Towards a Community of Individuals

Abstract

The Middle Ages end in the great season of civil humanism, followed by the Renaissance. These periods are marked by a new civil sentiment, which shows, nonetheless, a radical tendency to read, imagine and represent the civitas and the market — i.e. the civil economy — as an elitist relationship among subjects considered trustworthy: almost a sort of happy and sheltered oasis of mutually advantageous and stable relations, surrounded by the “crown of thorns” of the infamous, the poor, the untrustworthy, the excluded:

The ‘market’, as mirror of society, came gradually to assume the fundamental ambiguity that still characterizes it today. Thought of as an abstract and global reality, it seems to attract and include the totality of the existing population, while in fact it excludes many, establishing multiple hierarchies of economic, cultural and cognitive nature between people.

Todeschini 2007, p. 7 [my translation]

It is true that certain living creatures, as bees and ants, live sociably one with another… and therefore some man may perhaps desire to know why mankind cannot do the same.

Hobbes, Leviathan