Giovanni Sartori

Giovanni Sartori (13 May 1924 – 4 April 2017) was an Italian political scientist.

Quotes

The Theory of Democracy Revisited (1987)

1. Can Democracy Be Just Anyting?

• Communism and socialism can be connected to a single major author—Marx—and assessed as deviations from, and implementations or negations of, Marx. Democracy is not amenable to a similar treatment; the towering, single major author on democracy does not exist.
• What democracy is cannot be separated from what democracy should be.
• To avoid starting out on the wrong foot we must keep in mind, then, that (a) the democratic ideal does not define the democratic reality and, vice versa, a real democracy is not, and cannot be, the same as an ideal one; and that (b) democracy results from, and is shaped by, the interactions between its ideals and its reality, the pull of an ought and the resistance of an is.