Ripensare il paternalismo in epoca neoliberale

Democracy and liberalism seems today inescapable references to political discourse. No European government, but in hindsight the same applies to all states recognized as "fully legitimate" by the international community, could now be defined as contrary to the values of freedom and individual autonomy through which any theory of liberal democracy defines this form of government. The relationship between freedom and autonomy is far from peaceful theoretical point of view; and despite democracy and liberalism have been for a long time rival ideologies, they are traditionally t against any kind of authoritarianism. The democratic and the liberal agree on the assumption ideal according to which the individual is the best judge of their own choices, both in the public arena both in the private sphere in which it claims that the state respects and enforce the rights and freedoms of the individual. Moving from these considerations, it seems very curious that, despite the overwhelming consensus about the form of "liberal-democratic" government, go back today to talk at length about paternalism. The juxtaposition of two seemingly contradictory notions such as neoliberalism and paternalism - an expression used more and more frequently to mark either the continuity and discontinuity of hegemonic thinking with contemporary classical liberalism - emerged from the need to rethink some of those features that is usually to define "liberal democracies". On the one hand, the cornerstones of democratic theory now seem increasingly challenged by new forms of charismatic leaderism and technocratic depoliticization (the trend transformation of electoral processes in plebiscitary rites and the governments recourse to technical reassuring as a panacea for the economic crisis). On the other hand, the liberal principle proposed by John Stuart Mill 's as a limit against the intrusion of the state into the private sphere is exceeded by the increasing invasion of the public authorities in the choices of the individual, in the name of the complex calculations about “social utility”. As already pointed out several years ago "everywhere you are hymns to the free market, and all over the states intervening ever more invasively into the private lives. Where is the limit on the right of state intervention on our habits?”.
The need to go back to thinking of a category seemingly obsolete as that of "paternalism" emerges then from the observation that the benevolence towards the citizens is a topic of legitimacy of power far exceeded by the liberal and democratic politics.