E pluribus unum. The vocation for unity and the search for a strong government: responses to the crisis of parliamentarism after WWI

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Published

2026-07-06

Issue

Vol. 51 (2026): The 'strong government': building and legitimizing executive power in the twentieth century. A comparative perspective

Section

Fondamenti

License

Creative Commons License

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The issues are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0) which allows re-distribution and re-use of a licensed work on the conditions that the creator is appropriately credited and that any derivative work is made available under “the same, similar or a compatible license”.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.63277/gsc.v51i.5331

Authors

  • Massimiliano Gregorio Università di Firenze

Keywords:

Democracy, Parliamentarism, WWI, Constitutional theory, Constitutional history

Abstract

The essay aims to frame the issue of the search for a strong government within the context of the crisis of parliamentarism in the early postwar period. That crisis was triggered by the difficulty of parliamentarism in adapting to the new mass democracies that emerged after WWI. The responses developed by European constitutional thought to overcome the crisis are situated within a space ideally bounded by the opposing positions embodied by Kelsen and Schmitt, within which a range of very different solutions were nonetheless articulated.