Il mito della tolleranza nella civiltà occidentale : riflessioni sulla sua genesi e sulla sua valenza simbolico-politica

Tolerance, universally recognized as one of the cardinal values on which the West is founded, certainly established itself at the turn of the 17th and the 18th centuries, on the basis of the humanistic and Renaissance outbursts of the previous centuries. Nevertheless, the following article tries to show that this value has a much older genesis, which has its roots in Greek and Roman civilizations, and above all in the dimension of myth, which has always been the foundation and glue of the collective imaginary of a people, as the origin of its socio-political identity. Hence the need to restart examining tolerance as a dimension of power, inspecting its genesis and structure, but above all its symbolic value.