How did competitive elections become the sine qua non of democracy? And what was lost in that association? Natasha Piano’s brilliant and bracing book, Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science, provides a bold, revisionary answer to this question. She shows that the originators of the so-called “elite theory of democracy”—Italian scholars Gaetano Mosca and Vilfred Pareto—precisely wanted to call attention to the dangers of the conflation of democracy with elections. They worried about plutocratic dynamics inherent in electoral competition. Yet far from heeding this warning, political science rushed to embrace its supposedly more “realistic” theory of democracy, leaving the discipline ill-equipped to confront the oligarchic capture of electoral institutions in our own moment.
Piano confronts head-on the widely accepted disciplinary story about the development of political science and democratic theory. According to the established narrative, eighteenth and nineteenth century revolutionary democratic movements pursued democracy, understood as the rule of the people, based on utopian fictions like that of government by the popular will. These naive aspirations were then confronted with the cold reality of scientific analysis by a variety of “elite” theorists—Max Weber in Germany, Gaetano Mosca and Vilfred Pareto in Italy, with Robert Michels and Joseph Schumpeter as a bridge between Central and Southern Europe. Despite some small differences, all these thinkers argued that democracy was really about competition between various elites for followers and power.
Their ideas were then absorbed into mainstream, mid-century political science. The founders of American political science used the elite theorists both as a resource for a scientific approach to politics and as a foil, insofar as the Americans wanted to be more supportive of democracy than the Europeans. Thus, the Americans were able to use the ideas of the elite theorists to define a domain of inquiry for the burgeoning social science of politics as well as to develop an appropriate normative orientation—namely, a wary appreciation of electoral competition as the most we can reasonably hope for in democracy.
Piano upends this entire narrative. Mosca and Pareto are at the heart of her argument. Far from issuing a blanket condemnation of democracy, both scholars, writing in the context of post-unification Italy, saw that Italy’s nascent electoral system was a vehicle for plutocratic forces. The persistent economic inequality between Northern and Southern Italy meant that the new system was largely a vehicle for the domination of wealthy Northern interests. Both thought that genuine democracy required extra-electoral measures, such as massive redistribution or more participatory checks on elites, to counter this threat of plutocratic capture.
Yet this basic thrust of their thought, Piano argues, has largely been missed because their readers have neglected both the immediate Italian political context as well as the larger tradition of Italian pessimistic rhetoric and theorizing. This pessimism, Piano avers, was meant to be politically productive. It sought to inoculate both the public and intellectuals from ideological mystifications—such as, for example, the idea that elections alone make a society democratic. The beginning of this shift was already present in their disciple, Robert Michels. Although he still retained their basic orientation toward countering the threat of plutocracy, his thinking tips from a salutary pessimism to a destructive fatalism about politics and parties, a fatalism that may help explain his eventual embrace of fascism.
But the real shift occurs with Schumpeter, the subject of the most provocative chapter in the book. In Piano’s reading, Schumpeter adds a distinctively Austrian irony to the Italians’ pessimism. While there was still a fighting spirit in Mosca and Pareto, Schumpeter adopts a cool, distanced attitude. He thinks that elites have surrendered the defense of the very liberal institutions they benefit from, instead adopting woolly, socialist doctrines. If they would wake up, they would see that their best hope is to wrestle the language of democracy to fit with the actual, disappointing practices of liberal capitalist societies. He dares them to publicly proclaim that, actually, democracy is just electoral competition between elites. Put differently, Schumpeter advocates for exactly the move Mosca and Pareto warn against: the ideologically driven conflation of democracy with elitist liberalism.
Surprisingly, Schumpeter’s gambit succeeds. Through his influence and the uptake of the Italian elitists in American political science, as well as the pressures of the Cold War, political scientists increasingly identify the main problem of the discipline as the study of democracy narrowly understood as the study of elections. For both advocates and detractors, the “minimalist” or “elitist” theory of democracy was now established as a specific doctrine with a canon and history.
What was forgotten in this moment of supposed victory for the elite theorists? Piano argues that these historical misinterpretations and suppressions blinded political science and political theory to the forces at play today: plutocratic corruption of elections, mass disenchantment, and the appeal of populist outsiders who can rally the people against this corruption. Piano argues that returning to the original elite theorists—Mosca and Pareto—can help orient us in this moment. Rather than ascribing this oligarchic ascendency to popular incapacity or the deformation of elections, we should see this as part of the inherent dynamics of electoral versions of democracy. Countering plutocratic erosion, then, cannot just mean restoring the status quo of competitive elections. Rather, new, more muscular modes of popular empowerment are necessary.
I can hardly do justice to the range of Piano’s argument here. As a deft blending of impressive historical and contextual readings and contemporary democratic theory, the book will be of interest to both intellectual historians and contemporary democratic theorists. For intellectual historians, it will force a more careful confrontation with the genesis of contemporary political science. But here, one also wonders about how far to characterize Mosca and Pareto’s pessimism as a critical, democratic orientation. What stopped them from providing a more forthright and clear articulation of their democratic goals? Was their subtle pessimism ultimately self-defeating?
An alternative framing to Piano’s reading is that Mosca, Pareto, and Schumpeter were all trying to articulate a new version of liberalism in a rapidly changing—and democratizing—world. To be sure, none ascribed to a simplistic, free-market version of liberalism. But their wary critique of plutocratic capture was articulated as much in a spirit of liberalism as of democracy. The issue was that electoral politics enabled rampant rent-seeking, undermining basic liberal principles and harming the public. This is why Mosca, for example, did not hesitate to advocate for a restricted franchise, given the worry that an enfranchised Italian South would be ripe for corruption and rent-seeking. Their orienting ideal, as Piano argues, was “good government,” which sounds very much like the traditional concerns of liberalism—the rule of law, independent institutions, and pluralism.
There is then perhaps a second irony submerged in Piano’s story. Mosca and Pareto correctly identified the threats that capitalist elites pose to both democracy and liberalism. But because they were wary of a full-throated defense of political equality and what it may entail—because they erred on the side of liberalism rather than democracy—they inadvertently contributed to the consolidation of post-war liberalism and its neglect of the plutocratic threat. As Piano notes, we now know that the post-war moment was an economic anomaly, and democracies have returned to a high inequality norm with rampant plutocratic capture. One lesson we could draw from this history, then, is that the way out today must involve robust, egalitarian, and populist democracy, rather than a refashioned liberalism.
