Élites et democratie. Perspectives theorico-­politiques

This article seeks to assess the democratic potential of the concept of a political elite. Against a merely empirical use of this concept (predominant in the twentieth century), we show, from the perspective of political theory, that it can also be understood as an a-democratic, fully democratic, and even progressive notion—thus extending the work of Bernard Manin, Giovanni Sartori, and Eva Etzioni-Halevy. Understood in a philosophically normative (rather than descriptive) sense, far from being a blight on democracy, political elites constitute one of its soundest anchor points.