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The Study of Elites: Who's Who, When, and How

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Dankwart A. Rustow
Dankwart A. Rustow
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Review Articles
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World Politics , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , July 1966 , pp. 690 - 717
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Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1966

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References

1 Lasswell, Harold D., Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (New York 1936), 13.Google Scholar

2 The Italian study appeared in the American Political Science Review in 1936; the Russian, German, and Chinese ones are Nos. 2, 3, and 8 of the Hoover Institution Studies, Series B: Elite Studies (Stanford 1951–1955). Lasswell's essay “The World Revolution of Our Time” (pp. 29–96) is an adaptation of No. 1 in the parallel Series A: General Studies (1951). Series B, No. 1, Lasswell, Harold D., Lerner, Daniel, and Rothwell, C. Easton, The Comparative Study of Elites (1951), No. 4Google Scholar, Knight, Maxwell E., The German Executive: 1890–1933 (1952), and No. 5, Ithiel de Sola Pool and others, Satellite Generals (1955), are not reprinted in the present Lasswell and Lerner volume.Google Scholar

3 Erikson, Erik H., Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York 1958).Google Scholar

4 For a further critique of “the illusion of decision-making,” see Sereno, Renzo, The Rulers (New York 1962), 82–88.Google Scholar

5 Hobbes, Leviathan, chaps, II, 13.

6 “Here is an ant-heap, with the human ants hurrying in long files along their various paths; their joint achievement does not concern us, nor the changes which supervene in their community, only the pathetically intent, seemingly self-conscious running of individuals along beaten tracks” (The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, preface to the first edition, quoted here from the second [London 1961]Google Scholar, xi).

7 Die Führungsschichten in Österreich und Preussen (1804–1918) (Wiesbaden 1955).Google Scholar The book presents, in only 189 pages, detailed information for nine key years during the period 1804–1918 on the regional and social origins of all ambassadors, provincial governors, members of parliament, ministers of interior, foreign affairs, and war, as well as holders of the highest decorations. One of the author's conclusions: “Austria did not lose the Prusso-Austrian War of 1866 but the German-French War of 1870; for, after the founding of the Empire by Bismarck, naturally far fewer Reich Germans went to Austria, since they now enjoyed, to a more tangible extent, the advantages of a large state in their country of origin” (p. 66, my translation).

8 The Roman Revolution (Oxford 1939)Google Scholar, vii.

9 Colonial Elites: Rome, Spain, and the Americas (London 1958), 52.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., 4.

11 Moore, Barrington Jr., Political Power and Social Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), 101f., 131.Google Scholar

12 For these lines of criticism see, ibid., 136–38; Runciman, W. G., Social Science and Political Theory (Cambridge 1963), 113ff.Google Scholar, 120ff.; and Bendix, Reinhard, Nation-Building and Citizenship (New York 1964), 301Google Scholar and passim.

13 For one such set of characterizations see Almond, Gabriel A. and Coleman, James S., eds., The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton 1960)Google Scholar, which includes a chapter by the present writer on the Near East.

14 Lerner fails to mention that the hypothesis was formulated a decade earlier by Sigmund Neumann who suggested that “the modern dictator is a marginal man of a marginal group” (Permanent Revolution, 2nd ed. [New York 1965], 62Google Scholar). Neumann's study first appeared in 1942, Lerner's in 1951.

15 Cf. Mills, C. Wright, The Power Elite (New York 1956), 366ff.Google Scholar

16 Frey describes fully the ingenious calculations by which he converted these ratings into numerical indices of power for each deputy (pp. 225–46, 443–47). He then tabulates such traits as age, education, and regional origin separately for “top leaders,” “middle leaders,” and “backbenchers” (pp. 264–68). It turns out that the first two groups deviate from the assembly as a whole in the same direction as (though slightly less than) cabinet members (see diagrams, pp. 279f)—who of course could be much more easily identified. One wonders, therefore, whether the enormous additional effort that went into these calculations really paid off in additional knowledge obtained.

17 Bendix, Reinhard and Lipset, Seymour Martin, “Political Sociology,” Current Sociology, VI, No. 3 (1957), 85, as cited in Marvick, 14.Google Scholar

18 United States Senators and Their World (Chapel Hill 1960), 45Google Scholar, n. 39. Cf. Matthews', earlier study The Social Background of Political Decision-Makers (Garden City 1954).Google Scholar

19 See Rustow, , “The Army and the Founding of the Turkish Republic,” World Politics, XI (July 1959), 527ff.Google Scholar

20 In fact, the Ceylonese figures in my consolidated table refer only to physicians, since Singer did not list engineers. It is not clear whether he found no engineers at all in Ceylonese cabinets and parliaments, or whether he included them in other categories such as “public service” or “business” (p. 171).

21 Russett, Bruce M. and others, World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators (New Haven 1964), 70f.Google Scholar

22 Bottomore finds that Western intellectuals today do not fully qualify as a ruling elite “because they lack any distinctive group organization or ideology” (p. 71); yet the same may be said of the intellectuals of developing countries, particularly in Asia and Latin America. Political competition still is largely confined to the urban educated groups, but that competition is sharp; and ideological tenets like nationalism, social justice, and economic progress are invoked by everyone. Lasswell himself concedes that “intellectuals … are not fully conscious of a distinct identity” (Lasswell and Lerner, 87) but does not seem to realize how precarious that makes his construct of the intellectuals as a revolutionary elite.

23 This is the judgment of Rosenberg, Arthur, A History of Bolshevism (London 1934), 66.Google Scholar

24 On the importance of Taine and Tocqueville as precursors of elite theory see Sereno's subtle and urbane study The Rulers, 8–17.

25 In the words of Salomon, Albert, “German Sociology,” in Gurvitch, Georges and Moore, Wilbert E., eds., Twentieth Century Sociology (New York 1945), 596.Google Scholar

26 The above account follows, in part, both Bottomore and the similar critique in Runciman, 64–86.

27 Mosca, Gaetano, The Ruling Class, ed. Livingston, Arthur (New York 1939), 50.Google Scholar

28 Lasswell, Lerner, and Rothwell, 7. For similar formulations see Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How, 168, and Power and Personality (New York 1948), 109.Google Scholar Bryce had written that “in all … organized bodies of men … direction and decisions rest in the hands of a small percentage, less and less in proportion to the larger size of the body, till in a great population it becomes an infinitesimally small proportion of the whole number. This is and always has been true of all forms of government, though in different degrees” (quoted ibid., from Modern Democracies [New York 1921]Google Scholar, chap. 75).

29 Barrington Moore, vii, 101f.

30 Lasswell, Harold D. and Kaplan, Abraham, Power and Society (New Haven 1950), 202.Google Scholar The quotation is from Pareto, Vilfredo, Mind and Society (New York 1935), 246.Google Scholar Cf. Bottomore, 26: “When we ask, who has power in a particular society, the reply is, those who have power"; and the comment by Carl J. Friedrich in Meisel, 177.

31 Lasswell, for example, defines the elite alternatively (1) as those who wield influence or make decisions (see the quotation at the opening of this review) and (2) “as the collectivity from which active decision makers are drawn …” (Lasswell and Lerner, 12). The other empirical studies, by implication, accept the first definition. The second echoes the Communist Manifesto in which contemporary rulers are called a “committee for managing the common affairs of die whole bourgeoisie.” Cf. Friedrich in Meisel, 177.

32 “A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model,” American Political Science Review, LII (June 1958), 463.Google Scholar

33 Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York, n.d.), 21. This edition by Dover Publications is a reprint of the English translation of 1915 based on the first German edition of 1911.

34 Patrik Reutersward, quoted in Rustow, , The Politics of Compromise (Princeton 1955). 167.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 P. 463.

36 Lasswell, Lerner, and Rothwell (cited, n. 2).

37 The relationship of modernization to equality is considered further in my forthcoming study of political modernization.

38 By implication, however, Mills concedes from the start that his quarrel is with the power of organization rather than with a specific ruling minority (p. 11).

39 Following his statement of the iron law of oligarchy (see above, p. 710 and n. 28), Lasswell continues: “But this fact does not settle the question of the degree of democracy. … The key question turns on accountability.” At the conclusion of his essay in the Marvick volume he asks “how elite studies will affect elites, recognizing this as a special case of how science, and especially social science, affects society"; and emphasizes his own answer: "To the extent that procedures and results are public and competitive, democratic tendencies are favored, since they foster simultaneous improvement of insight and understanding" (p. 281).