A Layman’s Introduction to Elite Theory

“History can be described as the graveyard of aristocracies (elites).”

This quote from influential political theorist Vilfredo Pareto, one of the founders of the Italian School of Elite Theory singlehandedly encapsulates the evolution of Politics.

Since classical antiquity, we can categorize governments into the following: Aristocracy, Monarchy, and Democracy. Aristotle conceptualizes the State as the political unit that strives towards the Common Good, and with the emergence of proto-Enlightenment thought supplanting Scholasticism, a schism emerged between Political Science, Ethics, and Morality.

With such a break, the State was transformed into an entity that seeks to increase and centralize its Power exponentially to attain a ‘monopoly on violence’, as defined by Max Weber, or a permanent ‘state of exception’, as stated by Giorgio Agambem, drawing from Carl Schmitt.

Nevertheless, we can observe that there are certain universal principles and laws that persist and can be applied to any political society in history. This is where both Pareto and his contemporary Gaetano Mosca provide us with their insights about the nature of political arrangements.

First, there are always and everywhere two distinct classes: the so-called ‘ruling’ and ‘non-ruling’ classes, The ruling class is constituted by the minority and the non-ruling by the rest, that is, the majority, and within the ruling class, we can find two different types of elites, or what Pareto calls ‘residues‘, these being either ‘foxes‘ or ‘lions‘.

The first group can be classified as elites who rule through persuasion, cunningness, and compromise. The second one, on the other hand, rules through cold, harsh, brute force, meaning they are more willing to resort to violence to protect their position.

While one group may dominate another for a certain period, all ruling classes in history have invariably contained a mixture of both ‘foxes‘ and ‘lions‘, and Mosca himself proved to be adamant to the idea that singular rule is practically unattainable, instead insisting power was always vested in a small number of people with common interests who monopolize force.

The non-ruling class, by consequence, is nothing but powerless against this small minority since it lacks the necessary features required to establish control. Thus, Mosca dispels the notion that the masses can be self-governed in the following terms: ‘The organized hundred will always defeat the disorganized thousand.’

Fellow Italian elite theorist Robert Michels builds on his colleagues’ work by contending that what in reality enables the small minority to govern and exert control over the large majority is indeed organization, but more than organization itself, hierarchy.

For him, organization necessarily requires a hierarchical structure, as in the classical political form of oligarchy, and that need becomes an inevitability, or as he coined it, an ‘Iron Law of Oligarchy‘, that provides that the management of any institution requires special expertise, education, and skills, which in turn is what distinguishes the elite from the masses.

In the age following the Industrial Revolution, extensive division of labor and mass production exacerbated this separation, given that as organizational complexity increases, so does the need for tight management, and to quote Michels, “who says organization, says oligarchy.”

In our current reality, no institution can be classified as fully democratic, since there always happens to exist a decisionist leadership class. If the non-ruling majority wanted to trump the ruling minority it would have to organize itself, creating a hierarchy amongst its members and thus a class of people (that is, a minority) to replace the current ruling class.

Consequently, the fall of an elite governing class’ goes in hand with the ascent of another competing ruling class that replaces it in turn. This cyclical and deterministic phenomenon is what we might call the ‘circulation of elites‘.

This phenomenon concerns how new elites can enter the political system and ultimately attempt to replace or usurp the current elite.

There are different barriers to entry depending on the political system. For instance, it is much easier for new elites to arise in a democratic system where, at least in principle, there are no barriers to entry compared to an aristocracy where it is much easier for someone to be cast in the ruling minority if he is born into it.

Since societal matters mirror the way in which the elites conduct themselves, one can understand the history of a country and analyze its Politics based on the structure of the Ruling class.

Pareto takes Michels’ idea about the circulation of elites one step further in the sense that he talks about it as a ‘process of dynamic competition‘. According to him, societal shift can take place when the types of individuals, along with their relations towards society, change.

Two main ways exist relating to how a circulation of elites can take place: a conservative and steady integration of new individuals, or with revolutionary means which translates to a new regime and ideology to legitimize it.

In the case of Aristocracies, they face an inherent difficulty in the system since the supply of new individuals is inelastic, thus in the long run there is a tendency for them to degenerate and eventually be overthrown. Democratic systems may not face the same problem at this scale but they still in practice have external obstacles to the free circulation of individuals on the social ladder.

Returning to the analogy between ‘foxes‘ and ‘lions‘, revolutions typically arise when there is a disequilibrium between both groups within the decadent ruling class, as one type of elite becomes heavily overrepresented.

Thus, a new counter-elite sets to exploit the internal weaknesses to restore balance, and for that new emerging elite to be properly established and withstand the test of external competition, powerful narratives, called ‘political formulas‘ by Gaetano Mosca, become necessary.

These ‘formulas‘ are sets of abstract principles or beliefs, which help legitimize and eventually consolidate the ruling elite in their position, irrespective of their alignment with social reality.

Examples of ‘political formulas’ could be the so-called ‘Great Chain of Being’ persistent through the Christian Middle Ages, the hendiatris (tripartite motto) of Revolutionary France, “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité“, or the appeal to ‘the Proletariat‘ in Marxism, and later on, in communist regimes.

These abstract beliefs illustrate and serve as an answer to man’s universal social need for moral principles that don’t base themselves on material realities.

Speaking of Marxism, one might think that the political framing of Italian Elite Theory is similar to the method of Power Elite Analysis, developed by New Left sociologist C. Wright Mills, but the fact is that the former predates the latter, and has several key differences that make these two almost impossible to combine, given that Power Elite Analysis, due to its Marxist heritage, focuses on the socio-economic factors that make the rule of the elites possible in the first place, narrowing the focus mainly on the capture of economic resources by the ruling class in order to maintain its control.

Furthermore, while ‘classical’ elite theory resembles a value-free attempt to analyze the function of power, Power Elite Analysis takes a critical approach and even seeks to be remedial, claiming that a classless society brought forward by the proletariat can bring equality.

For Pareto, Mosca, and other elite theorists (the titular Machiavellians of James Burnham’s book of the same name) this is nothing more than a utopian folly, and as witnessed with the Russian Revolution, elite rule must be understood as something inevitable, and cyclical brought forward by civilizational forces.

In that sense, anyone who seeks to understand any political system, irrespective of its ideology, shall first understand that it will inevitably be composed of a non-ruling majority and a ruling minority.

This realization creates radical implications for mass ideologies, such as the Enlightenment idea of popular sovereignty, for the simple fact that if power resides within a tight minority group, then it can’t reside at the same time with the rest of the population.

Majority rule thus can be described as nothing more than a mere political formula to effectively blur the lines separating the rulers from the non-rulers. The political elite can still cling to power through either the pervasion of the incentive structure within mass society, clientelism, or even internal political party arrangements.

At last, considering some of the insights of American political theorist James Burnham, who was heavily influenced by the earlier works of Pareto, Mosca, and Michels: “the general field of the sciences of Politics is the struggle for social power among organized groups of men.”

The wielders of power, and ultimately, the ones controlling the institutional structures for violence and the exception, that is, of the State apparatus, constitute a classical definition of an oligarchy, shaping and transforming society’s character, underscoring the top-down mechanism of culture being downstream from a set of rules that regulate behavior, that is, of Law.