ABSTRACT
Alessandro Pizzorno is on the faculty of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He has also taught occasionally in the United States, but very little of his work is as yet available in English. The selection that follows is taken from "Politics Unbound," the first essay in Charles Maier's collection, The Changing Boundaries of the Political. The selection reflects many of Pizzorno's abiding interests: in the relation between the political and other spheres of value and action; in the relation between politics and personal identity; and in political modernization. It further reflects an analytical commitment that Pizzorno shares with many of the other thinkers gathered in Rethinking the Subject. For the strict idealist, the world is made of nothing but representations. For the strict idealist, the world itself is nothing but a representation. Though influenced by the phenomenological traditions of both Germany and Italy, Pizzorno is by no means a strict idealist and the world he treats is by no means a mere representation. Perhaps a "neo-idealist," he instead regards representations as forces in their own right, constitutive not simply of subjects and subjectivities but also of social groups and institutions. A final note: Much in Pizzorno's selection is critical at once of the substantive and of the methodological presumptions of earlier theories of modernization. Not all of our contributors have undertaken comparable critiques, but most seem to have come to a comparable conviction: in the virtues, perhaps even in the necessity, of rethinking "the subject" and rethinking modernization in tandem.
