Rethinking democracy, freedom and protest in an age of global crises following the 2025 Italian general strike for Gaza

On September 22 in Italy, more than half a million people stood up. The unions had called for it, demanding the renewal of national contracts, a legal minimum wage to combat precarious work, and an end to the relentless budget cuts gutting public healthcare and education. They demanded a halt to the country’s spiralling military spending and its complicity in foreign wars.

Beyond this, the citizens rose against one of the mightiest foes democracy has encountered since its institution. As is often the case with such Leviathans, this foe permeates society and its members yet lacks a concrete face. It weighs us down, it bleeds us out, it consumes us.

Menefreghismo. Italian for “I-don’t-give-a-fuck-ery”.

It’s seeing the IDF bomb a hospital and swiping to the next TikTok, it’s witnessing starving children in the rubble and skipping to the next Instagram story, it’s watching a report on the Global Sumud Flotilla, and then changing the channel.

Across hundreds of squares in the country, protestors stood proud, refusing to remain in complicit silence upon a livestreamed genocide. For once, the citizens have refused to swipe, to skip, to change channel. What we saw on September 22 was the Italian people exercising liberty – a liberty that has been replaced with the liberty of choosing between 12 brands of diet soda and seven streaming platforms.

Thousands took to the streets in Italy on September 22 to protest against Israel’s

The liberty of ancients compared with that of moderns

For students of liberal thought, this essay, published by the Swiss thinker Benjamin Constant, serves as the “North Star” for the sort of liberties that a modern constitutional state should strive to serve and protect. It is not my aim to defend the validity of this document as an ideological endgame – I’d like to approach it as a diagnosis which Constant was able to make at a very early stage of the liberal state.

Undoubtedly, it has carried Western civilisation with some amount of success but, in a truly Hegelian fashion, it’s a concept of liberty which would eventually resolve into the democratic crisis facing modern citizens across the globe, causing Fukuyama himself to toy with the idea of “the end of the end of history”.

The liberty of the ancients

The Ancients that Constant was speaking of were those from Classical Greece, around the times of Pericles and Cleisthenes. His original text is quite straightforward, defining the liberty of the time as consisting of:

“…exercising collectively, but directly, several parts of the complete sovereignty; in deliberating, in the public square, over war and peace; in forming alliances with foreign governments; in voting laws, in pronouncing judgments; in examining the accounts, the acts, the stewardship of the magistrates; in calling them to appear in front of the assembled people, in accusing, condemning or absolving them.”

To put it simply, it was through the res publica that citizens exercised their liberty. I don’t intend to glorify the Athenian model, as, undoubtedly, this condition was not without problems. On one hand, the status of citizenship was extremely exclusive, leaving important segments of the population unrepresented – women, foreigners and slaves.

On the other hand, such synthesis of the political with the private creates the potential for what John Stuart Mill or Alexis de Tocqueville called “the tyranny of the majority”, the dissipation of the individual into the mass. Notwithstanding, I’d invite you to consider this idea of liberty as a model for “citizens of the world” – how do you expect a society to develop in which participation and collective action are the standards for actualising our liberty?

The liberty of the moderns

And then came the revolution. With it, the individual as the cornerstone of a new society, guided by the Enlightenment values of reason and autonomy. The modern citizen was one who prized a type of liberty that appeared more immediate, more palpable – a liberty of developing a private sphere which would occupy a larger part than it ever did in history: associate, discuss, own, or refrain from any of the above.

The liberty of the Moderns, for Constant, rejects an invasive, paternalistic government. Constant himself pinpoints the change of paradigm, stating:

“Thus among the ancients the individual, almost always sovereign in public affairs, was a slave in all his private relations. As a citizen, he decided on peace and war; as a private individual, he was constrained.

Among the moderns, on the contrary, the individual, independent in his private life, is, even in the freest of states, sovereign only in appearance. His sovereignty is restricted and almost always suspended.”

This is the idea of liberty that permeated the last two centuries.

To be fair, the “Liberty of the Moderns” was, in its time, a revolutionary shield. Constant envisioned a world where individuals were protected from the arbitrary power of the state, free to enjoy their security, their property, and their private lives through the rule of law and representative government. For a society emerging from the shadow of the guillotine and the whims of monarchs, this was a promise of peace and stability. It was, perhaps, the liberty needed for then.

The liberty of the Postmoderns

Decades later, however, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt would offer a devastating second opinion on this great trade-off. She saw that the retreat into the private sphere wasn’t a pure victory for freedom, but a profound loss. We had gained the quiet contentment of our individual lives but had lost what she called “public happiness”: the unique joy that comes from acting together, in public, to shape our shared world. Arendt warned us that a life lived only in the private realm was, in a political sense, incomplete (not to mention that the misery and discomfort that left the Western household wasn’t simply eradicated, but exported elsewhere).

We find ourselves in a world vastly distant from that of Pericles, and that of Constant; correspondingly, we are in need of redefining key concepts that inhabit the social. We speak of technofeudalism, gender theory, decolonisation and countless more ideas that not only describe our Zeitgeist but present us with the big questions and challenges of our generation.

In a conversation with Yanis Varoufakis in 2016, Noam Chomsky claimed: “… one of the paradoxes of neo-liberalism is that it’s not new and it’s not liberal”. Beyond the humorous intent of his comment, his breakdown strikes at the core of my thesis – namely that the liberty guiding the modern neo-liberal democracies is one vastly different to that of the Ancients, and that of the Moderns.

Think of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People – is this the same Liberty that the neoliberal establishment concretely guarantees? In the timeless painting, Liberty, symbolised as a woman among a pile of corpses, stands tall, guiding men, women and children against the oppressor, taking them out of the private into the most public of settings. If you believe humans to truly be political animals, you’d see this as the most actual condition of humanity.

Yes, perhaps as a general trend, Western peoples appear to have broken free from state interference, but this counterfeit freedom has been nothing but the modernisation of the chains binding the individual. It is the right to curate a personal brand, to choose between algorithmically defined realities, to express dissent within corporate-approved channels that harvest our rage for engagement metrics. The liberty of the Postmoderns offers us the illusion of infinite choice while demanding the price of our collective political agency.

It is the perfect cage – and the saddest part, it’s one we built ourselves and don’t want to exit. It is in this cage that Menefreghismo has been allowed to grow, in a feedback loop resulting in the three Ds that afflict civil society: Detachment, Disaffection, Disenchantment.

• Detachment: because when liberty means being left alone, participation becomes a chore, not a right.
• Disaffection: because a state that only exists to protect our private lives feels distant and alien when it fails to address our collective crises.
• Disenchantment: because when we are told that our only power lies in our individual choices, the very idea of collective change seems like a naïve fantasy.

Citizens don’t believe in the liberal establishment anymore; politics has been relegated to a secondary, even tertiary attribute of the modern individual. Most people will pat themselves on the back for showing up to the ballots every four years and posting a picture with #IVoted – today, this is the embodiment of an active citizen.

Voter abstention is a problem, but we can’t treat it as an isolated phenomenon. It is a symptom of a body politic that lacks a soul – a citizenship that believes that no matter what they do, things won’t change, so they might as well retreat into their algorithm-built cocoon and look after themselves.

Look at Lady Liberty again in the painting. What I saw on the general strike of September 22 was a brief glimpse into another type of liberty. I’m not advocating for a return to the liberty of the Ancients. History rarely moves backwards, and when it does, it doesn’t stay there for long. I’m advocating for a renewed, intersectional concept of liberty – it requires strikes, protests, boycotts, civil disobedience. It requires exiting the private and reconciling with the social. It requires resilience (sumud), endurance, and a lot of frustration.

Antonio Gramsci would call the moment we’re living in an “interregnum” – an in-between time where the old world dies but the new cannot yet be born. The task is clear: to wrest liberty back from indifference. Not alone, but together. Not as consumers, but as citizens. Not tomorrow, but now. It is up to us to decide which paradigm will carry us forward into prosperity, or condemn us to further bloodshed.

Carpe Diem

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