Between Ethics of Freedom and Ethics of Order: Person, Society and State

Abstract

In an age that seems to let prevail what R. Kimball calls “the meaninglessness of meaning”, how can we reflect on the relationship today between politics and common values ? Does the current era which has been defined as the “age of sorrowful passions”, have perhaps as its crucial bond the “misery of relativism”? The modern claims of a radical neutrality of common values in every public and community sphere has today been exposed as unattainable. If one cannot face head on with courage the matter of the “public function of truth”, the risk that emerges is that of “heterogenesis of ends”, also in respect to the great illuminist ideals. Therefore the risk is a sort of “self-dissolution” of the very same project of modernization. Only a reconsideration of core notions of the human person, of society and of the state, all within a prospective that is integrated into a coherent anthropological project, can hinder the nihilistic flow of a modern “passion du neutre”, and become the foundation of an authentic “liberal community”.