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as doctors, psychologists, engineers, sociologists, or journalists. ‘Com -
petence’ has replaced idealism.22
Many of the intellectuals, who have joined in this new varie -
gated liberalism of competences described by Pasolini, seem today
to form the new dominant elite identified by Christopher Lasch.
Both Pasolini and Lasch deal with categories within the society
which can potentially include powerful elite groups. On the one
hand, in all of Pasolini’s essays, his aversion to certain Italian con-
servative and catholic politicians and clerics is well known, but
Pasolini is not particularly afraid of them. In fact, he does not con-
sider them a threat to democracy anymore, as they pertain to a very
‘old’, traditional and almost extinct system of power:
The future does not belong to the old cardinals, the old politicians,
the old magistrates, or the old policemen. The future belongs to
the young middle classes who do not need to exert the power any-
more by using traditional instruments; who do not need the
Church anymore […] The new middle classes’ power needs a total-
ly pragmatic and hedonistic spirit for the consumers: a purely tech-
nical and earthbound universe.23
On the other hand, Pasolini, as well as Lasch always mentions the
new system of power, the one of the elites, or of the ‘competence’
in general terms, regardless of specific individuals. Nevertheless, it
is worth noticing that Pasolini and Lasch often engage in contro-
versy with individuals who pertain to their own political tendency
and to their own ‘category’, progressive, liberal, non-conservative
intellectuals and scholars. Pasolini argues and debates with intel-
lectuals and writers such as Eco, Calvino, Moravia and others,24
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22 Therefore, as the Italian scholar Claudio Giunta points out in his book, “it is not a paradox that
in our present society, where traditional authority apparently has disappeared, we live hetero-
directed lives and we get advice and instructions even in fields such as nutrition, children edu-
cation, leisure activities, where individuals’ will had always been sovereign”. Claudio Giunta,
L’assedio del presente. Sulla rivoluzione culturale in corso (The Siege of the Present. On the Current
Cultural Revolution), Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008, p. 54. The translation from Italian is mine.
23 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Scritti corsari, p. 15.
24 Ibid. For the controversy against Umberto Eco, his prejudices against homosexuals and his ideo -
logical point of view on abortion, see the brief essay entitled “Febbraio 1975. Cani” (“February
1975. Dogs”), pp. 115–121; for the one against Italo Calvino, on some historical and political
considerations of his, see the brief essay entitled “8 luglio 1974. Limitatezza della storia e
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