«“But are you still there?” The question takes me by surprise, not so much for the curiosity it expresses, but for the veil of menace it carries. “Where?”, I grumble. “But to the Left, no?”, she urges me, my daughter. “Well yes...”, I reply without thinking too much about it, unaware of the quagmire I’m getting myself into.”Why?”. “Why?!?”. Yes, why do I insist on staying in a place that no longer exists? ... A system of ideas and promises betrayed every day by those same people who say they still want to represent it? ...Something that, if it ever made sense, still failed to overcome the time barrier separating the 20th century from ‘our’ time, her and mine, the time in which we live today?».

In an imaginary dialogue with his teenage daughter, the author, a political scientist and a leading exponent of the Italian left, ventures into a difficult reflection on the past, from the’ 68 and the French May to the workers’ strikes in the large factories of northern Italy in the 1970s, to the dark years of terrorism.

Up to that great watershed that was the fall of the Berlin Wall, that 1989 that saw not only the dissolution of an ideal, which for more than half a century had seemed to represent the future, but the hands-down triumph of neo-liberalism and a form of totalising competitive individualism, where only monetary gain gave meaning to one’s existence. 

And what about equality, proclaimed by all democratic constitutions? The common good as a social ideal? 

«Gone are the myths and collective rituals, gone are the symbols and languages that founded identities... There remains, however, an indelible difference, firmly planted in the chaotic everyday life we live, between those of us who continue to suffer and be indignant at the sight of old and new inequalities, and those on the other side who live with them distractedly, or who theorise their natural necessity. Those who consider them an injustice to be removed, and those who consider them a status quo to be preserved».