The Ruling Class I: Political Science

People have long wanted to think that social phenomena are not mere chance, or God's will, but "rather the effects of constant psychological tendencies determining the behavior of the human masses." Aristotle wrote in his Politics.

Another approach was the Macchiavellian, to learn by what arts an individual or class "might succeed in achieving supreme power in a given society and in thwarting the efforts of other individuals or groups o supplant them."

It turns out that a good half of the field of human thought... may be looked upon as devoted to political science.

The most highly developed part of political science is political economy, an effort that began at the end of the 18th century, investigating "the production and distribution of wealth" apart from the mass of other social phenomena. This led by the middle of the 19th century to "a tendency to explain all political events in human history on the basis of economic considerations," a reference, no doubt, to Marx.

But this book is devoted to the organization of political authority apart from economic considerations.

Of course, everyone wants knowledge to be "scientific" but political science is not yet one of them, owing not least to the great complexity of human societies. Typically, political science suggests either the operation of the will of God or "the free and spontaneous expression of the will of the people" or at least a majority of them. Two methods of analysis have dominated: the effect of climate and the effect of the physical differences "between the various races of men."

Mosca accepts the climate, or environmental argument: obviously a favorable location in respect of "temperature and rainfall" is beneficial. But these factors "diminish with the growth of [a] civilization." He then goes on to analyze northerners vs. southerners and "the superiority of certain races" and rejects them, with an aside to Darwin and Spencer. Nor is he inclined to give much weight to the idea that "each race has special intellectual and moral qualities" -- and this a century ago! For one thing he suggests, even when one race conquered another, the defeated people were not all slain, but "reduced to servitude" and thus survive, but as part of the conqueror's realm.

Nor is Mosca much of a fan of the historical method, in particular because of the "scant reliability of historical materials." And what about Roman history? Were "Tiberius and Nero.. the rascals that Tacitus said they were"? And then basing our understanding of the more primitive human and animal societies makes us dependent on the sagacity of the traveler or reporter of an exotic location, and anyway, how relevant are primitive tribes to a more complex society where politics is a very different affair than the small society of a few families.

So Mosca turns to his own method of analysis, and that starts with the notion that all societies have "a class that rules and a class that is ruled."

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