Abstract
The article aims to analyze the historical and theoretical reasons of the weakness of the critical voices of current societies. The author tries to revitalize the social critique through a reconstruction of the material and ideological transformations of the recent history of capitalism, which have signed a secret alliance between this form of life and the critiques originally directed against it. Like capitalism, the critique seems to be permeated by a new spirit too: after having distinguished the ancient model of critique from its modern version, the author describes the ideological and organizational aspects of its new spirit.