Identità e iterazioni democratiche in Seyla Benhabib. Verso un altro cosmopolitismo?

Since the end of the Twentieth century, the socio-cultural boundaries of political communities have been challenged, state sovereignty has been frayed and an intensifi cation of antagonisms related to religious, ethnic and cultural issues has emerged. Within this framework, this paper intends to investigate whether the “democratic iterations” envisioned by Seyla Benhabib (2004) allow the “abstract” normativism of Rawls and Habermas to be overcome, without renouncing the foundations of their discourse ethics. Therefore, the contribution’s aim is to analyse how Benhabib’s proposal of a deliberative democracy opens to cultural integration and gender emancipation lets new processes of multicultural identity’s construction to begin, in view of a new model of cosmopolitan citizenship.