Democrazia e populismo : sull’impossibilità di una democrazia post-rappresentativa, a partire da B. Constant e N. Bobbio

The theme of representation, in the form of democratic government, has always been a problem worthy of investigation, from the origin of the debate to the present day. Today, for instance, new political subjects, often called “populists”, tend to propose new ways of political participation. To address these issues, we can refer to a great classic of political thought, Benjamin Costant, approaching it through the key of reading offered by Norberto Bobbio. Both authors, although in different forms, show the limits of a non-representative democracy, so that Bobbio, in his review of the concept of “freedom” starting from the work of Costant, will come to argue that democracy is “the only achievable”. The second part of the article focuses on the impossibility of a post-representative democracy today, focusing first on the genesis of the crisis of representation, from which arise phenomena that can be summarized under the name of “post-democracy”.