The word Italy evokes many largely warm, images…hospi- tality…sophistication…family…history…culture…opera…cui- sine…fashion…architecture…to name a few. But ”œgood government” does not immediately spring to mind. Which is precisely why Filippo Sabetti’s book The Search for Good Government: Understanding the Paradox of Italian Democracy is so important. And the nature of Sabetti’s scholarly and reflective work reaches far beyond the intricacies of the search for good government in Italy. It embraces core issues about morality, democracy, social norms and political culture all students and supporters of democracy might well consider.
In this wide-ranging but carefully written analysis, Sabetti not only explores what has happened to democracy and governance in Italy in the postwar years, but contextualizes this study with a strong and compar- ative historical overlay. Sabetti also challenges, with both flair and rare insight, some of the guiding princi- ples of Robert Putnam’s Marking Democracy Work (1993) relative to the differences between northern and southern Italy and respective atti- tudes to governance.
In tracing the evolution of the Italian state through the customs union debates to the case for a Federal Union, the 1848 revolts, and the cen- tralization and decentralization debates in the late 1800s, Sabetti notes the influence of concurrent and indigenous democratic and related developments in Sicily, the Swedish- Norwegian system, the French, Scottish and American systems, and learned intellectual engagement by the creators of the Italian state as to the relative merits of each in terms of Italy’s needs.
The creation of the Italian state, and the rejection of decentralist options through the Law on Administrative Unification of March 1865, did put unity at the centre of the plan. But, as Sabetti points out, it was Luigi Einaudi, a political economist from Piedmont who went on to be a governor of the Bank of Italy, who allowed that while they were opting in their own minds for liberty and democracy, those who framed the cen- tralized state were unwittingly laying in the state infrastructure that would be instrumental in the later dictator- ship.
In this part of the analysis, as well as in his sections on the constitution- al design that did not happen, the role of central planning, and the effects of the anti-Mafia engagement as a proxy for the search for good gov- ernment, Sabetti reaches out to embrace social, economic and politi- cal mainstreams to explore where their points of confluence produce opportunities for government reform, institution-building and various vira- goes in one direction or another. This is no sterile political science reader. Nor is it a tiresome collation of gov- ernmental theories and political sci- ence. It is a fulsome and interdiscipli- nary analysis written in reader-friend- ly prose that makes both the underly- ing analytical themes and the core insights more than accessible.
In his final chapters, where he confronts Putnam’s use of ”œpath dependent” analysis to explain gover- nance realities in Italy (path depend- ency argues that it is very hard for societies to break out of paths estab- lished by the weight of past cultural, political, religious and historic momentum), Sabetti exposes the read- er to a carefully articulated and highly refined argument about the way in which change happens in political reality, how the forces of the past mat- ter, and the importance of understand- ing how these forces interact with present reality to produce opportuni- ties for change.
He does nothing so inelegant as dismiss Putnam’s watershed work. Rather, he chooses to contextualize its relevance and proscribe limitations on its application in a fashion that advances the reader’s understanding of the core issues around culture and democracy, not to mention the inter- action with civil society that sheds light on democracy as a whole, not just the intricacies of Italian democra- cy as such.
While economics is called the dis- mal science, students of political theory know that some scholars can be not only impenetrable but often obscure and disengaged in their writing, to the point of causing immense cognitive frustration for the reader. Sabetti gives political science scholarship a much better name with this work. His book invites the reader to think laterally about a host of forces that produce good and bad government. It engages the theories of others and does so with care and scholarly inquiry. It builds an analytical case about Italian democracy that clearly suggests compelling lines of inquiry for democracies elsewhere, especially those smug about their alleged excellence. It ties culture, histo- ry, choice, economics, sociology, exter- nal influence and political pragmatism into a rich fibre of constructive insights that not only connect up, but allow a cogent and easily embraced conclusion to be understood and appreciated. It is a book well worth reading.
