Che cosa è l'identità collettiva?

Communitarians object to liberals that, without the experience of belonging together in a community, the ground of the social contract disappears: social obligations become temporary, troubled, and defeasible. The notion of collective identity is crucial for them, since they need it to explain what binds together those who belong in a community. However, it will be claimed here that the notion is incoherent since, on the one hand, it must be possible to know which features are constitutive of the identity of any given community and, on the other, no general and reasonably objective method or procedure is available to get to know it. Such a procedure ought to resemble, at least in outline, a poll taken from the members of the community. Arrow’s Theorem shows that severe limitations inhere in any voting procedure. Since all of the Theorem’s assumptions hold in case a poll aims at establishing the content of the identity of any given community, it is claimed that not even as a thought experiment can a poll amount to a method for giving objective content to the notion of collective identity.;

Marco Santambrogio, Che cosa è l'identità collettiva? in "TEORIA POLITICA" 3/2007, pp 19-43, DOI: