Democracy versus demagogy. Brief considerations of some key concepts of María Zambrano’s political vision

Abstract

Persona y democracia represents the core of María Zambrano’s political vision. In particular, this brief observation focuses our attention on the key concepts of “mass” and “people”, essential to the confrontation between the ideas of democracy and demagogy. Linguistic simplification, the need for homogenisation, and fear of the different are some of the constitutive elements of mass. They are distant from the idea of person, which is instead the basis of democracy. In other words, the central point of this paper is a relational politics, grounded in hope and openness, based on an analysis of its opposites.