Aleksandr Archangel’skij, Author, TV host, Journalist (Russia); Luciano Violante, President Emeritus of the Chamber of Deputies; Joseph H.H. Weiler, University Professor at the NYU Law School and Senior Fellow at the Center for European studies at Harvard. Introduced by Lorenza Violini, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Milan.

Will democracy have the capacity, in the coming decades, to prove itself as a still sustainable system of government? Digital civilisation and globalisation are jeopardising the freedom of the ‘I’, an ‘I’ whos life relies more and more on homologation in hyper-individualised universes. This undermines the basic structure of democratic processes, that large web of relations connecting individuals, their aggregations, the sovereign people and power-holders.
Internet voting, direct and digital but elitist democracy, and the exasperated search for consensus aim at deteriorating not only the foundations but also the mechanisms of democracy, reducing the self to a ‘voter’ and politics to an art of manipulation and consensus management. How can an anaesthetised democracy be revived?
This topic will be discussed frankly, without the anxiety of constructing hard-to-prove-true projects and without thinking that new ‘electoral’ mechanisms or new systems of government can replace the atrophy of freedom and responsibility. A free-range discussion open to everyone’s contribution, looking for new and viable paths for our living together.