In this chapter Mosca examines the importance of individuals and their influence on the ruling class.
1. The man who rules and his officials are creatures of "the ideas, sentiments, passions, and therefore, polices of the social strata which come just below them." However, even a sound ruling class, with honest and energetic members, can find itself ruled by a fool. It is a prisoner of its political principle and cannot overturn it on a whim.
But, with an energetic ruling class, the damage done by a Nero need not be fatal. The Roman Empire survived him. The British George III was "a man of little brains," but England extended its empire across the world on his watch.
So, for Mosca, the real achievement of heads of state is "their success in transforming ruling classes by improving the methods by which they were recruited and by perfecting their organization." The first Roman emperor Augustus
successfully transformed the old republican system into another that better suited the needs of the times, and... he revived the old Roman ruling class... by introducing new elements into it.
In France Louis XIV assisted by Richelieu and Mazarin created the absolutist bureaucratic state with an effective financial system and standing army. In Russia, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine II reorganized the ruling class. Alexander the Great could invade Persia because his father had reorganized Macedonia and built up the army. Ditto Frederick the Great in Prussia.
But a superior man at the head of a collapsing ruling class will fail to keep things going, e.g., at the end of the Roman and Byzantine Empires.
2. People agree on a fairly close connection between the moral and intellectual qualities of the ruling clique -- head of state and associates -- and the ruling class as a whole. But Mosca feels that this rule applies even more strongly between the ruling class "and the gross mass of the governed."
Mosca does not buy the notion that "'the people' are naturally good and virtuous and that the ruling class is vicious and corrupt." The people may be good, but we cannot know their capacity for tyranny and luxury unless they have the opportunity to practice them. The way to tell is from people rising into the ruling class. If they are really better than their new class associates then they can claim superiority.
In fact, in every society success is reserved for people that possess the qualities that are esteemed and praised in that society. And if you recognize an intellectual quality in another, then you must possess it in yourself. If society values "refined tastes" then men with refined tastes will get ahead, and vice versa.
Mosca applies this notion to the fact that many peoples have undergone foreign domination, or rule by "aristocracies of foreign origin for long periods." He cites Russia, once ruled by Scandinavians, and Egypt, ruled successively by Alexander's Ptolemies, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Berbers, Circassians, Turks. And then there is India.
So, as long as a dominant class of foreign origin "keeps fairly pure in blood" it can continue to rule. But as it mixes with the indigenous elements "the political structure weakens and the nation falls into anarchy or comes under a new foreign domination."
When a nation or a race does not possess elements that are fitted for command... then that people or that race is destined to fall under foreign rule, or under ruling elements of foreign origin.
Thus, for Mosca, the old categories of Aristotle and Montesquieu do not apply. For him the question is the qualities of the ruling class "on which the strength or weakness of our states depend" and which provide an image of the "political virtues and defects" of the nation the ruling class rules.
3. But to come to a correct understanding of ruling classes we have to push away the less perfect ideas with which we understand the world. And the most important such idea is Marx's "historical materialism," which is based on two propositions. First,
that the whole political, juridical and religious organization of a society is uniformly subordinated to the prevailing type of economic production[.]
Thus any change in the system of economic production would "bring on a change in the form of government." Second,
that every economic period contains seeds which... make the advent of successive periods necessary[.]
Thus, in the present bourgeois period with its concentration of wealth taking place, a subsequent collectivism is unavoidable and inevitable.
According to Mosca this Marxian doctrine comes from Pierre Leroux and his Égalité of 1838 and Humanité of 1840. Leroux regarded the nineteenth century as a transition between an age of inequality that was coming to an end and an age of equality that was about to dawn.
Mosca notes that plenty of regimes have changed their nature without any change in the structure of economic production, including the transformation from the Roman republic to Augustan empire, the fall of the Roman Empire, development of Italian cities into tyrannies in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Of course, it is true that the development of large-scale modern industry in the nineteenth century has created a large working population of manual workers that has been receptive to communistic ideas formulated a century before by Rousseau. So economic transformation can be one of the factors in political change, but certainly not the only one.
And what about various military developments that affected political regimes, like the Greek replacement of war chariots with hoplites, the development of firearms, and compulsory military service in the French revolution and in Prussia?
It seems altogether absurd to regard as mere effects, and never as dignified, respectable causes, the political doctrines and religious beliefs which constitute the moral foundations of state organisms.
Let us rather say that
every moral force tries, as soon as it can, to acquire cohesion by creating an underpinning of interests vested in its favor, and every material force tries to justify itself by leaning upon some concept of an intellectual and moral order.
Born as an intellectual and moral force, collectivism is trying "to create a whole network of material interests to keep the rank and file faithful and to remunerate the ruling class that has grown up with it."
Human history is so complex that a "single-track" doctrine "necessarily leads to erroneous conclusions and false applications" and encourages fantastical predictions of the future.
The second Marixan maxim is a platitude: of course every era contains the seeds of the next one. But the seeds are not exclusively economic, as Marx insists. In any case, the concentration of wealth which is supposed to precede collectivization had not, prior to World War I, started a blooming of collectivization.
Of course the idea behind the idea of the seeding of the collectivist era follows from Rousseau's idea that society makes man bad, and private property is the cause of human selfishness, and the answer is to abolish private property. Marx's genius was to propose that this process of the abolition of property is inevitable.
Among all the arguments in favor of a doctrine, the most convincing will always be the one that represents its triumph as inevitable in the more or less immediate future.
4. Should the "best people" rule, as Plato suggested? This notion has received a boost from the optimistic view of human nature in the followers of Rousseau. Mosca thinks that the "good" person probably is not suitable for political office, because to rise in the social scale requires hard work and ambition, probably not the priorities of the "good" person. But the "best" man is the one best suited to ruling -- and the current ruling class more or less inhabits that role. The good ruler is one with "perspicacity, a ready intuition of individual and mass psychology, strength of will, and especially, confidence in oneself."
Perhaps what we mean is a "statesman," the man
who, by the breadth of his knowledge and the depth of his insight, acquires a clear and accurate awareness of the needs of the society in which he lives, and who knows how to find the best means for leading that society with the least possible shock and suffering to the goal which it should, or at least can, attain.
In other words, a Cavour or a Bismarck.
A politician on the other hand is a man who has the qualifications that are required for reaching the highest posts in the governmental system and knows how to stay there.
But should a king be a philosopher, and a philosopher a king as Plato proposed? He might be a Marcus Aurelius. But mostly philosophers like "neither to command nor obey."
Really, all we can hope for is for politicians not to fall below the average for the ruling class, and "to understand and appreciate the ideas of thinkers who study political problems intensively."
But in the sciences and especially the social sciences it is impossible to find the truth unless "the thinker is able to strip himself of every partisan passion, every interest, every fear."
5. The "best" man for highest office is always never the "best" in an absolute sense, but merely an individual with "the qualities best suited for directing and dominating men." Yet people yearn for "absolute justice."
Absolute justice in a political system can only mean that the success of every individual, the rank he occupies in the political scale should correspond exactly with the actual utility of the service which he has rendered, or is rendering to society.
Or as Saint-Simon formulated: "To each according to his ability, to each ability according to its results." But it is almost impossible to evaluate such things. And when should they be evaluated if, say, a politician implements a policy that may not bear fruit for decades? But even after decades, men do not judge objectively. "Many a historian, writing in the twentieth century, cannot manage to exalt Caesar without taking a fling at Cicero." Evaluating a human being is evidently a superhuman task, and that is why "almost all religions... have then handed the judging along to the gods, or to God."
There is some equivalence between services rendered and recompense received in the free contracts of private life. But that equivalence is not founded upon a moral principle "as is desired for political life." And the scientific discoverers rarely benefit from their discoveries.
If absolute justice is impossible, "relative justice," the "sum of laws, habits, norms... laid down and enforced by public opinion" is possible, But, of course, results of human endeavor depend not just on work, but "ability" and "luck." The people most in favor of absolute justice are those "who hold bad cards and would like to have better ones and therefore propose stopping the game and having a new shuffle and a new deal."
6. Perhaps the most important question for political science is how to eliminate or reduce "those great catastrophes" that thrust people "back into barbarism."
But these catastrophes are not because a nation has "aged." Only humans age and die; they replace themselves with children, The only nations that have truly "died," in the sense of leaving no survivors, have been aboriginal pre-agricultural peoples in consequence, for example, of European colonization. Since the agricultural age, defeated peoples tend to survive, if diminished and absorbed. The "dying" is metaphorical.
Nations die when their ruling classes are incapable of reorganizing in such a way as to meet the needs of the changing times by drawing from the lower and deeper strata of society new elements that serve to given them new blood and new life.
Plus,
nations are also marked for death when they suffer a dwindling of those moral forces which hold them together and make if possible for a considerable mass of individual efforts to be concentrated, disciplined and directed towards purposes related to the collective interest.
This explains why a nation hangs onto tradition, feeling "that if it is not to die it must hold faithful to certain principles, certain fundamental and characteristic ideas, which impregnate all the atoms that unite to form its organic being."
But that could mean fossilization, immobility. The way to avoid the "death" of a nation is different.
That way is to provide for a slow but continuous modification of ruling classes, for a slow but continuous assimilation by them of new elements of moral cohesion that will gradually supplant the old.
So, a "political organism... can... be immortal, provided it learns how to transform itself continually without falling apart." An example of a successful adaption in Mosca's time was Japan. "That country found a way to transform itself without falling apart."
7. If political ruin is to be avoided, perhaps political science can help. It could contribute more than the genius of individual actors like Augustus or Napoleon. Better than genius would be an "exact knowledge of the laws that regulate the social nature of man."
There has been considerable advance in such knowledge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it cannot bear fruit before it has "obtained a strong hold on the minds of at least a majority in the ruling class, and thoroughly remodeled them." It must control their thinking and feeling. And yet scientific ideas are not well adapted for that, since they have little to do with "stirring the passions of the day... or... the interests of the moment."
Next: Future of Representative Government
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