This paper explores the issue of the Italians’ relationship to democracy against the theoretical background of Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the modern public sphere. After introducing the basic tenets of Habermas’s theory of democracy as founded on public opinion, open to dialog and exercising reason, the paper examines the state of the Italian public sphere in the wake of the Berlusconi era. The paper summarizes several perspectives by prominent Italianists on the different aspects of the Italian public sphere and draws conclusions about the limits and potential of the Italians’ commitment to democracy.

This paper discusses the Italian ethnographer Ernesto de Martino’s investigation of ritual crying in Southern Italy, bringing to the fore the role ethnology was called to play as a new twentieth-century discipline that emerged from the forced encounter between powerful “advanced” nations and societies “without history.”  Ethnology sought to analyze the impact of cultural norms on a world increasingly polarized between the inevitable march towards rational modernity and the appeal of a magical pre-modern time.  For de Martino, in particular, ethnological research on popular religiosity and ritual crying exposed the peculiarities of Italy’s uneven development in the post-war years and became a means through which to rethink the Italian South.

Can the concept of ecstasy explain some of the rationale of dictatorships, and more specifically of fascism? And can the concept of ecstasy be connected to manipulation? These are the two central questions I would like to raise and explore in this paper, although there are also other questions that will emerge in my discussion which I hope will help clarify the relationship between ecstasy and manipulation

Introduction to CIS 5.1.

The authors consider the role of the sacred in Italy from the Middle Ages to the present day, particularly in relation to religion (above all Catholicism) as well as to the currents of modern critical thought.