ABSTRACT
One might say that in each culture, what defines the perimeter of the world is precisely the interplay between symbolic norms and actual normality. Pluralism was so far from being an obvious truism that, until yesterday, it was still a firmly rejected heresy in Europe, and, to a lucid analysis, is "still an experiment" that offers "no guarantees of meaning". The idea that the European political model suddenly found itself threatened by the dehumanizing dominion of technique – with liberal capitalism the most coherent expression of it – now seems, in the light of the facts, a groundless simplification. The criticism was aimed at cultural pluralism, which in those very years began to take on a precise appearance, particularly in the United States. The idea that the unity of the republic should correspond to a "substantial" homogeneity of the people long remained the dominant ideology in the United States.
