Milieu 05 of 12
Elite theory before fascism
Three writers watched democratic forms arrive without democratic substance, and concluded that organization itself produces a ruling minority.
- Years
- Roughly 1896 to 1915
- Location
- Italy and Germany
- Funder
- UNKNOWN. These were university and journalistic careers rather than a funded programme. The research document records no funder.
- Institution
- Italian universities, and for Michels the German Social Democratic Party as his object of study
The climate
Mass suffrage was arriving and parties were becoming bureaucracies. These writers watched the forms of democracy appear without the substance, and built a general theory out of what they saw. Politically they run in several directions, some of them ugly, and their arguments were later useful to fascism. Meet the arguments rather than avoiding them.
The three claims
Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (1896). Every society is run by an organized minority over a disorganized majority. Each ruling class legitimates itself with a Glossary / MoscaThe story a ruling group tells to explain why it should rule: divine right, the will of the people, expertise. Believed sincerely rather than cynically.Full glossary: divine right, the will of the people, expertise. The formula is believed sincerely by the rulers, which is what makes it work and what makes cynicism the wrong lens for reading it.
Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society (1916). Derivations are the reasons people give. Residues are the drives underneath. History is the circulation of elites, one group replacing another while the structure holds.
Robert Michels, Political Parties (1911). The Glossary / MichelsOrganizing at all produces a permanent leadership layer whose interests drift away from the members. Derived from the most internally democratic party of its day.Full glossary. Organization itself produces a permanent leadership stratum with interests distinct from the members.
Michels derived it from the German Social Democratic Party, the most internally democratic mass party then in existence, which is what makes the finding devastating rather than cynical. He was not describing a corrupt organization. He was describing the best available one.
What it adds
This is the standing objection to Gramsci. Gramsci's answer to hegemony is counter-hegemonic organization. Michels says organization is where the problem starts. Both cannot be fully right, nobody has adequately worked the tension, and it bears directly on anything built out of this material. It sits in the open questions for that reason.
C. Wright Mills descends directly from this line, as does James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (1941) and The Machiavellians (1943).
Adjacent, and written under occupation
Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power (1945), argues that centralizing power expands by liberating individuals from intermediate bodies such as guilds, churches and local authorities. Emancipation and centralization advance together, each one clearing the ground for the other. It was written in occupied France and it reaches a pessimism comparable to Schmitt's by a completely different route.