Seconde Camere e rappresentanza politica

The second Chamber of Parliament was an ideal place of transition from a society based on social classes to a system founded on the political representation. Unlike the modern parliamentary system, based on a meaning of a community as the sum of individual holders of rights to be defended by the deputies elected by them, the society organized in classes was the mirror of societas civilis built around the presumption the classes were representative of the community in the assembly. The transition from the state organized in classes to the modern state and the gradual recognition of citizens’ individual rights have placed the imperative of a reflection on the political representation, in particular on the relationship between elector and elected. The progressive enlargement of a representative basis, an historical process that has affected mainly the lower house, has continued to resonate with a constant re-enactment of the constitutional tasks for long periods of history absolved by classes and gradually merged into the upper chamber: in a modern society, following the process degrees of institutionalization for counterpowers that connoted the society organized in classes compared to the feudal one, the troubled path of legitimacy, which involved the lower chamber, was moderated by the transfer of tasks of balancing classes in the second branch of Parliament, ideally invested since then by the assignment to wade in the long-term formal equality towards the substantial one, negative freedoms to political freedoms, transforming the sovereign authority as legitimate power based on consensus.