1. In societies with a certain amount of civilization, ruling classes do not justify their power simply by possessing the power,
but try to find a moral and legal basis for it, representing it as the logical and necessary consequence of doctrines and beliefs that are generally recognized and accepted.
So, in a Christian nation the ruler will rule as God's anointed; in a Muslim nation the ruler will be the caliph of the Prophet; in China the mandarins interpret the will of the Son of Heaven. Even the Roman emperor was supposed to have received a mandate from the people. In the US powers emanate from the will of the voters.
This principle is what Mosca calls the "political formula" and it differs from society to society. Although these justifications are hardly scientific, they fill a real need.
[T]hey answer a real need in man's social nature; and this need, so universally felt, of governing and knowing one is governed not on the basis of mere material or intellectual force, but of the basis of a moral principle, has beyond any doubt a practical and a real importance.
For if the divine right of kings was the superstition of the ages, then popular sovereignty is the superstition of our age. The question is whether any society can hold together without some universal illusion.
2. Societies are held together by a belief in common brotherhood and hold apart from other groups by a sense of antagonism. The political formula must be based on the special beliefs of the group it serves. The sense of brotherhood no doubt originated in the primitive belief in a common ancestor, but Mosca suspects that affinity by race today is a mere pretext. What defines community is more likely "community of language, of religion, of interests, and the recurring relationships that result from geographical situation." They all contribute to the "development of a conscious social type." This "social type," once formed, serves as a kind of "crucible" in which we become who we are because of who we were born and bred.
(Definition: A "social type" is a community of like-minded people with the same language, religion, interests, that propagates itself down the generations unless interfered with).
3. In the dawn of history each civilized people was an "oasis in a desert of barbarism" and did not have much interaction with other civilized peoples. E.g., Egypt and China. Thus each civilized people was a single "social type."
[E]ach social type had an absolute originality that was virtually unaffected by infiltrations and influences from outside.
Even though a people may have a common belief and a common identity it doesn't stop them from squabbling and trying to dominate each other. Thus ancient China was always broken up into many semi-independent states, ancient Egypt was always breaking up and recombining, and the cities of ancient Greece were forever trying to impose an hegemony on each other.
But each ancient people had a simple political formula that was wholly identified with its religion.
Their god was preeminently a national god. He was the special protector of the territory and the people. He was the fulcrum of its political organization. A people existed only as long as its god was strong enough to sustain it, and in his turn the god survived only as long as his people did.
Mosca uses the ancient Hebrews and their Jehovah as an example, and compares them with nearby Moab, Babylon, and Thebes, and he notes that when these nations warred against each other they were conscious of the power of the opposing god. In due course these battling states and empires came to accept that other peoples had different gods, and rulers even "found it politic to recognize and worship the god of the vanquished. Thus Alexander sacrificed to Ammon and the Romans "admitted all conquered deities into their pantheon." The long periods of peace and lulling of rivalries permitted a new phenomenon, the rise of universal religions -- Buddhism, Christianity, Islam -- "that sought to extend the influence of their doctrines indiscriminately over the whole world."
4. The new religions, each with their "complete body of doctrine," changed the rules completely. Now disparate peoples under different political entities could experience community with their coreligionists across the border. But equally as the new religions
served wonderfully to bind their cobelievers together in brotherhood... they also act as estranging forces of great potency between populations that cherish different beliefs.
The Romans might not have bound their peoples together had they created their empire after the foundation of the new universal religions; the Jews, of course, never allowed themselves to be assimilated to Rome. In particular, Muslims have proved resistant to assimilation.
5. The rise of the new religions introduced a new complication, the "struggle between church and state."
The political organization still tries to justify its own existence by the tenets of the existing religion, but the religion, on its side, is always trying to obtain control of, and to identify with, political power in order to use the latter as an instrument of its own ends and propaganda.
Thus in Islam politics and religion are most closely united; in China of 1920 Buddhism "lives meekly under the protection of the state;" in Christian states the relationship varies. In Russia state and church are almost one; under Protestantism the dominant sect has dominant political power; Catholicism once hoped to unite all Christians, but now "gets along by compromises."
In those countries where the population is divided among several sects, the political problem is complicated, and requires the ruling class to invent a moral or legal basis for its rule to balance the divisive demands of the religions with a "national feeling," such as a long tradition of independence, or an age-old dynasty, so that e.g., a good Catholic may also be a good German.
For Mosca, a ruling class that is vigorous and soundly organized can deal with the competition of the universal religions. But if it is weak and feeble then "the state ends by becoming a plaything of one of the universal religions or doctrines" -- including social democracy.
6. Feudal states come in different flavors. But they are small, less developed, less complex that bureaucratic states.
By "feudal state" we mean that type of political organization in which all the executive functions of society -- the economic, the judicial, the administrative the military -- are exercised simultaneously by the same individuals, while at the same time the state is made up of small aggregates, each of which possesses all the organs that are required for self-sufficiency.
For us, the Europe of the Middle Ages is the familiar example; but similar feudal states existed all over the world, and many great states, including Egypt and China switched between feudal and bureaucratic form. Even small political units that were not agricultural, such as the trading cities of Tyre and Sidon, Genoa and Venice, Bremen and Hamburg were feudal and their leaders combined management of banks, commerce, trading posts, command of ships in peace and war, and governed their cities.
7. In the "bureaucratic state" not all executive functions need to be concentrated in the bureaucracy.
The main characteristic is... that... the central power conscripts a considerable portion of the social wealth by taxation and uses it first to maintain a military establishment and then to support a more or less extensive number of public services.
The more the number of officials with public duties, "the more bureaucratic a society becomes." There is always a greater specialization of functions, of which the first is the "withdrawal of administrative and judiciary powers from the military element" and the fact of greater discipline in all grades of service. The feudal state, on the other hand, depends much more on the charisma of the leader, so that the death of the leaders can lead to the end of the state.
But a bureaucratic state can maintain its identity as leaders come and go, and can even change its political formula and modify its structure, as Rome did when it adopted Christianity. Our modern nations have nearly all shifted from "a divine right formula to parliamentary forms of government."
8. Bureaucratic control does not necessarily mean centralization: e.g., China. The main characteristic is that its functions are exercised by salaried employees, and when a state spreads over huge territories and millions of individuals "nothing short of bureaucratic organization seems capable of" directing traffic for a ruling class to "make its influence effective and powerful beyond its own frontiers."
Under a feudal organization the authority which a given member of the ruling class exerts over individuals of the subject class... may be more direct... Under a bureaucratic organization society is influenced less by a given individual leader than by the ruling class as a whole.
Egypt was bureaucratized in the seventeenth and eighteenth dynasties but suffered because it had no coinage. Rome was "highly bureaucratized" and spread Greco-Roman civilization over large parts of the ancient world.
But "history shows no instance of a society in which all human activities have been completely bureaucratized:" justice, public administration, education, roads, canals, railroads, and public works. But not production, which seems to "lend itself ill to bureaucratic regulation."
[W]e have fairly strong evidence that the extension of bureaucratic control to the production and distribution of wealth would be fatal.
(This was written before the example of the Soviet Union).
Of course, a bureaucratic state can tax the wealth-producing class so heavily that profits are markedly reduced, and production falls off.
As wealth declines, emigration and higher death rates thin out the poorer classes, and finally the exhaustion of the entire social body ensues. These phenomena are observable whenever a bureaucratic state declines.
We have seen this in the decline of Egypt, Rome, and even France.
9. Mosca now deals with competing theories of government, including those of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer.
[Comte] stressed three stages in the evolution of human intelligence, the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive, with three different types of social organization corresponding to them, the military, the feudal and the industrial.
Indeed, mankind can attribute phenomena to the gods, to first causes, or, as now, to natural laws. But Mosca thinks that Comte is wrong to think that historical periods map directly to specific stages in human evolution. To him, all three intellectual processes occur in all historical periods. Even the savage, on his hunt, does not rely on the gods, but on "observations that have been accumulated and systematized by himself and his fathers.. in accord with the dictates of sound science."
10. The fact is that mankind lives in all three intellectual worlds: "even when he believes and hopes that God is going to interfere in his behalf, he is careful to keep his powder dry." Comte's doctrine comes down to the commonplace that the more science, the less metaphysical thinking and the less interference from the gods.
Comte is wider of the mark when he parallels his intellectual stages with "his three types of political organization, the military, the feudal, and the industrial." The military function is found in all human societies. Nor is the feudal system necessarily associated with "the predominance of metaphysics in human thought." In fact, according to Mosca, the Middle Ages were full of theological thought, more so than the earlier classical period, and "the marvelous and the supernatural were elements and familiar as the air they breathed."
11. Nor, in Mosca's opinion, is there a correspondence "between the industrial system and positive science." Actually Comte thought that industrialism would only develop in the remote future
when the managerial functions of society would be entrusted to a priesthood of positivistic scientists and to a patriciate of bankers and businessmen[.]
Comte was also opposed to the parliamentary system as being a manifestation of anarchy.
Spencer, on the other hand "divided human societies into two types, the militant (i.e., military), based on force, and the industrial, based on contract and the free consent of the citizens." His basic idea is that the militant society is based on status and the industrial society on contract. But for Mosca this is naive, because every ruling class, including our present one, rules, and enjoys the status of the ruler. And he does not agree that states where the rulers obtain the assent or acquiescence of the ruled should be considered industrial and the states that do not achieve that acquiescence are militant. Ancient Greece and Rome demonstrated elective systems, but they were hardly industrial peoples under Spencer's definition.
12. Mosca sets up Spencer as arguing this:
[A]s militarism decreases and industrialism increases proportionately, a social organization in which the individual exists for the benefit of the state develops into another organization in which the state exists for the benefit of the individual.
In fact, we cannot say whether the brain exists for the body or the body for the brain. Spencer finds government supervision of irrigation as militant; Mosca considers it over-bureaucratization. Spencer finds the private vendetta as a symbol of militancy; Mosca defines it as a state where central authority is weak.
But, though Spencer speaks through "cloud of... misunderstanding" Mosca approves him for
we cannot fail to see that by a "militant state" he means a state in which juridical defense has made little progress and by an "industrial state" another type of society in which justice and social morality has much better safeguarded.
In other words, Spencer makes sense if understood through Mosca's theoretical framework!
Mosca also thinks that Spencer is upside down in considering "war and the need of military organization... the causes of all violence." For Mosca war is just one way in which humans tyrannize over their fellows. Instead, Mosca says, the real curb on violence is the realization in highly developed societies that war infallibly harms both victor and vanquished.
Mosca also disapproves of Spencer's idea that armies should be manned by volunteers -- the kind of people that, for Mosca, are most inclined towards violence and therefore oppressing their fellows.
Next: Ruling Class and Social Type
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