Parties and Representative Government: On the Democratic Theory Implications of Gallo's Hegel and Italian Political Thought

My contribution builds on Fernanda Gallo's most recent book to alert to its significance for political theorists working on historical and contemporary debates on representative government and democracy. Doing so, it argues, entails a threefold endeavor. First, it requires actively challenging the conventional marginalization that, with the exception of a few canonical figures (e.g., Machiavelli, Beccaria, Gramsci), has relegated Italian thinkers to a condition of marginality in the academic study of the history of global political thought. Relatedly, it calls for a deeper and broader exploration of the resources - historical, conceptual, and normative - that the intellectual and political history of modern and contemporary Italy can offer to social scientist s working on parties, partisanship, and political representation. Third, it demands renewed and sustained emphasis on the nexus between history and theory, on the one hand, and between theory and practice, on the other, especially when it comes to the study of representative government and party democracy, their transformations and challenges.