Knowledge of fundamental concepts and problems in democratic theory in relation to the processes and contemporary cultural conflicts. Specifically, the following skills are going to be developed: To know and understand the basic concepts and problems of contemporary theories of justice. To know and understand the basic concepts and problems of the concept of political culture. To know and understand current theories on political representation. To acquire conceptual and methodological skills relative to these concepts and problems. To be able to analyze and critically judge the debates present in the various studies on the subject. To discuss the relevant literature. To be able to develop academic oral and written texts related to the subject. As a result of learning, the student will know the main issues addressed by the political philosophy in relation to the formation of a democratic political culture. They will acquire the conceptual skills and methodology to address them and will be able to handle the literature on the subject. The final paper of the course will be a valuable exercise for achieving the highest standards of conceptual rigor in academic debate.

Program: 1 - Political culture in representative democracies 2 - Political representation and the visualization of social conflicts 3 - Public sphere, rational argumentation, and staging 4 - Presence, immediacy, and the expression of political identities 5 - Political violence and frames of recognition 6 - Democratic institutions and the reproduction of political imaginaries The political culture of contemporary democracies is, first and foremost, a representational culture. This course aims at recovering the implications of this idea, but also the reasons for its fatigue in the contemporary world. Democracy is suffering a persisting crisis of legitimation, which is basically a crisis in its representative dimension. This fact is linked with the progressive instability and illegibility of shared representations and imaginaries. Thus, the course is focused on the recovery of the theoretical roots of democratic societies. We are looking for the cultural conditions, the values, the theoretical models, the forms of representation of the individual and the political community. The methodological approach is not empirical. On the contrary, it offers a panoramic view over a number of huge models of self-representation of the political subject and the people since the age of the democratic revolutions. The unfolding of these models will run in parallel with the main currents of contemporary aesthetics. The starting point of the historical discussion will be the classic Platonic analogy between the agora and the theatre, as a privileged space for the enacting of the essential moral conflicts that divide the political, but also, at the same time, as a place for the construction of a shared political culture. The course will show that, in contrast with the Platonic insight, in the last two Centuries, different answers to analogous problems appeared, with different understandings of the popular will and its institutional reflection. We will explain that those different understandings still have, in our days, deep ideological implications.

Teacher presentations on the general contents of the course and on selected texts. Discussions with students about the issues involved and about the adecuate conceptual tools to confront them. A tutorial system to guide students in the realization of the final work will be established.