Fulvia Giachetti 31 October 2025
What is liberté? Freedom. What kind of freedom? The freedom to do whatever one wants within the limits of the law. When can one do whatever one wants? When one possesses a million. Does freedom allow everyone to have a million? No, it doesn’t. What is a person without a million? A person without a million is not someone who does whatever they want, but someone to whom others do whatever they want.” Thus wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1862, upon returning from his first trip to Europe. In just a few lines, the Russian writer grasped a contradiction that would come to define all modern political thought: the promise of universal freedom versus the reality of a freedom distributed according to wealth. What at the time sounded like a moral provocation now returns as a historical diagnosis of the increasingly worn-out relationship between capitalism and democracy, one that fully embraces the crisis of liberalism and that of freedom.