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Anti-Elitism Revisited*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Giovanni Sartori
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ARE ELITES AND LEADING MINORITIES A NECESSARY EVIL, A LIABILITY, or are they a vital and beneficial asset? Ultimately, the question is: should we downgrade or uplift leadership?

The list of authors who speak in favour of the latter view is impressive, both in time and in eminence. For the ancients, it is the major Greek historian, Thucydides, who reminds us that the greatness of Athens reached its height with Pericles precisely because ‘by his rank, ability, and known integrity he was enabled to exercise an independent control over the multitude’. After we had begun again, Bryce reviewed the most advanced experience of his time in this concise sentence: ‘Perhaps no form of government needs great leaders so much as democracy does’. Fifty years later, in 1937, after the downfall of democracy in Italy, Germany and Spain, de Madariaga wrote : ‘Despite appearances, liberal democracies are dependent on leadership even more so perhaps than other, more authoritarian forms of government; for . . . their natural tendency to weaken the springs of political authority must be counterbalanced by a higher level of. . . authority on the part of their leaders’.

Type
Review
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , 01 January 1978 , pp. 58 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1978

References

1 History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley, New York, 1950, Bk. II, ch. VII, pp. 142–43.

2 The American Commonwealth, New York, 1888, III, p. 337.

3 S. de Madariaga, Anarchie ou Hiérarchie, Paris, 1936, p. 56.

4 Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, London, rev. 1940 English ed., p. 87.

5 Lindsay, A. D., The Modern Democratic State, London, 1943, p. 261.Google Scholar

6 Public Opinion and American Democracy, New York, 1961, p. 558. Reference is made to The Responsible Electorate, Cambridge, Mass., 1966.

7 The little book that launched the label is Bachrach, P., The Theory of Democratic Elitism: A Critique, Boston, 1967.Google Scholar The literature on elites and democracy is extensive. See Keller, Suzanne, Beyond the Ruling Class, New York, 1963;Google Scholar Bottomore, T. B., Elites and Society, 5, 1964 Google Scholar; Parry, Geraint, Political Elites, London, 1969,Google Scholar which also reviews the works of Hunter, Dahl, F., Polsby, N. and Presthus; McFarland, A. S., Power and Leadership in Pluralist Systems, Stanford, 1969.Google Scholar

8 This is, let it be remembered, the thread and recurrent them of my book.

9 See G. Sartori, Democratic Theory, 2nd rev. ed., ch. IV, sect. 1.

10 With one major exception, the ‘valuation’ of the individual (see ibid., ch. XII). But this exception has no bearing on the present argument.

11 Op. cit., p. 106.

12 Personally I would only change (in accordance with my text, ch. II, sect. 2) the expression ‘in the lives’ in Bachrach’s last sentence into ‘in the minds’.

13 As T. B. Bottomore puts it, the ‘inconsistency’ of Mosca and of Aron ‘consists in moving, at different stages of the argument, from the concept of a plurality of elites to the quite different concept of a multiplicity of voluntary associations’ - the correct point being that the advocacy of flourishing voluntary associations ‘does not lend support to elite theories’ (Elites and Society, pp. 118–19). Not dissimilarly Bachrach’s case rests, in the main, on rejecting the narrowing of democracy to a ‘political method’ and in enlarging ‘the political scope to include the more powerful private institutions’ and, more generally, generalized participation (op. cit., p. 97).

14 My own stand on the point is summarized in ‘Democracy’, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, New York, 1966, Vol. 4, pp. 113–15. For Aron’s position see esp. ‘Social Structure and Ruling Class’, British Journal of Sociology, 1, 1950; and ‘Classe Sociale, Classe Politique, Classe Dominante’, Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 2, 1960.

15 These are the categories with which I have reconstructed the concept of politics in its variations from Aristotle to the present time (see ‘What is “Politics”,’Political Theory, 1, 1973), not simply categories for the occasion.

16 L’Esprit des lois, Bk. VIII, ch. II.

17 Power and Society, p. 201.

18 See Sartori, ch. III.

19 Lasswell and D. Lerner, The Comparative Study of Elites, Stanford, 1952, p. 13.

20 This was actually the problem of C. Wright Mills, who contrasted the power elite with the intellectual elite and sought to render the former accountable to the latter (see Causes of World War Three, New York, 1958, ch. 7).

21 This is to underline that we are not dealing here with the operational definitions that best serve the researcher. This is an entirely different problem that requires a different treatment.

22 E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People, New York, 1960, p. 35, quoted in Bachrach, op. cit., p. 37.

23 The proof lies in the experiment proposed by F. A. Hayek: if the government monopoly of money were to be abolished, inflation would immediately disappear (Denationalization of Money, Institute of Economic Affairs, London, 1976). We may be unwilling to implement the proposal; the mental experiment, as such, remains of great value. From the people’s side, Samuel Brittan compounds the problem in this formula: ‘the lack of budget constraint among voters’. (‘The Economic Conditions of Democracy’, British Journal of Political Science, 1975, p. 139.) See also J. M. Buchanan, R. E. Wagner, Democracy in Deficit, New York, 1977.

24 See R. Rose and B. Guy Peters, Can Government Go Bankrupt? A Preliminary Inquiry into Political Overload, forthcoming.

25 See M. J. Crozier, S. P. Huntingdon, J. Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, New York, 1975.

26 See Sartori, ch. IV, sect. 5.

27 See my article, ‘Representational Systems’, International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, Vol. 13.

28 This is the felicitous rendering of the antithesis between democracy and its absence by Burzio, F., Essenza e Attualità del Liberalismo, Turin, 1945, p. 19.Google Scholar

29 The book appeared in German in 1911 and in Italian in 1912; since Michels was bilingual both texts may be considered original. It was translated into English in 1915, and reprinted in 1958, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, Glencoe.

30 Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie, ch. II. Democracy as a party system is examined extensively in my Parties and Party Systems, Cambridge, 1976.

31 See Maranini, G., Miti e realtà della democrazia, Milan, 1958.Google Scholar

32 La sociologia del partito politico, p. 33. For a concise summary of Michels’s theses ‘on the oligarchic tendencies of political organizations’ see his Studi sulla democrazia e sull’ autorità, Venice, 1933, pp. 58–9, and the following passage written in 1909: ‘If there is a sociological law which political parties follow… this law, if reduced to its most concise formula, must sound like this: the organization is the mother of the rule of the elected over the electors’ (p. 49).

33 La sociologia del partito politico, p. 419. The German text reads Führertum, and the Italian text sistema di capi; therefore, to translate this simply as ‘leadership’ (as in the English version) fails to convey the meaning of the text. However I add ‘leadership’ to remind us that Michels’s concept also extends, for lack of distinction, to the latter notion.

34 See Sartori, G. ‘Democrazia, burocrazia e oligarchia nei partiti’, Rassegna italiana di sociologia, III, 1960, pp. 119–36. Here I cite the bibliography and point to the difference between the approach of Michels and that of Max Weber.Google Scholar

35 As authoritatively acknowledged, among others, by M. Duverger: in Michels’s work ‘the oligarchic tendencies of mass organizations are still described in terms of the contemporary situation’ (Les Partis politiques, Paris, 1951); and by S. M. Lipset; ‘The obvious conclusions of this analysis are that the functional requirements for democracy cannot be met most of the time in most unions’ (‘The Political Process in Trade Unions’, in Political Man, p. 394). Michels is often unwittingly or indirectly confirmed. See Kariel, H.: ‘The voluntary organizations or associations which the eary theorists of pluralism relied upon… have themselves become oligarchically governed hierarchies’ (The Decline of American Pluralism, Stanford, 1961, p. 2).Google Scholar See also S. M. Lipset’s ‘Introduction’ to the Collier Books ed. of Michel’s book (New York, 1962); and J. Linz, ‘R. Michels’, International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, Vol. 10

36 La sociologia del partito politico, Preface, p. xiii.

37 E. g., Michels states that the representative system is impossible, recalling the Rousseauian postulate that the exercise of the will cannot be alienated (La sociologia del partito politico, p. 37).

38 See J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 269. Ch. XXII should be read, however, in full.

39 The best formulation of this rule is in the 2nd ed. of his Constitutional Government and Democracy, Boston, 1941, ch. XXV. The ch. is omitted in the 1950 ed., even though the rule reappears in Friedrich’s subsequent Man and his Government, New York, 1963.

40 Therefore, whether a society is class based, conflictual, or integrated is immaterial. I fail to understand, in particular, why Dahrendorf’s theory of social conflict (Classes and Class Conflict in the Industrial Society, London, 1959) should be construed as an attack upon the competitive theory of democracy. Actually Dahrendorf criticizes Mosca, Pareto and Aron (plus Talcott Parsons) for their understanding of societal structures and interactions.

41 Carole Pateman is correct in pointing out that Schumpeter is not clear-headed about the ‘classical theory’; but she largely overstates her own case by asserting that ‘the notion of a “classical theory of democracy” is a myth’. (Participation and Democratic Theory, Cambridge, 1970, p. 17.)

42 Actually, it is dubious whether a mandate assumption is an intrinsic element of the classic theory: being medieval, it neither belongs to the democracy of the ancients nor to that of the moderns.

43 Since the ulterior implication can be that Mosca and Pareto were used by Fascism, let it be stated that this is simply not true. As N. Bobbio correctly points out, ‘In the two major doctrinaires and creators of the doctrine of Fascism, the philosopher Gentile and the jurist Rocco, the theory of elites had no part, not even peripheral.… The actual followers of the theory of the political class have not been Fascist writers, but anti-Fascist and democratic writers.… The only serious attempt… to apply and to refine Mosca’s ideas… has been made by the demo-radical pupil of Gobetti, Guido Dorso; and the only reelaboration of Pareto’s ideas… has been undertaken by the demo-liberal Paretian Filippo Burzio.’ (Saggi sulla Scienza Politica in Italia, Bari, 1969, pp. 247–8).

44 Reference is made especially to G. Duncan, S. Lukes, ‘The New Democracy’, Political Studies, 2, 1963, and to C. Pateman, op. cit.

45 This is the quotation upon which Duncan and Lukes, who consider Mill the ‘central democratic theorist’, build their case (op. cit., p. 158).

46 Representative Government, New York, 1951, p. 391.

47 Bachrach, op. cit., pp. 40–41.

48 Actually Bachrach attributes these views to me. The caricature and disparagement are so evident that the editor of the Italian translation of Bachrach’s book writes that his misreading of my Democratic Theory is ‘a patent case of polemic distortion’ (M. Stoppino, ‘Presentazione’, La Teoria dell’Elitismo Democratico, Naples, 1974, pp. xvii-xviii.) To illustrate with a precise example, according to Bachrach I advocate proportional representation on the following grounds: ‘In addition to its superiority in producing better leadership, Sartori argues that p. r. is also a superior system since… it invariably produces coalition governments which make it more difficult for the electorate to “pin down who is responsible”.’ (Op. cit., p. 42.) Not only have I never advocated p. r., nor ever said that it produces better leadership (how and why should it?), but I said, and still say, the exact contrary of what Bachrach invents, namely, that since coalition governments do not enable the electorate to pin down responsibility, this is a drawback of proportional representation.

49 Perhaps I should explain why Anthony Downs’s An Economic Theory of Democracy, New York, 1957, has not been included in the main genealogy outlined in the preceding pages. Actually the competitive theory does draw on a central economic analogy, but it is not an ‘economic theory’. I describe the importance of the Downsian analysis in Parties and Party Systems, ch. X, of my book.

50 See Polyarchy, p. 9. Polyarchies are here characterized as ‘relatively (but incompletely) democratized regimes’.

51 See Sartori, ch. I, sect. I.

52 This point is completely missed by the anti-elitists. Their argument generally is that since the majority of the people cannot organize themselves into pressure groups, the majority remain voiceless. The fact that the majorities have voice, and often a winning one over pressure groups, precisely as electoral majorities, is consistently (and significantly) glossed over.

53 See Polyarchy, pp. 4–8.

54 This reading is plausible on two counts. First, it is Dahl who points out that inclusiveness alone leads to a ‘closed hegemony’, to wit, plebiscitarian and mobilizational regimes. Secondly, when Dahl describes specifically the ‘good society’ (in After the Revolution?, New Haven, 1970) he does envisage, in the main, the problem of participation - that will be discussed in my book in Appendix 3.

55 Specifically, my difficulty with ‘contestation’ is that it does not pass the test of the principle of the opposite danger (ch. V, sect. 5 in my book). Contestation is a democratizing force as long as it vies with an oligarchy. When pressed further, Alain’s remark becomes very pertinent: ‘A contested power quickly becomes tyrannical,’ (Le Citoyen contre les pouvoirs, Paris, 1926, p. 150). Thus I would say that a polyarchy is better served by ‘voice’ (see Hirschman, A. O., Exit Voice and Loyalty, Cambridge, Mass., 1970).Google ScholarPubMed