Dynamics of Legitimation: History, Myth, and the Construction of Identity

Presenting themes tackled by different academic disciplines (in particular, Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology, and Classical Studies), the author adopts a transdisciplinary approach to investigate how time shapes human identity, both individual and collective. Part of his thesis is that all empirical representations of time and of human identity can be reduced to just two paradigms - historical and mythical experience - that share the same transcendental structure, defined as a "dynamics of legitimation." "Dynamics of legitimation" is a transcendental structure, common to different cultures, which founds the shaping of human identity, both individual and collective, through the representation of time. On the empirical level, this dynamics determines two different sorts of identities (the subjective and the functional one) and two different representations of time (historical perspective and mythopoeia) that are responsible for the actual representations that time takes, all the way from ancient to modern societies.