NATIONALISM AND CIVIC LIFE: FROM INCONSISTENCY TO INEQUALITY

There is a strong bond between the individual, the state and the society. Failing to properly address the relationship between individuals inside a community and culture will bring democracy into contempt. Although it should promote values and target important questions regarding the civic life, the state is now more than ever concerned of its well-being in terms of pursuing new markets and promoting empty social discourse. In a sense, it is not democracy which dwindles but its leaders and political representatives. Their inconsistency and lack of discourse brings us today in front of a new challenge: the rise of populist nationalism, a byproduct of immoral markets, widen inequality and a new social contract. My thesis aims at connecting the dots between the decline of civic life due to increased inequality and the rise of populist nationalism, in a soft-despotic context, which settles the terms for a new social contract. Having to do with a Tocquevillean approach on democracy and despotism, my paper will endure the illusion of self-determination, postulating nonetheless the idea of contractualism and civic duty.