A Sense for Political Community
Roberta Sala, Sarah Songhorian · 2023
The aim of this chapter is to gesture towards a new sense of political community by means of an analysis of political obligations and political motivations. To that aim, we will elaborate on Italians’ compliance with the norms and rules issued during the first and second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. Thus, in Section 10.1, we describe how people dealt with such rules. In Section 10.2, we assess the reasons people provided for complying or not with the legal dispositions. In Section 10.3, we discuss the case of non-compliance. To contrast it, sanctions were adopted backed by the harm principle or by impure paternalism. Hence, we gesture towards enlargement of the concept of political obligation by exploring, in Section 10.4, the role of regulated emotions – as opposed to immediate ones – in motivating people to comply with rules and norms that are not necessarily those they avow. The final goal is to investigate if and to what extent the wider political community can be properly felt as such by individuals and to wonder whether it might incorporate the strong motivation we feel towards the members of our own group.