Abstract

According to the Italian intellectual Rocco Montano, the typical dysfunctions relating to modern democracies can be reduced to the dissipation of an institutionally constructed moral consensus due to political partisanship. This analysis finds proof in recent phenomena of post-democracy, as well as in Antonio Rosmini's and Antonio Gramsci's analysis of civil society. All three thinkers maintain that an intellectual elite is an essential prerequisite for the stabilizing of such a consent, which according to Montano and Rosmini should be institutionally guaranteed by a Second Chamber of Parliament, not by party agitation. Further research about the importance of religious tradition for such pre-political moral consensus also leads to the reflections of Wilhelm Röpke and Jürgen Habermas.