  We show that abelian bosonization of 1+1 dimensional fermion systems can be
interpreted as duality transformation and, as a conseguence, it can be
generalized to arbitrary dimensions in terms of gauge forms of rank $d-1$,
where $d$ is the dimension of the space. This permit to treat condensed matter
systems in $d>1$ as gauge theories. Furthermore we show that in the ``scaling"
limit the bosonized action is quadratic in a wide class of condensed matter
systems. (Talk given at ``Common trends in Condensed Matter and High Energy
Physics", September 3--10, 1995 -- Chia).
