Is Democracy a Lost Cause?—Paradoxes of the Imperfect Invention

According to enlightened and popular belief, democracy is the most perfect and virtuous regime that human beings ever devised. This book seeks to evaluate democracy as one of many technologies for exercising power. Democracy, and the noble principles inspiring it, are a technology particularly suited to governing modern and post modern societies and although it certainly is an extraordinary invention, democracy deserves to be evaluated on a realistic and pragmatic level. Mastropaolo adopts an historical perspective of a political sociologist to describe the transformations undergone by democratic regimes during the last half century. Since the end of the Second World War, despite the apparent continuity of their forms, two types of democratic regime, and two very different ways of thinking about democracy, have succeeded one another. So much more than a success-story, the government of the people, by the people and for the people, is a puzzle, still waiting to be solved.

Alfio Mastropaolo teaches Political Science at the University of Turin. He is a specialist of Italian politics, of political elites and of democratic theory. His works include: Antipolitica, Alle origini della crisi italiana (2000) e La mucca pazza della democrazia. Nuove destre, populismo, antipolitica (2005).