HANNIBAL IS IN THE CITY: SEVERAL REFLECTIONS ON CONTEMPORARY BARBARIANS. A SOCIAL-CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH
HANNIBAL IS IN THE CITY: SEVERAL REFLECTIONS ON CONTEMPORARY BARBARIANS. A SOCIAL-CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH

Summary/Abstract: For the renowned Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, barbarism equates with the incapacity of persons or whole societies to reason and assume themselves critically. Barbarism is therefore the main ingredient of totalitarian regimes, dogmatic ideologies and discretionary practices. In the developed countries, the present economic and identitary crisis has shifted the attention from the responsible Western barbarians to exterior ones, immigrants or foreign cultures being in this case the most convenient scapegoats. But, as the title of this essay metaphorically points out, Hannibal is not at the gates, it is inside the polis, ardently championing a diverse repertoire of discourses like democracy, human rights or free market in order to silently consolidate its hegemony at the expense of real rights, democracy and freedom. Material and political asymmetry is growing in the Western world, a clear sign of barbarization for social-constructivists like Nicholas Onuf. On the other hand, the West still possesses both the material (economy) and intellectual (modernity) resources necessary to overcome the crisis, even if the geopolitical configuration of the world is slowly shifting towards East. In social-constructivist terms, we can avoid the barbarization of this process by impelling actors to reshape structures trough a protest culture that will claim alternative, less asymmetric constructions whenever the situation calls for it.

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