Is Democracy a Lost Cause?

Paradoxes of an imperfect invention is the apt subtitle that Alfio Mastropaolo chose for his magnum opus. As a guide, the subtitle suggests that we read the book with a critical but open mind. Modern democracy is an institutional fact. It exists by a set of constitutive rules, themselves the product of human invention. The invention had no firm, willful starting point and it is not eternal; neither by definition nor in its set of rules. These are never perfect, not because subject to infringement and change but because they are not meant to be. Contrary to the rules of football or chess, also institutional inventions with their own history, they do not aim at a fixed outcome. Further, when democracy seems to become the only game in town, when other games fade out, then the restlessness of human invention if nothing else sets the course of human affairs in motion again. To paraphrase an American President, it's politics, stupid; and politics is here to stay. But democracy? To address the question, the best we can do is 'reculer pour mieux sauter'. Mastropaolo provides a thorny, relentless guide through the exercise. -- Giuseppe Di Palma, University of California, Berkeley

Alfio Mastropaolo considers the past, present, future of democracy in terms of a fine synthesis of political and social theory, history and recent political science and cultural theory into an original and insistent account of its evolution in practice and in theory. Is Democracy a Lost Cause? engages with the central concerns of the current debates about political institutions. Alfio Mastropaolo does not merely assess the main issues; he illuminates them by subjecting each to scrutiny from the various standpoints of contemporary argument. This is an imaginative and important contribution to our understanding of democracy, its critics and supporters. -- Joni Lovenduski, University of London

Alfio Mastropaolo is professor of Political Science at the University of Turin. Among his works are Antipolitica: Alle origini della crisi italiana (L'Ancora, Napoli, 2000), La mucca pazza della democrazia: Nuove destre, populismo, antipolitica (Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 2005), The Center-Left's Poisoned Victory (edited with JL Briquet, Berghahn, New York, 2007).