Democratic Elitism
The Founding Myth of American Political Science
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Harvard University Press
Publishing:25th Apr '25
£33.95
This title is due to be published on 25th April, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
A searing argument—and work of meticulous scholarship—about how American political scientists misinterpreted the elite theory of democracy and in so doing made our political system vulnerable to oligarchic takeover.
Do competitive elections secure democracy, or might they undermine it by breeding popular disillusionment with liberal norms and procedures? The so-called Italian School of Elitism, comprising Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels, voiced this very concern. They feared that defining democracy exclusively through representative practices creates unrealistic expectations of what elections can achieve, generating mass demoralization and disillusionment with popular government.
The Italian School’s concern has gone unheeded, even as their elite theory has been foundational for political science in the United States. Democratic Elitism argues that scholars have misinterpreted the Italians as conservative, antidemocratic figures who championed the equation of democracy with representative practices to restrain popular participation in politics. Natasha Piano contends not only that the Italian School’s thought has been distorted but also that theorists have ignored its main objective: to contain demagogues and plutocrats who prey on the cynicism of the masses. We ought to view these thinkers not as elite theorists of democracy but as democratic theorists of elitism.
The Italian School’s original writings do not reject electoral politics; they emphasize the power and promise of democracy beyond the ballot. Elections undoubtedly are an essential component of functioning democracies, but in order to preserve their legitimacy we must understand their true capacities and limitations. It is past time to dispel the delusion that we need only elections to solve political crises, or else mass publics, dissatisfied with the status quo, will fall deeper into the arms of authoritarians who capture and pervert formal democratic institutions to serve their own ends.
Natasha Piano makes a compelling case that generations of political scientists have misunderstood the elite theorists of democracy to be defenders of the elitism that they in fact attacked. More than this, she shows that they warned us of the ways in which demagogues can mobilize disaffected voters against democracies when they fail to deliver good government. This message is as timely today as it was in the 1930s. Democratic Elitism is essential reading for anyone who is troubled by the challenges that governments face across the democratic world. -- Ian Shapiro, author of Uncommon Sense
A bracing and imaginative history of ideas that inverts what we think we know about democracy and elitism. In this insightful book, Natasha Piano provokes us to think anew about democracy’s past and future, and asks whether the democracy we want can ever be tied to elections alone. -- Katrina Forrester, author of In the Shadow of Justice
In a brilliant revisionist account of early twentieth-century political theory, Natasha Piano shows how mid-century American political scientists perversely misread important critiques of elite self-dealing. In so doing, they limited the definition of democracy to the conduct of ‘free and fair elections’ between candidates pre-approved by economic and social elites. This book has startling relevance to our present democratic deficits. -- Nils Gilman, Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President of the Berggruen Institute
Natasha Piano offers an astonishing, captivating, and truly original interpretation of elite theory. Contrary to the agnostic reading of Italian elite theory that has dominated political science, Piano invites us to see it as an incipient critique of the oligarchic tendencies of representative government. -- Nadia Urbinati, author of Me the People
ISBN: 9780674295377
Dimensions: 235mm x 156mm x 16mm
Weight: 534g
256 pages