As producers of ideology, parties create social energy; as organizational mechanisms, they direct and orient it; as institutions of democracy, they express the people's will and sovereignty; as carriers of an internal logic, they usurp and appropriate it.

Today, however, at the moment of the collapse of all "truths," these traditionally known merchants of hope, who in the past were creations and also creators of desires, expressers but also organizers of confrontations, can no longer operate as "central offices managing eternal truths." Consequently, they are experiencing the greatest crisis in their history; they are being questioned as a whole; they are under attack from all sides.

Often, in fact, they are blamed for whatever phenomena of corruption arise, which are, however, inherent to the very nature of politics and the exercise of power. However, parties are nothing but processes of institutionalized intervention of society in the game of power. Their sins are, perhaps exaggeratedly, the sins of society.

The aim of this new work, therefore, is to provide the Greek reader with the most complete possible "cold" knowledge of the party phenomenon.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]