The epistemological standards of contemporary social sciences refute ‘functional’ and ‘law-like’ explanations, whereas mechanism-based causal explanations have become widely accepted in various fields of inquiry. The paper supports the hypothesis that authors Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, despite their deference to positivist epistemology, significantly anticipated these developments. Indeed, with their emphasis on history, contexts and agents, elitists ushered into the debate of their time some arguments that realist epistemology fully developed, emphasising the role of context-specific and, often, not directly observable (...) explanatory features. To illustrate the ante litteram epistemological realism of elitist thinkers, the paper reconstructs the positions of Mosca and Pareto concerning two major themes of that time, in which elitists challenged the mainstream ideas and values of most of their peers with epistemological arguments that refuse a linear notion of causality. (shrink)

In contemporary democracies, the balance between the minority principle and democratic principles, one of the components underlying the relationship between liberalism and democracy, is being broken. This paper offers a reflection on this theme – crucial for the future of representative government – in relation to the importance of the theory of elites. The article is divided into three parts: the first part briefly traces the main phases of the theory of elites from the late nineteenth century to the present, (...) indicating, for each, the salient features; the second part focuses on the elements characterizing the alliance between the minority principle and democratic principles, which forms the basis of liberal representative democracy, with specific consideration paid to the geometric architecture of democracy, comprising a horizontal dimension and a vertical dimension; finally, the third part argues the need for strengthening the logic of distance to consolidate the connection between the theory of elites and liberal representative democracy. (shrink)

1. The life and thought of the Italian-German sociologist Robert Michels (1876–1936) has received increasing attention in recent years.1 Much of this renewed interest in him, however, has mostly fo...