This new form of democracy, the author says, is unprecedented, and therefore difficult to analyse without adopting a new kind of critique, distinct from any theoretical approaches used in the past.

The “power of the people” is in the process of being replaced by the “power of the media”: societies are no longer using the media as their instrument of mass communication, but are rather being shaped by it.

Elefante argues that totalitarianism is characterized by the indistinctness between culture and politics: no form of culture is “politically neutral”.

A fictitious majority can nowadays be won and bragged about through TV talk-shows in which fiction and reality are hard to tell from each other. True democracy, concludes the author, can only be revived by filling the cultural gap between intellectuals and their audience.

Fabrizio Elefante is an editorial consultant, journalist and researcher who has worked as a culture writer for Italian broadsheets Sole24Ore and Messaggero.

He also collaborated with the Department of Aesthetics of the Università Statale of Milan, the Center for Semiotics of the University of Urbino, the Ecole de la Cause freudienne of Paris, the Collége Internationale de Philosophie of Paris and the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici.
You can read the introduction, first chapter, and comment or buy this book at www.ipocpress.com

Faith in Democracy
by Fabrizio Elefante
ISBN: 9788895145402 – p. 218 – € 21.00 – Paperback – Dec 2008
IPOC – Italian paths of culture
www.ipocpress.it

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