In the spring of 1976 Norberto Bobbio published, from Einaudi, an agile volume (he will define it as a “small volume”), with the questioning title: Which socialism? A short but actually very dense text, of an exquisitely political nature or intended to intervene directly not only in the battle of ideas but also in that “for power”. The PCI, which had swept the administrative elections the year before, threatened to become, in the general elections, a party with a relative majority. And in any case it was approaching impetuously to the government area. The old sage of the Italian left told them they weren’t prepared. Who did not have a “theory of the state”. That their socialism, of explicit Marxist derivation (and when Bobbio speaks of “socialism” here means exclusively that, as if the various social democratic or reformist variants did not fit into the theme) was totally centered on the question of “who governs” – the proletariat or the bourgeoisie – but seriously neglected the question of “how to govern”, which is exactly what makes the difference for who is to be governed, and for whom is to judge the value of a form of government: whether the exercise of “socialist power” »Would have respected the liberal rights of freedom while at the same time managing to achieve its objectives of social transformation. Or if vice versa he would have sacrificed the former to the latter – but also the latter to the former.
Apparently it was the revival of the themes that Bobbio, twenty years earlier, had posed to Togliatti and his followers in the heated debate on Politics and culture (title of the successful book published in 1955). And that is the idea that either socialism will be liberal – that is, it will be able to protect together with the demands of equality of the last (of the “fourth estate”) also the principles of freedom of “bourgeois” derivation (of the third estate) -, or it will not be, that is, it will turn out to be a traditional dictatorship like any other. But in reality, on closer inspection, the focus of the reflection was another: no longer a question of “isms”, that is, of the relationship between liberalism and socialism (or communism, understood as the hegemonic version of socialism in that historical time), with the connected combinatorial conjugations of liberal-socialism or liberal-socialism that had long involved Bobbio himself. But of empirical practices and the organization of power. Questions based on the evidence of the facts that tell us (then as now) that “where there is democracy there is no socialism” – with all due respect, of the supporters of social democracy – “and where there is socialism [inteso come il «socialismo reale» dell’area sovietica] there is no democracy “. Therefore the very concrete challenge of how to graft some variant of (real) socialism on the body of (empirical) democracy, that is, of a specific form of government, not of some political culture or ideological assumption but of a system of rules and institutions.
And it is here that what is rightly considered one of the leading contemporary thinkers of democracy inserts his horse’s move: shifting the terrain of contention from the question of socialism to that of the democratic form. And it does so on the assumption that the relationship between democracy and socialism “is not a peaceful relationship”, just as the relationship between democracy and liberalism had not been, because democracy – he explained – “is subversive”. To want to take it seriously is tremendously demanding, so much so that its realization is even more difficult than that of socialism. And it is subversive, “in the most radical sense of the word” because wherever it arrives it “subverts the traditional conception of power” which would like it to descend from top to bottom. In this even more subversive than socialism which, if understood as “transfer of the means of production from private individuals to the state”, reproduces, in a much more centralized form, a “form of power that descends from above”, whereas here it would be a matter of a ‘ authentic participation “from below”.
Not only that, but then added Bobbio, democracy is all the more difficult as it is full of paradoxes that make its realization uncertain, first of which the dimensions of the organizations in which it is structured, by their nature standardized, and we know, at least since Roberto Michels enunciated the “iron law of the oligarchy”, that the greater the number of participants, the more vertical and selective is the organization of decision-making processes and the bureaucratic structure. According to paradox – and we see its dimensions today – the exponential growth of the complexity of modern social systems that require “technical solutions that are not reliable except by competent ones” who, as such, escape democratic control and produce that involution of democracy into technocracy (which is precisely “the government of the competent”, or technicians). Finally, “mass society”, characterized by that “generalized conformism” which is the negation of the democratic spirit.
This is why, rather than liberal socialism or liberal socialism, if one really wanted to identify the political model supported by Bobbio of maturity, one should rather speak of a form of “social democracy” which, if done as God commands, in favoring a form of power “from below” would end up embodying the reasons for a practical socialism (a form of social justice respectful of freedoms or, if you prefer, of “equal freedom” for all) which perhaps, at the turning point of our 70s, one could still hope. This would have been the step that would have constituted the real miracle produced by the entry into the government area of a new “player”, a player hitherto excluded. That passage was not there. The partial, fleeting approach of the Communists to the government did not mark a start in the democratic sense of democracy (excuse the pun), partly due to a lack of political strength, but also, precisely, due to the absence of thought and will. On the contrary, it was accompanied by a substantial continuity in the methods of government in the name of governability which definitively made those of Italian democracy – to take another expression of Bobbio – «promises not kept».