The economic crisis that erupted in 2008 has not only had devastating material consequences: it has undermined an entire system of knowledge , jeopardizing the very credibility of the human sciences. Economics, sociology , and politics are faced with unprecedented discredit and are forced to scour their scientific universe far and wide, seeking not one-size-fits-all solutions, but new strategies that can truly have a positive and tangible impact on people's lives, just as the 1929 crisis led to the development of a novel development model. To do so, the human sciences must look back in time, retracing the trajectory of development from the post-World War II period to the present.
A Western conception
The idea of development is ethnocentric and in particular Western. If in the nineteenth century it appeared under a pseudoscientific guise and soaked in positivism and Darwinism, in the twentieth century it almost became an ideology, but it still emerged as a concept in antithesis to what was not the West: strong in a century-long industrialization, at the forefront of science and politically mature, Westerners believed they were invested in a far from disinterested way with the so-called "white man's burden". decolonization and the Cold War led to nothing but further interference in the internal affairs of backward countries, however no longer by Europe, but by the United States and Soviet Union, with a multiplicity of approaches that depending on the context imposed the socio-economic model now of one and now of the other, in a real global contest between capitalism e socialism.
The dominant ideology
The American development model, supported by international institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, is undoubtedly the one that has shaped the contemporary world the most. Its cornerstones are democracy and free trade and the ultimate goal is to fully integrate underdeveloped countries into the fluid and elusive circuit of globalizationCritics of such a model have highlighted several controversies, however: the Third World would not act as an equal member of global trade, but would instead be enslaved by large economic concentrations that would allocate the least qualified jobs there, exploiting both workers and natural resources, while the most innovative and technological activities would remain firmly anchored in the Western world. Second, numerous attempts to transplant democracy to certain underdeveloped areas would have proven to be fiascos, worsening unstable situations already gripped by poverty and conflict.
The ideologies of dissent
Diametrically opposed to the dominant Western ideology was a melting pot of alternative theories, often Marxist and based on the Soviet Union. The rejection of the market economy and a complete rejection of globalization, conceived as the quintessential tools of Western hegemony, constituted their primary demands. Often rejected by official culture, dissenting ideologies were accused of self-referential and abstruse intellectualism, as well as of advancing colorful and utopian solutions. Moreover, some believed that their more extremist currents were fomenting revolutions and guerrilla warfare around the world, thanks in part to the lavish funding provided by the Soviets. The bloody and horrifying outcome of certain “socialist experiments”, such as the Chinese cultural revolution and the Cambodian genocide , gradually obscured the fascination that that intricate agglomeration of theories had had on the collective imagination of certain social groups and on the less orthodox dissenting intellectuals.
The year 2000
The final collapse of communism in the early 1990s, which was already foreseen in 1986 Chernobyl disaster it had been the grim omen, revealed the poverty sometimes extreme in which the former people's republics found themselves in that immense and boundless Eurasian mass that from Iron Curtain culminated in Vladivostok and Pyongyang. In the West, the epilogue of the Cold War was somewhat superficially hailed as the end of history: the Western democratic and capitalist model was the only possible one and the only one to have triggered authentic development. Today, however, it is this same model that is tottering, urging the human sciences to profoundly renew themselves. The ominous preludes of an imminent epochal turning point are made clearly visible by the emergence of new political forces that dream of radical changes. It is not easy to foresee the direction that contemporary society will take if new measures are not implemented. stabilization policies, but there is already some evidence, even if still undefined. Thus, looking at the Polish constitutional reform, at Putin, at Orban, at Erdogan, at Trump and at Brexit, we have come to theorize the "illiberal democracyThis would be a democracy because it would draw its legitimacy from perfectly democratic methods (elections and referendums) but would resort to illiberal and alien methods (think of Hungary's treatment of migrants or the failed proposal to force British companies to declare the percentage of foreigners they employ) and to redefine or dismantle globalization itself.
Stefano Ghilardi
