The Elite Theory of Power

Michels cites Mosca on a small point that shows how the theory works: the drive to keep a position in the family is so strong that where members of a dominant class could have no sons of their own, as with the prelates of the Roman Church, nepotism arose spontaneously to serve the same purpose.

Vilfredo Pareto and the circulation of elites

Pareto approached the same fact through psychology rather than organisation. Societies contain people of superior capacity in every field, and those with capacity in the arts of government form the governing elite.

His contribution to an answer is the theory of the circulation of elites. Elites are not permanent. They decay, because the qualities that win power are not the qualities that keep it, and because an elite that closes its ranks stops recruiting the ablest from below. When it decays, a counter-elite forms and replaces it, and the cycle begins again. Pareto's famous names for the two temperaments, the cunning foxes who rule by manipulation and the forceful lions who rule by strength, describe the alternation: a governing class of foxes eventually loses the will to use force and is displaced by lions, who in time become foxes.

The political conclusion is bleak and is the one examiners want stated: history is a graveyard of aristocracies. Revolutions do not end elite rule. They replace one elite with another.

Robert Michels and the iron law of oligarchy

Michels is the member of the trio whose evidence is best, because he did not argue from history in general. He studied the organisation most committed to internal democracy in the Europe of his day, the German Social Democratic Party and the trade unions attached to it, and asked whether an organisation that believed in democracy could practise it.

His answer is the sentence MU's own paper has asked about. Michels writes, in Political Parties (1915), that it is organisation which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators, and concludes: "Who says organization, says oligarchy." He adds immediately that every party organisation represents an oligarchical power grounded upon a democratic basis, that everywhere there are electors and elected, and that the power of the elected leaders over the electing masses is almost unlimited.

Why organisation produces oligarchy

Michels's causes fall into three groups, and an answer that gives all three is complete.

Technical and administrative causes. A large body cannot decide anything by meeting. It must delegate, and delegation means a permanent staff, which means specialisation, which means that after a few years only the officials know how the organisation works.

Psychological causes in the leaders. Office confers status, income and a way of life. Leaders come to identify the organisation's interest with their own continuance, and, in a phrase Michels quotes from French working-class circles, homme elu, homme foutu: the man elected is the man finished. Even the purest idealist who holds power for a few years, he writes, cannot escape the corruption that the exercise of power brings with it.

Psychological causes in the masses. Most members are not interested in administration, are grateful to those who do it, and feel a genuine need for guidance and even for veneration of their leaders. Apathy is not imposed on them; it is a fact about how people spend their attention.

The conclusion Michels draws

If the most democratic organisation in the most democratic movement in Europe was in practice run by its officials, then oligarchy is not a defect of a particular party but a law of organisation as such, and any organisation, of any ideology, will produce it. From this he draws the conclusion that a socialist student should find hardest: the socialists might conquer, but not socialism, which would perish at the moment of its adherents' triumph, because a victorious movement is an organisation and an organisation is an oligarchy.

C. Wright Mills and the power elite

Mills wrote about the United States in the middle of the twentieth century and gave the theory its modern form. His argument is that power in a large industrial society is concentrated at the top of three institutional hierarchies, the political directorate, the corporate chiefs and the military commanders, and that the men who occupy those positions are interchangeable, share a social background, education and outlook, and take the decisions that matter among themselves.

Mills is useful in an answer because his elite is institutional rather than personal: it is not that certain people are superior, but that certain positions carry power, and whoever occupies them will exercise it. He also insists the power elite is not a conspiracy; it does not need to meet in secret, because a common background and common interests produce coordinated behaviour without coordination.

The Indian application

The theory is easy to illustrate in India and a good answer does so rather than staying with European examples.

The composition of legislatures, the senior civil services, the higher judiciary and the boards of large companies has been studied repeatedly, and every study finds concentration by education, by language, by urban origin and by social group. Political families supply a substantial share of candidates in most parties. Party organisations, in the strongest possible confirmation of Michels, are run by small groups at the top, and elections to internal party posts are rare.

Where India departs from the classical theory is worth saying too, because it makes the answer balanced. Since the 1990s, elite composition has changed substantially: groups previously excluded from power have captured State governments, reservation has altered the recruitment of the administrative services, and local government has brought several million people from those groups into elected office. That is not the abolition of the elite, which the theory would say is impossible, but it is exactly what Pareto called circulation, and it happened without a revolution.

A worked example

A State decides how to spend two thousand crore rupees allotted for urban infrastructure.

What a pluralist expects to see. Residents' associations, transport unions, contractors, environmental groups and ward councillors each press their case, and the allocation reflects the balance of their strength.

What an elite theorist predicts. The choice between a metro line, a flyover network and a piped water programme was effectively settled before any of those groups was consulted, in meetings between a handful of people: two ministers, three secretaries, the head of the development authority and the consultants who prepared the feasibility report. Mosca's explanation is that those eight can act together and the several lakh residents cannot. Michels adds that the residents' associations, which exist to represent them, are themselves run by a few office bearers who have held their posts for years and who deal with the same eight people.

What would falsify the prediction. If the allocation were changed materially by a public consultation, if the associations' office bearers turned over regularly, or if the eight came from visibly different backgrounds and disagreed along those lines. Those are testable, which is the merit of the theory.

Where the theory is silent. It cannot say whether the metro was the right choice. Elite theory explains who decided and why it was few; it has nothing at all to say about whether the decision was good, and an answer that treats it as a criticism of the outcome has misunderstood it.

Criticism of elite theory

It proves too much. If every arrangement is oligarchy, the word stops distinguishing anything. There is a real difference between a party whose leaders can be voted out and one whose leaders cannot, and elite theory has trouble expressing it.

Michels's evidence is narrow. One party, in one country, before the First World War, in conditions of persecution that themselves encouraged centralised control.

Elites compete. The pluralist reply is that there is no single elite but many, in business, labour, agriculture, the professions and the regions, and that they check each other, which is a different system from rule by one group.

It ignores the effect of accountability. Even if a minority always decides, it matters greatly whether that minority must face an electorate, a free press and a court.

It is politically dangerous. If popular rule is impossible, the argument for resisting authoritarian rule is weakened, and elite theory has historically been used for exactly that purpose.

Distinctions that carry marks

What elite theory is NOT

It is not a conspiracy theory. Mills is explicit that the power elite need not meet or plot; shared position and background produce shared behaviour.

It is not the same as the Marxist theory of power. Both say a minority rules. They disagree about why, about whether it can ever end, and about what the minority is: for Marx it is the class that owns the means of production, for the elite theorists it is whoever is organised, and that difference is the subject of the comparison chapter.

It is not an argument against democracy in every sense. Several elite theorists accepted that competition between elites for popular votes is a real and valuable thing, and Joseph Schumpeter built a whole theory of democracy on it, defining democracy as an institutional arrangement in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote.

"Iron law" is Michels's phrase, not a description of a proven regularity. He called it a law; whether it is one is the argument.

Quick revision

1. Core claim: in every society an organised minority rules and a disorganised majority is ruled.
2. Mosca, Elementi di scienza politica (1896): two classes always appear; the minority rules because it is organised; every ruling class has a political formula that justifies it.
3. Pareto: the circulation of elites; foxes and lions; history is a graveyard of aristocracies.
4. Michels, Political Parties (1915): "Who says organization, says oligarchy." Causes are technical, psychological in the leaders, and psychological in the masses. Studied the German Social Democratic Party, the hardest case for his thesis.
5. Mills: the power elite of political, corporate and military hierarchies; institutional, not conspiratorial.
6. Criticism: proves too much; narrow evidence; elites compete; accountability matters; and it can be used to argue against democracy itself.

Test yourself

1. "Who says organization, says oligarchy." Who said it, and why? Robert Michels, in Political Parties (1915). He argued that organisation itself gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors and of the delegates over the delegators. A large body cannot decide by meeting, so it delegates; delegation creates a permanent and specialised staff; the staff alone comes to understand the organisation; leaders acquire an interest in their own continuance; and the members, being uninterested in administration and grateful to those who do it, accept the arrangement. He drew this from the German Social Democratic Party, the organisation of his day most committed to internal democracy, which is what made the conclusion an iron law rather than a complaint about one party.

2. State Mosca's theory of the ruling class. That in every society two classes appear, one that rules and one that is ruled. The ruling class is always the less numerous, performs all political functions, monopolises power and enjoys its advantages, while the second is directed by the first. The minority prevails not because it is better but because it is organised, and a small number acting together defeats a large number acting separately. Every ruling class also maintains a political formula, a justification the ruled accept, which converts power into authority.

3. Explain the circulation of elites. Pareto's proposition that elites are not permanent. An elite decays because the qualities that win power are not those that retain it, and because an elite that closes its ranks stops recruiting ability from below. A counter-elite then forms and displaces it. He described the alternation through two temperaments, the cunning foxes who rule by manipulation and the forceful lions who rule by strength, each in time giving way to the other. The conclusion is that revolutions replace one elite with another rather than ending elite rule.

4. What is the power elite, and how does Mills's version differ from Michels's? Mills's power elite is the small group at the top of three interlocking hierarchies in a modern industrial society, the political directorate, the corporate chiefs and the military commanders, whose members share background and outlook and decide the important questions among themselves. It differs from Michels in its source: Michels derives oligarchy from the internal logic of any organisation, so it appears even in a small union branch, while Mills derives it from the concentration of decisions in a few institutional positions in a particular kind of society at a particular stage.

5. Give three criticisms of elite theory. First, it proves too much: if every arrangement is oligarchy, the term cannot distinguish a party whose leaders can be voted out from one whose leaders cannot, though the difference is real. Second, the pluralist reply is that there is no single elite but many competing ones in business, labour, the professions and the regions, which check each other. Third, it undervalues accountability: even if a minority always decides, it matters greatly whether that minority must face an electorate, a free press and a court.