Abstract

Our democracies presently face a set of unique challenges. In this article we argue that the current crisis needs to be understood as resulting from the convergence of two historical transformations: the paradigm of boundlessness; and what we term “endividualismo”, a novel mutation of individualism in the context of the financial age. The result is a novel political reality where individual rights are ever-expanding and the opportunities for collective action have shrunk to the point of impossibility. The resulting powerlessness of the polity demands new answers: we need to reconfigure the relationship between citizens and political power.