Crisis of Democracy? On the Social Prophetism of the Young Ricœur

Abstract

The essay presents the Ricœurian article La crise de la Démocratie et de la conscience chrétienne («Le Christian-isme Social», 1947), reconstructing its theoretical and practical background and showing the strength of its relevance. In particular, it emphasises the importance and limits of the conceptual pair freedom/equality; the decadence of the utopia of the left and the resurgence of the totalitarian threats of the right, as well as the confusion caused by the impossibility of distinguishing between them; but above all the need not to think of democracy as a concept, a system of values or a particular political form, but as an ongoing ‘practice’, a history that has begun and that we have the task of carrying forward, because only on its flowering depends, from time to time, the real blossoming of the human being: or its loss.