Abstract
The author unfolds the semantic richness that Mazzarino, at various moments of his reflection, has given to the notion of democratization, taken in the social and cultural sense; he seems to have borrowed the concept from Adolf von Harnack, associating it with a conception of Christian expansion as a « rivoluzione spirituale » (not political), an echo of the « geistige Revolution » of Ernst Troeltsch. In Mazzarino’s concept of « democratizzazione della cultura » we should read a double movement: on one side, a descending democratization, analysed here as a downward transfer and universalization, by the Fathers of the Church and/or by the senators, of the aristocrats’own values : metaphoric ennobling, “dignity” of the poor, who through the credit which they have with God, become the « protectors (patroni) of the souls of the rich » (Paulinus of Nola); on the other side, an ascending democratization, which rehabilitates certain concrete forms of social inferiority (receiving a salary etc.), by presenting th...
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