La massima concentrazione del minimo potere. Governo e attività di governo nelle democrazie contemporanee

This essay deals with both the topics of the Government (in the sense of the Cabinet, or of the executive branch in the constitutional organization of public powers) and the government (in the sense of the governmental functions, to be differentiated from the mere administrative functions). The starting point is the idea that, from the very beginning, it has been the specific aim of the governmental power to assure peace and public security. It is only in the age of the Enlightenment that the theory of the people’s sovereignty in America and the theory of the pouvoir constituant in France start to assign to the political power the goal of projecting the future, giving to the legislative the faculty of choice, and to the executive branch the means to realize that choice. It was nevertheless only during the fascism that the Italian doctrine of constitutional law elaborated the theory of the indirizzo politico (an expression that has no equivalent in the English language and can be translated as the power of determining the general directions and the general directives of the State’s action). It is only in the context of this theory that an idea of the privileged autonomy of the Government, in the general texture of the constitutional distribution of powers, could be fully elaborated. This essay then asks about this theory in today’s European democracies, in which the State’s powers have been largely delegated to supranational or international entities. The Government’s power has reached arguably its minimum in our history, but the tendency is to concentrate in such a Government the maximum amount of power possible. This is rather paradoxical and shows the limits of the doctrine of the direct proportionality between strength of the political power and strength of the executive branch.