Page - 72 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:2

73 | www.limina-graz.eu Isabella Guanzini | Ideas of Freedom munus in the exact sense that we deeply carry responsibility for com- munity” (Esposito 2010, 49). This means that community itself becomes the utopian image of a (quasi-) solitary reverie or a (quasi-)miraculous reality, because it is the mere effect of a corpuscular mass of individualist subjects. Already within the liberal tradition, many authors have brought to light the potential drifts of the excessive polarization between democratic and lib- eral freedom, communitarianism and individualism, the discourse of du- ties and the discourse of rights. In his essay Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville analyses the complex dynamics of democratic industrial socie- ties and their administrative mechanisms, going so far as to speak about a “tyranny of the majority”: “I see an innumerable crowd of similar and equal men who spin around restlessly, in order to gain small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each one of them, withdrawn apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others; his children and his particular friends form for him the entire human species; as for the remainder of his fellow citi- zens, he is next to them, but he does not see them” (Tocqueville 2010, 1249–1250). An excess of liberalism and egalitarianism reduces human community within the narrow limits of the domestic sphere which “gladly abandons the great society to itself”, though in the end it becomes more subservient to the conformism of the “general opinion”. To the eyes of the critics of the second half of the 19th century, moderniza- tion and conformism appear as deeply intertwined phenomena. In his es- say On Liberty, the champion of modern liberty, John Stuart Mill, shows all its preoccupation with regard to the levelling tendencies of a form of egali- tarianism that cripples every expression of individuality, thereby resulting in an authentic “despotism of custom”: “The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to hu- man advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary, which is called, according to “I see an innumerable crowd of similar and equal men who spin around restlessly.”