Book review: Democratic Elitism

Jackson, Robert ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6195-1067 (2025) Book review: Democratic Elitism. Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum (RJISSF). 146.

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Abstract

In Democratic Elitism, Natasha Piano provides a vital reappraisal of the so-called “elite theory” of polymathic political thinkers Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels. Her reinterpretation argues that this “Italian School of Elitism” has been misappropriated in the Anglophone world. They are not in fact “elite theorists,” but “democratic theorists of elitism”. Piano documents the progressive distortion of their thought and the foundational influence of this “perverted” image on post-Second World War American Political Science. She convincingly charts the genesis of that image as the foil against which the doctrine of “democratic elitism” was defined, mediated through the work of political scientists Joseph Schumpeter, Robert Dahl, et al. Rather than the conventional interpretations of Pareto, Mosca, and Michels as conservative and anti-democratic (even fascist) stereotypes, Piano’s “revisionist” reading of these figures seeks to recover their obscured criticisms of the plutocratic tendencies inherent in the structures of liberal parliamentary, electoral, and representative processes.