Greetings from an Ordinary Nightmare. Danilo Zolo, la sindrome di Singapore e la delusione democratica

This article intends to provide a template for understanding the legacy of Danilo Zolo’s political thought through a reading of his books about the crisis of western democracy. While Zolo’s view has often been considered to be pessimistic, little has been done to reconstruct the function of disillusion in his work. The essay highlights that his view of a strict connection between politics and fear and his critique of abstract universalism is founded on epistemological and ethical convictions that have structural similarities with the positions held by theorists and philosophers of the “school of suspicion” (Ricoeur), with a peculiar emphasis on disappointment as a weapon of criticism. The grim portrait of Singapore’s socio-political system, which closes his book on Principato democratico, makes it possible to understand how disillusion offers an insightful prognostication about the developments of western politics.