Gaetano Mosca

Gaetano Mosca was born in Palermo on 1 April 1858 and died in Rome on 8 November 1941. He graduated in law at Palermo in 1881 and taught constitutional law, later holding chairs at Turin and Rome. He worked for years as an editor of the proceedings of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, which gave him a close view of parliamentary politics, served as a deputy and briefly as an under-secretary for the colonies, and in 1919 was appointed a senator for life, remaining active until 1926.

His first major book, on the theory of governments and parliamentary government (1884), already contained his central thesis. Elementi di scienza politica (1896, enlarged 1923) developed it into a general political science; its English translation was published in 1939 as The Ruling Class. Although critical of democracy, Mosca opposed fascism: he signed the 1925 Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals and spoke in the Senate against Mussolini's laws curtailing political rights.

• The political class. 'In all societies … two classes of people appear — a class that rules and a class that is ruled.' All but the most primitive societies are governed in fact, if not in theory, by an organised minority. Minorities rule because they are organised and the majority is not; a hundred acting in concert defeat a thousand acting separately.
• Political formulas. Every ruling class justifies its power through a 'political formula' — divine right, popular sovereignty, the will of the nation — that the governed accept. Democratic doctrines, on this view, are formulas rather than descriptions.
• Renewal of elites. Ruling classes differ in how they are recruited. Mosca distinguished aristocratic tendencies, by which power is transmitted within families, from democratic tendencies, by which the ruling class is renewed from below, and autocratic from liberal principles of authority flowing downwards or upwards. Healthy regimes combine them.
• Juridical defence. Liberty and the rule of law depend not on majority rule but on 'juridical defence': a balance of distinct social forces — church, army, landed and commercial wealth, bureaucracy, intellectuals — none of which can dominate the others, together with an independent judiciary and free press.
• Against Jacobinism. He described 'democratic Jacobinism' as illiberal because it subordinates everything to a single force, and feared that universal suffrage would hand power to organised minorities claiming to speak for the masses.

Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels form the 'Italian school' of elite theory. Mosca's version is the most liberal and institutional: he was less interested in the psychology of elites than in how social forces and legal guarantees can limit any ruling minority. His work influenced later 'democratic elitism', including Schumpeter's competitive theory of democracy, and the pluralist response of Robert Dahl, who asked whether competing elites in a polyarchy amount to rule by a single class.

For governance design Mosca poses two questions that remain central. First, since some minority will always do most of the work of governing, how is it recruited, renewed and held accountable? Answers include competitive elections, open civil-service entry, term limits, rotation and selection by lot. Second, what prevents any single organised force from absorbing the others? His concept of juridical defence anticipates modern emphasis on separation of powers, independent courts and a plural civil society as conditions of liberal democracy, and offers a framework for analysing how technology companies or data-holding agencies might become new organised minorities.

• Unfalsifiable generality. Critics argue that the claim that a minority always rules is true by definition, since some people always hold office, and tells us little about how much power elites actually have or how responsive they are.
• Conservatism. His scepticism about popular sovereignty and his opposition to universal suffrage in his early work were used to justify restrictions on democracy; later he accepted representative government as the best available system.
• Neglect of mass agency. Social movements, parties of mass membership and electoral realignments show that the ruled can shape the agenda, a point pluralists and democratic theorists pressed against elite theory.
• Priority disputes. Mosca accused Pareto of borrowing his theory without acknowledgement; historians still discuss who originated elite theory.

• Sulla teorica dei governi e sul governo parlamentare (1884)
• Elementi di scienza politica (1896; 2nd ed. 1923) — English: The Ruling Class, trans. Hannah D. Kahn, ed. Arthur Livingston (McGraw-Hill, 1939)
• Storia delle dottrine politiche (1936)
• Overview: 'Gaetano Mosca', Wikipedia