Questo saggio affronta la dottrina politica di S.N.H. Linguet, analizzando l’uso sistematico dei paradossi al suo interno. La critica dell’ideologia fisiocratica consente a Linguet di individuare il nesso tra scienza e politica quale fondamento dell’ideologia della società e della sua critica. La costellazione concettuale formata da proprietà, appropriazione, patrimonialismo e patriarcato stabilisce le coordinate della sua teoria politica dei concetti sociali. La categoria di rapporto sociale non esprime la coordinazione tra soggetti indifferenti, ma la subordinazione di alcuni (...) individui al potere sociale dei proprietari. La critica di Montesquieu, del suo concetto di legge e di dispotismo asiatico, conduce Linguet ad affermare la necessità di uno Stato burocratico che, grazie al suo diritto positivo sia in grado di governare i movimenti della proprietà che per Linguet è il centro reale del sistema politico. (shrink)

Starting from the doctrine of ideology proposed by Destutt de Tracy in the late eighteenth century, the paper reconstructs its historical relationship with the social science, of which it was originally meant to be the ultimate expression. The historical necessity of ideology as a political science of the social is found in its ability to mediate and legitimize power relationships. It is not for chance that the Marxian critique of ideology is a radical critique of the constitution of power in (...) a capitalist society. The attempt of the social science to neutralize the problem of power through the abandonment of the value judgments leads instead to the declaration of the end of ideologies. In the last part, the paper analyses the way in which ideology, after its identification with the forms of total domination, returns as a neoliberal tool of legitimizing market as a society without history. (shrink)

The experience of the post-colonial State underlines the transformations of the modern State. In fact, some features of the post-colonial State which were regarded as being overcome or at least inconsistent with the constitutional, democratic and rational form of the State, are now emerging also in those States that never made experience of colonization, or have been colonizers. The essay analyses the transformations of the modern State aiming to articulate the concept of Global State. In this case, the question of (...) origins does not represent a principle of legitimation, as it was with the doctrine of social contract. Rather, the symbolic and historical discontinuity defines a cut between the origin and the functioning of the State, corresponding to a transformation of the legitimating sources of the State itself. Within the global State, sovereignty is not anymore a monopoly, but a widespread practice enacted by several social structures. (shrink)

En este artículo Maurizio Viroli muestra que aunque el patriotismo republicano tiene una dimensión cultural es, sobre todo, una pasión política basada en la experiencia de la ciudadanía. Patriotismo es el amor por una república libre y por su forma de vida: il vivere libero. En este sentido, el patriotismo es casi lo opuesto al nacionalismo. Para los nacionalistas el patriotismo es el amor por una libertad más modesta: la libertad de disfrutar a la sombra del trono, y en (...) paz, de la casita y el majuelo. Para los patriotas republicanos el amor por la patria es una pasión artificial, para los nacionalistas es natural. Como conclusión, Viroli sugiere que el patriotismo republicano es capaz de responder a los dilemas de la democracia moderna al ir más allá de la elección entre el mito del nacionalismo cívico y el horror del nacionalismo étnico. (shrink)

1. Dialettica, metafisica e cosmologia -- Dall'anima alla prassi etica e politica.

RiassuntoL’articolo prende in esame un ben noto frammento degli «Aitia» di Callimaco che offre la più importante testimonianza del culto dell’ecista nelle colonie siciliane. Una più approfondita indagine dei vv. 40–41 consente di istituire un parallelo con le norme rituali concernenti i Tritopatreis nella lex sacra di Selinunte (A 9–15). In entrambi i casi a un sacrificio animale con sversamento del sangue segue una libazione senza vino e un banchetto sacro. La sequenza rituale è inusuale e la sua diffusione nel (...) mondo coloniale siciliano mette in luce sia la complessità del culto dell’ecista dal punto di vista religioso, sia l’intimo nesso che lo connette con la memoria sociale e l’identità della comunità politica. (shrink)

Il saggio ricostruisce la specificità della costellazione algoritmica che si affermata a livello globale dal 2001. Esso identifica le piattaforme quali configurazioni asimmetriche di poteri che consentono l’accumulazione mentre operano una centralizzazione che consente una riconfigurazione del sociale rispetto alla società in rete. Grazie a esse gli algoritmi svolgono due specifiche funzioni politiche: la mediazione tra contenuti computazionali e culturali e una funzione di comando che impone agli individui specifici comportamenti conformi alla loro esistenza digitale. Le piattaforme non solo una (...) nuova forma di impresa, ma anche un modello politico che investe lo Stato che, rinunciando a elementi della sua sovranità, riafferma il proprio ruolo specifico all’interno della forma politica algoritmica. (shrink)

The thematic section of this issue of «Scienza & Politica» is focused on the problem of ideology. It is assumed that, though in the last decades its end has been repeatedly announced, ideology is still alive. Within the processes of globalization, the references to ideology and its critique regain a central place both in historical research and in political theory. Ideology and its critique seems to be strictly bounded with each other since the origin of the concept, which aimed (...) to pave the way for a new understanding of the world and of the language adopted to name it. The critique of ideology, therefore, has historically been a contestation - performed by particular subjects - of a way of interpreting the world scientifically, thus legitimating the existing relationships of power. (shrink)

The essay maintains that, despite the significant successive transformations, a ordoliberal moment operates within the neoliberal program. Ordoliberalism establishes a specific political anthropology based on the centrality of economic action and on an a-revolutionary temporality that enhances the normative continuity of the tradition. Even against the specific configurations that the State can assume, especially the democratic one, it also aims at the constant reactivation of a political as a fundamental decision in favor of the economic.

Traditionally, from Aristotle to Hegel, has been considered as valuable the following sequence: Thought → Word → Writing. In this essay I claim that the right order of the sequence is utterly the opposite: oral language does not come first, gesture does; writing is independent from language both because gesture comes first and because writing, differently from language, can record; finally the capacity of recording and of communicating is typical of the soul seen as a tabula.

In the wide critical reviews that the enterprise of Begriffsgeschichte has triggered, the difficult relationship that conceptual history – in its Koselleckian declination – entertains with systemic theory has remained maybe underexposed until now. Moving from the tension between experience and historicity in Koselleck, the article reflects on the tensions that the historical-conceptual structure reveals as soon as it comes into contact with the problems of historical semantics that accompany the Luhmannian attempt of operating, in the register of second order (...) observation, a temporal dislocation and a de-paradoxification of the paradox activated by Derrida’s différance, as constitutive of historicity. The blind spot at the bottom of Luhmannian gaze cuts out the borders of the “history” continent along the lines of the shipwreck of the classic semantics of modernity. (shrink)

On the occasion of the almost contemporary publication of two interesting books on Thomas Paine, SCIENZA & POLITICA has addressed the two authors – Matteo Battistini and Maurizio Griffo – with some questions about the different approaches of their works. The result is a long-distance dialogue, which explores not only the significance of the American revolutionary and constitutional events, but also the influence that the English legacy and the French revolutionary experience have exercised on the American political thinker. (...) A Tale of Two Paines handles the problem of its attribution either to liberalism or to democratic radicalism; it also faces the preoccupation with the defence of liberty in the historical reconstruction of the State in the light of the affirmation of the sovereignty of society. (shrink)

Objects come in three kinds: physical objects that exist in space and in time, and are independent from subjects knowing them, even though they may have built them, as for artifacts ; ideal objects that exist outside of space and time, and are independent from the subjects knowing them, but which, after having been discovered, can be socialized; social objects, that do not exist as such in space, since their physical presence is limited to the inscription, but last in time, (...) and whose existence depends on the subjects who know, or at least can use, them and who, in certain cases, have constituted them. This latter circumstance display us the fact that social objects, for which construction is necessary, depends on social acts, whose inscription constitutes the object. As I show through the law Object = Inscribed Act, social objects consist in the recording of acts that encompass at least two people, and are characterized by being inscribed, on a physical substrate what so ever, from marble to neurons, passing through paper and computers. If all this is true, then a theory of social objects develops naturally into a theory of the document, understood as an inquire centered on the definition of what I call “documentality”, namely the properties that constitute, in each case, the necessary and sufficient conditions to be a social object. At last, there is no society if there are no documents, and documents are records with a particular social value. (shrink)

This introduction opens the monographic issue starting from 1968 and arriving to neoliberalism as its most articulated answer, without the claim to give a complete picture but in order to illuminate the complexity and radicality of this caesura. In this reconstruction 1968 starts well before, so that it is not possible to establish a precise starting date and place. The contestation of authority, the questioning of patriarchy, the activation of heterogeneous and often “unexpected” subjects: the fierce critique of the current (...) state of things produced a crisis of legitimacy that involves the State, society, capitalism and science. In this sense 1968 was an unaccomplished and therefore never finished revolution. (shrink)

L’obiettivo del presente articolo è mostrare che, come sostentuto da Armstrong, il pensiero agostiniano si caratterizza per un’attitudine positiva nei confronti del mondo sensibile e del corpo. A tal fine, saranno analizzate le riflessioni di Agostino presenti nel primo libro del De Libero Arbitrio e nel decimo libro delle Confessioni. La presente indagine si articolerà in tre momenti. In primo luogo, esaminerò le analisi dell’Ipponate relative alla natura del peccato per mostrare che, per Agostino, agire bene è amare i beni (...) eterni. In seguito, traccerò le riflessioni agostiniane dedicate al peccato e all’ordine della natura umana per chiarire perché, per l’Ipponate, dominare le passioni è realizzare la propria natura. Infine, esaminerò le analisi agostiniane dedicate ai concetti di uti e frui per mostrare cosa l’Ipponate intenda per uso corretto dei beni temporali e per dominio della ragione sulle passioni. Sarà così possibile evidenziare che, per Agostino, contenere le passioni non significa astenersi da esse e allontanarsi dalle creature, ma utilizzare entrambe correttamente. Parole chiave: Agostino; peccato; mondo sensibile; uti; frui. (shrink)

INDICE -/- Note biografiche Introduzione, di Riccardo Faucci -/- Parte I - Da Verri a Toniolo 1. Jeremy Bentham: Contemporary Interpretations, di M.D.A. Freeman 2. Su Helvétius, Beccaria e Bentham, di Letizia Gianformaggio 3. L'etica utilitaristica di Pietro Veti, di Vincenzo Polignano 4. ll liberismo interventista di Vincenzo Emanuele Sergio, di Anna Li Donni 5. Il concetto di " felicità pubblica, nella << Genesi del diritto penale » di Romagnosi, e il rapporto Romagnosi-Bentham, di Robertino Ghiringhelli 6. « La più (...) grande felicità per il maggior numero » all'Accademia dei Georgofili ( 18)0-1850), di Gabriella Gioli 7. Una nota su Manzoni critico dell'utilitarismo, di Maurizio Mori 8. Sul concetto di utile in Francesco Ferrara e in Maffeo Pantaleoni, di Daniela Parisi Acquaviva 9. Sul pensiero sociale cristiano di fronte all'edonismo, di Luciano Avagliano 10. Giuseppe Toniolo e il recupero cattolico dell'utile e del valore, di Anna Camaiti -/- Parte II Aspetti di storia del pensiero economico nell’età classica -/- 1. La filosofia economica di Thomas Hobbes, di Marco Bertozzi 2. Ordinamento del sapere, modelli metodologici ed economia politica in Adam Smith, di Sergio Cremaschi 3. Elementi classici nel pensiero di Adam Smith: giurisprudenza romana e morale stoica, di Gloria Vivenza 4. Il “lusso” negli economisti italiani del Settecento, di Cosimo Perrotta 5. Prezzi naturali, prezzi di mercato e legge degli sbocchi nel dibattito fra Malthus e Ricardo, di Lilia Costabile 6. Marx e la moneta, di Roberto Petrini -/- . (shrink)

En un libro reciente, Maurizio Viroli sostiene que en El Príncipe Maquiavelo delinea la imagen del fundador que la teoría política republicana necesita, la que recibe su encarnación paradigmática en Moisés y sus acciones. Aquí propongo que para una comprensión adecuada del Moisés de Maquiavelo resulta clave la interpretación que éste ofrece del incidente del becerro de oro (Discursos III, 30), al que interpreta como una revuelta contra Moisés motivada por la envidia. Este episodio, sugiero, ejemplifica las acciones necesarias (...) para asegurar las instituciones de un estado libre recién constituido en el contexto del conflicto permanente entre grandes y pueblo. (shrink)

The debtor-creditor relation, which is at the heart of this book, sharpens mechanisms of exploitation and domination indiscriminately, since, in it, there is no distinction between workers and the unemployed, consumers and producers, working and non-working populations, between retirees and welfare recipients. They are all "debtors," guilty and responsible in the eyes of capital, which has become the Great, the Universal, Creditor.--from The Making of the Indebted Man Debt -- both public debt and private debt Has become a major concern (...) of economic and political leaders. In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato shows that, far from being a threat to the capitalist economy, debt lies at the very core of the neoliberal project. Through a reading of Karl Marx's lesser-known youthful writings on John Mill, and a rereading of writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, Lazzarato demonstrates that debt is above all a political construction, and that the creditor/debtor relation is the fundamental social relation of Western societies.Debt cannot be reduced to a simple economic mechanism, for it is also a technique of "public safety" through which individual and collective subjectivities are governed and controlled. Its aim is to minimize the uncertainty of the time and behavior of the governed. We are forever sinking further into debt to the State, to private insurance, and, on a more general level, to corporations. To insure that we honor our debts, we are at once encouraged and compelled to become the "entrepreneurs" of our lives, of our "human capital." In this way, our entire material, psychological, and affective horizon is upended and reconfigured. How do we extricate ourselves from this impossible situation? How do we escape the neoliberal condition of the indebted man? Lazzarato argues that we will have to recognize that there is no simple technical, economic, or financial solution. We must instead radically challenge the fundamental social relation structuring capitalism: the system of debt. (shrink)

In this paper I deal with ethical implications arising from animal biotechnology. I analyse some general questions surrounding the production of transgenic animals through a specific case study: the oncomouse. In particular, I explore ethical factors involved in the production of oncomice. This is because biologists genetically modify animals’ germ cells and refuse to modify human germ cells. I will underline how the international community has thus far justified this ‘ethical difference’.

Maurizio Ferraris explores how, through the reading of Proust's _In Search of Lost Time_, one can explore memory, art, and society, using the book as a guide for living life.

Niccolò Machiavelli is one of most influential modern political thinkers. His works, above all The prince, The discourses on Livy, The Florentine histories, and The art of war, are still passionately discussed in the intellectual community. Against the trite commonplace that Machiavelli was a teacher of evil who justified political immorality, Maurizio Viroli shows, on the basis of a rigorous study of his texts, that Machiavaelli taught instead the best way to attain true glory through political action.

Nationalism and patriotism are two of the most powerful forces shaping world history. In this paperback edition of a highly successful, wide-ranging study, Maurizio Viroli shows exactly why patriotism is a political virtue and nationalism a political vice.

We propose a mentalistic and nativist view of human early mental and social life and of the ontogeny of mindreading. We define the mental state of sharedness as the primitive, one-sided capability to take one's own mental states as mutually known to an i nteractant. We argue that this capability is an innate feature of the human mind, which the child uses to make a subjective sense of the world and of her actions. We argue that the child takes all (...) of her mental states as shared with her caregivers. This a llows her to interact with her caregivers in a mentalistic way from the very beginning and provides the grounds on which the later maturation of mindreading will build. As the latter process occurs, the child begins to understand the mental world in terms of differences between the mental states of different agents; subjectively, this also corresponds to the birth of privateness. ? (shrink)

In recent years, the persuasion that Niccolò Machiavelli was a cynical, irreligious devious, ambitious, deceitful, and misogynous man has been gaining remarkable consensus among scholars. The most...

Sex robots are already a reality: in this provocative text, Maurizio Balistreri explores the fascinating world of future sex, exploring the ethical questions raised by the existence of a sex robot industry.

This article sets the stage for a genealogy of the postgenomic body. It starts with the current transformative views of epigenetics and microbiomics to offer a more pluralistic history in which the ethical problem of how to live with a permeable body – that is plasticity as a form of life – is pervasive in traditions pre-dating and coexisting with modern biomedicine (particularly humoralism in its several ramifications). To challenge universalizing narratives, I draw on genealogical method to illuminate the unequal (...) distribution of plasticity across gender and ethnic groups. Finally, after analysing postgenomics as a different thought-style to genomics, I outline some of its implications for notions of plasticity. I argue that postgenomic plasticity is neither a modernistic plasticity of instrumental control of the body nor a postmodernist celebration of endless potentialities. It is instead closer to an alter-modernistic view that disrupts clear boundaries between openness and determination, individual and community. (shrink)

A history of colonization inflicts psychological, physical, and structural disadvantages that endure across generations. For an increasing number of Indigenous Australians, environmental epigenetics offers an important explanatory framework that links the social past with the biological present, providing a culturally relevant way of understanding the various intergenerational effects of historical trauma. In this paper, we critically examine the strategic uptake of environmental epigenetics by Indigenous researchers and policy advocates. We focus on the relationship between epigenetic processes and Indigenous views of (...) Country and health—views that locate health not in individual bodies but within relational contexts of Indigenous ontologies that embody interconnected environments of kin/animals/matter/bodies across time and space. This drawing together of Indigenous experience and epigenetic knowledge has strengthened calls for action including state-supported calls for financial reparations. We examine the consequences of this reimagining of disease responsibility in the context of “strategic biological essentialism,” a distinct form of biopolitics that, in this case, incorporates environmental determinism. We conclude that the shaping of the right to protection from biosocial injury is potentially empowering but also has the capacity to conceal forms of governance through claimants’ identification as “damaged,” thus furthering State justification of biopolitical intervention in Indigenous lives. (shrink)

Our understanding of body–world relations is caught in a curious contradiction. On one side, it is well established that many concepts that describe interaction with the outer world – ‘plasticity’ or ‘metabolism’- or external influences on the body - ‘environment’ or ‘milieu’ – appeared with the rise of modern science. On the other side, although premodern science lacked a unifying term for it, an anxious attentiveness to the power of ‘environmental factors’ in shaping physical and moral traits held sway in (...) nearly all medical systems before and alongside modern Europe. In this article, I build on a new historiography on the policing of bodies and environments in medieval times and at the urban scale to problematize Foucault’s claim about biopolitics as a modern phenomenon born in the European eighteenth-century. I look in particular at the collective usage of ancient medicine and manipulation of the milieu based on humoralist notions of corporeal permeability (Hippocrates, Galen, Ibn Sīnā) in the Islamicate and Latin Christendom between the 12th and the 15th century. This longer history has implications also for a richer genealogy of contemporary tropes of plasticity, permeability and environmental determinism beyond usual genealogies that take as a starting point the making of the modern body and EuroAmerican biomedicine. (shrink)

The article Thinking embodiment with genetics: epigenetics and postgenomic biology in embodied cognition and enactivism, written by Maurizio Meloni and Jack Reynolds, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal on 18 June 2020 without open access. With the author’ decision to opt for Open Choice the copyright of the article changed on 6 November 2020 to ©The Author 2020 and the article is forthwith distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution.

In this paper, we analyse the most important documents establishing the criteria for the treatment and exclusion of COVID-19 patients, especially in regard to the giving of respiratory support, in Italy and Spain. These documents reflect a tension that stems from limited healthcare resources which are insufficient to save lives that, under normal conditions, could have been saved, or at least could have received the best possible treatment. First, we analyse the healthcare systems of these two countries before the spread (...) of the virus, both of which have seen decreases in the number of intensive care beds and have been marked by financial cuts during the last ten years. It is a fact that a greater number of people, especially those over 70 years of age, have been left without respiratory support treatment, and therefore, there have been a greater number of deaths. It is also a fact that there has been a higher infection rate among healthcare professionals due to the delay in the management of protective measures and the inability to provide adequate care for those in nursing homes, as recognised by WHO. In the context of this health emergency, healthcare professionals have suffered a real ‘moral distress’ because, knowing first-hand the causes of the limitation of resources, they have had to put triage protocols into practice. Finally, we set forth a series of concrete ethical proposals with which to face the successive waves of COVID-19 infection, as well as other future pandemics. (shrink)

This paper draws from Foucault’s analysis of liberalism and neoliberalism to reconstruct the mechanisms and the means whereby neoliberalism has transformed society into an ‘enterprise society’ based on the market, competition, inequality, and the privilege of the individual. It highlights the role of financialization, neglected by Foucault, as a key apparatus in achieving this transformation. It elaborates the strategies of individualization, insecuritization and depoliticization used as part of neoliberal social policy to undermine the principles and practices of mutualization and redistribution (...) that the Welfare State and Fordism had promoted. It shows that the aim of neoliberal politics is the restoration of the power of capital to determine the distribution of wealth and to establish the enterprise as dominant form; this requires that it target society as a whole for a fundamental reconstruction, putting in place new mechanisms to control individual conduct. The analysis refers to the case of workers in the culture industry to illustrate the operation of these mechanisms in practice. It also outlines the main elements of the analytical apparatus that makes visible the new role of the state as an ensemble of apparatuses constituting the conditions for neoliberal market capitalism and the new type of individual appropriate for it. The paper thus adds a new dimension to Foucault’s analysis. (shrink)

The article considers the attitudes of the Church regarding homosexuality in the Middle Ages and the early Modern period, against the background of the anthropological concepts of those times. In the light of several important documents of those periods, it examines critically the interpretations most popular today in the area of gay-his- tory - that of the homophobia of the Church, that of early tolerance, that of the late development of the homosexual identity - and it demonstrates the unilateral nature (...) of these interpretations. Through a Thomistic reading of the Aristotelian texts on homosexuality, the article considers the significance of the categories of homosexual condition and homosexual person used in moral theology, introducing a reflection on the relationship between natural condition and sinfulness in the homosexual orientation. (shrink)