Ricerc@Sapienza

In contemporary society, intelligence has become an essential qualifying element not only for the individual as such but also for the community to which he belongs, for te way in which he administers his personal or collective assets, because of the way he lives and of the technologies he uses. Being smart has become a cross-cutting need for multiple fields of human life. But what does being a smart person mean? Can he also be a prosumer? And Finally, when do individuals cease being consumers to become prosumers?

Although classical sociology has long neglected the role of environmental factors in the determination and interpretation of social facts, considering the environment as an external variable that is complementary or even irrelevant to the social fact (Durkheim, 1982), in recent years the biological and physiological dimensions began to recover the space that had long been denied to them. Peace studies and sustainablility studies have played an important role on it.

By giving the prevailing literature about biocapitalism for granted, the following pages are therefore dedicated to these aspects that are generally “neglected” by reflection. The focus is on links and sense, or if we want, to culture the relationships that biocapitalism produces and feeds on. This generally happens through the tools of ideology and communication, but also through a true ideology of communication.

In nowadays globalized world, highly interconnected by various kind of networks, first of all the social networks, a radical phenomenon is rapidly gaining momentum: that of the sharing economy. From the United States to the Eastern Europe, the phenomenon is becoming increasingly vast and increasingly discussed. Uber, Airbnb, HomeExchange, and so on are extending like wildfire. Even in Albania we start to see the first startups and the first experimentations. But what does this mean? Does represent an opportunity of development for the country? What are its critical issues?

Western liberal democracies are nowadays
experiencing the decline of “middle-class constitutionalism”. A
growing economic inequality is threatening the contemporary
constitutional state and its political stability, eroding social
homogeneity considered by Hermann Heller to be a necessary feature
for a sound democracy. This process has significant democratic
backlashes and political implications. Looking in historical and
comparative perspectives at the dynamic balance between economic

Stefano Velotti critically discusses Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Seeroy' text L'esthétisation du monde. Vivre à l'âge du capitalisme artiste. Velotti criticizes the two authors for their lack of conceptual precision and the rhetorical use of catchphrases, as well as for the partial, First-World-based diagnosis of contemporary capitalism.

Max Weber’s account of the rise of capitalism focused on his concept of a Protestant ethic, valuing diligence in earning and saving money but restraint in spending it. However, such individual restraint is foreign to contemporary understandings of finance, which treat ever-increasing consumption and debt as natural, almost essential, for maintaining the economic cycle of buying and selling.