1. Every "social type has a tendency to concentrate into a single political organism." Equally,
[T]he political organism, in expanding, almost always aims at spreading its own social type, and often succeeds in doing so.
The Assyrians did it by scattering conquered peoples among groups "that were Assyrian in spirit and nationality, and in the end were absorbed by them."
The Romans sometimes scattered conquered peoples, but not "the highly civilized populations of the East."
[I]n Gaul, Spain and Britain the empire assimilated the barbarians principally by establishing the Latin language and Roman law and spreading Greco-Roman literature and learning -- in short, by extending the benefits of an admirably organised public administration and a superior civilization.
Charlemagne "transplanted numerous colonies of Franks" to the lands of the defeated Saxons.
Or you can assimilate conquered peoples by the "offering of a higher level of culture" as the Spanish and Portuguese did in South America.
2. But often times a different social type will survive despite the heavy weight of the conqueror's hegemony. In the Persian empire subject populations "kept their beliefs, habits and customs intact."
We find different social types existing side by side even in modern states. "Turkish cities used to have their Greek, Armenian, and Jewish quarters... In India Brahmans, Mohammedans, Parsees and Europeans live side by side." The East seems to be "a museum for collecting and preserving the loose ends of social types that are elsewhere absorbed and vanish."
When a state is made up of a mixture of social types, the ruling class should be recruited almost entirely from the dominant type; and if that rule is not observed, because the dominant type is too weak either in numbers of in moral and intellectual energies, then the country may be looked upon as a sick country that stands of the brink of serious political upheavals.
This happened to the Ottoman empire in its last century. And the British in India used natives in public administration and in the army. If this continued, "it is doubtful whether European rule can long endure in that country.
In a country with mixed social types, one will become predominant. Sometimes this is the conquered ruling class that is absorbed in order to retain some power and privileges. "More often, traditions of an ancient greatness... are strong enough to overcome personal interests, and then the upper strata in the vanquished classes become the most unassimilable element." The Copts in Egypt remain Christian; the highest castes in India "supplied the fewest converts" to the Islamic Mughal empire.
3. Now Mosca examines the case where the political formula of the ruling class does not penetrate the entire society,
when the complex of beliefs and moral and philosophical principles that underlie the formula have not sunk deeply enough into the consciousness of the more populous and less well educated strata of society.
E.g., slaves in Rome and the "Indian pariah... regarded as outside every caste."
Usually political formulas and their beliefs and sentiments soak into the lower classes in time. But
when rapid flows of ideas agitate the higher classes, or... intellectual centers... in large cities... the lower classes... are likely to be left behind.
Then, Mosca says, "differing social types tend to form inside the society."
When a society enjoys "spiritual unity among all classes" it means that the lower classes will support even the most corrupt regime. People will "make the utmost sacrifices" if their beliefs coincide with their rulers' beliefs as expressed in the regime's political formula. Mosca cites the devotion of the Russian soldiers during Napoleon's invasion, the peasants of the Vendée uprising in 1793, the Spanish resisting the French invader in 1808.
But in 1798-99 the upper class of Naples was enthusiastic about the "French gospel of freedom" while the lower classes hated the French Jacobins. The result was the treasonable surrender to Napoleon's army by upper-class republicans and subsequent reprisal by royalists and the lower classes.
4. Now Mosca investigates "differences in intellectual cultivation and differences in language, habits, and family customs."
In the first place, "intellectual cultivation" is a new phenomenon, a result of advanced education of a few in the last two centuries. There are still no distinctions between the intellectual and the rest in the Muslim East. In Czarist Russia the distinction between the "intelligentsia" and the muzhiks could not have existed in the time of Peter the Great.
In France... Voltaire declares, that when Louis XIV actually assumed the throne, in 1660, the French nobility were rich in natural intelligence but ignorant and crude in manners.
In England, toward the end of the eighteenth century, Cobbett pointed to the difference between the farmers of the good old days... and those of the time he was writing. Formerly, he says, farmers had lodged and fed all their peasants... Then customs changed. The wage earner drew his pay and went to eat his meal alone in some tavern. The farmer became a "gentleman.. His sons would, if necessary, be clerks, copyists, shop-boys, but in no case farmers.
Disparities increase in bureaucratized societies. In the feudal society the ruling class is sprinkled out among their followers, their natural leaders, and the "baron knew his vassals personally."
In the Middle Ages the first peasant revolts broke out not when feudalism was harshest but when the nobles had learned to associate with one another, when the courts of love -- a conscious quest of good manners (the gai saber) -- had begun to give them polish and alienate them from the rustic ways of the lonely castle.
The fact is that the peasants hated the educated people that had abandoned the old ways of the countryside.
5. Mosca takes exception to the notion that humans are guided by "self-interest" alone. Interest is not just "pounds and pence:"
Interest is suited in each individual to the individual's own tastes, and each individual interprets his interest in his own individual way. For many people, to satisfy their pride, their sense of personal dignity, their vanities great and small, to humor their personal caprices and rancors, is worth far more than pleasures that are purely material.
For the lower classes, "more bitter by far than physical privation is the existence of a higher world from which they are excluded." So, in the city, rich and poor are hostile to each other. But, when it comes to wars against foreigners, the poor usually go for soldiers, especially if the foreigner has a different religion. Social democracy decrees that the proletarians of all countries are allied against the capitalists of the whole world. But Mosca reckons that if it were a Chinese invasion or a Russian invasion, the workers would "eagerly cooperate with the ruling classes.
There comes a point "where differences in social types as between members of different countries becomes greater than difference in social type as between classes in the same country."
6. The isolation of the lower classes from the ruling class often results in the formation of an intermediary ruling class to rule over the lower class and this new class is often "antagonistic to the class that holds possession of the legal government." This clandestine government can often be better loved, feared, and obeyed than the legal government. [E.g., American city political machines]
Often, when a section of the ruling class tries to overthrow the government it seeks the support of the lower class and gets it if the lower class is hostile or indifferent to the legal order. But the opposite can occur, when the ruling class seeks the support of the lower class in fighting some "revolutionary current."
But the most dangerous consequence of the differences in social type between the classes and their mutual isolation is
a decline in energy in the upper classes which grow poorer and poorer in bold and aggressive characters and richer and richer in "soft," remissive individuals.
This decline is virtually impossible in a feudal society where local leaders have "to be energetic, resourceful men." But when the state is bureaucratized the ruling class need not keep up to the mark, and can indulge in sentimental theories about the "innate goodness of men."
[C]ertain it is that when the ruling class has degenerated in the manner described, it loses its ability to provide against its own dangers and against those of the society that has the misfortune to be guided by it. So the state crashes at the first appreciable shock.
Mosca approves of the ruling class of 19th century England.
[I]n the course of the nineteenth century England adopted peacefully and without violent shocks almost all the basic civil and political reforms that France paid so heavily to achieve through the great Revolution.
England had a ruling class with "the greater energy, the greater practical wisdom, the better political training.
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