Giovanni Sartori (political scientist)

Giovanni Sartori, 2009

Giovanni Sartori (born May 13, 1924 in Florence , † April 1, 2017 ) was an Italian political scientist and philosopher .

His book Homo videns on the relations between the media and contemporary society achieved a circulation of over 100,000, his work Democrazia e definizioni (1957) and his major political science work, Parties and Party Systems from 1976, have shaped party and democracy research to the present day.

Life

Sartori received his doctorate in political and social sciences from the University of Florence in 1946 . As a lecturer in modern philosophy , logic and political science , he initiated the establishment of the first political science faculty in Italy, named after Cesare Alfieri .

In 1954 he qualified as a professor for the subject “History of Modern Philosophy” and in 1955 for political science. From 1950 to 1956 he was Professor of Modern Philosophy at the University of Florence, then until 1963 Professor of Political Science and from 1966 to 1976 Professor of Sociology there.

In 1976 Sartori went to Stanford University in California as Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution . From 1979 until his retirement in 1994 he was Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University in New York . In addition, Sartori was a lecturer at Harvard University and Yale University, among others . In 1993 he returned to Florence and until 1996 also taught as Professor of Political Science at the University of Florence.

In 1971 he founded the Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica (Italian political science journal), of which he was editor until 2004. In 1973 he was a co-founder of the Società italiana di scienza politica (SISP) and its first president (until 1975).

Sartori was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Accademia dei Lincei and wrote for the Italian daily Corriere della Sera . He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Genoa , Georgetown University , the University of Guadalajara and the University of Buenos Aires . Since 1988 he has been Vice President of Società Libera , a society dedicated to the study and promotion of the liberal ideals of society.

His close connection with his hometown Florence is also expressed in the burial in a chapel of the Florentine basilica San Miniato al Monte , which is said to bear the inscription: "Giovanni Sartori per se e pei suoi" ("Giovanni Sartori for himself and his people") ).

Democracy theory

With the publication Parties and Party Systems , published in 1976, Sartori made an important contribution to democratic theory. At its center is the competitiveness of party systems, for which he developed a typology that is still widespread in political science today. In a first step, this typology differentiates between competitive and non-competitive party systems. The competitive party systems can be further subdivided into systems of polarized pluralism and moderate pluralism, into a predominant party system and a two-party system. The non-competitive systems include one-party systems and hegemonic party systems.

Polarized pluralism is characterized by the fact that there is a large number of parties that hardly work together, with at least one party rejecting the political system in principle and the opposition party not assuming any responsibility. This leads to triangular relationships: Two or more parties must work together to support the government while repelling attacks on the state.

The fact that changing coalitions are not possible results in the system becoming frozen: the parties can no longer move. These parties usually have a strong connection to a well-defined worldview, which increases polarization.

The moderate form of the pluralistic party system is characterized by changing coalitions, by lower ideologization, the lack of a fundamental opposition and a concentration of the competition between the parties on the takeover of government.

Media theory and media criticism

Sartori's work Homo Videns: Televisione e Post-Pensiero from 1997 is a popular science essay that can be assigned to media criticism and media philosophy .

Sartori starts from the culture philosophical main work philosophy of symbolic forms of neo-Kantian Cassirer in which the human anthropological at the same time as Homo sapiens such as " animal symbolicum is determined".

Sartori accordingly characterizes the effect of the mass media as the replacement of abstract, analytical, logical, systematic and at the same time reality-related thinking by the visual perception of manipulated or virtual images. Following Leibniz and Vico , but mainly due to the distinction of Immanuel Kant between mundus intelligibilis and mundus sensibilis in the Critique of Pure Reason Sartori represents his main thesis that human development was reversed by the influence of television, homo videns have the Homo sapiens replaces that there is a regression to the pre-cultural early days of humanity.

Sartori's theory follows on from the work of Allan Bloom , Jürgen Habermas and Neil Postman in many ways . Its main opponent is "Negropontism", named after Nicholas Negroponte , which sees the new media as only the instruments of a superior, democratic and progressive civilization. Furthermore, Sartori stands in opposition to all directions of postmodernism and deconstructivism , which fight rationality and self-identity as an expression of coercion.

Sartori's main argument is the distinction between seeing and understanding or recognizing or apprehending and determining their relationship. While the senses passively convey pictorial ideas to us that are without structure or meaning in themselves , the understanding only creates contexts of meaning through the formation of concepts . In addition, thinking is also able to detach itself completely from experience . Language is the medium of this discursive , analytical thought process , which is also reflection . Reality - and self - experience do not take place via sensory stimuli , but are the result of an active semantic, logical and systematic organization of the contents of consciousness .

The homo videns, on the other hand, loses all contact with reality and with himself in the digital , virtual and manipulated image worlds . The circular wandering around in hypertexts and the playful getting lost in virtual pseudo-worlds leads to the loss of self-control, to chaotic disorientation, to the splitting of the neurotic self into multiple personalities.

Following Leibniz, who presented thinking and free decision in their inner context, Sartori comes to the conclusion that modern homo ludens are at the same time unfree, externally controlled and politically incompetent, which calls into question the existence of representative democracy or through misunderstood participation Democracy destroyed and replaced by mediocracy .

Others

Sartori published a book in March 2009 with the title Il sultanato (German: The Sultanate ). In doing so, he analyzed the Italy that Silvio Berlusconi had shaped with his media power as the owner of the Mediaset group (→ Berlusconism ).

Sartori coined the terms Porcellum and Mattarellum for electoral reforms of the Second Republic .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://corrierefiorentino.corriere.it/firenze/notizie/editoriali_e_opinioni/17_aprile_05/scienziato-quasi-profeta-de1cf7ae-19d4-11e7-b3fa-21a56a023b72.shtml
2. ^ Giovanni Sartori: Il sultanato , Laterza publishing house, ISBN 978-8-842-08914-8

Web links

• Literature by and about Giovanni Sartori in the catalog of the German National Library
• Homepage: http://www.giovannisartori.it/