← New Books Network
New Books Network
Natasha Piano, "Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science" (Harvard UP, 2025)
00:56:45
Loading summary
Transcript37 lines
- [00:00]
Podcast Host (Sponsor Announcer)
This episode is brought to you by Avid tv. Where do savvy minds go to find masterful documentaries and hard to find films from across the globe? Try a free month long trial at Ovid and go beyond the mainstream. Indiewire says Ovid is unafraid to program films that matter and the New York Times calls Ovid a terrific streamer for independent film fans. A boutique hand curated streaming service, yet now with over 2,400 titles, Ovid is the home to films by auteurs from Chantal Akerman to Chris Marker to Wang Bing and has the richest collection of probing, avant garde and provocative films anywhere. Ovid offers many things except conformity. Try Ovid today and get your first month free. Use promo code N B N O V I D. That's Ovid TV promo code N B N O V I D It's okay not to be perfect with finances. Experian is your big financial friend and here to help. Did you know you can get matched with credit cards on the app? Some cards are labeled no Ding decline which means if you're not approved they won't hurt your credit scores. Download the Experian app for free today. Applying for no Ding decline cards won't hurt your credit scores. If you aren't initially approved, initial approval will result in a hard inquiry which may impact your credit scores.
- [01:16]
Dr. Natasha Piano
Experian this episode is brought to you by Lifelock.
- [01:21]
Podcast Host (Sponsor Announcer)
It's Cybersecurity Awareness Month and Lifelock has tips to protect your identity. Use strong passwords, set up multi factor authentication, report phishing and update the software on your devices and for comprehensive identity protection, let LifeLock alert you to suspicious uses of your personal information. Lifelock also fixes identity theft, guaranteed or your money back. Stay smart, safe and protected with a 30 day free trial@lifelock.com Podcast terms apply. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:52]
Moteza Hajizadeh
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Moteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Natasha Piano about a recent book that she's published with Harvard University Press. The book is called Democratic Elitism the Founding Myth of American Political Science. Dr. Natasha Piano is an Assistant professor of Political Studies at UCLA University and she's also the co editor of Florence Political Writing From Petrarch to Machiavelli. Natasha, welcome to New Books Network.
- [02:30]
Dr. Natasha Piano
Thank you for having me. I'm really happy to be here.
- [02:34]
Moteza Hajizadeh
Before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself, tell us about your field of expertise, what attracted you to the field of political science and also, more importantly, the idea of the book. How did the idea of this book came to you?
- [02:49]
Dr. Natasha Piano
Great. Well, I'm democratic theorist and a historian of political thought, and I specialize in European and Anglo American intellectual history in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particular focus on the Italian political tradition, how it was interpreted and reimagined in America in the 20th century. And this book has been a long time in the making. I think I could safely say that ever since my undergraduate studies, I was always struck by the kind of cognitive dissonance in how we Americans talk about democracy. On the one hand, in academic circles and even in everyday language, democracy is usually defined pretty narrowly, mostly in terms of free and fair elections. So that's one element or one of our habits. But at the same time, everyone knows democracy mean something more than that, more than elections. And even the familiar phrase, oh, elections are a necessary but insufficient condition for democracy just raises more questions because it leaves us endlessly debating about what that extra thing is in democracy. What do you need besides elections to make it work? And so I've always been interested in those two elements even before, long before I started formally writing this book. And I think that addressing that kind of cognitive dissonances is really why I ended up writing it. And this book kind of challenges the narrow story of democracy as elections. It kind of, in a nutshell, tends. Well, it tends to. Well, the book suggests that we tend to assume that democracy simply means competitive elections, that if people can vote, the system is democratic. But the Italian thinkers that we often label elitists actually saw things very differently. They weren't anti democratic in the way that we usually think. They were worried about plutocracy, about how wealth can capture politics through electoral systems. And they argued that elections on their own tend to reinforce elite control rather than challenge it, because wealthy interests shape who can compete in elections and who can win. So my, my book kind of flips this traditional story and it shows that these Italian thinkers that we usually assume were elite elitists weren't trying to exclude the masses. They were warning us that elections alone can't protect democracy. So true democracy, they believed, or the democracy that the way that we use the term 10 depends on institutions that help keep economic power in check, not just voting on certain officials every few years. So that's just in general what the book's about.
- [05:42]
Moteza Hajizadeh
This is very contemporary, I think. These are, this is, these are the things that everybody's these days talking about, at least those who are interested in politics and how elections have sort of been. It's true. It's. They're all done. I mean, in the Western world, mostly they're done in a democratic fashion, but you can see how the influence of money and big corporates, sort of. Sort of. And also the power they have over media, you can pretty much say that the power is kind of shifted between a couple of interested parties, and those independents rarely get the chance to be involved. So when I was. Even when I was reading it, I felt it's a book of history in a way, but at the same time I felt it's very contemporary and the topics are related to the things that are happening in political ordering around the world, everywhere, most countries. And I must also say that when I read the title Democratic Elitism, I thought it's kind of a paradox. Or how. How do you bring these two together? And there are a lot of Italian thinkers that you discuss in the book. And I told you before I started this interview, I'm not a political historian at all. And I found to me, they were all new. And the topics, they're really fascinating. So I'm going to ask you a few questions about them. And you're going to forgive me because I'm sure I'm going to mispronounce some of them anyhow, the names of some of them. In the first chapter, you talk about Wilfredo Pareto, if I'm not mistaken. First introduce him, who was he? And then I really enjoyed his idea of elite circulation because I guess to the novice it might sound like he was a conservative or he's sort of a anachronistic speaking of fascist. But that's not what he was. That's not his theory. And he was very much a critic of corruption. But tell us who he was and what was his theory of elite circulation? What does that mean?
- [07:37]
Dr. Natasha Piano
I think Pareto is probably the most famous. He's certainly the most colorful member of the Italian school, and I think that's because he was an economist. And he's best remembered for things like Pareto optimality or the Pareto principle. And that gets reused in lots of different social sciences, not just economics, but sociology. So he became a paramount figure in American political thinking because he was first and foremost an economist, or at least ostensibly so. But both. All of his economic thinking really demonstrates his lifelong concern with how inequality functions in a given society across time. And the standard story like you were alluding to just now kind of goes something like this. Pareto began as this passionate, fervent classical liberal who Hated government intervention of any kind. But then he became disillusioned with mass politics and the whole course of the 19th century and drifted towards elitism or even proto fascist ideals in his old age. And American political scientists tended to highlight his really derisive, sharp remarks about the mob or mob mentality. And so they assumed that he was fundamentally an anti democratic thinker, someone who distrusted popular participation at its core. But I really, I think that's wrong. I think that really misses the point and his overall trajectory and his overall commitments. Pareto wasn't condemning the people in his political and economic thought. He was actually warning against elite corruption. Mostly he was more worried about the elites inability to participate in politics, not the mass ability to do so. And his real concern, I think, was the plutocratic tendencies within Italy's new representative system. How wealth and influence were beginning to, or maybe not beginning, had always distorted political life and undermined the people's ability to believe in the government. So he warned that if elites continued to be to act in such a corrupt fashion, that they would lose the Italian people's faith in liberal representative government to some demagogic plutocrat who would then easily dismantle the liberal norms and procedures that the Italian unification process had fought so hard to erect. So he was, he was really concerned with elite corruption, and he was specifically concerned with how electoral regimes in themselves facilitate plutocratic corruption. So it wasn't just that these elites were bad or one set of elites was particularly corrupt. The issue was why it is the case that electoral government facilitates elite connections and collaborations that tend to have a plutocratic or corrupting influence on the entire government himself. So he was trying to show the structural reasons, not some kind of moral, moral adjudication about why some elites were bad and others weren't. That wasn't what he was going for. He was trying to give us a holistic account of why electoral government has this dangerous tendency residing within it.
- [10:53]
Moteza Hajizadeh
And like I said before, I ask you, it's very contemporary as well. I mean, the argument sounds very contemporary and relevant. It's more or less the same things we hear these days about the critics of liberal democracies. And as an example, and you live in the United States yourself, when Donald Trump was one of the nominees a few months ago, he was Hillary Clinton who was complaining. In response, the people were complaining, he said, well, it's either Trump or Kamala Harris. So if you're looking for a different option, it seems that your options are quite limited. So I felt that it's also quite Close. I'm keen to know your thoughts, how his criticism helps us better challenge. Sorry, Better understand the challenges or limitations of contemporary liberal democracies.
- [11:39]
Dr. Natasha Piano
Right. Well, our tendency is to think that criticizing elections undermines contemporary liberal democracies. That ever mentioning the plutocratic tendencies that are inherent in electoral structures is bad for representative electoral politics. And his critique offers a counterintuitive instinct for us, but I think one that might do us well to reconsider. His thought was this. In order to save electoral government, we have to be honest about its limitations. In order to uphold electoral representative governments, we need to identify exactly what the problems are that elites will always dominate electoral processes. That's just what elections are designed to do, is to have elites compete with each other. And that's all right. That's okay. Elites are inevitable. Plutocratic capture of the entire government is not inevitable. And the way to avoid having plutocratic capture of the entire government is not by empowering a certain sect of superhuman super brilliant elites. It's by creating democratic constraints on representative institutions so that they work together such that liberal democracy actually has meaning. So that the liberal parts, the representative parts of the government that we call liberal democracy, are functioning and create an elite class that is accountable and representative to the populace, but also that the democratic elements which are external to elections uphold those representative systems. So he kind of. He kind of. Or Mosca and Pareto, I think both of them together are trying to make sense of what we call liberal democracy by celebrating both parts instead of just making them the same thing.
- [13:33]
Moteza Hajizadeh
And I must say I really like his. His metaphor of that elite circulation as. As a river. I found it quite powerful metaphor there. And by the way, his idea of born governor. Can you speak Italian? I'm absolutely sorry if I'm butchering all these pronunciations. So that's basically the same thing. You discussed that. It's about how he's just. With that idea, he's trying to challenge that dominant narrative that democracy is election. And I think that's a very. These days a lot of people have that kind of reductive understanding of democracy that it's only a three year or four year election.
- [14:13]
Dr. Natasha Piano
Yes, absolutely. I think his metaphor of the elite circulation as a river is a fascinating image because it captures both the inevitability of elites and their need for renewal from democratic sources. So when Pareto talks about the circulation of elites, he means that every political system at its core is governed by elites. But those elites don't stay fixed forever. And when one ruling group starts to lose its Energy or legitimacy, another rises to take its place. Place, either through some kind of gradual assimilation or sometimes through a violent revolution. But in this sense, the river is always moving. Elite power keeps flowing, changing form and adapting. And so that's one part of how to study any particular societies. Look at the elites, look at what the needs are, look at how competent they are, and you're going to sense the evolution of that political state based on the flux of, of the change in elites. But there's a second part of that river metaphor that's often been overlooked. And after he talks about the circulation of elites, he adds that even a river must eventually return to its bed or in order to flow freely again. So in other words, when the ruling class becomes too detached from the wider public, so when it loses touch with the social and emotional needs of the majority, the political current, he says, gets blocked. And that process of circulation, whether through reform or upheaval, brings elites back to a majoritarian source. And so for Pareto, elite power wasn't static. It depended on constant movement. And in order to work effectively, it depended on responsiveness. And the stability of a regime was dependent on elites being able to respond and hear and listen majoritarian needs of desires, lest they be completely disconnected and subsequently removed.
- [16:17]
Moteza Hajizadeh
Let me move on to the next chapter. Again, I found a lot of the arguments in the second chapter. I mean, the thing you could discuss in the second chapter, quite again, vibrant and potent and relevant to what's happening these days. But again, I'm not sure about the pronunciation. I need your help. Is it Gaitano, Mosca or Mosca, but.
- [16:39]
Dr. Natasha Piano
That'S, you know, I think you're doing great.
- [16:41]
Moteza Hajizadeh
And yeah, see, that's another thing you discuss in the book. Again, I had no idea. And I'm sure a lot of our listeners were not into political study, did not know him. It's to. Again, I must emphasize how refreshing it is to know that people in much, much earlier, you know, were thinking about the challenges of contemporary democracy. Here again, he has this critique of representative government. He, he has concerns with the economic inequality. Again, the same things that is discussed these days. And he has a concept, he has a really interesting concept, democratic impulse, that there's a need to renew the ruling class from below. Continual renewal of ruling class from below. But tell us first who he was, and then we'll get to talk about some of his ideas.
- [17:29]
Dr. Natasha Piano
Right, so, Moska, you're right. It's completely unheard of in American political science today. But a hundred years ago, when the discipline was getting off the ground. He was all the rage. All of the American political scientists explicitly modeled how they thought American political science should be on Mosca's thought. You know, Harold Lasky and there so many political scientists that thought they were moscians and wanted to build American political science in his more realistic orientation towards elites and election and power. So it's so funny that now, you know, it's. He's completely forgotten figure in the history of American political science. He was a. Mosca was a Sicilian, a southern Italian who, from a middle class family who somehow worked his way up through a legal education to become a professor and senate member. He was a fierce defender of liberal parliamentary government and the Italian unification process, but a critic of the conservative liberals who thought that we should just import or copy or replicate English parliamentary systems onto the Italian peninsula. He's like, that's not going to work. We can't just pretend like we're going to make a state out of nothing where people speak different languages, have different identities, different traditions. We're going to just say, okay, now you can, and different economic statuses. Importantly, he said it's a dream to think that we're just going to start having elections and people are going to think that this represents their interests. He, like Pareto, said it won't work that way because of the plutocratic elements that rely within electoral politics. And specifically he focused not on just like the billionaires, right? The, the Elon Musk or the von Dreesens or the specific billionaires that might be preponderantly powerful in the electoral process. He was concerned that regional economic inequality, especially between the industrialized north and the poor agricultural south, would create a system of elite alliances where the northern capitalists would go in, would form alliances with the old landed southern barons and that would inhibit any kind of representation from the middle and working class Southerners. He said, obviously it's going to make sense. Even if you are able to implement an electoral process into the southern region, you won't actually get representative electoral results because obviously elite capitalist interests combined with the landed gentry, they're going to be able to win elections better than illiterate masses. It's unfair to set universal suffrage up in this way because it's just going to create powers, recreate systems of domination. It's not going to undercut them in any way. And if that happens, Moscow worried, then all of these southern masses are not going to believe in electoral politics or the promises of parliamentary government and instead they're going to turn to other clientele structures like the Mafia that seem to be more accessible and more in line with their short term economic interests than some northern capitalist who is able to run an election or back a southern candidate where wealth and politics is so obviously at play in the electoral context. So the point is that he really focused on how to be honest about the tendency for elections to become corrupted by severe regional economic inequality and how addressing regional economic inequality was necessarily a political problem that helped address the limitations of elections. So he's emphasizing a different element than Pareto, but they were both committed to being honest about the limitations of electoral politics in order to fortify representative practices.
- [21:59]
Moteza Hajizadeh
Yeah, well, when I was reading it, I could see that sometimes, you know, there were some similarities with Ferrara Pareto. And I'm interested to know also about his art's concept of democratic impulse and how it differs from conventional notions we have of electoral participation. What did he mean by democratic impulse?
- [22:23]
Dr. Natasha Piano
Right. You know, typically what we understand as democratic is just the idea that anyone can formally enter an electoral competition and that makes it democratic. And he, Muska, said, no, that's not enough. That's not. Doesn't qualify. Because the reality is, even if you can, there are formal barriers. There are no formal barriers to entry. There are informal ones that are just as effective or prohibited, prohibiting in allowing people to participate in electoral contests. Mostly just the cost of an election. Right. It's just too expensive to run a campaign. You need so much wealth, as we have seen in the United States and abroad, to run a successful electoral campaign. So Mosca's answer to the problem of plutocratic capture in liberal representative government was this democratic impulse that he said lied outside of elections. He wanted, obviously he wanted elites to form some kind of cohesive class that would enable government to function properly, but in a way that was accountable and connected to ordinary citizens in a way that designed institutions that fostered real contact between citizens or and their local representatives. So he did this in two ways, because it's hard for us to imagine institutional innovations that would fit this category outside of elections. First, he was really focused on how to make educative institutions that facilitated the middle classes into entering politics. He thought that before elections you needed some kind of education system that focused on middle class entry into political elite circles. And he was obsessed with this. It's the cetto medio. The middle class was a source of inquiry for him into that process. But he also offered institutional innovations that we don't consider today, but that we might in the future. He thought that instead of imposing or replicating English institutions Into Italy we should take some parts of the English model. Specifically, he admired the technocratic representatives that were participating in local government that acted as this go between between citizens and their parliamentarians. He was interested in how they're in technocratic solutions to how technocrats could actually facilitate local government as opposed to what we typically see today in our discourse where we say, oh, there's the populace and the experts and the technocrats and those are two opposing things. He thought that there were administrative solutions and administrative law that could allow technocrats a go between role that would bolster local self government. So he was. This is in the 1880s when he's arguing with the more conservative liberals about having this rigid parliamentary structure and he's like, no, I mean that's not going to work here in Italy. We need to do something different. We need to look at the English institutions that value independent, locally rooted politics and how technocrats could actually help facilitate that. Accountability based MPs is what he was talking about and that might be a little specific, but he was thinking about different institutional mechanisms that we never even consider today because we forget that that's a, a democratic process that could help supplement representative electoral politics. Does that answer your question?
- [26:01]
Moteza Hajizadeh
It does. Yes, it does. But again, it raises a lot of other questions as well.
- [26:06]
Dr. Natasha Piano
Yeah, of course. What does that look like?
- [26:08]
Moteza Hajizadeh
Yes, you're right. Yeah.
- [26:09]
Dr. Natasha Piano
You know, it's funny because everyone says, you know, he was upset he idealized England and. But he idealized England and parliamentary government because he said elections work beautifully in England because they have all of these other things that supplement and support the electoral process. They have a culture of, of local institutions. They have all different sects that are, are that participate in politics in different ways. They have a history of self government that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years. How are we going to just randomly place elections on our Italian peninsula or. And half of where the whole, the whole peninsula is just not used to that kind system of government and expect it to work properly. We need to think about the local institutions that can be not exported simply, but transposed and translated so that it makes sense in our context.
- [27:01]
Moteza Hajizadeh
I find it quite fascinating. I live in Australia myself and the election system here is similar at the same time different from England. And I don't know much about England, but I guess it's more or less modeled on that. But some people don't consider it to be a positive thing. But I do think it's a positive thing which is preferential voting which is in place in Australia. So if I I vote for the first candidate, but if he doesn't win, my vote goes for this, my second option. And if the second option doesn't win, the votes go for the third option, which, which I. So some people are not happy with this, but I think it's. It works quite well despite the fact that. And I think a lot of the concerns that the first two theories had more or less are addressed maybe in this way because even in Australia we've seen the rise of more Green candidates, independent candidates, which 10 or 15 years ago was almost unheard of. You only had the two major parties, but now they're independents, the Greens and even other parties, they are right wing parties as well who get a lot of votes. But again the power is sort of distributed among different parties. And it's I guess partly because there are a lot of local institutions pretty much the same as in England in a country like Australia as well. So when you were discussing this and when you were just explaining about England and a few weeks ago I did another podcast about democracy, democracy and liberalism in France in its early days. So I find it quite interesting when a lot of people even in France were pointing to England model as an ideal model of democratic representation, let's say. Let me go to the third chapter. The thinker you discussed is a bit different from the other two, Robert Michel. So he has this idea of the iron law of oligarchy that he discusses in the book. First introduce him. Tell us what he meant by that Iron law, oligarchy and how. I know there is a lot of questions I'm all convincing into. One, how did he differ from. Because I guess he was a little bit more pessimistic or maybe deterministic compared to the other two. He felt that it's inevitable that you get an oligarchy through a democratic representation. Tell us about Robert Michel's great.
- [29:24]
Dr. Natasha Piano
Yes, mickls is a fascinating figure. He's technically considered the third member of the Italian school of elitism. But he was the only German member. He was the only member that became a part of the fascist party. He was a third member of the Italian school of elitism by proclamation. It's not like Pareto and Mosca said, you know, this, this third guy, he's it. Absolutely not. So he, he kind of self identified and that for a variety of historically contingent reasons stuck and he developed and interestingly enough in the post war period after 1945, he came to be considered the most of the three members of the Italian school of elitism, even though he was the Only one to join officially join the. The fascist Party. Not just that. I mean, Pareto died before Mussolini's formal ascent of power, so you really don't know what would have happened there. But Mosca became a fierce opponent of the regime. He was one of the authors of the antifascist manifesto, and he resigned his Senate position in protest of Mussolini. So you have Moscow, who's considered who is more actively anti fascist, and Mickels, who became a fascist. And yet Americans in the post war period said that Mickels was the most democratic or democratic thinker of the pair. So it's just. It's wildly ironic. I argue in the book that that's actually not the case and that he came to be seen as the most democratic thinker of the pair because he was more willing to identify democracy as competitive election than either Pareto and Mosca. Pareto and Mosca were warning us against the conflation. And because Nichols was less sensitive to the plutocratic horrors of the Italian risorgimento or the Italian unification process, he was more willing to identify them as equivalent and therefore less appreciative of the risks of conflating election and democracy. And that's why I think he initiated the corruption of Italian. Of the Italian school of elitism, or Italian, of this strain of the Italian tradition. I can say more about, you know, exactly what the risks are of conflating election. Yeah, it could be.
- [32:09]
Moteza Hajizadeh
It would be great because. Yeah, what are the risks? Yeah, because he was the one who said, right, democracy is election. And then you discuss some of the risks in the book. And you mentioned that he also joined fascism. So I'm keen to know how his pessimism about this whole party organization influenced his decision to join the fascist party.
- [32:30]
Dr. Natasha Piano
Yeah, well, first, I didn't answer your first question about the iron law of oligarchy. Mickels developed what he called the iron law of oligarchy. And he said that because oligarchy develops in any organization, even in party organizations that are ostensibly the most progressive, most socialist, most communist, most liberal leaning. Liberal. Not in that sense, but horizontally focused ideologically even, because bureaucracy, neurocracy. I'm sorry, oligarchy necessarily develops in party institutions, that it will necessarily develop in the state. Right. That there is no way to avoid hierarchical and oligarchic organization based on the fact that it happens even in the most progressive socialist parties. So in some sense, Mosca would say of Mickls. I'm repeating Mosca's critique of mickls, but he said he's more pessimistic in a deterministic or fatalistic way, as you said, because Micklis tried to impose this false equivalents where bureaucratic hierarchy of the party is the same as a bureaucratic hierarchy projected onto the state. And Molska said, that's wrong. You know, just because you have some kind of tendency towards oligarchy in the party based on the need for bureaucratization, doesn't mean that you can't inhibit that in the state structure because of all these other. All these other mechanisms that are included in state, state theory that don't exist within the party. So that. So Mosca thought that was incorrect, right? That he's like, that's a little too deterministic. You shouldn't project what happens onto the party, one for one, into what happens in a state, even though there are oligarchic tendencies in both parties and states. So that was, you know, Mosca's critique of Mickels. But more importantly, Mosca and Pareto wanted to discourage the conflation of election and democracy because it wasn't just a semantic issue for the Italians, as opposed to the German Mickels. There are two threats to popular government that come from equating elections with democracy. And the first is, I think we've talked about it a lot, but the first is obvious. It's the plutocratic threat. And if we assume that elections are the same as democracy, we kind of obscure the ways that wealth and influence can distort the system. So electoral institutions can be hijacked by powerful interests, producing a government that serves the few instead of the many. And that becomes obvious. But the Italians argue that this danger, instead of just papering over it, should be constantly exposed and countered, not ignored or just simply subsumed as one of the problematic effects, you know, elements of democracy. And I think today we see this pretty clearly, as you were saying, in the citizen growing disillusionment when elected officials don't seem to even address or represent public interest. So that's one threat. But the second threat was more important to them. It was the demagogic threat. And they thought that viewing election as this democratic expression of popular sovereignty gives potential demagogues, often demagogues who are plutocrats themselves, the ability to claim that they truly represent the will of the people, kind of endowing them with this unfounded right to rule that becomes difficult to dispute. Because once you say, oh, elections empower the person, they're the democratic expression of popular sovereignty par excellence. When once a demagogue begins, wins an election, and then dismantles all of the liberal norms and procedures that you're calling democratic, you find yourself in a bind. What do you do? Does that really mean that elections are democratic, or does it mean that, you know, does it mean something else? You know, what. What does that mean when. When demagogic plutocrats continue to then dismantle the very procedures that you're calling democratic in the first place? So I guess the idea is not that elections may occasionally produce dangerous leaders, but Pareto and Mosca were concerned that the democratic power we attribute to elections enables such leaders to characterize themselves as the voice of the people, allowing them to kind of deal this death blow to popular government writ large. And so they were worried about these two twin threats, the plutocratic threat and the demagogic threat, and how that could eventually just kill a whole entire representative government.
- [37:24]
Moteza Hajizadeh
And the other person you discuss in the book, Joseph Schumpeter, again, leave it to you to correct me. He sort of redefined democracy as a competitive leadership. What did it mean, his redefinition of democracy? And what are the implications of that shift for democratic theory?
- [37:49]
Dr. Natasha Piano
It was such a. Schumpeter's intervention represented a huge shift in democratic theory. I can't overstate how important his role in this story is. Schumpeter, as you said, offered this alternative theory of democracy in which we understand competitive election as the sole criterion for distinguishing democratic regimes from authoritarian alternatives. And so in Schumpeter, in so doing, at this, you know, at this moment, when Schumpeter wrote Capitalism, Socialism and democracy in 1939, his intervention there allowed for a huge rupture within some form of continuity, such that American political scientists could plausibly claim that their approach was realistic or empirical or based on, like, pessimism or some kind of reality about how elites and masses operate in electoral regimes. That was kind of in line with Schumpeter and also Mosca and Pareto and Mickels approach to these questions, but distinct because American political scientists could identify themselves with Schumpeter, this more democratic or liberal figure, than the fascist Italians. Even though they weren't fascists. Right, Even though the Italians themselves weren't fascist and it was only the German one who was a fascist, but they could distance themselves from the Italian. The seeming connection to Italian fascism that was exhibited in the Italian school of elitism theories, but still have some continuity with them through Schumpeter, through Schumpeter's position between these two schools of thought. So it really enabled reformulation, and it gave American political scientists permission to identify democracy exclusively as an electoral apparatus, even, because Schumpeter said, why don't we just do that? It'll resolve a lot of theoretical headaches that we have about popular sovereignty and the people's will and how to express it. And it may help us show the virtues of electoral government against fascist totalitarianism embodied by, you know, Hitlerite Germany, Mussolini's Italy, but also Soviet communism. So he was thinking about it more as a way to distinguish not just against Soviet communism, even though that's how American political science would understand it in the. In after 1945, but just against all forms of authoritarian government. And so that really, I don't know, that was. It was. It's a foundational moment in the story.
- [40:47]
Moteza Hajizadeh
And was he also dismissive of. Of the idea of mass participation in a. In a democratic. Sorry, in elections?
- [40:56]
Dr. Natasha Piano
Well, I argue. So that is the story. Right. In fact, he. In part four of the text, specifically in one part of part four called Human Nature and Politics, Schumpeter offers what Has Been now offers a pretty dismal account of mass participation in politics, where he calls his readers, to be honest, about the fact that most people don't have time to worry about political endeavor. They're mostly concerned with their own private lives. And so he demonstrates that, and that's certainly an element of part four of the book. In this section, he discusses Sorel and mass psychology theory, Le Bon, which seemed to put him in conversation with Pareto and Mosca to a lot of the American political scientists reading his work after 1945. And this is there in the text. But I don't think that Schumpeter's concern was mass epistemic incapacities for politics. If you read the whole book, he offers an alternative vision of democracy, not as competitive election, but as a transformational ideal that has helped reshape corrupt elites from feudalism to the present moment. And so he offers this competing vision of democracy against what he calls the alternate theory in. In part four, which makes the book much more theoretically complex and interesting. It highlights. If you read the whole book, it highlights how he's just as concerned with elite corruption as he is with mass. I'd say more concerned with elite corruption than he is mass epistemic incapacities for politics. He's worried that Western elites in Europe and America are going to lose the war to fascist and authoritarian threats to the liberal way of life. And he says it's because we've let them, because we have not understood our commitment to our own values, and elites have not articulated our positions to these liberal norms and procedures well enough so that responds to the general populace. So I think there's a lot to be explored there. But the point is that American political scientists only read part four of that book and really ran with it.
- [43:19]
Moteza Hajizadeh
I'm going to ask you a question which is relevant to this, and it's your last chapter. And again, it's a terrible general question here. Your last chapter, you discussed how Americans received all the ideas of all these thinkers. You earlier mentioned that some of them, they were misinterpreted as fascist. The one, I think it was, Mikael, you mentioned that who actually joined the fascist party was looked at as an ideal model. But at the same time, Schumpeter as well, generally tell us, how did Americans reinterpret the Italian school of school's critique of plutocracy? How did they transform into, let's say, celebration of elite competition?
- [44:05]
Dr. Natasha Piano
Yeah, it's a fascinating story. I even wrote this book, and I still am perplexed by how it happened because you look at it and it just seems so obviously distant from what they actually said. So I think it's a story of layers where just one redescription or change in nuance encouraged another and another, and then so many layers of American misreading. It's kind of like a game of telephone or where, you know, somebody calls and says, oh, this person said this. And then the other person, you know, you see the transformation go on and on to the point where it's totally different than what the original person said. And I think that's the best analogy to explain what happened in the course of American political science. I mean, at this juncture, in this particular moment in global politics, we kind of know that plutocracy in electoral government is a problem. But the issue isn't just like I was saying earlier, it's not just super billionaires. It's the issue of regional economic inequality. And that's all coming to the fore today. But after 1945, I think it was really hard for American political scientists to understand where the Italians were coming from in this critique of plutocracy. And I think that's for three main reasons. I think the first is the obvious issue of the Cold War. I think that after 1945, American political scientists misunderstood the Italian critique of electoral plutocracy because they were concerned with distinguishing the west from the Eastern bloc. And in so doings, they kind of completely missed the Italians deeper warning about plutocratic capture because they were so worried about, specifically communists instead of a complete fascist totalitarian orientation. So I think that's one of the reasons why Americans weren't really able to hear the Italians. The second reason is because there was just an unprecedented amount of economic equality after the war. In a way that makes the Italian moment more similar to ours today, where there's immense disparities in income inequality, in general economic inequality. That's why we've had this proliferation of studies specifically on this. I mean, Piketty is the most famous example. But you know, there's just so much research on economic inequality and how maybe the period between 1945 and 1970 was aberrational and that most of human history has accepted, experienced fierce income inequality such that plutocracy usually was on the tips of everyone's tongue. Whereas the moment between 1945 and 1990, or 1970, wherever you want to demarcate that, it didn't seem like such a real threat. It wasn't as scary. And then I think the third reason why Americans could just completely ignore the thrust of the Italian critique of electoral government is because we're different. We Americans were a little bit more optimistic. We couldn't really understand or relate to a kind of political pessimism that said, you know what elections are this, they're terrible, they do this, they inculcate plutocracy, they inculcate oligarchy and still think that that's a celebration of electoral institutions. Or not celebration, but endorsement of electoral institutions. I think American political scientists in the post war period were allergic to criticizing electoral institutions because they didn't think that was necessary or salutary for their maintenance. Whereas the Italians were like, yeah, you criticize it in order to be aware of what they can do, aware of elections and their limits, so that people don't lose faith in it. From the Italian perspective, if you say elections can make a unicorn and make all this democracy and create all this. Create all this, these democratic effects, and then they don't. People are going to discard the value of those electoral institutions. I think Americans were really worried about even criticizing elections minimally, because they thought that that's the real cause of disillusionment, whereas it's just a difference in. In orientation. And I think that matters.
- [48:35]
Moteza Hajizadeh
As a final question, whenever I ask historians or political scientists about their ideas about the current political landscape, it's not positive. They're not really. They try to be carefully optimistic, although the pessimism is more dominating there. But your political scientist, also political historian as well, what do you think? In today's day and age, given the challenges we have with the erosion of democratic institutions and the rise of populist and right wing politicians. What do you think we can learn from the Italian school's vision of democracy as a good government? Also political, in terms of political participation as well.
- [49:25]
Dr. Natasha Piano
I think that, strangely enough, I think there's more optimism to be had even in the darkest of times. I think that on the one hand, we've been narrowly identifying democracy as competitive election, but on the other, this moment has made us realize that it's not just insufficient, it just doesn't jive with how we use this term democracy less as a form of government and more as this aspirational ideal or concept or principle or kind of power. And I think Pareto and Molska's endorsement of buon Governor helps us return to this root meaning of democracy literally as like a kind of power or principle, a people power or a principle. And that's a broader understanding that goes beyond elections, obviously. But it's important because it releases us from this necessity to identify democracy as a government or as a regime type, and allows us to. To think about it more as some kind of power or principle that. That includes institutions, norms and procedures that are myriad. Right? It doesn't just have to be one institution. It doesn't have to be elections or lottery or referenda. You don't have to pick one major institutional design and stick with that as democracy. Because unlike oligarchy or monarchy, the root of democracy is power. It's principle, it's something else. It's not just one kind of regime. And that shoehorning democracy into one regime type is where we get into theoretical and political trouble. So I think that their idea of good government helps us return to a conception of democracy as demos, as people and critia as power. And that means encouraging institutions, norms and procedures that are popular. You know, that's what a government of the people, as Lincoln famously said in the Gettysburg Address, so, meaning that it's genuinely grounded in and responsive to the majority, or credibly such that the majority themselves believe that the government is responsive. Not necessarily perfectly representative, but responsive, a pluralist. So like a government for the people, it means that there's no single elite group that dominates and that there's actual genuine, real competition that's supported by democratic channels external to elections. And then I think also something that we've forgotten, but that, that is important to understand in, in this new conception of democracy or this new old, etymologically revived conception of democracy, is that democratic institutions, norms and procedures also have to be anti, actively anti plutocratic. And that's what government by the people means. It means that there are institutions that actively resist the concentration of wealth and influence that are not internal to elections themselves. Now, whether that's something like referenda, whether that's something like what Mosca was arguing in accountability based local government and technocracy, whether that's, you know, in Pareto's case, he thought that Swiss cantons could be effectively introduced in a representative system, Swiss canton style, like small elements of participatory politics, but not exclusively participatory politics, just anti plutocratic ones that don't require citizens to completely be immersed in political participation while still inhibiting concentration of wealth and influence in government. So I think that's the kind of democracy that Italian, the Italian thinkers were describing, or at least that's a democratic element that they thought made buon go verno or good government work. Not one that denies elites exist, but one that constantly works such that their legitimacy is grounded in representative action through democratic accountability mechanisms. Beyond election. That's always the point, like it has to be beyond election, because that makes election true to its representative politics, that democracy helps the, the electoral part remain representative. And I think that makes sense to us today. It's just that that hasn't been our political thinking or practice for a long time. But if there's ever been a moment to revise our conception of democracy, I think it's now where we could plausibly exit this phase of democracy as competitive election and expand our horizons.
- [53:57]
Moteza Hajizadeh
Yeah. Dr. Natasha Piano, thank you very, very much for taking the time to speak with us on New Books Network. There's a lot in the book and what we've just done here was to scratch the surface. And as I said at the beginning, I found ideas in the book, despite the fact that they were expressed by Italian political theorists a century ago, found them quite contemporary and relevant. And I'm sure that our listeners and readers, hopefully those who will pick up the book to read, will find a lot of food for thought. The book we just discussed was Democratic the Founding Myth of American Political Science, published by Harvard University Press. Thank you very much for your time.
- [54:34]
Dr. Natasha Piano
Thank you for having me.