The Case of Gaetano Mosca

...He suggests that anarchism leads always to feudalism, and that liberal principles are more likely to prevail when a nation is moving toward power and wealth, and "some of the noblest faculties of man" are challenged...

...Mosca, as Professor Meisel sees him, was closer to Tocqueville and Mill than to Burke...

...Sometimes —a third consideration—a man of striking personality, or achievement in another field, is fixed upon as the high water mark of a doctrine, to the neglect of others...

...he was not only wrong, Mosca thought, but there was too much hatred in him...

...His name is not in the Britannica...

...So a Machiavellian statesman supports religion even if he doesn't believe in it...

...He tests—although not systematically enough—each hypothesis by the evidence of relevant historic events...

...Reviewed by Ralph Ross Co-author, "The Fabric of Society" Neglect of Gaetano Mosca is a puzzle...

...Pareto's name is in the histories and encyclopedias...

...Pareto was for a time an important sociologist and, although most of his economics was quickly forgotten, his name still graces one economic principle, "Pareto optimality...

...Merely to assert," he wrote, "that in all forms of government the real and actual power resides in a ruling minority is to dismiss the old guides without supplying new ones— it is to establish a generic truth which does not take us at once into the heart of political happenings, present or past...

...In the course of Mosca's argument, he proposes many political laws: e.g., "over-bureaucratization facilitates revolution," "type and level of civilization vary as ruling classes vary...

...But the academy notoriously responds less to that fact than journalism or business...

...But an explanation may be a clue to the neglect of Mosca by conservatives and a clue to the mind of the "new conservatism...

...They propose little more than that we rely on Providence...

...For everything history studies is also classified as some other "field" of knowledge: politics, sociology, art, science...

...His mind was fertile in specific ideas and proposals...

...Democracy," "socialism," "equality" were myths...

...And we can be grateful to Professor Meisel that he reminds us of Gaetano Mosca...

...Pareto, especially, accused others of myth-making...

...The Columbia Encyclopedia includes G. D. H. Cole, but not Mosca...

...The Myth of the Ruling Class is based on examination of all Mosca's books and papers...

...But rule by the elite, too, is a myth, ultimately the platonic one of government by the best qualified, although in our day it bears the stamp of the bourgeois, the man of merit as demonstrated by achievement, as opposed to the man of birth or the man of theory...

...Marx was a life-long enemy...

...In the meantime, he reminds us how tremendously valuable "social science" can be when it is practiced by a first-rate mind...

...Machiavelli is quite explicit in the Discourses, in a passage that echoes Polybius, that religion is the foundation of moral, social and political health—whether it be true or false...

...Whatever his merits, the inclusion of his name in so many books that exclude Mosca's may be explained but not justified...

...It has arrived at many, when used for that purpose, but they are not called laws of history...

...One reason may be that bis name is not so fashionable as others...

...It is the final chapter of his History of Political Thought...

...it is a religious revival with political means...

...Perhaps, too, there is a feeling that a doctrine is properly discussed only by the man who advanced it farthest...

...But his method was different from Mosca's, his ideas more often foolish, and his political thought mixed with dubious sociology...

...The title of Professor Meisel's book uses the word "myth" in Sorel's sense of a belief based on faith, un-testable but of great importance in holding a society together...

...There has been far less attempt to test or apply these ideas than their importance warrants...

...But Mosca's ideas, although some have been used as "myths" by others, were legitimately scientific as he used them...

...One of the few political theorists of consequence in the twentieth century, perhaps the last giant, Mosca is not even mentioned in many standard works on political thought, or in encyclopedias...

...Even if there is little place for Mosca in the intellectual division of labor in our academies today, there will be in the future...

...But Pareto was nearly a fascist, and Mosca retained the liberal values of 19th-century democracy, even in his disillusionment...

...It is useless to answer that history has not arrived at any scientific laws, and so is not pertinent to social science...

...it is not merely in his influence...

...His repudiation of Mussolini is clear (and courageous) in his last speech to the Italian Senate...

...Also, like Spengler and Toynbee, he had a great international success with a multi-volumned explanation of practically everything...

...Mosca's relation to Machiavelli, and his opposition to him are treated admirably by Professor Meisel...

...For Mosca's importance is his own...

...These, and dozens of other ideas, need more exact formulation before they can be tested...

...Despite his preoccupation with the idea of a ruling minority, Mosca knew that in itself the concept was empty...

...Nothing is left over as the "subject" of history...

...For a while, too, he affected radicals whose faith was already crumbling...

...This requires historical knowledge— a commodity very rare among social scientists, whose training usually excludes itand great discrimination, to insure that what is offered as evidence is actually relevant, not just an approximate historical analogue...

...More likely, he is neglected because of his method, which is not the currency of social science in our day...

...The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences employed Mosca as a contributor, but has no article about him...

...Finally, Mosca is read far too little in colleges and universities...

...He did elaborate some ideas left less developed in Mosca: the doctrine of "circulation of elites," for example...

...Still, he has had an influence—but a peculiar one...

...Mosca gives some support to Machiavelli in this (although, by and large, he thought Machiavelli an impractical bookworm...

...When a law is discovered— about business cycles or migrations, for instance—it is a law in another "field...

...His analyses of political actions which he opposed were as masterly as his rhetoric...

...This may seem preposterous in a book with such a title...

...Mosca emerges as a great and good man, disillusioned by 19th-century democracy, anxious to establish a scientific study of politics, concerned with liberty, idealistic and hard-headed enough to want "relative justice...

...The "new conservatives" rest on Burke because he is himself religious and argues that what ought to exist on earth depends on the divine order...

...Perhaps—apart from the people about us, whose names creep in—we tend to write about extremists...

...So he tries to add analyses of social and political events, using as his main categories "the ruling class," "juridical defense," "social type," "political formula," "level of civilization...

...He had nothing in common with the Rosenbergs and Streichers, of course: His condemnation of racial theories is explicit...

...Theirs is not basically a political movement that demands recognition of religion as an element in politics...

...One weakness of contemporary social science is revealed in this relative neglect of Mosca: too slight a concern with history, which results sometimes in restating what every one should know, and expending time, money and ingenuity to learn what can be found in an hour in a library...

...Professor Meisel's book at last does some justice to Mosca, and it is lack of that justice I have been deploring...

...Finally, Mosca was enshrined by a new conservatism—not the "new conservatism"—as a Machiavellian and so, in James Burnham's words, a "defender of freedom...

...In part, that may be because political science as we practice it is either descriptive, like anatomy, or behavioral, like social psychology, while political theory tends to be traditional, scholarly or analytic...

...Still, Mosca is a conservative in the best sense: He learned from history and wanted no sudden break with the past...

...The same is true for Robert Michels...

...His last statement of it is now translated and appears here as a "supplement...

...Russell Kirk and the "new conservatives" are followers of Burke and want no more to do with Mosca than with Machiavelli...

...So does William Eben-stein's Great Political Thinkers...

...For a brief time, his argument that all societies are ruled by an organized minority was bandied about in proto-fascist circles by people who had read about him but had not bothered to read him...

...His basic idea was stated early and repeated in book after book, always with additions and qualifications...

...John H. Hallowell's Main Currents in Modern Political Thought has no Mosca in the index, but not only has the ever-present Cole but Nicholas Berdyaev, Franz Boas, Christopher Dawson and Jacques Barzun (who have, strictly, little or nothing to do with political thought), as well as historians like Carl Becker and Hans Kohn...

...Not so the "new conservatives...

...Thus Pareto, who was influenced by Mosca, is chosen as the exponent of the same ideas, as Democritus is credited with the atomic theory first expounded by I^eucippus...

...But Burke was also a political thinker and a statesman...

...So John Stuart Mill is commonly regarded as the final exponent of utilitarianism, although Henry Sidgwick has a stronger claim...

...the elite who always ruled, whatever the system, was the underlying reality...

...In The Conservative Mind, Kirk examines at considerable length literary conservatives like James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Adams but doesn't mention Mosca or, for that matter, Pareto and Michels...

...He was welcome evidence that they had been wrong...

...Mosca's is a historical method...