THE FUTURE OF MODERN DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY APPEARS TO depend on the amount of political participation, i.e. on how much its individuals will have to participate in political interests and activities. To be sure, the way industrial society functions requires an increasing involvement of the individual in public activities. But is there a danger that the private lives and aspirations of all individuals will be increasingly absorbed by the ‘public cause’? And that the Church, the intellectuals, the artists, the trade unions, and last but not least, the media might become transmission-belts of the ideological-political organizations?

The welfare state gives in principle a due primacy to man's free choice of how to fulfil himself, for himself and not by the state and for the state. But within the welfare state, which could continue this balancing act, which is this balancing act, it is the individuals themselves who seem now to be more and more attracted, for stark economic reasons, but also because of ideological fallacies by the ‘external goods’ rather than by the ontological and interiorized raison d'être. Are we witnessing the transformation of the real man into the citizen, or comrade, of man into fan?