1. A ‘ civitas maxima’ of progress? – That the civitas maxima progress promised by Kant and Kantian idealists reveals itself today, in the phase of multi-ethnic coexistence that is supposed to herald its concrete realisation, a formless, degraded civitas, is a paradox that deserves attention. There is in it perhaps a kind of necessity, caused surely by the programmatic disparity that, at least for those still lingering within the Kantian viewpoint, exists between what is and what ought to be, between theoretical dimension and historicity – but caused, further back, by the very nature of the juridical means invoked in order to ensure the success of the pan-communicative cosmopolis. I refer, in the terms Habermas uses, to the so-called law as universal medium, or «category of social mediation between facts and norms»:a law that claims contradictorily to embody a certain moral content and simultaneously to remain a neutral technique of communication. This while it is by now clear – especially in light of recent international events, marked by the experience of ‘humanitarian’ wars and the widespread, uncontrolled problem of mass immigration – that the liberal dream of identifying law (with its inseparable centralised jurisdiction) as the universal means of resolving conflicts corresponds to an abstract normative ideal that does not stand up to criticism stemming from any serious, realistic investigation.

Nevertheless, the temptation to produce facile neutralisations (carefully dissembling the ideological manipulations that from time to time are put in place) continues to be strong and to show up even within theorisations that claim to be a rational response to the logic of violence that inspires the technostructures of global power. This is certainly so in regard to Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative action, which despite its stated intentions ends up substantially reinforcing the rationales of already strong powers, and therefore lining with cosmopolitan-humanitarian justifications the extreme developments of a doctrine of the intimately coercive costitutional-liberal State.