The game of disillusion : social movements and populism in Italy

In the last decade, ‘populism’ has become one of those overloaded, catch-all notions, whose stratified and intertwined meanings prevent any clear analytical use. Yet, today, the notion of populism cannot apparently be excluded from our vocabulary. In this chapter, we present a cartography of the main characteristics of current forms of populism, and of its implicit historical convergences with the requests of contemporary emancipative social movements; indeed, the emancipative collective movements of the last decades and current forms of populism are opposing phenomena sharing common roots. In the chapter, we introduce some of the main characteristics of the Italian case. We explain the genealogy of Italian cultural characteristics, with specific attention to the relation between individual political participation and communitarian temptations.