Italian Elitism and the Reshaping of Democracy in the United States

Giorgio Volpe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000362329
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This book deals with the reception of Italian elitism in the United States, identifying its key protagonists, phases, and themes. It starts from the reconstruction of the scientific and political debates aroused in the United States by the works of Mosca, Pareto, and Michels, and moves on to define their theoretical influence in the American scientific and academic contexts. The analysis takes into consideration the period from the first contact between elitists and American academia in the early 1920s to the publication of The Power Elite by Mills, in 1956, which marks the emancipation of American elitism. After introducing the fundamental principles of elite theory, the first part of the study reconstructs the debate that it aroused beyond the Atlantic. The second part examines the original American reworking of the elitist lesson, concentrating on the works of the authors most strongly influenced by it: Joseph A. Schumpeter, Harold D. Lasswell, and Charles W. Mills. The book aims to shed light on the contribution of Italian elitism to the development of American political thought.

1
The Italian school of elitism

Elites

Elitism rests on the assumption that in every society a minority of people holds the greatest amount of existing resources and, consequently, power in its various forms, by virtue of which it dominates the rest of the population. From this assumption, it follows that all types of government are oligarchies and that political ideologies represent the changing rational justifications of the concrete power relationships that have always characterized the life of all societies.¹

Such principles were formulated in a series of works published between 1884 and 1916, refined and expanded after the advent of Fascism. These include Sulla Teorica dei governi e sul governo parlamentare (1884) and Elementi di scienza politica (1896 and 1923) by Gaetano Mosca;² Les systèmes Socialistes (1902–1903) and Trattato generale di sociologia (1916 and 1923) by Vilfredo Pareto;³ Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie (1911 and 1925)⁴ and Corso di Sociologia politica (1927) by Robert Michels.⁵ Although elite theorists discussed themes that had always been involved in the debate about humanity and society, their analyses were imbued with unprecedented realism and the aspiration to apply scientific methods to the study of politics, thus allowing them to capture the attention of the scientific community. The aim of elitist research was not to ascertain the best possible form of government or understand how to achieve the perfect society, but to empirically identify the concrete foundations of human relationships as well as key sociopolitical dynamics. Elitism, Bobbio writes, “was not deduced from a priori principles but was derived exclusively from an unprejudiced and ruthless observation of the facts”;⁶ therein lay the strength of its arguments and the causticity of its critique.

If the elite theorists assumed the same realistic and value-free approach in the study of politics, their analyses stemmed from different disciplinary perspectives. Vilfredo Pareto, a sociologist, focused his research on the reasons and dynamics that cause the social equilibrium to be established, undergo a crisis, and re-establish itself. Starting from the acknowledgement of the heterogeneity and stratification of society, he focused on issues such as the identification of social forces, the distinction between logical and non-logical actions, and the processes of social selection. In this sense, it is fair to say that Pareto aimed to explain the reasons for the social inequalities that inevitably characterize human nature. Gaetano Mosca, a political scientist, centred his investigation on the formation, organization, distribution, and legitimization of the political power that would enable the imposition of decisions on the community. He covered topics such as the identification of the subjects who hold power, the study of the tools and techniques of government, as well as the analysis of the relationship between the rulers and the ruled. Thus, from his perspective, elitism’s aim is to understand the foundations of political power. Assigning Robert Michels’ studies a clear methodological connotation is a more difficult task. Taking the party structure as the main object of his examination of democracy, he addressed both the traditional topics of political science, such as the organization and the bureaucratization of political parties, and sociological issues like leaderism and the relationship between leaders and the masses. However, Michels’ relationship with elitism was problematic. Often, his positions were original and not always comparable to those of Pareto and Mosca.

From this quick summary, it becomes clear how the different scientific orientations of Mosca, Pareto, and Michels were reflected in a greater or lesser sensitivity to the key themes of elitism. For this reason, the first two sections of this chapter present the fundamental elements of the elite theory by comparing the work of Mosca and Pareto, as they lend themselves to being contrast by focusing on the political and the sociological. The third section looks at Michels’ work, showing his empirical approach. The final section provides an overview of the political implications of the thinking of these three authors.

*

The elite theory was first articulated by Mosca in his work On the Theory of Governments and Parliamentary Government (1884), and later exhaustively discussed in The Ruling Class (1896), where it received its canonical formulation:

Among the constant facts and tendencies that are to be found in all political organisms, one is so obvious that it is apparent to the most casual eye. In all societies – from societies that are very meagerly developed and have barely attained the dawning of civilization, down to the most advanced and powerful societies – two classes of people appear – a class that rules and a class that is ruled. The first class, always the less numerous, performs all political functions, monopolizes power and enjoys the advantages that power brings, whereas the second, the more numerous class, is directed and controlled by the first; in a manner that is now more or less legal, now more or less arbitrary and violent, and supplies the first, in appearance at least, with material means of subsistence and with the instrumentalities that are essential to the vitality of the political organism. In practical life we all recognize the existence of this ruling class.⁷

As can be seen from these few lines, Mosca adopted the term “ruling class” to define a select group of people who hold political power. The more famous term “elite” was first used by Pareto in the introduction to Socialist Systems (1902) and later in The Mind and Society (1916):

Let us assume that in every branch of human activity each individual is given an index which stands as a sign of his capacity. … So let us make a class of the people who have the highest indices in their branch of activity, and to that class give the name of elite.⁸

Although the second term enjoyed greater popularity for being more easily recognizable and applicable to various social contexts, Mosca continued to defend his choice, believing that the ruling classes should possess the ability to govern, but that this “by no means implies that they are the ‘best’ individuals intellectually, much less the ‘best’ individuals morally.”⁹ In other words, Mosca deemed Pareto’s choice of term incorrect as in his opinion “elite” had a positive connotation, which made its use improper from a scientific viewpoint. Mosca’s words went unheeded; however, in preferring the term “elite” scholars chose not to focus on the term as a value judgement. Michels chose the term “oligarchy” instead, first in a series of essays on the theme and then in his major work, Political Parties (1911). In his case, the choice of the term was dictated by a different criterion. While Mosca and Pareto sought to identify a power group, the German-born sociologist highlighted a political practice, which is to say that all forms of government are oligarchic regardless of their formal differences.

The elite theory focuses on several elements: composition and formation, extension, renewal and replacement, and organization.¹⁰ As concerns the first element, Mosca asserts that the members of the ruling class “are distinguished from the mass of the governed by qualities that give them a certain material, intellectual or even moral superiority.”¹¹ Even though these required qualities may change depending on the historical period, Mosca believes that some of them are stable over time, such as wealth, military valour, religious wisdom, and scientific culture. Alternatively, as often happened in the past, one may belong to a political class by inheritance, having been born into a family in which the above characteristics were acquired from an ancestor. However, this does not mean that the upper classes represent a higher degree of social evolution, as some interpretations of Darwin’s thought or of authors like Gumplowicz¹² seem to suggest:

If the ruling class really belonged to a different race, or if the qualities that fit it for dominion were transmitted primarily by organic heredity, it is difficult to see how, once the class was formed, it could decline and lose its power. The peculiar qualities of a race are exceedingly tenacious. Keeping to the evolutionary theory, acquired capacities in the parents are inborn in their children and, as generation succeeds generation, are progressively accentuated. The descendants of rulers, therefore, ought to become better and better fitted to rule, and the other classes ought to see their chances of challenging or supplanting them become more and more remote. Now the most commonplace experience suffices to assure one that things do not go in that way at all.¹³

Mosca simply acknowledges that to be born in a specific environment and have a good education favours the acquisition of certain intellectual and moral qualities. Be these qualities real or apparent, however, the most significant fact is that the members of the ruling class effectively seem to fulfil certain requirements of the society in which they live. While Mosca bases his analysis on historical sources, Pareto’s inquiry reveals his training as an economist, taking Otto Ammon’s wealth distribution curve as a starting point to define the concept of elite.¹⁴ Although he does not postulate the qualities required of the members of the elite, Pareto states a simple fact: every field of human activity can be described as a “sort of upturned top,” the summit of which is occupied by very few individuals endowed with certain “physiological and psychological characteristics.”¹⁵ According to Pareto, even if a direct correlation between individual qualities and wealth cannot be proven, it is a fact that individuals at the top of the political and social pyramid tend to occupy the upper echelons of society also in terms of wealth. Due to their different scientific approaches, it should be noted that Pareto writes of a plurality of elites, referring to the different fields of human activity, while Mosca narrows his focus to a single ruling class identified with the upper layer of society and holder of political power. In the first case, we are dealing with a broader research perspective according to which elites are the most conspicuous phenomenon of social heterogeneity and, therefore, a key factor of social equilibrium; in the latter, the rulers/ruled dichotomy is the starting point for the birth of modern political science.

The extension of elites points both to the extent of the phenomenon in society and to its structure. Mosca identifies two “strata” in the ruling class. The first characterizes “all forms of government and includes two or three dozens of persons, or even as many as a hundred, according to the case, who monopolize the management of the state and occupy the more important offices, sometimes in rotation.”¹⁶ The second is larger and includes “all the capacities for leadership in the country,” constituting an essential element for the functioning of the state and the effective condition for its stability:

[T]he stability of any political organism depends on the level of morality, intelligence and activity that this second stratum has attained; and this soundness is commonly the greater in proportion as a sense of the collective interests of nation or class succeeds in exerting pressure on the individual ambitions or greeds of the members of this class. Any intellectual or moral deficiencies in this second stratum, accordingly, represent a graver danger to the political structure, and one that is harder to repair, than the presence of similar deficiencies in the few dozen persons who control the workings of the state machine.¹⁷

Although Mosca’s analysis often lacks clarity on this particular point, the second stratum may generally be identified with elite classes who always come between the ruling minority and the ruled majority, albeit in ways that change over time. In “primitive autocratic systems,”¹⁸ the second stratum included priests and warriors, that is, those who possessed the required moral authority, material strength, and consequently financial power. This model was superseded by the “bureaucratized autocracy”¹⁹ in which the expansion of the state apparatus necessitated the enlisting of public servants, mainly drawn from the middle classes, who could absorb the task of organizing and directing the masses. In representative regimes, finally, the role of trait d’union between the leaders and the people is played by that portion of the electorate made up of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Italian school of elitism
• 2 Politics in transformation
• 3 The two faces of elitism
• 4 From the people to the elites
• 5 We, the elite
• Conclusion
• Index