The classical antinomies of the modern era – Power of the “States General” v. Divine Power of the King, Liberalism v. Democracy, Liberalism v. Socialism – represent the conceptual elaboration of the contradictions inherent in each phase, which as a whole constitutes a slow and tortuous, but constant progression not toward the abstractly conceived Open Society, as Karl Popper maintained, but, thanks to the predominance of macho culture, toward the Open Society of Global Capitalism. Each of these elaborations was destined to become obsolete in the next phase, so much so that it was inexorably forgotten by public opinion: Who in the West today remembers, not to say would fight for, the Divine Right of Kings? Or for suffrage based on wealth? The progressive departure from the Closed Society marks each of these phases, which have also existed and marked an important moment in history, even if under the spoiled aegis of instrumental rationality. The intellectual elaborations that tried to justify them and grasp their dialectic were not simple flatus vocis.

Today, then, it is inappropriate to speak of class struggle: an essential category for understanding, on the one side, the evolution of Western society between the middle of the 18th century and, on the other, the first dramatic decades of the 20th century and the advent of the welfare state after the Second World War. No greater injustice to Karl Marx could be done than to hypostatize a category he elaborated at the time (1845) when with Friedrich Engels he wrote The Conditions of the Working Class in Great Britain.

Each of the past elaborations, in fact, has been functional to the emergence in the West of a subject that was the protagonist of the transformation toward a formally open society: the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and the middle class. Today, thanks to the development of capitalism, hailed by Marx as the most radical revolution in history, the subject, although ambiguous because contradictory, that appears in an intense and massive way for the first time since the Neolithic Revolution on the stage of public life is women, not as biological beings, but as bearer of an ethos, the empathic spirit, the ability to listen, to care for the small necessities of life. The male too possesses this by nature, but, given the trauma suffered in the historical evolution of the species, in the majority of them it has become blurred and, in the most serious cases, has disappeared. The future is entrusted to the ability of women and those men in whom the empathic charge has survived, to raise it from the interpersonal level to that of collective organization.