Social Mobility Among The Dead

...they are engaged in a most useful social activity: the posthumous circulation of the elites will realize the presumed ideals of the Soviet Union in the afterlife and give renewed point to the old saying that even in the grave you can't find any peace...

...One must suppose that their bodies will now be transferred from some obscure burial plot near the cellars of the GPU to a place of high honor in a State Cemetery...

...When Pareto advanced the notion of the circulation of the elites he suggested that if, in the selection of members of the elite, there existed free competition, so that each individual could without obstacle rise just as high in the social scale as his talent permitted, the elite could be presumed to include at every moment just those persons best fitted for membership in it...

...For reasons of a profound nature, which probably only the sociology of knowledge could fully clarify, these studies have up to this date unduly restricted themselves to mobility patterns among the living...

...I wish to point out here that the approach to this subject has so far been unduly limited...

...Yet as recent Russian events have made clear, so undue a narrowing of our field of attention leads only to a distortion of vision What have the recent revelations of Khrushchev and subsequent decisions in Moscow shown if not that a man's social mobility cannot be considered terminated by death...

...But they have so far neglected to make hay of the fact that such chances are by no means terminated upon a person's death...

...This will thus serve to correct any imperfections of the principle of free socialist competition of talent...

...Even those who did not do so well while alive might still attain posthumous status—and this may well serve the Russian state as a kind of functional equivalent of obsolete Calvinist notions about salvation and election...

...bile society in which every citizen has an equal chance to attain positions of highest eminence...

...Had Pareto not limited himself to the living he might have been able to modify his unduly pessimistic conclusions...

...Similarly, we can now expect a reverse movement of the bodies of their executioners...

...When it was recently decided that Stalin's body was no longer to share a social pinnacle among the dead with the body of Lenin but was rather to be downgraded to share high, but no longer top, status with a number of miscellaneous heroes of the Soviet Union on the Kremlin wall, we were given the first empirical proof of a theoretical proposition which can now be advanced with some confidence: The dead move—up and down...

...And when Western readers will soon learn that Russian gravediggers are kept busy disinterring and reinterring corpses according to new scales of posthumous status, let them not take this to be useless make-work...

...He also noted, however, that this condition is never found in reality, that there exist always obstacles to the free circulation of the elites...

...Metaphors such as those referring to "eternal rest" are utterly misleading here...

...Russian propagandists have often pointed out that theirs is a highly mo...

...But nothing prevents Russian society, once the personality cult has been overthrown, from rectifying past mistakes so that yesterday's revolutionaries will after death be accorded the honor due their merit...

...Recent Russian events clearly indicate that the posthumous circulation of the elites may serve to rectify distortions and departures from the principle of free social movement Granted that an individual's earthly career may often have been stopped short of his potentialities because of Stalinist terrorism, the anti-party activities of this group or that, and the like...

...In effect, we have already learned that a number of Russian leaders who had been executed for villainous crimes in the thirties are again to move up into the ranks of heroes...