The essay argues that AI is reshaping law and democracy not only through new tools, but by generating a largely private, opaque & laquo;environmental & raquo; normativity that can conflict with traditional, text-based legal interpretation and accountability. It highlights how dominant digital platforms can influence perception and public discourse, fostering manipulation and polarization while shifting power away from representative institutions. In the justice system, he distinguishes helpful & laquo;auxiliary & raquo; uses of AI (le-galtech support) from & laquo;substitutive & raquo; ones that would replace human judgment. Zac-caria is cautious about predictive justice: it may aid analysis, but becomes dangerous when prediction turns into prescription, undermining the human, contextual nature of legal decision-making.
Starting from cybernetians' recurring references to Leibniz, this essay explores his contribution to the conceptual history of technology, of which cybernetics constitutes a decisive threshold. By examining the political theology underlying mechanistic thought-especially through the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence-and by contrasting Leibniz with Hobbes, it highlights his critique of power modeled on the machine and his anticipation of forms of governance that work by encouraging individuals to align spontaneously with universal order. From this perspective, monadology is interpreted as a theory linking order, individuality, and discipline: pre-established harmony becomes an operational principle that requires tools such as probability calculus and codification to secure the relation between spontaneity and program at the core of Leibniz's concept of freedom.
This paper aims to discuss, from an epistemological perspective, the thesis that technical activity constitutes an extension of the biological dimension. This is an ancient hypothesis that has more recently been taken up in biology, engineering, and the social sciences. The paper first delineates the field of inquiry, with reference to the French technological tradition; it then defines the thesis more precisely with reference to the work of Leroi-Gourhan; finally, it highlights some fruitful lines of problematisation of this thesis within the fields of cognitive archaeology (psychic domain) and the study of technical objects (political domain).
The essay analyses the interface between political and capitalist powers and digital technology and thus the functional role of this technique in governing and controlling the social. A triangle emerges, its poles being High-Tech capital, the State, and, in an ambivalent position, the magmatic cloud of the Social, which is the object of social control but also the subject of power that produces information, sociability and aggregation power. The current threshold of this social control project, has been hit by failures deviations, attacks and default, opposed by the security-driven hardening of power poles: the monopoly of infrastructures in Big Tech platforms and the centralization of political decisions. A hardening that attests to the failure of the project itself and the undisciplined power of the social pole.
Utopia and realism are two trends in political thought that emerge from great political, cultural, and social upheavals and correspond to the need for new concepts and a new political lexicon. While utopian writings of the Renaissance reveal a harsh and disenchanted realism-for instance, an ironic disenchantment pervades More's utopia, which shines through the scornful etymologies-, a strong utopian tension characterises Machiavellian realism. Furthermore, Renaissance utopia reveals its novel and modern image of the world by accepting the technique (artificium). Finally, a peculiar example of Renaissance utopia is the intersection between utopia and prophecy, allowing the direct political engagement by communities guided by prophets, who are aware of the tragic reality and intend to radically transform it for the realisation of the kingdom of Christ.
On the publication of the volume Il popolo sovrano. Unity e conflitto nella teoria democratica di Hermann Heller (Napoli, 2024), this essay discusses its contents considering the unity-plurality dialectic underlying Hermann Heller's production and the need for materiality that animates the new Staatslehre proposed by the author. In particular, the hellerian approach to the theory of the Sozialer Rechtsstaat will be highlighted as the outcome of a need that is both theoretical and, lato sensu, political, in the face of the challenges posed by the advent of the <
The essay analyzes how Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, and Walter Benjamin secularize Jewish messianism into distinct yet interconnected forms of modern utopian thought. Cohen transforms the messianic idea into a rational-ethical principle orienting humanity toward an infinite process of moral and social development. Influenced by Gustav Landauer's libertarian socialism, Buber promotes a dialogical socialism rooted in the communal renewal of life and labour, where the I-Thou relation provides the ethical foundation for social transformation. Benjamin radicalizes this trajectory by articulating a revolutionary messianism in which redemption emerges through the interruption of historical continuity (Jetztzeit) and the recovery of memory of oppressed people. Through this trajectory, the essay retraces a dialectic between restoration and revolution in which Jewish messianism and libertarian utopia converge as critical responses to modernity and alternative models of emancipation.
Francesco Filelfo deserves to be studied as a political philosopher, not just an interesting Italian humanist. In his On exile, he conjures up a notion of a human subject who relies exclusively on his impervious-to-fortune own virtue. This seems to imply a notion of effective practical action that can radiate from itself-and from itself alone-a claim to justice-without conjuring up any traditional background metaphysics or theology.
The essay investigates the relationship between anthropology and epistemology in the political thought of Friedrich August von Hayek, highlighting how the idea that human beings have a limited and defective cognitive capacity constitutes the central theoretical premise upon which the concept of a free society is the basis of Hayek's theory. According to the interpretation proposed in the article, reliance on such a premise entails a specific form of voluntary servitude intrinsic to the very idea of free society.
The essay aims to show the importance Marx assigns to the verb 'to have' in describing human nature. It signals the human animal's spread, or non-identity, from its immediate activity, allowing it to 'use' its life in multiple ways. The being that 'has' its life does not act according to a code of innate instincts but acts by contracting 'habits'. This aspect becomes crucial when Marx gets in touch with the workers' associations in Paris in 1844. Marx, through recourse to the notion of 'habit', attempts to outline an organisation model based on a 'provisional' rationality that does not inhibit the potentialities of the human animal.
This essay analyses the conceptual status of utopia in the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and in those of some 20th-century authors who refer to them (Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Fredric Jameson). The attempt defines the role of utopia as a critical category that combines a principle of struggle oriented towards emancipation with reference to a historically determined social force. In this sense, utopia has been (and perhaps still could be) the index of an effort at categorisation that simultaneously has the urgency of understanding the mechanisms of domination, both present and past, and of seizing the opportunities that, in different circumstances, are offered to the revolutionary subject to force the established order.
As an ideal place, but no actual, the utopia represents the essence of modern thought in its quest for emancipation from absolutism and for creation of a just society. Utopia, however, has taken on many forms-free and rational communities, fanciful journeys, legislative projects, models of sovereignty-and even some reversals, as in dystopias. This complexity also depends on the interpretation we give today to utopian desire: an "open future, or the acceptance of contemporary society as a "realized" project of well-being? In the first case, utopia keeps alive the possibility of a better world; in the second, it affirms the certainty of an alienated and mechanized world. The essay emphasizes the importance of a utopian vision that outlines a non-totalitarian project of political transformation and an alternative future of hope on environmental and social justice issues, thus escaping the tyranny of the digital capitalism and the ideology of consumption. " imagination of political action within a historical perspective that looks to the
Discussing in the critical note Jos & eacute; Emilio Buruc & uacute;a's book (Civilizaci & oacute;n. Historia de un concepto, 2024), this contribution takes some of its insights for a comprehensive history of political concepts. What comes into question, to "provincialise Europe" (Chakrabarthy), is a quest to treat political concepts as signifiers with many entrances, to assume the point of view of the heterogeneous (Braudel), to proceed to a spatialization of discursive communities and to treat them as conflictual fields within which hegemonic and counterhegemonic processes are produced.
In 18th-century France, the term utopia, which appeared in dictionaries at the end of the century, expanded its meaning and came to refer to an "imaginary government plan" conceived for the common good. The 18th-century utopia is a heterogeneous collection of texts reflecting Enlightenment philosophy. In the second half of the century, uchronia-a future that realises current aspirations-is combined with a conception of history embracing the ideas of progress and perfectibility. Three significant works are considered here: one literary-L'an 2440 (1770) by Louis-S & eacute;bastien Mercier-, one philosophical and political-Morelly's Code de la nature (1755)-and one linked to a perfectible philosophy of history-Condorcet's Esquisse d'un tableau historique (1793). These writings present several antinomies, including the impossibility of reconciling egalitarian social order and freedom. In fact, both Mercier and Morelly have resorted to censorship in the name of "enlightened" reason. The utopias of the 18th century reappropriated the language and philosophy of their era.
The article aims to draw attention to a note (number 14) in Hannah Arendt's contribution on the Hungarian Revolution, published in 1958. In this note, she demonstrates having read and appreciated Ignazio Silone's perspective on the 1956 uprising, considering it in terms of continuity, but also in terms of a break with Rosa Luxemburg's interpretative framework of conciliarism. A deeper exploration of this reference to Silone, however, can be crucial not only for understanding Arendt's reflection on Hungary, but especially in attempting to reconstruct the reasons behind Arendt's lack of interest in Antonio Gramsci's open Marxism.
The essay traces the transformation of the concept of progress in French thought, beginning with Bernard de Fontenelle's perspective in the late 17th century. Through an examination of Turgot and Voltaire's contributions, it culminates in Condorcet's Tableau historique, written during the height of the French Revolution. The essay delves into the conceptual foundation of progress, as well as the inherent aporias and contradictions that the French philosophes left behind for the nineteenth-century discussion.
The French philosophical moment of the first decades of the 19th century marks a significant transformation in the history of the concept of progress. The translation of the concept of progress into the concept of "development" and the foundation of a science of history make progress available to the function of government through the prognosis that binds the future to the past. This entails a different regime of historicity and a new epistemology of the political, which the article reconstructs through Tocqueville, Guizot and Comte.
The Age of Enlightenment has usually been presented as the cradle for the idea of progress, which fully flourished until the significant rupture of the Restoration, although its periodisation as well as legacy are still debated. The article analyses the development of the idea of progress during the last thirty years of the 18th century in Germany, retracing its path through a multidimensional confrontation with the political concepts stemming from the French Revolution. This was evident in critical philosophy, idealism, and some episodes of Jacobinism. Meanwhile, the political and cultural ferment of the early decades of the new century was characterized by a clash between reaction (with evolutionieren as a key term) and revolution.
Hayek's theory of knowledge reflects the theory of the market, which forms the foundation of neoliberal political ideology. The market-whether oligopolistic or not, in its networked structure of dispersed knowledge and uncoordinated actions, is the best system for resource allocation and serves as an impartial tribunal for 'merits' in the form of profits and losses. The market spontaneously coordinates free individual choices within an environment characterised by widespread ignorance. Ignorance ensures a freedom unconditioned by external factors. Although personal merit is unknowable, the market, through competition, distributes 'values' and creates a unique meritocracy to incentivize each individual's entrepreneurial talents. This article employs the lens of merit and meritocracy to illuminate the internal logic within Hayek's theoretical works, which often tread the line of paradox, presenting counterintuitive propositions and multiple logical contradictions.
Aim of the article is to retrace the origin of the main concepts and the pivotal argument put forward in Emil Lederer's late work, State of the Masses. The idea of an order based on the direct relationship between leader and masses, able to destroy society and its internal plurality, finds its roots within the First World War. To find the appropriate concepts to analyse this new order, which Lederer calls totalitarian State, he is forced to carry out a renewal of his lexicon, emphasizing the role of irrationality and emotions. This effort lasted for years and found in State of the Masses its most effective formulation.
