This is a book about the realities of power and how
it functions, stripped of ideological baggage. It has at its core a thesis,
which absolutely contradicts the democratic or populist delusion, that the
people are or ever could be sovereign. An organized minority always rules over
the majority. Perhaps as a testament to that fact, a recent empirical study
showed that public opinion has a near zero impact on law-making in the USA
across 1,779 policy issues. In fact,, my thesis goes further than that to suggest
that all social change at all times and in all places has been top-down and
driven by elites rather than ‘the people’. Those movements which have the
appearance of being organic and bottom-up protests – for example, the 1960s
Civil Rights movement in the USA or the Russian Revolution of 1917 – were, In
fact, tightly organized and funded by elites. Those attempts to drive change
from the ‘bottom-up, which is to say, in the absence of elite organization – we
might think of the events of 6th January 2020 in Washington DC or the recent
Yellow Vest movement in France – will amount
to little more than an inchoate rabble. This principle holds true
regardless of the size of the political unit, be that a small company of twenty
people, a large organization of thousands of people, a nation of millions, or
even the entire world. It holds true not only in terms of hard power – the ability
to capture and hold office – but also in two other crucial respects. First,
there is the question of logistical power – simply the ability to execute
orders- for it is possible to capture office without achieving the ability to
execute, as Donald Trump showed. Second, there is the question of the ‘soft
power’ of discourse, of information flow, and of opinion formation.
In addition to democratic delusions, there are also four liberal delusions that
will be subject to significant attack by the thinkers who we will be considering.
Let us call these the ‘Four Myths of Liberalism’:
1. 1.Myth of the stateless society: that state and society were or could ever be separate.
2. 2.Myth of the neutral state: that state and politics were or could ever be separate.
3. Myth of the free market: that state and economy were or could ever be separate.
4. Myth of the separation of powers: that competing power centers can realistically
endure without converging
In the cold light of reality, these four myths turn out to be little more than
wishful thinking.
Before continuing, it is worth emphasizing what ‘top-down’ or ‘elite driven’
change means. These phrases may suggest shadowy organizations that puppeteer unseen
from the sidelines, but that is not the sense in which they should be
understood. Rather, the defining
feature of ‘top-down’, as opposed to bottom-up, change is the fact of tight minority
organization as against the disorganized masses. ‘Elite’ in this sense could be
the elites currently in power or a set of ‘counter-elites’ who seek to supplant
them. I the former cases, we could cite examples such as the Civil Rights
movement of the 1960s, various LGBT movements, Black Lives Matter or Greta
Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion. In these cases, the current power structure
uses its considerable influence and resources – whether through legal means
using the formal structure of the state and its apparatuses (education,
state-backed media, etc) or through
non-government organizations (NGOs) and corporate lobby groups – to manufacture
consent and give the appearance of
popular support for elite projects. In the later case, however, the efforts of the
counter-elites will only find success in a revolution. As outlined in Chapter
7, evolutions only occur when the current ruling class loses its ability and resolve to maintain power, which
will produce widespread popular discontent, and when a counter-elite is ready
to seize the initiative to fill the vacuum. ‘ Rebellions happen; revolutions
are made.’ The superior and tight organization of the counter-elite group determines
largely why it is that group as
opposed to any other that will now take the reigns of power. Historical studies
on revolutionary figures as diametrically opposed as Vladimir Lenin and Adolf
Hitler have noted tight organizational
ability and iron discipline as
the defining characteristics of their respective vanguards. Lenin has ‘a
profound mistrust of the revolutionary potential of the masses, who he
believed, without the leadership of an elite party vanguard, would inevitably
become diverted by the bread-an-butter issues of Economism.’ Likewise, Arthur
Bryant described Hitler’s NSDAP as ‘a
fighting movement of flawless discipline, and animated by the same unquestioning
devotion to its faith and leaders as the old Prussian Guard.’ Bryant goes on, ‘It
must place him among the great organizers of mankind that he was able to
establish it so quickly.’
Aside from this iron discipline in organization, Lenin and Hitler also had in
common an utter contempt for democracy, which was seen as a time-wasting
impediment to effective decision-making, and a total disdain for the polite and
respectable ‘bourgeois’ society of the status quo they each sought to supplant.
The important point for this study, however, is that neither the rise of the
Bolsheviks nor the rise of the Nazis was a popular
uprising but rather the result of the determined organized efforts of
counter-elites. Likewise, the movements of Civil Rights, LGBT rights, Black
Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion were not popular uprisings either, but the result of determined organized
efforts of the elites currently in power or, if you prefer, the ruling class.
This book will start by introducing the core tenets of the elite theorists,
Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels. These thinkers give us the
indispensable tools and vocabulary with which to analyze politics and power. It
will then add crucial insights from two other important political theorists,
Carl Schmitt and Bertrand de Jouvenel, to think more about how power and law
function in practice and about how political change – ‘the circulation of elites’-
can come about. Three chapters will follow on the ‘managerial class’- the vital
second stratum of the elites or ruling class identified by the elite theories –
and the special treatment given to this topic by James Burnham, Samuel T.
Francis and Paul Gottfried. Chapter 10 forms a brief conclusion applying some
of these lessons to the current political moment.
It is worth mentioning here that this book is interested primarily in the
fundamental concepts rooted in these works and not, for example, the lives and
contexts of the authors or how their work has been received by scholars over the
decades. I will do my best to draw on the
vast body of secondary literature, but purely for the purpose of better
illustrating the core ideas rather than critiquing them except where necessary.
There are two key reasons for this, one practical and the other pedagogical.
The former is simply because of space, one could easily write a whole book on
each of the chapter topics. The latte, however, is to avoid confusion. Many of the thinkers we are discussing were
severely critical of, or even outright hostile to, both socialism and liberal
democracy, while many of the scholars who have worked on them have been either
socialists or defenders of liberal democracy. Thus, their purposes for taking
on these thinkers were usually in the service of defending their ideology,
whether by re-interpreting or trying to co-opt the thinker for it or trying to
find ways to disprove the thinker to ‘save’ it. This is not to say that any of
the scholars in question were dishonest, or that their work was ‘bad’, or even
that their arguments were incorrect, but rather to recognize that they were
working under conditions in which they felt the need to pay lip service to the
official doctrine the ‘political formulas’- of the status quo, I feel no such
obligation.. Besides, as John Higley has pointed out, the march of history
continues utterly in defiance of democrats and social radicals:
Many
democrats and social radicals have rejected the early elite theorists ‘futility
thesis’. They have sought to demonstrate that particular elites are not those
with superior endowments or organizational capacities, but merely persons who
are socially advantaged in power competitions. Adherents of this view have
argued that the existence of elites can be terminated either by removing the
social advantages that some people enjoy or by abolishing the power
concentrations that spur competitions among them- remedies that often go
hand-in-hand. There are no historical instances, however, where these remedies
have been successfully applied in a large population for any significant length of time.
This book seeks to advance a value-free analysis which is not in tye service
of any ideology. If power in human societies functions according to certain
immutable laws, these laws are not suddenly suspended in the liberal,
socialist, or fascist society. Granted, history never occurs in a vacuum:
complexities and contingencies always play a part in its seismic events. But
this does not mean we cannot discern identifiable patterns as to the nature of
power and politics which cut across the specifics of time and place and of
governmental system.
Nonetheless, we should mention at the outset the most generic complaint made by
scholars who have sought to critique the thinkers I am covering in this book.
James Burnham, who is one of them, dubbed these thinkers ‘the Machiavellians’.
This does not mean they were all disciples of Niccolo Machiavelli, but rather
that they conducted their work in this spirit: to see the world as it is and not how it ought to be. In
other words, their watchword was realism. They each had a pretense to the neutral
objectivity of science. Since it is virtually impossible when dealing with a topic
such as politics to eliminate the biases and preferences of the author entirely,
this has been fertile ground for their critics. If they could as James H. Meisal put it ‘demonstrate the hidden moral
bias’, these claims to objectivity vanish. For example, Gaetano Mosca was a
kind of liberal, as was Bertrand de Jouvenel.
Vilfredo Pareto was read by and influenced Benito Mussolini and voiced
some support for fascism before he died. Robert Michels joined the Italian
fascist party after being a socialist and a syndicalist earlier in his life.
Carl Schmitt joined the German National Socialist Party. James Burnham was a Trotskyist
who later became a founder for the American conservative magazine, National Review, and was awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan, a Republican. Where the
personal sympathies of the author leak into their otherwise ‘value-free’ work,
it does admittedly become a potential issue. For example, C. A. Bond points out
in his book Nemesis, some instances
where de Jouvenel’s otherwise exemplary work lapses into the assumptions of liberal
individualism. Ettore A. Albertioni shows where liberal ethical assumptions
creep into the work of Mosca, especially when he posits juridical
defense* as a positive ethical category in an otherwise amoral analysis.
Karl Mannheim criticized Vilfredo Pareto
for making a ‘myth’ out of the idea of the man of action and said his elevation
of this idea was arbitrary. George Orwell complained that James Burnham too
readily wrote off the prospect of making incremental and marginal increases in
the standard of living for those worst off in society because of his personal
antipathy to socialism. All these criticisms amount to is that our authors were
only human: real men living in real conditions with all the raging political
debates that go on in any era. None of these criticisms significantly attack
the core of the central arguments
made by these thinkers.
Thus,, I have presented what is most essential in the various theses of these
authors while stripping out what I see as the most ephemeral elements. In other
words, it does not matter that Mosca favored juridical defense or separation
of powers while Pareto favored a strong ‘man of action’ or Machiavellian
lion. It does not matter that Samuel T. Francis called for a ‘revolution of the middle’ or
that Karl Schmitt supported the Nazis. We must relegate all these stances to the
category of personal policy preferences.
We must separate those, which are merely contingencies owing to the
circumstances and tastes of their authors, from the essential ideas concerning power and politics. What matters in each
of their cases is whether the core principles of power and its functioning
which they outlined are true. Does reality
bear out in practice what they say in theory, now and always. This is the only
test of a theory that aspires to realism.
The importance of taking this realist approach to power and politics is not
only theoretical or academic, but also has practical implications. Those who
wish to bring about political change
cannot hope to do so if they adopt populist methods o have faith that at
some point a critical mass of the public will suddenly reach a ‘tipping point’
after which elites will be inevitably toppled. Change always takes concerted
organization and cannot hope to be achieved simply by convincing the greatest
number of people of your point of view. Power does not care, in the final
analysis, how many likes you got on your Twitter account. In practice, the
great bulk of people will adjust to new realities after the fact of change and
reorient themselves to the new power structure one way or another. In any case,
‘manufacturing consent’ can only be
carried out once a group is de facto
in power. A group may achieve de jure
power only to find that they cannot
execute or manufacture consent because they have not achieved de facto power and, realistically, de facto power is the only power that
counts.
* Mosca had in mind an independent ad fair judiciary backed by a strong rule of law which will, in turn, help to maintain a morally upstanding and law-abiding citizenry. If a ruling class keep political prisoners and act in an arbitrary manner, do not give the ruled the right to a fair trial, do not prosecute serious crimes and let criminals loose on the streets, and so on, then it it is evidence of a lack of juridical defense.
