The Philosophical Dreams of Emancipation

One of the main reasons of the current crisis of "utopian imagination" can be brought back to the long-term effect of the Berlin wall's fall: facing the historical perversion of the socialist dream, the western emancipating imagination seems to be entered in a state of permanent insomnia, which does not allow to elaborate the past nightmares, nor to project and realize new daydreams of a better freedom. Starting from an historical account of the main philosophical theories of emancipation along the western history of ideas, the article tries to update the theoretical and political answers to the classical questions which concern any theory of emancipation: 1) From which kind of oppression should we be liberated? 2) Who are the victims of this state of oppression? 3) Who are the liberators? 4) How can the liberators free the victims of the oppression? 5) Why should such a process of emancipation start?