DEMOCRACY AND

INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT*

by Norberto Bobbio

A few years ago I dealt with the "paradoxes" of democracy, i.e., with the
objective difficulties faced in applying the democratic method in those
societies seeking democracy.1 For one who considers democracy as the ideal of
good government (in the classical sense of the term, i.e., that it is more
successful than others in bringing about the common good), the other topic of
constant debate is the "failures" of democracy. A great deal written about
democracy today deals with the exposure of these failures. This applies to the
now-classical theme of the theory of elites, to the more classical topic of the
gap between formal and substantive democracy, and finally to the more
recent question of ungovernability. On the other hand, political writers have
not paid sufficient attention to "the invisible government."
The Rule of Public Government in Public
One of the cliches of all old and new accounts of democracy is that it
consists of ruling by the "visible government." It is part of the "nature of
democracy" that "nothing should remain confined to the domain of
mystery."2 Somewhat inelegantly, one could define the rule of democracy as
the rule of public government in public. The expression is only apparently
inelegant since "public" has two meanings: one is the opposite of "private," as
in the classic distinction between ius publicum and ius privatum, stemming
from Roman jurisprudence; the other is the opposite of "secret," which
means "manifest," "plain," or "visible," rather than belonging to the res
public or state. Precisely because the two senses do not coincide, a public
performance can very well be a private affair, and a private school must
operate publicly. Similarly, there is no conflict betwen the private character
of the rule by the pater familias (in accordance with the distinction between
private and public law) and his duty to act publicly in that capacity, or
between the public nature of the rule by an autocratic ruler and the exercise
of this rule in circumstances surrounded by the greatest secrecy.
As the rule of the visible government, democracy brings to mind the image
of the agora or of the ecclesia, an image transmitted to us by political writers
of all times, who attached special significance to the great example of
Pericles' Athens; i.e., a meeting of all citizens in a public place for the
•Originally published in Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politico, X:2 (August 1980), pp.
181-203. Translated by Maurice A. Finocchiaro.
1. Cf. Norberto Bobbio, "Are There Alternatives to Representative Democracy?" in Telos,
55 (Spring 1978), pp. 17-30.
2. Cf. R. Puletti, "II Lento Cammino verso la Verita," L'Umanitd, March 13, 1980, p. 1.
42 TELOS

purpose of making and hearing proposals, exposing abuses or launching

accusations, and reaching decisions by a show of hands, after having listened
to all arguments, pro and con, presented by the various speakers. Glotz writes
that when the people met, the herald cursed anyone who was trying to deceive
them and made everyone feel as if they were being watched by the gods,
especially if demagogues abused their oratorical skills. Magistrates were
under constant surveillance, and "nine times a year, at every prytany, their
power was to be renewed by a vote of confidence, by a show of hands, and if
they did not get it they were ipso facto sent before a tribunal." It is not
without reason that the assembly has often been compared to a theater or
stadium, i.e., to a public show with spectators watching a performance which
develops in accordance with pre-established rules and ends with a judgment.
In a passage in the Laws, which speaks of the time when people were subject
to laws and gives as an example their respect for musical laws, Plato relates
how, due to poets imbued with bacchanalian enthusiasm, there arose a
deplorable confusion in music and people began to disregard musical laws;
thus "public stages turned from silent to full of sounds, as if they understood
what is beautiful or not in art, and instead of an aristocracy of music there
was a miserable theatrocracy."4 Immediately thereafter he redefines this
newly coined term, theatrocracy, as "democracy in musical matters,"
interpreting it as the effect of the popular pretension of being able to speak of
everything and of no longer recognizing any law. Plato is an anti-democratic
writer. The conflation of rule of the people with rule of the theater public
(with the consequent contraposition of the rule of the public and rule of the
best) allows him to express once again his condemnation of democracy,
understood as the rule of license and disintegration. But the association of the
demos and the public at a theater goes beyond the value judgment to which it
is tied in the Platonic passage.5
How suggestive ancient democracy was at the time of the French
Revolution is well known. It does not matter here whether reality
corresponded to the model or over the centuries had been transformed into a
normative ideal. Especially during periods of upheaval and of waiting for the
norms ordo, democratic government remained the ideal model of public
government in public. From the countless works of the revolutionary period, I
3. G. Glotz, La Cittd Greca (Turin, 1948), p. 202.
4. Plato, Le Leggi, 701a (Bari, 1921), Vol. 1, p. 102. But see also the preceding passage
where it is stated that music must not be judged by beginners, so that the judge of good music
must not listen too much to the audience, "confused by the shouting of the crowd," and in
which there is a criticism of "what the law allows in Sicily and Italy, where it sanctions the
judgment of the crowd and proclaims the winner by a show of hands" (659b).
5. Nietzsche's use of the term theatrocracy derives from Plato, even though it has a
different emphasis on the theater as a place rather than on the theater as the collective
spectators. In // Caso Wagner Nietzche reproaches the Bayreuth movement for encouraging
"the presumptuousness of the ignorant and idiots in art," so that "all these people nowadays
organize associations, want to dictate their own taste, would like to act as judges even in rebus
musicis et musicantibus" (here the Platonic derivation is clear) and for having indulged in
"theatrocracy," defined as "the strange idea of believing in the primacy of the theater, in its
right to supremacy over the other arts." Cf. Nietzsche, Opere, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari
(Milan, 1970), Vol. 5, section 3, p. 39.
 DEMOCRACY AND INVISIBLE GO VERNMENT 43

take this exemplary reference from the Republican Catechism by Michael

Natale (Vico's bishop, sentenced in Naples on August 20, 1799): "Is there
anything secret in the Democratic Government? All the rulers' actions should
be known to the Sovereign People, except for some measures involving public
safety, which must be revealed when the danger is over." 6 This passage is
exemplary because it expresses in few strokes one of the fundamental
principles of a constitutional state: public openness is the rule, secrecy the
exception — an exception that must not destroy the rule, since secrecy is
justified only if it is limited in duration, like all exceptional measures (such as
those taken by the Roman dictator). 7
This point that all decisions and more generally all of the rulers' actions
should be known by the sovereign people has always been considered one of
the hinges of democratic government defined as direct government by the
people or controlled by the people. How could it be controlled if it were kept
secret? Of course, later the ideal of direct democracy is abandoned, with the
birth of the large modern state (though even small states are no longer
city-states), and it is replaced by the ideal of representative democracy,
already perfectly sketched in one of Madison's letters polemicizing with
ancient democracy. 8 Nevertheless, the public character of government
power, understood as non-secret, as open to the "public," remains one of the
basic criteria to distinguish a constitutional from an absolute state, and thus
to identify the birth or rebirth of public government in public. In a passage of
his Verfassungslehre, Carl Schmitt expresses very well — perhaps beyond his
intentions and at any rate in a different context from mine — the connection
between the principle of representation and the public character of
government; he goes so far as to conceive representation as a form of
presenting, of rendering present, of rendering visible, what would otherwise
remain hidden. It is worthwhile to quote at least two passages:
"Representation can take place only in the public sphere. There is no
representation which operates in secret.... A parliament has a
representative character only in so far as one believes that its activity proper is
public. Secret meetings, secret agreements and decisions of any committee
can be very significant and important, but they cannot ever have a
representative character." 9 The second passage is even more explicit and
6. Michele Natale, Catechismo Repubblicano per Vlnstruzione del Popolo e la Rovina de'
Tiranni, recent edition by G. Acocella, (Vico Equense, 1978), p. 71. Another curious quotation
from Maurice Joly, Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu: La Politique de
Machiavel au XIX Siecle par un Contemporain (Brussels, 1868): "but, since publicity is the
essence of free countries, all these institutions could not last long if they did not function in the
light of day" (p. 25).
7. The relation between exceptional measures and their temporary character is one of the
characteristics of Roman dictatorship — of what Schmitt. calls "commissioned" dictatorship to
distinguish it from sovereign dictatorship. Cf. his La Dittatura (Bari, 1975: original edition,
1921), chapter 1. The temporary character justified the exceptional concentration of power.
When dictatorship becomes permanent, the dictator becomes a tyrant. Roman dictatorship is
a typical example of justified exception to a rule because of temporal limitation, typical in the
sense that any exceptional measure, if rigorously limited in time, suspends the application of
the rule but does not rescind it, and thus it saves the basic structure of the state.
8. Cf. letter No. 10 of Nov. 23, 1787 in II Federalista (Pisa, 1955), pp. 56ff.
9. Published in Munich and Leipzig, 1928, p. 208.
44 TELOS

closer to our theme: "To represent means to render visible and to render
present an invisible being by means of a being which is publicly present. The
dialectic of the concept consists in this, that the invisible is presupposed as
absent and simultaneously rendered present."10
Besides and beyond the theme of representation, the theory of democratic
government has developed another idea closely tied to that of the visible rule:
decentralization understood as a re-evaluation of the political relevance of the
periphery vis-a-vis the center. One can interpret the ideal of local government
as an ideal inspired by the principle that ruling is as visible as it is near. In
fact, visibility depends not only on the ruler presenting himself in public, but
also on the spatial distance between him and the ruled. Even though mass
communication has shortened the distance between the elected and the
electors, the public character of the national parliament is indirect, since it
shows itself primarily through the press, and through the release of
parliamentary proceedings, laws, and other actions in official government
publications. The public character of city government is more direct,
precisely because the visibility of administrators and of their decisions is
greater, or at least one of the arguments used by the defenders of local
government, the argument to restrict and multiply centers of power, is based
on the citizens' greater opportunity to look into matters that concern them
and to minimize the invisible government.
Some years ago, in a well-known, much discussed by, in my opinion,
questionable work, Habermas studied the transformation of the modern state
by showing the gradual emergence of what he calls "the private sphere of the
public domain," or, expressed differently, the public relevance of the private
sphere, that is, the emergence of so-called public opinion, which wants to
discuss and to criticize the actions of public administrators, and which,
because of this, requires (and cannot not require) that political as well as
judicial debates be public.11 It is easy to see that the greater or lesser
relevance of public opinion as opinion about public acts, i.e., acts
characteristic of that power exercised by the supreme decision-making
elements of the res publica, depends on the greater or lesser openness to the
public, i.e., on the visibility, knowability, accessibility and hence
controllability of the actions of those who hold supreme power. Publicity, so
understood, is a typical Enlightenment category insofar as it well represents
one of the aspects of the battle by those who consider themselves chosen to
defeat the kingdom of darkness; the metaphor of light and clarification is
very appropriate for the contrast between visible and invisible government.12
10. Ibid., p. 209. This aspect of Schmitt's thought is discussed by J. Freund, L'Essence du
Politique (Paris, 1965), p. 329.
11. J. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Oeffentlichkeit (Neuwied, 1962). The book seems
questionable to me because in the course of the entire historical analysis he never distinguishes
the two meanings of public: as belonging to the sphere of the state, and as the opposite of
secret, or manifest, which is the meaning of the German term Ojfentliches.
12. Which does not prevent the use of secret societies by the exponents of the
Enlightenment as an indispensable instrument to fight the battle against absolutism. On this
theme, R. Koselleck has written extensively. See Critica illuministica e Crist della Societd
Borgehse (Bologna, 1972). Koselleck writes: "Against the mysteries of the idolaters of political
 DEMOCRACY AND INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT 45

In a passage on the "solar myth of revolution," Starobinski relates that Fichte,

a supporter of the revolution, had dated his Vindication of the Freedom of
Thought against the European Rulers who have Disregarded It (1793) upon
Heliopolis, "the last year of ancient obscurantism." 13
Kant contributed more than anyone else to clarifying the connection
between public opinion and the public character of power and may be
considered the starting point of any discussion on the necessity of the visibility
of power — a necessity that for Kant is not only political but moral. In his
famous essay on the Enlightenment, Kant resolutely declares that it demands
"the most inoffensive of all liberties, namely that of making public use of one's
own reason in every field." To this remark he adds that: "the public use of
one's own reason must be free at all times, and it is the only thing that can
bring enlightenment to men," where "public use of one's own reason" means
"the use which one makes of it as an expert before the whole public of
readers." This comment accompanies the praise for Frederick II, who
supported religious liberty and freedom of thought, the latter understood as
allowing subjects "to make use of their reason" and "publicly to tell the world
their ideas about a better constitution, freely criticizing the existing one."
Of course, the public use of one's own reason requires that the ruler's actions
be public. Kant is very explicit on this point and, in part because of his topical
relevance, deserves to be explained more clearly. In the second Appendix to
Perpetual Peace, entitled "On the Compatibility of Politics and Morality
According to the Transcendental Concept of Public Law," Kant considers "a
transcendental concept of public law" the following principle: "All actions
pertaining to the rights of other men, whose maxim is not susceptible of
publicity, are injust." What is the meaning of this principle? Generally
speaking, one may answer that a maxim which is not susceptible to becoming
public is a maxim which, if it were ever made public, would provoke such a
reaction in the public as to render its actualization impossible. Kant's
applications to two enlightening examples, involving internal and
international law, clarify the problem better than any other comment.
Regarding the former, he gives the example of the right of resistance;
regarding the latter, the right of the ruler to break agreements made with
other rulers. He argues as follows. In the first case, "the injustice of rebellion
is made evident by this, that its maxim, were it to be known publicly, would
render its own aim impossible. Therefore, it would have to be kept necessarily
secret." 16 In fact, who at the moment when he accepts the pactum
subjectionis could publicly declare that he reserves the right of not following
it? And what value could such a pact have if it were to be recognized as a right

arcana there was the secret of the Enlightened. 'Why secret societies?' asks Bode, one of their
supporters in northern Germany. 'The answer is simple: because it would be folly to play with
one's cards down when your opponent has them up'." Page 108.
13. J. Starobinski, 1789, Les Emblemes de la Raison (Paris, 1979), p. 34.
14. Kant, 'Risposta alia Domanda: Che Cosa i Pllluminismo," in Scritti Politici e di
Filosofia della Storia e del Diritto (Turin, 1956), pp. 143,148.
15. Ibid., p . 328.
16. Ibid., p. 331.
46 TELOS

of participants? In the second case, analogously, what would happen if in the

very act of negotiating a treaty with another state, one of the parties were to
declare publicly that it does not feel bound to the obligations deriving from
the pact? Kant answers, "It would happen that everyone would avoid it, or
else would ally itself with other states in order to resist its claims," and
consequently, "politics, with all its cunning, would defeat its own purpose, a
reason why that maxim must be regarded unjust."17
On the validity of this principle as a criterion to distinguish good from bad
government, I do not think there is any need to insist. Reading the
newspaper, which every morning reports news of public scandals, everyone
can add many examples and see the confirmation of the soundness of the
principle. What constitutes a public scandal? A scandal is born when the
public learns about an act or series of acts which, until then, had been kept
secret or hidden because, if made public, they could not have been carried
out. To take some banal, everyday examples, one need only think about the
various forms of public corruption, speculation, embezzlement, extortion,
private enrichment by public officials, etc. Which public official could
declare in public, when he assumes office, that he will appropriate public
funds or money not belonging to public administration which he handles
because of his office (embezzlement) or that he will force others to give him
money by abusing the power and function of his office (extortion), or that he
will use the office in order to acquire personal advantages (private
enrichment)? Clearly, such declarations would make the action in question
impossible since no public administration would give the office to anyone who
made them. This is the reason why such actions must be done in secret and
why, once made public, they provoke that upheaval in public opinion called
"scandal." Only a Platonic tyrant could publicly perform those dirty actions
that private citizens either hide or repress and carry out only in dreams, like
raping one's mother. The criterion of publicity, to distinguish justice from
injustice, and the licit from the illicit, is not valid for someone like the tyrant,
for whom the public and the private coincide insofar as the affairs of state are
the affairs of the tyrant and vice versa.18
Autocracy and "arcana imperil"
The importance given to the public character of government is an aspect of
the Enlightenment polemic against the absolute state, in particular against
the various images of the sovereign as a father or master, of the monarch
through divine right, or of Hobbes' earthly god. The father who gives
commands to his under-aged children, the master who does so to his slave
subject, the monarch who receives from god the right to command, and the
sovereign who is compared to an earthly god have no obligation to reveal the
secret of their decisions to the recipients of their commands, who do not
constitute a "public." 19 Rather, on the basis of the principle salus reipublicae
17. Ibid., p. 333.
18. Cf. Republic, p. 571.
19. Tasso has Torrismondo say that "the secrets of kings to the mad crowd are not properly
given." I take this quotation from the Introduction by L. Firpo to Torquato Tasso, Tre Scritti
Politici (Turin, 1980), p. 27.
 DEMOCRACY AND INVISIBLE GO VERNMENT 47

suprema lex, the sovereign, by divine right or natural right or right of

conquest, has the duty to keep his plans as hidden as possible. Just like a
hidden god, the sovereign is more powerful and better fulfills his function of
governing restless and ignorant subjects the better he succeeds in seeing what
they do without himself being seen. The ideal of the sovereign who is
compared to the earthly god is that of being, like god, the invisible all-seer.
The political relation, i.e., the relation between ruler and ruled, may be
represented as a relation of exchange in which the ruler gives protection in
exchange for obedience. Now, whoever protects needs to have a thousand
eyes, and whoever obeys has no need to see anything. The protection of the
one is as wide-eyed as the obedience of the other is blind.
Among the political writers whose theories of the "reason of state"
accompany the formation of modern states, one of the most recurring themes
is that of the arcana imperil.20 Clapmar, the author of the best known work
on the subject, De arcanis rerum publicarum (1605), defines arcana imperii
as follows: "the intimate and secret reasons or decisions of those who hold
power in a republic." Their aim is two-fold: to preserve the state as such, and
to preserve the existing form of government, that is, to prevent a monarchy
from degenerating into an aristocracy, and aristocracy into a democracy, and
so forth, in accordance with the nature of the various "mutations" discussed
by Aristotle in the fifth book of the Politics. The author calls thefirstarcana
imperii and the second arcana dominationis.21 They both belong to the genus
of "honest and legitimate deceptions." The Machiavellian Gabriel Naude
writes in his Considerationspolitiques sur les coups d'Etat (1639): "there is no
prince who is so weak, devoid of sense, and mindless as to entrust to the
judgment of the public what can hardly remain secret when confided into the
ear of a minister or confidante." 22 Already from these references one sees that
under the category of arcana are subsumed two different though closely
related phenomena: the phenomenon of hidden rule, i.e., rule which hides
itself, and that of rule which hides itself by hiding other things. The first
involves the classic theme of state secrets, the other the equally classical theme
of the legitimate and useful lie (legitimate because useful), which goes back to
Plato. In an autocracy, state secret is not the exception but the rule; great
political decisions must be taken in such a way as to be sheltered from the
indiscreet looks of any public. The highest degree of public power, i.e., power
to take decisions binding for all subjects, coincides with the greatest
concentration of the private sphere of the prince. In a work considered among

20. The expression derives from Tacitus. For a first approximation to the problem, see F.
Meinecke, L'Idea della Ragion di Stato nella Storia Modema (Florence, 1942) Vol 1 pp
186ff. • • ff
21. I quote from the edition published in 1644 by Elzeverium in Amsterdam. The volume
also contains, in the form of an introduction, the Discursus de arcanis rerum publicarum by G.
Corvino, the De arcanis rerum publicarum discursus by C. Besold, as well as Clapmar's own De
lure publico. The quoted passage is on page 10. Both expressions, arcana imperii and arcana
dominationis, are in Tacitus, though without the specific meaning given them by Clapmar; the
first in Annales. II, 36, and in Historiae, I, 4; the second in Annales, II, 59.
22. I quote from p. 54 of the Italian translation (Turin, 1958).
48 TELOS

the most authoritative for the reconstruction of French political thought of

the time of absolute monarchy, Claude de Seyssel's La Monarchie de France
(1159), we read that "one must also take care not to divulge at very large
meetings things which must be kept secret, for it is impossible that what
becomes known to many people should not become public."23 According to
the author, a king has to use three types of councils, like Christ who could
count on three groups of followers: the 72 disciples, the 12 apostles, and the
three most trusted ones, Peter, John and James. Of these three councils, the
last one is a secret one, consisting of no more than three or four people chosen
among "the most wise and experienced"; the prince is to discuss with them
the most important questions before submitting them to the ordinary council,
and those concerning which he disagrees with this council, up to the point of
not executing its opinion but following his own "without telling them
anything until it has been put into effect."24 Among the reasons favoring
secrecy are two prevailing and recurring ones: the time exigency of every
decision that concerns the supreme interests of the state, and contempt for the
people, considered as a passive object of power, due to its being dominated by
strong feelings that prevent it from arriving at a rational idea of the common
good and make it easy prey for demagogues. The more absolute the prince's
power, the more it must appear externally by means of unmistakable signs: a
palace in the middle of the city, a crown, a scepter and other royal insignia,
magnificent clothes, a retinue of noblemen, an escort of soldiers, a display of
showy symbols, arches of triumph to pass through, solemn ceremonies to
render public the main events of his private life, e.g., weddings, births and
deaths (in sharp contrast to the secrecy of public acts). To the luminous,
almost blinding, visibility of the person, necessary in order to instill a feeling
of reverential respect and fear toward the master of his subjects' life and
death, there must correspond the opacity of the actions necessary to guarantee
their uncontrollability and arbitrariness.25
Conversely, where the highest power is hidden, the counterpower also tends
to be hidden. Invisible power and invisible counterrule are two sides of the
same coin. The history of all autocratic governments and the history of
conspiracy are parallel and go hand in hand. Wherever there is secret power,
there is almost as a natural byproduct an equally secret anti-power in the
form of conspiracies, plots, coups d'etat, intrigues in the corridors of the
imperial palace, or of seditions, revolts, or rebellions prepared in rugged and
inaccessible places, away from the sight of the inhabitants of the palace, just
as the prince acts as much as possible away from the sight of the people.
Besides the history of the arcana domination^, one could write, with the same
23. I quote from p. 134 of the edition by J. Poujol (Paris, 1961).
24. Ibid., p. 139.
25. After writing this, I came across the book by R.-G. Schwarzenberg, Lo Stato
Spettacolo: Attori e Publico net Grande Teatro della Politica Mondiale (Rome, 1980). The
book's topic is the transformation of political life into a show in which the great politician
performs and has to perform like an actor. The author writes at the beginning: "Now the state
turns into a theatrical company, into a producer," where the only error is the "now," a rather
serious one, after all, in a book on politics.
 DEMOCRACY AND INVISIBLE GO VERNMENT 49

abundance of particulars, the history of the arcana seditionis. The theme has
disappeared from treatises of political science and public law written after the
advent of the modern constitutional state, which has proclaimed the principle
of the public character of government. But it was not ignored by ancient
writers whose works it would be appropriate to examine with some care, for
reasons which are all too obvious, unfortunately. In the Discourses,
Machiavelli devotes to conspiracies one of the densest and longest chapters,
which begins thus: "It did not seem appropriate to omit a discussion of
conspiracies . . . since more princes have lost their life and state through them
than through open war." And he continues: "thus, in order to allow princes
to learn how to avoid these dangers and private individuals to be more
reluctant in getting involved in them..., I will discuss them extensively,
without neglecting any important case relevant to the one or the other."26
Autocratic government not only conceals who and where it is, but tends to
hide its real intentions when its decisions must become public. Both hiding
oneself and hiding (other things) are two habitual strategies of the
phenomenon. When you cannot do without mixing with the public, then you
wear a mask. Among the writers on "reasons of state," the theme of falsehood
is an obligatory one, just as one needs to go back to Plato's "noble lie" or
Aristotle's "sophistical arguments." 27 There emerges the common opinion
that whoever is in a position of power and must constantly be on the lookout
for external and internal enemies has the right to lie, more exactly, to
"simulate"; i.e., to create an appearance of what does not exist, and to
"dissimulate," i.e., to prevent what exists from becoming apparent. A
ritualistic example is the comparison with a physician who hides from the sick
the seriousness of the disease. Equally ritualistic is the condemnation of the
sick person who deceives the physician and prevents the latter from curing
him by not revealing the seriousness of his problem. Analogously, if it is true
that the prince has the right to deceive the subject, it is equally true that the
subject does not have the right of deceiving the prince. The great Bodin
writes: "One must not spare beautiful words or promises: in fact, in this case
Plato and Xenophon allowed magistrates and rulers to lie, as one does with
children and the sick. So did the wise Pericles with the Athenians in order to
set them going on the road of reason." Grotius has a chapter of his De iure
belli ac pads on the question, De dolts et mendacio, in international
relations. This chapter is important because it contains a long list of classical
opinions for and against the public lie, as well as a rich casuistry; this is so
abundant and subtle that the reader of today gets lost, as if he were in a
labyrinth in which at the end of a path there are others, each of which leads to
others still, until one gets lost, unable any longer to find the way out or to go
back.
26. We are dealing with Chapter VI of Book III.
27. A good collection of quotations is found in R. De Mattei, "II Problema della 'Ragion di
Stato' nel Seicento. Ragion di Stato e 'Emendacio'," Rivista Intemazionale di Filosofia del
Diritto, 37 (1960), pp. 553-576.
28. Jean Bodin, Les Six Limes de la Ripublique (Paris, 1597), IV, 6, p. 474, quoted by De
Mattei, p. 560, n. 27.
50 TELOS

This highest ideal that government should be simultaneously all-seeing and

invisible has recently been rediscovered and admirably described by Foucault
in the analysis of Bentham's Panopticon, to which he devoted several pages of
Discipline and Punishment: a set of cells, each containing a prisoner,
arranged radially and culminating in a small tower from which the
watchman, symbol of power, can see at all times the smallest acts of those
being watched. It is not important that prisoners should see those who see
them; what is important is that they should know that there is someone who
sees them, or better, who can see them. Foucault correctly defines the
Panopticon as a machine which breaks the pair "seeing-being seen." Whoever
sees is not seen, whoever does not see is seen. He expresses himself thus: "in
the outermost ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central
tower, one sees everything, without ever being seen."30 Here is another
interesting observation: the architectural structure of the Panopticon creates
an asymmetric relation. Logically, the democratic form of government is
born from the agreement of each with all others, that is, from the pactum
societatis. Now, a contract represents the ideal type of a symmetrical relation,
being based on the principle of the do ut des, while the ideal type of an
asymmetrical relation is the monarch's command which creates a relation of
command to obedience. The structure of the Panopticon has been invented
for a model prision, i.e., for a type of social institution based on the principle
of maximum force and minimum freedom, for that type of institution like
insane asylums, barracks, and in part hospitals, which has been termed
"total" and whose maxim is "all that is not forbidden is mandatory."
However, it can very well be turned into an ideal model of the autocratic state
if, using the term "principle" in the sense of Montesquieu, one prefers its
principle, according to which the prince can make himself be better obeyed,
the more all-seeing he is, and he is more capable of giving commands the
more invisible he is. Considering the pair "command-obedience" as typical of
an asymmetrical power relation, the one who gives orders is more terrible the
more he is hidden (so that a subject knows that there are some who see him,
but does not know where they are); the one who must obey is more submissive
the more he is watched in all his movements, acts, and words, and the
sovereign always knows where he is and what he does.
Bentham himself has perceived the possibility, as Foucault clearly noted, of
extending the Panopticon mechanism to other institutions, to all
establishments "in which it is necessary to keep under surveillance a certain
number of people in a rather limited space," since "its excellence consists in
the great strength which it is capable of giving to any institution to which it is
applied."31 We must emphasize how infatuated the inventor is with the
creation, when he writes that the Panopticon "is capable of reforming
morality, preserving health, invigorating industry, spreading education,
lightening the burden of public office, stabilizing the economy like a rock,
29. Italian edition published by Einaudi (Turin, 1967), pp. 218-228.
30. Ibid., p. 220.
31. Ibid., pp. 224-225.
 DEMOCRACY AND INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT 31

and unraveling rather than cutting the Gordion knot of the laws of poverty:
all of this with a simple architectural idea."32 The very shape of the building
— up high the watchman in the tower, below the watched one in his cell —
raises a question political writers of all times, beginning with Plato, have
asked of any theory of the state: "Who watches the watchman?" The usual
answer consists in presupposing a superior watchman until, and in practical
matters an infinite regress is forbidden, we necessarily reach a watchman who
is not watched because there is no one above him. But who is this watchman
who is not watched? The answer is so important that political theories may be
classified by the answer they give: God, the hero founder of the state (Hegel),
the strongest, the revolutionary party which has acquired power, the people
understood as the whole collectivity which expresses itself by means of the
vote. Bentham is in his own way a democratic writer, and here is how he
resolved the problem of the watched watchman: the building can be easily
subject to continuous inspections, not only by designated inspectors but also
by the public. This device represents a further phase in the dissociation of the
pair "seeing-being seen." The prisoner is visible but does not see; the
watchman is visible and sees; the people close the circle by being a seer not
seen by any others except itself, and thus invisible, relative to others. The
invisible seer is once again the sovereign.
Reality and the Democratic Ideal
The preceding observations have shown the importance as well as the
vastness of the topic, and I have not even spoken of a crucial phenomenon in
the history of secret government: the phenomenon of secret services, and in
particular of spying, and correspondingly of counterspying, since an invisible
power is to be fought with an equally invisible power. There is no state which
has done without it, whether democratic or autocratic. The reason is that
there is no better way of knowing about others than to try to learn about them
without revealing oneself. It is no accident that Kant considers the absolute
prohibition of spying one of the preliminary articles for a perpetual peace
among states; for him, spying is a "dishonorable method," and he argues that
the use of spies in time of war, which is a device "whereby one exploits only
other people's lack of the sense of honor," would end up extending to
peace time."
At any rate, the purpose of these observations is not to give an historical
account of the various forms of invisible rule, but rather to confront with
reality the ideal of democracy as a government of visible rule. For centuries,
from Plato to Hegel, democracy has been condemned as an intrinsically bad
form of government because it is the government of the people and the people
degraded into mass, crowd, and rabble, is not capable of governing. To recall
32. Ibid., p. 225.
S3. Cf. Scritti Politici, op.cit., p. 288. In the republic of Ibania, described by the Soviet
dissident A. Zinoviev in his extraordinary book, The Yawning Heights, espionage is elevated
into a general principle of government, into a supreme rule not only of the relation between
rulers and ruled but also of the relation among the latter themselves; thus the autocratic
government is based, besides its capacity to spy on its subjects, on the help it receives from the
terrorized subjects who spy on each other.
52 TELOS

some traditional metaphors, the herd needs the shepherd, the ship crew a
captain, the under-aged son the father, the bodily organs the head. Since the
time democracy was elevated to the rank of the best possible form of
government (or the least bad), the viewpoint from which democratic regimes
are judged is that of promises not kept. It has not kept the promise of self-
government. It has not kept the promise of substantial equality (above and
beyond formal). Has it kept the promise of doing away with invisible
government?
It is well known that even the most democratic state protects a private or
secret sphere of its citizens, for example, by making it a crime to open
correspondence or by protecting the privacy and intimacy of individual and
family life from the indiscreet look of public administration and of molders of
public opinion; it also requires that some spheres of its own action should not
be made public, as happens with those laws which make it a crime to publish
secret discussions in parliament, judicial proceedings, and information
concerning criminal investigations. But the problem is not here. There is still
a difference between an autocracy and a democracy, since in the former
governmental secrecy is the rule, while in the latter it is the exception
regulated by laws which do not allow any undue extension. Nor am I going to
elaborate upon another problem which nevertheless would deserve
articulation, i.e., the re-emergence of the arcana imperil in the guise of
technical or technocratic government; the technocrat is in possession of
knowledge which is inaccessible to the masses, and if it were made accessible,
would not even be understood by the majority, or at least most people (that is,
the subject of democratic power) would be unable to make any useful
contribution to whatever discussion would follow. In this case, we are not
dealing with the traditional contempt for the people as an irrational crowd
unable to make rational decisions even in its own interest, to raise their eyes
from the earth of its own daily necessities to look at the shining sun of the
common good. Rather, we are dealing with the objective recognition of its
ignorance, or better, of its lack of skill, with the unbridgeable gap which
separates the expert from the amateur, the competent from the incompetent,
the scientific or technical laboratory from the street.34
In comparing the ideal model of visible government and reality, one must
keep in mind that every form of government has a tendency to shield itself
from its subjects by hiding itself and other things, or by secrecy and
concealment. As for this second aspect of the problem, the phenomenon of
hiding is common to every form of public communication. Once upon a time
it was called "simulation," from the viewpoint of the active subject, namely
the prince, whereas today it is called "manipulation," from the viewpoint of
the passive subject, namely citizens. Every problem in the domain of politics
can be examined from the side of the prince and from the side of the people.
For centuries political writers have been concerned with political problems
34. I do not deal with it since the clash between democracy and technocracy belongs more
to what I have called paradoxes of democracy and not to its failures. It would be useful to
distinguish two different functions of a secret: when the decision cannot be appreciated by
everyone (a technical secret), and when it is not meant for everyone (political secret).
 DEMOCRACY AND INVISIBLE GO VERNMENT J3

from the viewpoint of the prince; hence the interest in the useful lie, and the
conditions and limits of its legitimacy. The same problem, considered from
the viewpoint of the recipient of the message, becomes the problem of consent
extorted by means of the various forms of manipulation for which one
consults the experts in mass communication. In mass societies the most direct
heirs of the useful lie are ideological systems and their derivatives. Political
writers have always known and now we know better than ever that political
power properly so called (whose characterizing instrument is the use of force)
cannot do without ideological power, and hence persuaders, whether obvious
or hidden. This cannot be avoided even in a democratic regime in which
supreme power (supreme in the sense of ultimately responsible for the use of
force) is exercised in the name of and for the sake of the people, by means of
regularly scheduled elections with universal suffrage. In a way, such a regime
has a greater need of it than an autocratic or an oligarchic ruling class for
whom the subjects are an inert mass with no right. Democratic writers have
always complained against the prince's lies with the same determination with
which anti-democratic ones have railed at the deceiving eloquence of
demagogues. What distinguishes democratic from autocratic power is only
that the first, by means of the free criticism and expression of diverse
viewpoints, can generate within itself some antibodies and allow some forms
of deconcealment. 35
Sub-government, Crypto-government, and All-seeing Government
The most interesting theme through which one can test whether visible
power can defeat invisible power is that of the public character of
governmental actions: it constitutes the true turning point in the
transformation of modern states from absolute and constitutional states. On
this question, one must frankly admit that there has been no defeat of
invisible power by visible power. I am referring above all to the phenomenon
of the sub-government and to what could be called crypto-government. This
division of power is no longer vertical or horizontal, in accordance with
classical distinctions, but it is unorthodox, involves depth, and can serve to
grasp aspects of reality which escape traditional categories; there is surface or
public power, semi-submerged or semi-public power, and submerged or
occult power.
"Sub-government" has been so far an almost exclusively journalistic term,
and yet it now deserves to enter the technical universe of discourse of political
scientists. Perhaps the time has come to try a theory of sub-government, for
which there exists only a practice, and what practicel This phenomenon is
closely tied to the government of the economy, a central function of the
post-Keynesian state. Once the state has taken over the government of the
economy, politicians no longer exercise power merely by means of the
traditional forms of law, of legislative decree, and of various types of
administrative acts which have come to be part of the sphere of visible power
ever since the advent of parliamentary regimes and constitutional states,
35. A typical operation of "de-concealment" is precisely the disclosure of scandals, or to be
more exact, of actions done without publicity, which cause a scandal once they become public.
54 TELOS

namely states where the actions of public administration are subject to

judicial control. They also exercise their power by managing the great centers
of economic power (banks, state-owned industries, subsidized industries,
etc.), from which, above all, they obtain the means of subsistence for the
party apparatus, from which they in turn, through elections, obtain the
legitimation to govern. Unlike traditional legislative and executive power, the
government of the economy belongs largely to the sphere of invisible power
insofar as it is not subject, substantively if not formally, to democratic and
judicial control. As regards democratic control, the problem fo the relation
between parliament and the government of the economy continues to be one
of the most serious questions of debate on the part of constitutional theorists,
political scientists, and politicians. The reason is that, despite some
innovations, the problem is far from solved, as is shown by suddenly erupting
scandals, which present public opinion with disconcerting news, and reveal
the impotence more than the stupidity of parliament. Regarding judicial
control of adminstrative actions, the following elementary observation
suffices: in a constitutional state administrative justice aims at protecting
citizens' interests from the legal improprieties of public administration, on the
assumption that citizens are more or less harmed by such acts. However, when
an illegal act by a public official does not harm but rather favors the interests
of a citizen, in other words, when an individual citizen derives advantage
from public violations of the law, then the presupposition underlying the
institution of administrative justice has collapsed.
I call crypto-government the ensemble of actions performed by terrorist
political forces that operate in the dark in cooperation with the various secret
services, or with some of them, or at least without their opposition. The most
disturbing episode of this kind in recent Italian history is undoubtedly the
Piazza Fontana massacre. After more than ten years, despite the long judicial
procedure undertaken in more than one phase and direction, the mystery has
not been revealed, the truth has not been discovered, and the darkness has
not lifted. And yet we are not in the sphere of the unknowable. We are
dealing with a mere fact, which as such is knowable, so that though we do not
know who is responsible, we certainly know that somebody is. I am not
making any conjectures or advancing any hypothesis. I limit myself to
recalling the suspicion that remained after the closing of the trial, namely,
that state secrecy has been used to protect anti-state secrecy. At the cost of
appearing not up to date by fixing upon a remote but re-emerging episode
(and more than remote, indeed, removed), I go back to the Piazza Fontana
massacre because the degeneration of the Italian democratic system began
there, that is, at the moment when an arcanum, in the most appropriate
meaning of the term, entered Italian collective life unannounced and
unpredictably upset it, followed then by other episodes that have remained
equally obscure. Most people have a short memory. Still, there must be
somebody who represents collective memory and thus of neglecting nothing
which might help to understand. Recent history has been spotted by too many
mysterious objects for us not to want to reflect on the fragility and
 DEMOCRACY AND INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT 55

vulnerability of democratic institutions, especially from the viewpoint of the

opacity of government. And then, if the existence of an arcanum imperil or
dominationis remains a hypothesis, it is not a hypothesis but a tragic reality to
have experienced the return, unthinkable until a few years ago, of the arcana
seditionis in the form of terrorist action. Terrorism is an exemplary instance
of occult power present throughout history. One of the founders of modern
terrorism, Bakunin, proclaimed the necessity of an "invisible dictatorship."36
Whoever joins a terrorist group is forced to go underground, wear a mask,
and exercise the same art of lying so often described as one of the prince's
strategems. He, too, scrupulously follows the maxim that power is more
effective the more he knows and sees without being seen.
Before ending, I should like briefly to mention the other theme parallel to
that of invisible power: that of all-seeing power. Bentham himself was
perfectly aware of the limitations of his invention when he wrote that,
although applicable to other institutions besides prisons, it was conditional
by "space being rather limited." Strangely, the limitation of the Panopticon
was the same as that which Rousseau admitted for direct democracy, feasible
only in small republics. But today it is no longer an extravagant imagination
to think that direct democracy is made possible by the use of computers. And
why can't the same use of computers render possible a detailed knowledge by
those who hold power of citizens, even in a large state? Already today it is
impossible to compare the knowledge of his subjects by an absolute monarch
like Louis XIII or Louis XIV, with that which a well-organized state can
have. When we read the stories of the jacqueries, we notice how little the
monarch was able to see with his apparatus of functionaries, and how revolts
occurred without his being able to prevent them. How little indeed, by
comparison with the enormous possibilities that are available to a state in
possession of large artificial memories. It is impossible to predict whether the
scenario is only a nightmare or a destiny. At any rate, it would be a tendency
opposite to that which has animated the democratic ideal, as an ideal of
visible power: not the tendency toward the greatest control of government by
citizens, but on the contrary, toward the greatest control of the subjects by
those who hold power.
36. "This program can be clearly enunciated in a few words: total destruction of the
judicial-political world and of the whole so-called bourgeois civilization, through a spontaneous
popular revolution; it would be directed in an invisible manner, not by an official dictatorship,
but by an anonymous and collective dictatorship of friends of the total liberation of the people
from any yoke, firmly united in a secret society and always and everywhere acting for a unique
end and in accordance with a unique program." Cf. M.A. Bakunin to S.G. Necaev, in A.I.
Herzen, A un Vecchio Compagno, ed. V. Strada (Turin, 1977), p. 80.