Excerpt

Richard Rorty, who was a member of our Academy and who passed away much too early, wrote that the “hermeneutical attitude is in the intellectual world what democracy is in the political world.”¹ This statement is more and more evident, although not in its prima facie sense, which always runs the risk of becoming an ineffective truism. I want to suggest that the parallelism between hermeneutics and democracy should be taken today as the indication of a common crisis affecting them. To say it rather brutally: both hermeneutics and democracy appear nowadays so obvious and harmless (innocui) that they lose…