Abstract

Richard Rorty, who was a member of our Academy and who passed away much too early, wrote that the “hermeneutical attitude is in the intellectual world what democracy is in the political world.”1 This statement is more and more evident, although not in its prima facie sense, which always runs the risk of becoming an ineffective truism. I want to suggest that the parallelism between hermeneutics and democracy should be taken today as the indication of a common crisis affecting them. To say it rather brutally: both hermeneutics and democracy appear nowadays so obvious and harmless that they lose…