„Asceza politicului”. Secolul democrației între virtutea liberală și viciul antipolitic
“The Asceticism of the Politician” The century of democracy between liberal virtue and anti-political vice

Summary/Abstract: Accustomed to the thought of the 20th century as ‘the age of extremes’, that of the advent and triumph of - isms, we tend to forget that the 20th century was above all the century of democracy. The birth of the century's most virtuous and long-lived daughter was, however, troubled and its infancy difficult: in addition to the challenge thrown at it by communism, fascism and, after the end of the Cold War, by the new populisms, democracy also had to face the risks induced by the tares that accompanied it from its gestation, also favouring its temporary fall in the thirty years of fire and lead that linked the beginning of the First to the end of the Second World War. Nowadays, when new threats lick it, while ancient wounds, never completely healed, risk to reopen, it is more than ever worth going back to its beginnings, to discover who, back then, had grasped the monstrous potential, but also the sublime ones, that accompanied the birth of the new era. Piero Gobetti, the intellectual, the anti fascist hero, thus reveals to us not only the features of the clamorous fascist aggression, but also more subtle, and yet in turn lethal, evils that risked and risk suffocating the democratic dream, while also showing us the cure: to remember that politics begins and ends within the perimeter of human conscience; and that freedom is not a means but the ends, the only one worth fighting for.

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