An unseemly approach to the categories: democracy and citizenship

Abstract

The socio-political experience at the end of the century is characterized by the crisis of the modern State model and Democracy as a political regime. The possibility of a democratic reconstruction of political systems requires a deconstructive work of the basic concepts on which the democratic discourse has been founded. Representations such as citizen, consensus, sovereignty, legitimacy, social unity, general interest, are meanings denied by socio-political facticity. An invitation is presented to rethink the founding concepts of modern democratic theory in an effort to apprehend the complex dynamics and practices of fragmentation and multiculturalism characteristic of the end-of-the-century fracture.