ABSTRACT
The apparent elective affinity between totalitarian regimes and management of feelings, in fact, has always made it rather difficult to talk about atmospheres and politics – especially democracy. However, any proposal enabling a phenomenology of atmospheres to be combined with democratic politics is worth considering. Indeed, to mention Le Bon, even in democracy “men never shape their conduct upon the teaching of pure reason”, rather uncritically giving into the impressions produced by images, words and formulas. The academic fear both of over-generalizing the notion of atmosphere as such, and of dealing with an aestheticization of politics that appears to be a matter of political science, might also help explain this gap. A depressive megalomania or a disenchanted serenity, mere legal formality or a deeply involving civicness, simple geopolitical belonging or a truly shared destiny, reasonable hopes or self-inflicted complaints: all these and other conceivable conditions are, indeed, real atmospheres – or at least atmospherically conditioned moods.
