Sans rêve et sans merci: il sacro oggi

This article deals with an old subject through a new approach. The old topic, maybe one of the most typical and peculiar ones in the social sciences, is the sacred; the new approach is represented by the intent to invert the modern (weberian) process of secularization. If Modernity is to be defined as a process of slow, inexorable removal from the holy foundation of the social bound, “post-modernity” (whatever it means) marks a kind of “return to the sacred”, not in the sense of a collective conversion to the oldest forms of religious devotion, but, on the contrary, in the sense of a social “sacrifice” of what could be considered the last, most important and disturbing sphere of social attraction and affection: the consumerism.