The discovery of democracy: the modernization and exhaustion of imagination

Abstract

This article is a further study of the diagnostic of Modernity carried out by Alexis de Tocqueville. His criticism of the exhaustion of the imagination in the collective action with the emerging of the modern democracy enhances the contradictions of the contemporary world: a high level of welfare matches with the declining of the interest in public questions; the normalization of the behaviours and the administrative machinery taking possession of the public space of participation. Tocqueville and Mill start a critical diagnostic of the Modernity which will be followed by Weber and by the School of Frankfurt.