The Aporias of contemporary reason and the historical necessity of pluralist democracy: the critical thought of the Frankfurt School in the Era of its challenge

Abstract

We are living in a social order which is dislocated by several factors: modernity as a permanent acceleration, ethical apathy, an unlimited consumption, the dictatorship of mass media, the stately, authoritarian and dull bureaucracies, and serious ecological disorders. We are already living in the Anthropocene, the new geological era in the history of the Earth, in which the human beings have substantially modified the work of nature, disturbing it hopelessly. We must preserve what is still existing from critical thinking: a cosmopolitism without illusions and a defence of rationalism and of the universality of human rights.