Democratic Ethos, Imagination and Emotions

The paper is focused on Alessandro Ferrara’s attempt to overcome the limits of proceduralism through a reconsideration of some normative sources able to mobilize and to motivate people on the double level of ethos and of political imagination. In particular, on the subject of the thematization of imagination as a political force able to mobilize the people, the author tries to show that a deeper consideration of the emotional dimension might even prove to be useful for the basic aims pursued by Ferrara on the methodological level. The same can be said for the thematization of the democratic ethos proposed by Ferrara: this ethos is in fact first of all based on specific “passions”, and represents in general the “affective basis of a democracy”. The author attempts then to test whether some possible lines of research into a theoretical development of these topics related to the emotions would be productive.