Are we still living in a democracy, or are we immersed in a post-democratic system whose meaning and true aims we don’t understand? Can we speak today of the sovereignty of the democratic state, or is it the oligarchies, multinationals and centres of financial power that govern the democracies? How can a state that is deeply in debt, as many European states are today, describe itself as free and truly democratic? What has democracy become today? These are the questions that Zagrebelsky answers, in the awareness that today all powerful people, all politicians, indeed all of us without distinction, ‘speak of democracy knowing that we are using a mendacious word, which lends itself to falsehood. In this it is distinct from the words that indicate other forms of government such as dictatorship, oligarchy, etc. They were able to show themselves for what they were. Democracy could not. The reason is that, since the Second World War, democracy has become a word that we use for all that is good, just and worthy in collective life, in international, political and social relations, right down to the smallest dimension, that of interpersonal relationships within a couple.’

Ours is the grey time of nihilism, not the colourful time of politics. The paralysis of representation, the freezing of political competition, the reduced significance of electoral promises and programmes, the process of sharing and making generic agreements, the predominance of government in its technical and executive version of the overpowering wills of others: all this constitutes what may be summed up in the now widely used expression ‘post-democracy’, which essentially means ‘a ban on the discussion of aims’.