Elitism (Routledge Revivals)

G. Lowell Field, John Higley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135092207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

First published in 1980, this book presents an important critique of prevailing political doctrine in Western societies at a time of major change in circumstances of Western civilization. G. Lowell Field and John Higley stress the importance of a more realistic appraisal of elite and mass roles in politics, arguing that political stability and any real degree of representative democracy depend fundamentally on the existence of specific kinds of elites.

Chapter 1

Elitism in eclipse

There was one period in the history of modern social science in which a substantial and promising elitist position was articulated. This was during the first third of the present century, and the principal figures involved were Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels.¹ All three wrote extensive bodies of elitist political theory. All three were much more interested in the scientific explanation of how politics occurred and of the limits to political change than they were in promoting any political position for its own sake. None was consistently hostile to the general Western liberal value system, though more orthodox thinkers in Western countries have made much of the fact that all three tolerated, in the sense that they did not politically oppose, the Italian Fascist regime. Of the three, Pareto is perhaps least accepting of Western liberal values, but he is not an advocate of any other cause. Michels is an ex-democrat and ex-socialist, initially disillusioned, as he believes, on factual and not normative grounds. As his career progresses, Mosca concedes more and more the desirability and propriety, but not the effectiveness and viability, of liberal and, as he would punctuate it, ‘democratic’ government. Presumably, the Central European background of these men made it easier for them than for their Anglo-American and Northern European colleagues to admit the probably mistaken character of popular Western political creeds.

Mosca stressed the somewhat ambiguous point that those who rule are always a small minority in any society regardless of its formal organization. He commented at length, in a generally cultivated and liberal fashion, on a wide variety of historical polities, but he did not develop a formal system of analysis. He emphasized the desirability of what he called ‘juridical defence’, a concept roughly analogous to that of civil liberties. In a strict sense it meant judicial institutions independent enough to prevent persons in power from penalizing their rivals merely to further their own political chances. Though he denied its ideological rationale, and though he doubted its ability to persist, Mosca showed much sympathy for representative government, particularly in his later writings.²

Pareto, an engineer who turned later in life to economics, where he made substantial technical contributions, eventually also turned to political sociology, where he attempted a systematic theory of social and political change. In particular, he stressed changing combinations of the characteristics of ruling elites, the behaviour of which he likened to that of lions and foxes. In addition, he sketched the circumstances under which one elite combination, if it were not gradually absorptive of outsiders, would collapse and be replaced by the other.

Michels contributed a cogent analysis of what he took to be the inherent conflict between leaders and followers in a complex society. His example, with which he was personally familiar, was conflict in the German Social Democratic Party before World War I. He showed that even in such an avowedly egalitarian organization an elite of party leaders and officials necessarily became in most respects middle-class in attitude. By their presence in strategic positions, without which the organization would lose effectiveness, they came to dominate the organization and to modify its policy in directions more congenial to their interests than to those of the mass membership. His general conclusion was that oligarchy is inevitable in all organizations – the so-called ‘iron law of oligarchy’.

Pareto, Mosca, and Michels regarded themselves as empirical social scientists rather than social philosophers. They could do this because the acceptance of elitism as a moral point of view and as a respectable intellectual orientation was not uncommon in their milieu. Especially in Central Europe at that time there were many overt elitists. Throughout Western civilization, moreover, there were certainly many persons in the educated public who sympathized with this point of view. The three writers therefore felt no strong need to argue the moral respectability of their position in order to get a hearing. Although they often adopted polemical styles, these were intended to denigrate what they regarded as wayward intellectuals, in particular Marxists, and not to publicize an entirely novel point of view. In this general situation, they thus were able to direct their efforts to clarifying the mechanisms of elite behaviour and to making the elitist position more operational.

A half-century later this is no longer the situation in which advocates of elitist models find themselves. At present there are very few avowed or conscious elitists or, for that matter, persons who are open-minded about the employment of elitist models. Supporters of a laissez-faire economy, in so far as they can still be found, merely posit that this is the best route to increased prosperity for all. Social science advocates of the so-called ‘democratic theory of elitism’ are mainly concerned to make the comfortable argument that while elites play a role in the governance of modern societies this role is neither unpleasant nor irremediably opposed to a substantial degree of democracy. Those who discover power elites and ruling classes in these societies nearly always temper their ostensibly factual observations with their personal beliefs that there should not be, and possibly need not be, such perversions of democracy and equality. In fact, all associate themselves more or less fully with egalitarian and democratic values, and for many publicists ‘elitist’ is a favourite pejorative.

Thus to advance elitist hypotheses today it is not enough merely to argue, as Pareto, Mosca and Michels could, that elites always or usually exist and that they are probably of decisive importance. In addition to this, it is now necessary to refute the widely held assumption that values such as equality, liberty and freedom are universal and objective. Probably only by making this refutation can contemporary thought be brought to see the importance and the propriety of elitist assumptions. For if values are not universal and objective, but are instead plural and conflicting, then it will be seen to follow that only some tolerance of arbitrary, vested rights and powers, however impossible they may be to justify on an ab initio basis, constitutes a plausible and very likely a necessary barrier to the profitless battle of all against all.

I

During the half-century from roughly 1925 to 1975, the elitist paradigm sketched by Mosca, Pareto and Michels received very little elaboration. In Germino’s view, only Guido Dorso, a relatively obscure political scientist who died in 1947, tried seriously to extend it.³ This effective eclipse of the elitist paradigm can be largely accounted for by the novel historical experience of Western societies during the later nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. These years probably offered the most disorienting and deceptive circumstances that history has ever laid before a major civilization. Their consequence has been a set of basic considerations about human needs and behaviour that came to be generally believed by educated persons after World War II and that still underlie most thinking about social problems and policy choices in Western societies. Yet these basic considerations are all more or less erroneous.

Prior to the eighteenth century in the West, and down to the present day in the rest of the world, human experience has almost always taught that societal survival in a world of scarce resources cannot be assumed. The claims of rival societies for territory and for resources have had to be considered an ever present threat to domestic well-being. In the face of such threats, societal survival is more nearly in the interest of every person than is the pursuit of any general rearrangement of statuses and rewards within society. This is because it is usually obvious to most persons that defeat by rival peoples, to which internal social conflict could be expected to contribute, would probably result in the loss of their own culture and, consequently, in culturally degraded statuses, if not in outright enslavement and extermination.

But from at least 1683, when the Turks were defeated before Vienna, the preponderance of military skills and armaments possessed by Western societies has kept them largely free of this special nightmare. All subsequent attacks on their home territories have been unleashed by other Westerners, not by foreigners from drastically different cultures. These attacks have hardly ever been seen as threatening cultural or societal extinction. Gradually, this circumstance made it possible for Western populations to become preoccupied with programmes for internal social transformation of a more or less revolutionary character. Indeed, this became a central interest in Western thought. While opinion differed about the difficulties or disasters that such transformation might cause because of its threat to entrenched domestic interests, it was possible to avoid seriously considering the importance of social peace for the very survival of Western societies in a world of rival peoples. In other words, the assurance of cultural and societal survival for Western civilization in general fostered the probably deceptive belief that drastic social transformation, mainly in an egalitarian direction, could be purchased at an acceptable cost.

During the past century or so, the spurious plausibility of this aberrant current of Western social revolutionary thought was reinforced by a second deception. This was the doubt that the progress of scientific knowledge and its technological applications cast upon the universality of material scarcity. Prior to the latter part of the nineteenth century in the West, it was always fairly obvious, just as it still is obvious in developing societies today, that desirable positions in life are so few that the persons holding them can be expected to resist utterly all attempts at their displacement. Indeed, it was fairly obvious that this resistance would be so vehement as to make efforts at sweeping social change dubiously profitable, quite apart from the openings they might give to invading foreigners.

No matter of what they may consist, desirable positions almost always mean superior status, and this is usually accompanied by a hold on more than an average share of a society’s material wealth. In developing, less productive societies it is easy to see that a relatively equal distribution of material wealth would leave all persons seriously deprived. From the middle of the nineteenth century, however, Western industrialization and increased productivity seemed to offer possibilities for a much more equal distribution of material goods exactly because the consequence of universal deprivation appeared to be less and less certain.

For about a hundred years, Western progress did remove ever larger proportions of Western populations from the immediate threat of misery. In varying degrees and at different times, productivity increases actually appeared to be reducing emulative motives among various strata. For example, during the 1950s and early 1960s in North America and Western Europe it was not difficult to believe that progress in material well-being had basically satiated mass desires for better material circumstances. During those years in particular, increases in material affluence were rapid enough to outrun conscious consumer demand and, concomitantly, to suspend the forceful assertion of self-interest on the part of population categories that were previously, and for the most part remained, relatively poor.

These circumstances created the widespread impression that redistribution out of surplus production would shortly bring about a practical equality. This impression ignored, of course, the nonmaterial aspects of stratification, just as it ignored the engineering and economic difficulties of sustaining unlimited growth. Eventually, however, after a few Western populations reached very high levels of material well-being without coming appreciably closer to a practical equality, the illusory character of this impression became clearer.

This historical overview helps us to understand why, shortly after World War II, a moral point of view and an intellectual orientation that were compatible with the elitist paradigm ceased to be effectively transmitted to the young in the leading Western countries. In fact, they began to disappear with the deaths of the persons who held them. Of course, even before the war in countries such as the United States, Great Britain and France there had been no general acceptance of the elitist paradigm. A whole variety of circumstances, in addition to the two main ones we have just reviewed, combined to make it seem unduly pessimistic in those countries even during the first half of this century. Perhaps it is enough to say that because these were the most powerful and the most obviously successful countries in the West, persons who lived in them were necessarily more optimistic in evaluating their domestic political and social prospects.

During the pre-war years, nevertheless, many thoughtful persons could readily acknowledge at least some features of the elitist paradigm as true. This was especially so when they turned their attention to earlier historical periods or to the less developed regions of the world. Specifically, during the pre-war period it was fairly widely surmised, and often openly stated in well-informed circles, that what the Americans, the British or the French called ‘democracy’ in their own governments – the relatively free competition for elective offices that carried real authority – was a luxury. To be sure, ‘democracy’ was something to be firmly cherished by the countries that could afford it, but it was a luxury none the less. Thus it was widely noted that opponents of government policy were allowed to speak freely and that the results of elections were generally respected precisely in those countries in which no very sweeping policy changes were seriously at issue. It was widely assumed, moreover, that sweeping changes could only be imposed by force on large and unwilling categories of any nation’s population.

From roughly the end of World War II, however, even this willingness to take seriously and to discuss at least some aspects of the elitist paradigm effectively ceased in the leading Western societies. As the post-war period proceeded, fewer and fewer people could be found who were prepared to revert to, or even grudgingly concede the partial validity of, elitist hypotheses. Thus the change that set in after World War II was real and significant. The major aspect of this change was a new paradigm that came to pervade Western thought and that made the elitist paradigm very difficult to contemplate at all. This may best be called the ‘welfare state paradigm’. It appeared spontaneously immediately after World War II in the thinking of some elites in the leading Western countries and Japan, and over a decade or so it became generally professed. It amounts to an amalgam of the remnants of liberal and socialist doctrines once each of these had been stripped of its realistic and more pessimistic considerations.

II

During the first half of this century, the thought of Western-educated persons prevailingly followed two elaborate but distinct paradigms. In general, those who were most individually powerful were thoroughly imbued with liberal conceptions, while those who were more disaffected or dissatisfied adhered to socialist views. Both paradigms were, by this century, rich in detail and nuance. The eighteenth and early nineteenth century models from which they derived had been the subjects of lengthy elaboration and exegesis. Along the way, both had absorbed much of the practical political wisdom of earlier intellectual traditions. Both assumed a certain tendency in human behaviour toward individualistic selfishness. The liberal paradigm proposed ways of harnessing this tendency in order to make it a principal means of progress, in practical terms through the freedom of private entrepreneurs from political controls over the production and distribution of goods. On the other hand, socialism saw the same tendency toward selfishness as something that adequate social organization could and should suppress, also in the interest of progress, a goal which, in the abstract, overlapped considerably with that which liberals called by the same name.

Until World War II the liberal and socialist world views were sufficiently contradictory that co-operation between adherents of both always presented grave moral problems. In the early years of the Weimar Republic, socialists, because they also thought of themselves as democrats, joined in some coalition majorities for fear that otherwise there might not be majorities to support the democratic political system. But they found this experience extremely distasteful because it made them appear to be assuming responsibility for a capitalist system that they were powerless to change. Similarly, on two occasions the British Labour Party had the unsatisfying experience of forming governments that lacked absolute majorities in parliament. They thus found themselves compelled to govern a capitalist system that they had no mandate to change. The second of these two occasions led to a deep party split and to the party’s repudiation of most of its best-known leaders. During the decade before the war, socialist cabinets in Sweden and Norway enjoyed somewhat more favourable situations, but they too lacked sufficient parliamentary support to enable them to pursue anything like a full implementation of their programmes.

For their part, liberals gravely doubted their own ability to accept such a mistaken notion as socialism even if it were to win a majority at the polls. While an important part of socialist thought insisted on following democratic procedures where they were well established until socialism should be victorious in a popular vote, socialists too doubted that their liberal opponents would accept their authority even after they had won an election. Some socialists, concentrated mainly in the so-called communist parties, were unwilling to respect the authority of ‘bourgeois’ governments even if these governments could claim formal endorsement by popular majorities.

Thus during the inter-war years and earlier any discussion of serious social change, which was always viewed in terms of a change from a capitalist to a socialist economy, inevitably raised questions about the possibility or the propriety of some upset in the formal machinery of democratic government in the countries where representative politics were well-established. The important point is that always and inevitably in such political speculation the possibility of independent elite action, whether in favour of the right or the left, had to be considered. In this way, up until World War II, the relevance of the elite paradigm, and awareness of it, were preserved.

But already in the inter-war years the ground for a coming together of liberalism and socialism after World War II was being laid. Part of this ground was the rise of communist and fascist movements. A socialist faction, to which the specific label ‘communist’ was soon applied, managed to seize and hold power in Russia as that country staggered under the costs of its participation in World War I. Within a few years this regime came to be accepted as a permanent feature of the political landscape. Eventually, it satisfied the traditional criterion for socialism by abolishing the private entrepreneurial function. But, in the process, its denial of traditional political liberties and its highly dictatorial policies deeply offended many socialists as well as liberals. Fascism, both in its original Italian form and in the more sweeping German version, was a populistic reaction to egalitarian threats. It did not have a serious intellectual tradition behind it, however, and it could not be identified as either liberal or socialist. Consequently, its rise as a new and wholly unexpected force deeply frightened both socialists and liberals. In fact, as World War II approached, the Russian communists’ efforts to organize antifascist coalitions brought communists, other socialists, and liberals together in short-lived governments in France and Spain.

Nevertheless, in general the inter-war atmosphere allowed little ground for a compromise between liberalism ...