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Considering recent re-assessments of Pareto and Mosca, I discuss whether these thinkers’ socio-political orientations contribute to the ‘disfiguration’ of democracy (in: Urbinati, Democracy disfigured: opinion, truth, and the people, Harvard, Cambridge, MA, 2014) or provide a resource for the renewal of democratic institutions. Femia (Pareto and political theory, Routledge, Abingdon, 2006) presents Pareto as being in the “Machiavellian tradition of sceptical liberalism,” revealing the liberal potential of Pareto’s realist political theory. Finocchiaro (Beyond right and left, Yale, New Haven, London, 1999) ameliorates the conservative consequences of Mosca’s thought by reinterpreting him as a ‘democratic elitist,’ who holds a conception of political liberty “as a relationship such that authority flows from the masses to the elites.” Highlighting the significance of internal tensions within each thinker’s work foregrounded by these readings, between the causal primacy of psychic states and the ‘mutual dependence’ of social factors (Pareto), and between the elite principle and ‘balanced pluralism’ (Mosca), I ask whether the ‘sceptical liberal’ Pareto or the ‘democratic elitist’ Mosca elude Urbinati’s unpolitical, populist and plebiscitarian ‘disfigurations’ of democracy.

‘Disfigurations’ of Democracy? Pareto, Mosca and the Challenge of ‘Elite Theory’