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The Elite and the Ruling Class: Pareto and Mosca Re-examined

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Ferdinand Kolegar
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Extract

Mosca's and Pareto's elite conceptions have had a curious fate. Mosca's work, in many ways an anticipation of Pareto's, has been overshadowed by his more brilliant and renowned antagonist from the very beginning, and perhaps only the circumstance that his American editor chose as the title for his Elementi di scienza politica the two words which fairly epitomize his theory (“the ruling class”) enables many a student of sociology to associate Mosca's name with at least a vague notion about the nature of his contribution. Pareto himself, the skeptically disinterested “maître de Céligny,” whose only ambition was to “tell the complete truth and nothing but the truth,” has generally come to be regarded as a “Karl Marx of bourgeoisie,” an intellectual precursor of Fascism, and worse. Both are seen, unjustifiably, as enemies of democracy and detractors of the “new belief in the common man.”

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , July 1967 , pp. 354 - 369
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1967

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References

1 This expression of Pareto's is contained in a letter to his close friend. Carlo Placci, in the volume of correspondence edited by Tommaso Giacalone-Monaco (Padova, 1957)Google Scholar cited in Eisermann, Gottfried, “Vilfredo Pareto als politischer Denker,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie, vol. 13 (1961), Heft 3, p. 408.Google Scholar

2 Characteristic in this respect is Friedrich's, Carl J. treatment of Pareto in chapter VIII of the book of the same title (Boston, 1942).Google Scholar

3 For example, Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, and Homans and Curtis, An Introduction to Pareto (New York, 1934).Google Scholar

4 Mosca fought publicly, in article form, whereas Pareto confined his rebuttals to private correspondence and in public used the venerable polemical weapon of silence and appeared to ignore Mosca's claims and accusations. The fullest account of this episode is in Alfonso de Pietri-Tonelli, “Pareto e Mosca,” Rivista internazionale di scienze sociali, vol. VI, fasc. 4 (06, 1935), pp. 468–493.Google Scholar

5 Especially in the introduction to that work, pp. 1–73 of vol. I. Our references are to the first edition of Les systémes socialistes, published by Briére, Giard, Paris, 1902.Google Scholar

6 Les systémes socialistes, p. 7.Google Scholar

7 Pareto remarks that the qualities of a St. Francis were entirely different from those of a Krupp. “Les gens qui achetent des canon d'acier ont besoin d'un Krupp et non d'un Saint Francis d'Assise,” op. cit., p. 8.Google Scholar

8 Pareto, V., A Treatise on General Sociology, par. 2031. Another modification introduced in the Trattato is the notion of a simple opposition between the governing elite and the masses, supplanting to some extent the notion of the frequency distribution of attributes.Google Scholar

9 This is Friedrich's, Carl J. contention, in his Man and his Government (New York, 1963) p. 319.Google Scholar

10 Pareto, V., A Treatise on General Sociology, par. 2053.Google Scholar

11 Systémes socialistes, pp. 34–5.Google Scholar

12 Ibid.., p. 36.

13 Of the two most recent accounts of this period, Hughes, H. Stuart, Consciousness and Society (1958) and Gerhard Masur, Prophets of Yesterday (1961), Hughes deals at some length with the “heirs of Machiavelli”: Pareto, Mosca, Michels.Google Scholar

14 Cf. Pareto, V., A Treaátise on General Sociology, par. 2255–56.Google Scholar

15 Ibid.., par. 2612.

16 In speaking about his “new method of political analysis” Mosca says that “its major purpose is to study the formation and organization of that ruling stratum which in Italy is by now generally known by the name of political class.” (In his Storia delle dottrine politiche, 1933, as quoted in Meisel, James H., The Myth of the Ruling Class, p. 383.)Google Scholar

17 In his preface to the second edition of the Elementi (1922) Mosca acknowledges that “times have changed in the meantime and must be taken into consideration; they have prompted me to change not insubstantially the views advanced in the first edition. I shall not conceal that these changes reflect also the changes of my character and my intellectual attitude.”Google Scholar

18 Mosca, , The Ruling Class, p. 116.Google Scholar

19 Ibid.., p. 402.

20 Lasswell, and Kaplan, , Power and Society, p. 201 et seq.Google Scholar

21 This suggestion is made in Dreitzel, Hans P., Elitebegriff und Sozialstruktur (Stuttgart, 1962), to whose work we are indebted for many illuminating observations.Google Scholar

22 I am alluding to the title of a recent book on one of these otherwise quite dissimilar men (de Bonald), Spaemann, Robert, Der Ursprung der Soziologie aus dem Geist der Restauration (Munich, 1959).Google Scholar

23 Not that he fully succeeded in this resolve, but Borkenau's judgment that Pareto's sociology is a political manifesto in scientific guise is much too severe (cf. Borkenau, Franz, Pareto, London, 1936, p. 169).Google Scholar

24 It may be noted in this connection that Mannheim, in discussing the change in the principles governing the selection of elites, distinguishes between three types of selection: on the bases of blood (aristocratic society), property (bourgeois society), and achievement (modern mass democracy).Google Scholar Cf. Mannheim, Karl, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (London, 1940), p. 89.Google Scholar

25 Mosca has interesting things to say on hard work and on idleness, that “most insidious enemy of all aristocracies by birth.” “To rise in the social scale, even in calm and normal times, the prime requisite, beyond any question, is a capacity for hard work; but the requisite next in importance is ambition, a firm resolve to get on in the world, to outstrip one's fellows. Now those traits hardly go with extreme sensitiveness or, to be quite frank, with ‘goodness’ either. For goodness cannot remain indifferent to the hurts of those who must be thrust behind if one is to step ahead of them” (The Ruling Class). “Idleness generates softness and sensuality, stimulates frivolousness of mind and creates an apiration to a life of pleaures unaccompanied by duties. When there is no daily pressure from an obligation to do a set task, and when the habit of work has not been formed in early years, it is hard to escape the traps of that deadly enemy” (ibid.., p. 421).