The Fear of Ideas
The controversy surrounding the Italian government’s proposed revision of secondary school philosophy guidelines is not merely academic. It reveals a deeper anxiety about culture, ideology, and the fragility of democratic legitimacy in an age of political exhaustion.
The proposal, advanced under Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara and the broader cultural orientation of Giorgia Meloni’s government, would de-emphasise or exclude from official guidelines and recommended lists figures such as Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Baruch Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard, while shifting greater emphasis toward Italian and conservative intellectual traditions. This includes a relative reweighting for Giovanni Gentile, the philosopher most closely associated with Mussolini’s fascist regime. (Gentile is already a standard part of the Italian liceo philosophy curriculum, typically taught in the final year alongside his actual idealism and its political consequences. The proposed shift is therefore less about rehabilitation from obscurity than about recalibrating emphasis—potentially presenting his thought more affirmatively while reducing structured engagement with Marxist and certain other critical traditions.) Spinoza and others appear largely as collateral in the broader effort to prioritise a more nationally rooted canon.
Whether the final reform takes this exact shape or not, the symbolic significance is already clear: the state is attempting to intervene directly in the cultural formation of future generations by redefining which traditions deserve prominence in the classroom.
This is a risky move.
There is a profound irony in targeting Gramsci in particular. Gramsci is not simply another Marxist philosopher; he is the thinker who explained more clearly than anyone else how cultural hegemony functions—how institutions, education, language, and media shape the boundaries of what a society experiences as “common sense.” To de-emphasise or sideline him from curricula comes close to a textbook illustration of his central thesis.
The irony becomes even sharper when one considers Giovanni Gentile. Gentile was not merely an academic philosopher; he was one of fascism’s principal intellectual architects and the author of the 1923 school reforms designed to align education with the spiritual and political aims of the regime. He was assassinated in 1944 by communist partisans while serving as a minister in the Nazi-backed Salò Republic—a political killing tied to his active role in the regime, not an abstract execution for his writings alone. Yet the fact remains: ideas were understood to be dangerous enough to kill for, because philosophy does not remain confined to books but shapes institutions, identities, and the moral imagination through which societies understand themselves.
Italy therefore risks staging a strange historical inversion: marginalising the theorist of cultural hegemony while recalibrating the status of the philosopher of state-directed consciousness.
But the proposal also misunderstands the world in which it operates.
This is no longer the twentieth century, when states and institutions could plausibly regulate the intellectual formation of youth through schools, television, and official channels. Technology has shattered that monopoly forever. Young people today encounter political identity through algorithms, subcultures, podcasts, influencers, encrypted communities, online archives, and digital mythologies that escape institutional control almost entirely.
The likely result of de-emphasising certain traditions is therefore the opposite of what is intended. Restriction produces symbolic power. Prohibition creates fascination. A thinker excluded from official legitimacy does not disappear; he returns with the allure of forbidden knowledge.
The state may still control curricula, but it no longer controls cultural circulation.
This anxiety must also be understood geopolitically. The rise of China has generated within Western societies a diffuse fear of renewed ideological competition — a suspicion that liberal democracy may no longer be the most effective political vehicle for directing the flow of capital. In this context, Marxism once again becomes symbolically threatening, even where it has limited practical relevance to contemporary Chinese governance.
Yet this fear rests partly on a conceptual confusion.
Modern China operates a hybrid system of state-managed capitalism, technological coordination, export-driven industrial policy, and nationalist centralisation, deeply integrated into global markets. It retains Marxist-Leninist ideological framing and one-party rule but diverges significantly from classical Marxism or the emancipatory communist horizon imagined by twentieth-century European leftist thought. (That the Chinese state continues to officially invoke a Marxist lineage does not erase these practical differences; Western concern is therefore less about communism per se than about a capable geopolitical rival that claims that lineage.)
As argued in the fourth chapter of my book The Dream of Never, the globalisation of capital was accompanied by the hope that national liberal democracies would scale and spread alongside it. Instead, the opposite occurred. The rise of non-majoritarian institutions, the European Commission’s monopoly on legislative initiative, supranational arbitration, independent central banks, and the transfer of key economic decisions beyond the reach of the ballot hollowed out the political substance of Western democracies. The very mechanisms intended to embed liberalism in a globalised economy ended up proving that autocracies can manage capital at global scale with fewer internal frictions and greater decisiveness than democracies slowed by accountability. The architects of the postwar order inadvertently demonstrated that authoritarian governance can channel capital’s river more efficiently. In trying to secure liberalism through supranational structures, Western democracies have increasingly come to resemble the autocracies they once sought to tame.
The fear, then, is less about communism itself than about Western decline and erosion of relative power.
Under such conditions, legitimacy erodes. And when legitimacy erodes, democracies often begin imitating aspects of the systems they once criticised. Surveillance expands. Cultural management intensifies. Dissent becomes suspect. Political stability increasingly depends not only on persuasion, but on the regulation of acceptable discourse.
This is the deeper danger hidden inside proposals such as these.
In attempting to defend liberal democratic order against ideological threats, democracies risk internalising authoritarian instincts themselves. The fear of illiberalism becomes illiberal. The defence of openness produces selective exclusion. The protection of democratic culture begins to resemble the management of consciousness.
The irony is devastating: in trying to resist autocracies abroad, Western democracies are becoming culturally prescriptive at home.
And yet the strategy is likely doomed even on its own terms. Information no longer moves vertically from institutions to citizens. It moves horizontally, globally, and chaotically. Attempts to discipline thought through exclusion no longer produce consensus; they produce fragmentation, resentment, and intellectual countercultures impossible to predict or govern.
A confident democracy does not fear philosophers.
It argues with them.
It teaches Marx alongside Hayek, Gramsci alongside Gentile, because democratic maturity depends on confrontation with difficult ideas rather than insulation from them.
If democracies lose faith in their citizens’ ability to encounter dangerous thought without collapsing into extremism, then the crisis runs deeper than any philosopher could have caused.
The Dream of Never
Culture, Capital, and the Refusal of Limits
by Michele Rovatti
A sharp diagnosis of the growth imperative and the cultural logic that made it inevitable — from theology to AI.
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