The Individual and the New Man. An Introduction

This introduction specifies the main arguments of the book explaining the political meaning of the concept of modernism. The aim is not to propose a new periodization through which to read the political modernity. Our aim is rather to describe the process of a new politicization resulting by the interlacement of art and politics. The traces of modernism are a pattern of the complex and difficult processing of the crisis of conscience in the passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century which is announced by the obsessive presence of concepts like New Man, Machine, Total State, Avant-gard, Plan.