Paolo Carozza, Director of the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame; Joshua Mitchell, Professor of Political Theory, Georgetown University; Maurizio Molinari, Director of La Repubblica. Introduced by Martina Saltamacchia, Distinguished Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.

 What is happening across the Atlantic, documents on the big screen of history the fundamental interdependence between the individual and the people, in other words the need for the self to be within the context of a people in order to emerge, the essential contribution of each person to the common good and consequently the impossibility that a people’s government (demos) is truly such without a civil society characterised by this reciprocity.
Are we witnessing a crisis in the founding structure on which American society was built? Or is a different evolution taking place, if it is true that democracy is a system that governs difficulties and crises and is therefore unstable by definition? What then is the vital link between the presence of people who take responsibility with the courage to say ‘I’ and democracy itself?
In order to address this issue in all its complexity, we want to focus on the United States, in many respects an outpost where history is always ahead. Speaking at a European cultural event such as the Meeting about this crisis on the other side of the ocean therefore means talking in advance about something that concerns us all.