ABSTRACT
Dramatic social changes over the last three decades have revealed the limits of the modern definition of democracy and the inadequacy of political institutions’ responses to the planetarization1 of the world system. I will argue that today’s democracy requires conditions for enhancing the recognition and autonomy of individual and collective signifying processes in everyday life. Contemporary societies based on information allocate specific resources to individuals, who use them to become autonomous subjects of action; but in order to maintain themselves systems extend their control over the deep-lying sources of action and the construction of its meaning.
