FRANCESCO BATTEGAZZORRE

L'istituzionalismo di Giuseppe Maranini.

Partiti politici e democrazia

N. 199

Summary - Giuseppe Maranini (1902-1969) was a leading scholar in law and the constitutional history of post-war Italy. This essay examines his work from the point of view of political science, and focuses in particular of his contribution to the development of an institutional perspective for the analysis of the Italian political system, centered on the concept of partitocrazia. Maranini was an institutionalist in the sense that he was firmly convinced that the primary entities shaping politics are institutions. In this vein, political institutions - and in particular their strength or their weakness - become the analytical key of his general interpretation of politics, and particularly of democratic politics. The roots of this analysis lie in a vision of the political realm informed by two antagonistic principles. The first - a liberal principle - sees government as a threat for society, implying the permanent danger of degeneration into "tyranny": hence, the division of powers in the institutional domain is seen as assuring, through the mechanisms of checks and balances, the preservation of individual and collective freedom. The second principle - an idealist one - involves a vision of politics as a moral activity, and of the state as an ethical agent: hence, the emphasis on the promotion of the common good as the criterion for governmental action. Both of these two poles are normatively biased, and therefore useless from the point of view of empirical political theory. Moreover, the tension between the two poles is unresolved, the one simply juxtaposed with respect to the other, so that, eventually, the government's threat to society unnoticeably shifts into its opposite, i. e. society’s threat against the government and the state. These shortcomings notwithstanding. Maranini’s works offer a powerful insight for positive political research. His insistence on the consequences of the weakness of Italian political institutions in the post-war period identifies a factor that any overall explicative framework needs to embody, albeit purified of the polemic excesses and normative bias surrounding it.