Scienza e politica? Élite e «gruppi cooperativi» nella riflessione di Walter Bagehot

Walter Bagehot’s notoriety is linked above all to his famous book The English Constitution dedicated to the British political system and the dynamics of political power. Another book of this eccentric Victorian thinker is very important to understand his conceptual frame: Physics and Politics. This book is one of the first reflections in which Darwinian logics are explicitly applied to analyse political phenomena. The aim of the article is to examine some theoretical and conceptual elements present above all in this book, and to consider them as useful suggestions for studying the transformations of contemporary democracy.