Abstract
Autore:
Madeddu Alessandro
Titolo:
"Osservazioni su “Principi del Governo rappresentativo” di Bernard Manin"
Bernard Manin’s most notorious book, “The Principles of Representative Governament”, recently translated into Italian, contains a detailed survey of methods used to select the ruling class in pre-modern political systems. The main thesis is that contemporary representative democracies are to be conceived as partially "aristocratic" regimes because of their selective procedure. Moreover, the author collects a large amount of evidences regarding earlier systems, from the Classical Athens to the modern Venetian Republic, in which sortition was the main method of selection in order to support his thesis that representative government, when it was first established, by British, American and French revolutions, was designed to avoid a "real" democracy. Nontheless, the book is well-known among political scientists for another topic, the so-called audience democracy, through which the author develops his elitist view of democratic elections - a view vulnerable to certain objections.
