublimation or Foucault's idea of a power that is not censorship but is essentially production of reality. Hence the crucial importance of media and media control. This was however also the weak point of Berlusconism: the "spontaneous" character of the consensus he was able to construct has always been hard to be taken seriously, when the main beneficiary of that consensus was at the head of all tv channels, both pri­vate and public. The weakness in Berlusconism was therefore at the very core of the system. Its downfall was embedded in its very constitution.