Anakyklosis. Incubi di barbarie ritornata

The author recalls the dramatic global problems that have come to worsen our destiny as humankind in the past few years: from the pandemic to war in Ukraine, and the new explosion of the conflict in the Middle East in ways that threaten to disembark, on one side, in genocide and, on the other, in the universal realization of the «clash of civilizations». In this tragic contest, the author circumscribes the attention to recent events in Italian politics, in which lesser severity is evident, though it may only be in appearance. The arrival of a subject who presents herself as the heir of fascist political culture to the head of government is interpreted as the final act in the history of the so-called «second republic». The author takes up the notion of kakistocracy coined by him thirty years ago and draws from Polybius’ theory of mixed government to characterize the coalition founded by Berlusconi in 1994 as a mixed government «in reverse», that is, a mixture of the worst forms of government. He suggests reconstructing the Italian history of kakistocracy based on the dynamic dimension in Polybian theory as a heuristic tool: the idea of anakyklosis, as the eternal return of the same political forms. According to Polybius, even the mixed government has its specific life cycle, which consists of the succession of hegemonies between its components. The author suggests that, similarly, in the story of mixed government «in reverse», i.e. kakistocracy, different hegemonic phases can be traced. The history of the Italian kakistocracy seemed to have come to an end in the space of a «short twenty years» cut short in 2011 by the fall of the last Berlusconi government. However, after a decade of confusion, the history of the mixed kakistocratic government seems to have begun again. In its own way it might be following the scheme theorized by Polybius, finally conferring hegemonic power onto the tyrannical component. In conclusion, the author asks whether this history could lead to a full-blown return of fascist barbarism and suggests that the constitutional reform promoted by the current kakistocratic government with authoritarian hegemony points in that direction.