There are some expressions which suggest more than they say, and it is with a couple of these used by Böckenförde in his Law and secularization where I would like to start. The image of “dispersing like whirlwinds of sand” (p. 222) is evoked as man’s possible destiny if in response to the induced liberalization of the processes of “individualization and globalization” we do not follow the offer of new forms of “security and orientation”. Similarly, that of becoming “like whirlwinds” (p. 218), is the possible destiny if to counter the uprooting of forms of traditional life, such as that of farmers, we do not put down new roots in cities.

These images automatically incorporate Böckenförde’s thoughts in the furrow of an interpretation of modernity, of which Hegel is both the initiator and the most prominent supporter. According to these images, what is most at risk in a modernized society, is not so much the ability of individuals to assume a critical distance from orders and from the ethos in force – socialized to only recognize what they agree on, modern individuals do not lack critical skills, even if “abstractedly” put into practice – but rather the ability for individuals to belong, to feel part of something other than the Self and its “interests”. In fact, in Law and secularization Böckenförde also complains about the fact that today it has become almost impossible “to consider the nation, the people and patriotism as sacred laic entities, which if need be can demand life to be sacrificed” (p. 217).

It is in this big furrow where we find the happenings of the liberal State, as is recorded by the Diktum. A State where it is not necessary for a society which has differentiated itself to be made homogeneous again, reviving an ethical substance which under the fire of thought has become disjointed and less dangerous, uniting itself to citizens which are torn between taking care of the private and participating outside the confines, is a State which sees feelings of belonging dwindling, which can no longer be reproduced.

There is something lacking in this diagnosis. First of all, there is the feeling of a déjà vu. The citizens, who during the heyday of nationalism, would sacrifice even their on lives for Italy in the name of patriotism-nation, were the same people who no longer found it sensible to sacrifice oneself for Pisa or Lucca against Florence, or for the Grand Duke of Tuscany. They had recognized their loyalties addressing them to a wider community, but it was not for this reason that they had become “whirlwinds”. Civilised society, exchanges, the market, had created a new national context, object of a new form of belonging, before the State arrived – late, here and in Germany – to confer order to things. Why should supranational aggregations such as the EU and even cosmopolitan institutions not be able to keep the “whirlwinds” at bay, when the infrastructure of economic exchanges takes giants steps, and the market, the global interdependency already create a post-national civilized society? Just as Pisa is no longer a country to sacrifice oneself for but Italy becomes it, in the same way Italy today stops being it and perhaps the West becomes it, or perhaps “the whole world”. The country of countries is not completely over: there is still fighting between those who identify country with a “civilization”, ready to fight, and those who see it all over the world.

The forgotten pluralism

Secondly, the Diktum postulates, still in tune with Hegel, that the State makes into a law an ethos which unites the citizens together (where the vanity of imposing the moral “with a law”) and which thrusts its roots in a prepolitical religiousness. A secular and liberal State is, from this point of view, a State which, by limiting itself by putting itself as a dispositive to meet people’s needs and guarantee private autonomy, becomes “precarious” and as if “suspended in mid-air”. Civil religion, a junction to which some return, is nothing but a ““second”, if not even a third way” (p.81), in short, a pale surrogate.

Not even this reconstruction is very convincing. In a sense, in fact, many States which we call liberal have formed not by giving a juridical form to an ethos but rather by building a mediation between different religious cultures – a difficult mediation which at first was a suspicious armed truce, then disarmed, then only at the end of a long process did it become fully shared by a constitutional text. In other words, in the Diktum there is an underestimate of society’s ability to generate the sacred and with which also solidarity, which a society needs.

But the real point at the base of this, which leaves some perplexity in Böckenförde’s Kulturpessimismus, is the inadequate thematisation of the “fact of pluralism”. The plurality of the visions of the good, present in our society, is fruit of the free use of human reason in conditions of finiteness, not the fruit of the windmills of grains of sand which are not anchored. This Rawlsian intuition is not a liberal ideology. It is something which we can also translate in the vocabulary of Hegel and those important religions which occasionally hastily reject pluralism as “relativism”.

Even Hegel, even the monotheistic religions have a strong concept of human finiteness as the only place where all that is not finite can manifest itself. It will, therefore, not be difficult to admit that none of the finite manifestations of the infinite can claim the title of entire representative: it cannot do it without falling to idolatry or “evil infinite”. That evil infinite, which when it disposes of coercive forces of the State, historically has poured blood.

If it is so, why could the ability of the liberal-democratic State to unite its citizens not consist in giving a voice, an equal voice, to moments of value, of good, of the infinite in the plurality of the incarnations where we humans cannot not fulfill it? And consist in keeping the door of “it could-be-otherwise”, slightly ajar; the crack of the “contestability” of the particular clot of “good” which our “just” institutions try to fix in imperfect but perfectible ways which are ours?

It is with this process of identifying what is right, still continuing to look for the good at the heart of the State, and “statist” is the name which we give to those who excel in this practice. Durkheim himself, often quoted by Böckenförde, teaches us that the idealized, sacralised normativity, which generates solidarity, is not something which a society can not produce. The forms which become concrete can experience decay, crises and changes, but if there is society, there is also the production of the sacred and normativity. It is these inexhaustible resources that the democratic State can and must count on for its legitimate “prepolitics” – antecedent to the research of consensus between the free and the equal. Not on any particular historical objectivication (today which dominates, yesterday in decay) of these resources of sense.

Alessandro Ferrara, professor of Political philosophy at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, is President of the Italian Society of Political Philosophy. For many years now he has worked on the sources and justifications for the normativity after a linguistical turning point. Starting from a criticism on habermasian proceduralism, he looked to develop an authenticitarian concept of validity and a judicialist concept of justice in the sphere of political philosophy. Author of Reflective Authenticity (London & New York, Routledge, 1998) and Justice and Judgment (London, Sage, 1999), he is currently in the process of publishing The Force of the Example. Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, for Columbia University Press.

This article was published in Reset, Number 101.

Translastion by Sonia Ter Hovanessian