Le retour désabusé à la statique sociale, dont le structuralisme n'est qu'une variante, s'explique sans doute en grande partie par le refus de l'évolutionnisme des vastes constructions sociologiques du siècle dernier. En raison de la simplification outrée qu'il imposa à l'intelligence des processus sociaux, de l'exclusion dont il frappa tout autre modèle de changement, et de sa prétention non fondée à l'universalité, le paradigme évolutionniste fut à l'origine d'une réaction contre l'analyse dynamique, qui marqua profondément le développement ultérieur de la sociologie. Cette conversion fut d'autant plus radicale qu'une fois le schéma linéaire écarté, on se découvrait impuissant à comprendre la complexité des phénomènes sociaux dans leur temporalité, a réduire leur désordre apparent, et à mettre au jour les modéles du changement qui les sous-tendent. On renonça à penser dans le temps pour imaginer dans l'espace, on chercha partout l'invariant dans le mouvant, on préféra l'être au devenir (1). En dépit de l'intérêt croissant que suscite l'étude du changement, les effets de cette réaction se font sentir aujourd'hui encore comme en témoignent les résultats incertains des recherches conduites dans ce dernier domaine (2).

With the progressive development of secularism in the West, of which Spain's formally becoming a secular state in 1978 may be taken as a symbolic culmination, the Church-State problem has long receded from the foreground of the Occidental memory. Yet, in other parts of the world, where God is not dead, the analogue problem of the relationship between the hierocracy and the state merits attention. As the Islamic revolution of February 1979 eloquently demonstrates, the problem is of great importance and the sociologists' or social historians' neglect of it could only be to the detriment of their understanding.

Ipropose in this paper to develop a theme from an earlier article I wrote on Michels: namely, that Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens is to be understood as the work of someone who had passed over from revolutionary Marxism into the camp of elite theory; more precisely, it is a work which takes as its starting point a problem posed within a revolutionary tradition and proceeds to answer it from within a quite different theoretical framework. We could say that it offers a Right-wing answer to a Left-wing question. It is in this conjunction that lie both the strengths and weaknesses of the work (1). One failing of much of the critical literature on Zur soziologie des Parteiwesens is that it treats the conceptual and other inadequacies in its argument as a series of isolated errors, of separate points to be challenged, rather than as arising systematically out of the particular intellectual conjunction I have indicated (2). I propose, however, to go further in this paper than simply present a historical analysis of the intellectual development of an individual thinker. I want to ask the question: How far can the inadequacies of Michels' argument be overcome from within the framework of elite theory itself, and how far can they only be overcome by breaking with some of the central assumptions of that perspective? In other words, I want to broaden out the enquiry to consider what are the limitations of an elite-theoretical approach to the study of parties and elites, particularly parties of the Left.

The relationship between Max Weber and Roberto Michels is a fascinating one, both on the biographical and on the systematic level. Almost from the very start Max Weber became interested in the young scholar Michels who had already written extensively about the development of Italian and German Socialism. From 1906 onwards Michels became a regular contributor to the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, which was edited at the time by Max Weber together with Edgar Jaffé. Although Michels was twelve years younger than Weber, the scholarly contact between them, established through Michels' contribution to the Archiv, soon developed into a lifelong intimate friendship which was soon shared by Marianne Weber and Gisela Michels-Lindner also. This friendship was not without violent ruptures, but it was the most stable and personal relationship which Max Weber ever had. Michels became a member of the Heidelberg circle which met at the Ziegelhäuser Landstraße 35, and visited it whenever he happened to be in Heidelberg, and later, after Michels had moved to Turin, the Webers were regular visitors there. There is a rich stream of letters which bears testimony to this remarkable intimate friendship, which flourished despite the fact that Michels was still at the beginning of a troublesome academic career, while Weber was well established within the German Academic Community.