Page - 69 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:2

70 | www.limina-graz.eu Isabella Guanzini | Ideas of Freedom ity; the moderns sacrifice the totality in the name of liberty. The political project of modernity and the beginning of the political liberalism in Europe (Barberis 1999, 48 and 98), therefore, come to be grounded in the ideal of a negative anti-authoritarian and individualistic liberty, emancipated from any communitarian bond. If political liberty is the great invention of the ancients, individual liberty is the great invention of the moderns, though the latter finds one of its es- sential guarantees in the former. Everyone has determined one’s existence in relation to a great collective cause: revolutionary minds have then drawn consequences replete with decisive effects and counter-effects for the un- derstanding of the saga of modern liberty, which appears not so linear and monolithic as this neat dichotomy might suggest at first glance. Between communitas and immunitas and their contradictions What marks the beginning of modern revolution is the margin between the subject and the world, the distance and diffidence separating the individ- ual from the community. The notion of modern subject has a clearly indi- vidualistic trait, which is determined by its entrepreneurial and acquisitive “bourgeois passions”. These passions or virtues of the new homo faber and homo laborans – who will then become homo consumens – produce an an- thropological modification that necessarily affects the social body. Modern individuals, in fact, demand from the existing institutions a new mode of management of their needs and a rationalization of their instincts, together with a negative strategy capable of assuring and protecting their spaces of liberty and autonomy, limiting to a minimum the interference of the com- munity in the life of the individuals (Locke is paradigmatic in this respect). This results from the collective imaginary of acquisitive individualism, which is oriented to reduce the control by the other to a minimum while, at the same time, expanding the affirmation of the self and its control over things to a maximum, with a view to a better productivity. In this respect it can be observed that the survival and endurance of a civi- lisation based upon the political integration of giant macrocosms of indi- vidualistic existences seem to be astonishing. Amongst the most signifi- The survival and endurance of a civilisation based upon the political integration of giant macrocosms of individualistic existences seem to be astonishing.