Sulla laicità della democrazia nella società post-secolare: fondamenti di legittimità e Benedetto XVI "teorico della politica"

This essay concerns the topic of the foundations of power legitimacy in contemporary mass representative liberaldemocracies. In the first place, we trace the general theoretical framework within wich stay our subject. Secondly, we underline some questions concerning the “resources of meaning” required by political power legitimacy. To develop our argument: 1) we propose some selective reflections by Pope Benedict XVI, considered as a “political theorist”; 2) we put in dialog Benedict XVI reflections with some pages and politological analyses displaced in the XX Century and relative to our knowledge interest (recolling concepts as “reason”, “nature”, “faith”, “God” as well as the political-juridical doctrines of “natural law” and “positive law”). We have a double purpose: directly, to advance some food for thought inherent an important topic in the area of study of political culture; inderectly, to invite social sciences (and political science especially) to come back to a careful investigation of the questions concerning our democracies foundations of power legitimacy and their relations with religion. In discussing our argument, we suggest some considerations pertinent to secularization, the age of secularism and the post-secular society. We conclude focusing on unavoidable conditions so that non-believers, believers and differently-believers could be peer citizens when they move in the public sphere and in the political process of contemporary democracy.