The Only Thing That Politics Knows is Loot and Plunder

Back in the riots of the 1960s and 1970s guess what the radicals demanded? Less money on police and more money on school lunches and social services.

So now what do the radicals want? To defund the police and spend the money of social services and minority communities.

What is going on here?

I will tell you. If you are in politics the only thing you know is loot and plunder. That is what politics is about and what it has always been about since the dawn of dawn raids.

So the politician cannot see further than selling the notion that the other guys are screwing us and now we are going to screw them back.

By the way, in the City of Seattle, for 2017, the last year with data from the Census Bureau, police cost $200 million out of a total $3.75 billion in spending. Guess what the biggest item is? It is $1.1 billion for "Fuel and Energy" which comes mainly from the municipal Seattle City Light. 

Hey, I know wokies! Why not privatize and sell off City Light! Think of the proceeds that you can spend on lefty wish lists! But of course, that would never occur to you.

Back in the Sixties, as now, the residents of the inner cities resented that the rich folks looked down on them.

This has been the story of big city politics since the middle of the 19th century. The Irish were looked down upon as "shanty Irish" until they made their way into the middle class as "lace-curtain Irish." Jews that started immigrating after the 1905 pogroms were considered dumb, until they started knocking on the doors of Harvard, and the gentlemen at Harvard decided that the pushy smart Jewish kids weren't gentlemanly enough. Italians were notorious gangsters, until they got into the middle class and Frank Rizzo became mayor of Philadelphia on a law-and-order platform.

When an ethnic group first arrives in the city it feels like the whole world is out to get it. But then, slowly, inch by inch, it claws its way into the middle class, getting education and skills and learning how to interface and live with the market economy, which doesn't care about your ethnicity, not much, as long as you are trustworthy and deliver.

But there is a way to slow this process down. You can give a group of workers monopoly privileges working in a labor union in a large corporation. Then they'll think it's their bargaining power that has given them prosperity, rather than their skills and the innovation of their employer. You can give them welfare and free lunches and funnel money to them through community activist groups. Then they'll think that political power is the name of the game. And, as happened after the Great Society, the men won't work much and the women won't marry much.

Wrong idea. What gets people to be accepted as ordinary citizens is that they submit to the city's market economy and learn how to wive and thrive according to its rules. Then they find that it doesn't matter who looks down on them. They got their job, they got their family, they got their savings, and they got their respect.

Now, my notion with the Great Reaction is that liberal and lefty politics is a lurch back to the primitive, replacing market trust with fear, law with vengeance, and so on.

And I believe that the left's encouragement of resentment and class politics is one of the great crimes of the age. Because the one thing to learn, when you get to the city, is to forget your tribal resentments and your fear of the tribe next door, but to plunge into the market culture of trust and service.

And I believe, with my Little Darlings theory, that leftist politics is all about leftist power, not about helping the downtrodden. Leftist politics is all about finding the latest oppressed group and enticing that group into political followership with the prospect of loot and plunder. Because lefties understand only political power; they are utterly ignorant of the settled science that shows how and why we live in the Great Enrichment that has raised real per-capita income by 30 times in the last two hundred years.

But, I always say, to make the cultural adjustment to the market economy culture is the hardest thing in the world to do, because humans are programmed to mistrust the tribe next door, because the tribe next door represents a competitor for their food growing territory. Who knew that the way to prosper was to offer your services on the open market and to trust anyone that acts trustworthy?

But alas for the folks in the looted areas, their businesses destroyed, their hopes dashed. Because the lesson of the Sixties Riot era is that the riot areas never come back. See Detroit and Newark.

Riots and Mayhem: Be of Good Cheer

As Crane Brinton writes in Anatomy of Revolution, the normal cycle of a revolution is that the moderates get ejected by the extremists -- because revolution fails to realize the hopes of the extremists -- and then the extremists get ejected by the Thermidorean Reaction. That's because humans can't live forever in the white heat of religious frenzy.

As Festinger et al write in When Prophecy Fails, the failure of the prophecy (in this case abduction of the faithful by UFO aliens) does not end the religious cult that has formed around a religious prophecy. The cultists go for broke when the prophecy fails, looking for ways in which they failed to interpret the prophecy properly. Only later does the prophetic cult disintegrate as members start to fall away.

As Nietzsche writes, particularly in The Will to Power, when a god dies, as in his God is Dead notion, what follows is a period of decadence -- of cultural dying -- followed by nihilism, meaning that people experience life as meaningless, followed by the eternal recurrence, where life seems to be a constant recycling of meaninglessness, as in the movie Groundhog Day. But then a new age dawns with the revaluation of values, where a new god arises to comfort the believers.

As new age philosopher Ken Wilber relates, using his multi-level theory of consciousness, when things fall apart people regress from their current level of consciousness to the next lower level of consciousness. E.g., fascism, where people regress, when things aren't working, from a citizen consciousness appropriate for the city to a tribal consciousness appropriate for a people under siege.

And right now I am reading the classic Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga. It's about the thuggish lords and princes in love with tales of knightly derring do as soldiers for Christ saving damsels in distress. And elaborate court ritual. And the semi-polytheistic cults of the saints. Things weren't working, and people -- that is to say the ruling class -- really didn't have a clue.

Well, imagine you are a good educated Gentry liberal living in a good Gentry liberal city like Minneapolis or Seattle. How is it possible for racist sexist white policemen to be kneeing the necks of helpless victim minorities? It must be a malevolent influence. Maybe white supremacists!

Or, you might ask, how come a 48-year-old career criminal with fentanyl and methamphetamine in his blood gets to cash a fake $20 bill in today's America? What's wrong with us? (Yeah, I know, who's this "us" Kemosabe?)

Or, you might ask, how come that "peaceful protests" attended by earnest young Gentry liberal students become the occasion for organized gangs of looters driving SUVs up to high-end stores selling name-brand luxury goods?

Would you believe me when I say that all this mayhem represents the "failure of prophecy" of the Gentry liberal cult that believes in the saving of society by educated experts and/or activists that will assuredly bend the arc of history towards justice?

That the idea of beneficial legislation handing out loot, first to the working class, then to blacks and minorities -- and even gentry women and gays! -- does not solve any problems? Because the problem of the working class in the 19th century and the former slaves in the 20th century was that they had not yet learned the code of the city, how to become responsible citizens with marketable skills and a reputation for trustworthiness.

That the idea of the administrative and regulatory state, staffed by educated experts in the latest settled science, is a non-starter because life is much more complicated and conditional than is possible for administrative experts to direct from government offices.

That the idea of educated Gentry imposing their woke religious beliefs on the bigoted deplorables and firing them from their jobs for Badthink is a non-starter because, as the Founders declared in their wisdom, there should be no state establishment of religion. Yes, and in our modern era, dear Gentry liberals, that includes so-called "secular religions" like social justice. Do you know why the Founders put the thingy about no establishment of religion into the constitution, liberals? It's because they were still smarting from the religious wars of the 17th century, and figured that the government should confine itself to basic questions of life and death and mayhem in the streets and not arcane questions of morality.

So I am saying that we are in a Reign of Terror and Virtue, rather like the French Revolution, because the arc of history isn't bending fast enough for our liberal masters.

I am saying that liberals are experiencing a "failure of prophecy" right now and are reaching desperately to make the prophecy come true before it crashes to the ground in failure.

I am saying that we are about to experience the moment when the liberal god dies and a period of decadence and nihilism takes over as the former believers blunder around looking for a new god.

I am saying that liberals are going backwards, in a Great Reaction, trying to find meaning in the jumble of archetypes in the basement, now that their exalted higher consciousness seems to be failing them.

I am saying that the liberal Activism Culture is a dead end, because we do not need revolution, or a stage version, because the problem is liberals themselves, not some imagined patriarchy or white supremacy.

I am saying that liberals are leading their helpless victims up a blind canyon and the victims will crash into the canyon wall as other Little Darlings of the liberals have already done.

And the best thing that can happen in America is for liberals to become demoralized by their manifest failures and take their hands off the controls of the ship of state!

And then we can all get back to work and working together and building trust in reciprocal trusting relationships.

Rod Rosenstein: What Did He Know...

So now, finally, they had former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on the carpet before the Senate Judiciary Committee. And,

“If you knew then what you know now, would you have signed the application?” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham asked Rosenstein during his testimony.

“No, I would not,” Rosenstein replied.

So that's all right. Good old Rod. Would never have signed a FISA warrant based on false information -- hey even information gotten from a questionable furriner like Steele. Thank goodness Christopher Steele wasn't a descendant of the notorious Lucy Steele of Sense and Sensibility!

But, Mr. Former Deputy Attorney General, what in the world did you think you were doing approving a FISA warrant for surveillance on a US person involved in a presidential campaign?

Would you not, as an experienced and intelligent Justice Department official, and as a US person, smell a rat?

Would you not, as an experienced and intelligent Justice Department official, and as a US person, hear an alarm bell?

Would you not, as an experienced and intelligent Justice Department official, and as a US person, think to yourself: Whoa Neddy? Obtaining intelligence on the opposition campaign? Not cricket, old chap. Or baseball, pal.

But here is what I think was going on. You, Mr. Former Deputy Attorney General, knew that the president, Barack Obama, was "interested" in the case. So you didn't call the guys that had originated the FISA warrant and grill them to within an inch of medium-rare. No. You just waved it through. Because.

Was it because you didn't want to risk the displeasure of the White House? 

Was it because you knew that if you failed to get with the program you would "never work in this town again?"

Was it because you feared that, according to Obama house rules, the penalty for not getting with the program might be even more harsh that never working in this town again?

Well, all that is speculation. Who knows what works in the mind of man, eh, Mr, Former Deputy Attorney General?

But this give me an excuse to bring up the matter that I regard as the most basic for any electoral democracy. That the most important thing is the alternation in office. That when one party has had the presidency for two terms the right thing to do is for the Out party to win, and for the In party to concede with a good grace.

That the best way to avoid riots in the streets is for each party to get its turn in office.

This was taught to me by my Greek friend as the Greek colonels of 1967-74 were giving up power and returning Greece to electoral democracy. What is needed, said my friend, was for the Center Right to win and for the left to concede the election. Then what was needed was for the Center Left to win the next election and for the right to concede the election.

The last two times that the Democrats lost a change election when they were in power, in 2000 and in 2016, they failed to concede with a good grace. I regard this as the most serious political problem of our era.

And you, Mr. Former Deputy Attorney General, were right in the middle of the failure to concede. Indeed you were right in the middle of peculiar efforts to surveil the opposition party in the months before the election. For what purpose, may I ask?

Was it a purpose greater than the purpose of keeping a peaceable democracy where each party feels pretty confident that it will win or lose the next election in a fair fight?

Was it just a lack of judgement? Was it a case of pusillanimity? Was it a case of bad faith? Or was it a case of deliberate attempt to nobble the opposition?

Doesn't matter, really. The damage is done. And the chances are that the guilty will walk free.

But hey, Mr. Former Deputy Attorney General. I sure hope LTG Flynn gets his house back. That would be nice, don't you think?

The Ruling Class XVII: Future of Representative Government

1. Humans typically view the past by its "century," and for Mosca, the nineteenth century ran from 1815 to 1914. It was the nineteenth century that created the world that Mosca has lived in.

2. The nineteenth century was a century that attempted to implement the ideas of the eighteenth century, the program of "liberty, equality, fraternity." Mosca proposes to evaluate that implementation.

The concept of liberty was inherited from classical Greece and Rome through the Renaissance and popularized by Rousseau and others. The concepts were implemented through the practical experience of England in the eighteenth century as brilliantly interpreted by Montesquieu.

The classical assembly of all citizens was converted into representative parliaments. But the election of various officials was not followed from the classical age, and high administrative and judicial posts were appointed or permanent professional employees of the bureaucracy.

Bureaucracies were expanded in the nineteenth century as governments took on new functions, and the parliaments contented themselves with the right of audit and critique, and heading the bureaucratic machine with members of the parliament.

Military systems underwent huge change and development, but retained the autocratic structure from the absolutist times, and retains a distinction between officers, who are typically professionals from the middle and upper classes, and men, who are typically conscripts with the ways of the working and peasant classes. It is notable that despite trusting the proletarians with arms the armies have remained "a conservative force, an element of social order and stability." This can be used, as by the Bolsheviks, to bind the corps of officers to the regime.

In Europe the conception of political liberty extends beyond representative government with institutions and laws to provide against violation of private property, protections against arrest and condemnation, freedom of religion, an uncensored press, freedom to discuss political matters and form associations "for moral, political, or professional ends." These are real limitations on state power, and they are ultimately guaranteed by the representative system.

The concept of equality is harder to put into practice, "for equality is contrary to the nature of things." The bourgeoisie abolished class privileges at the end of the eighteenth century.

But little could be done with natural inequalities, or with artificial inequalities... which result from family inheritance -- disparities in wealth, upbringing and education.

Equality ought to do away with classes, but in fact the gap between classes, "in ways of thinking, of manners of feeling and in tastes and inclinations" has never been greater. And never have "classes been less comprehensible to each other."

The middle classes gave the lower classes the vote, as a demonstration of their good conscience, and due to various factors, including increased prosperity, has made it possible to grant economic concessions to the "populous classes" without reducing private savings and placing burdens on large and moderate fortunes. Of course, agitators have taken credit for these improvements, in which "there is a small amount of truth and a large amount of falsehood."

It is perhaps in fraternity that the least progress has been made. Despite the professions of brotherhood among the great religions -- that only extend to co-religionists -- "the practice of fraternity was far from perfect."

The problem is, of course, that "rivalries and conflicts of interest are unavoidable in the struggle for preeminence." But man should never need to hate.

Unhappily, the human being's need for hating has at no time seemed very close to disappearing from his nature.

The failure to achieve equality must have contributed to the failure of fraternity, for "that disappointment has intensified rivalries between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the helpless, the happy and the unhappy."

3. Nevertheless, Mosca asserts that "the nineteenth century was one of the greatest and most magnificent of all the eras that humanity has traversed." The achievements are material, intellectual, scientific. And "our political system must necessarily have made its contribution." Despite its illusions and its failures in equality and fraternity, "the ranks of the ruling class have been held open," and

the development of the old absolutist state into the modern representative state has made it possible for almost all political forces, almost all social values, to participate in the political management of society.

The current ruling class is divided into two: "one issuing from popular suffrage and the other from bureaucratic appointment." This has allowed better use of individual capacities and also distributed the powers of the state. It was Montesquieu that showed us that "if a nation is to be free" it must be governed by law, and "not the arbitrary will of its rulers." It must have a government where "authority arrests and limits authority." This can only work when the political class is divided by function. 

On the one hand the European nations have enjoyed a representative system that has allowed criticism of the rulers. It has also developed a strong state that can spend enormous amounts on public projects. It has left "sufficient vitality to achieve remarkable results in... the scientific, literary, and economic fields." And, it proved head and shoulders above the other countries of the world.

The center of gravity in European civilization is shifting towards the Americas, with their vast territories, great resources, and ability to support much bigger populations. But up to now the Americas needed European capital, and "the artistic and scientific culture of European countries is still considerably superior to the general level of culture in the Americas."

4. There are a number of seeds that were planted in the nineteenth century, seeds that could improve society, or dissolve it.

Europe has achieved a fair degree of individual liberty and restraint on arbitrary rulers, and remarkable material prosperity. But it has not realized equality. It is natural that there should be in the middle-class a movement devoted to realization of equality and empowering the masses, and it is not surprising that such a movement should believe that private property should be abolished. But the broader middle class has not fought the socialist movement that would seek to destroy it, partly because of general confidence in the "goodness of the human being" and the education of the masses, and a general belief in progress.

But the socialist gospel openly "fans feelings of class hatred." 

Today there is hardly a factory worker who does not believe... that the wealth of his employer, of of the shareholders who have supplied capital for  his factory, has been amassed by depriving workingmen of some of the wages that were due to them. 

Meanwhile the extreme "division of labor and specialization in production" has made every individual utterly dependent on the functioning of the whole.

If any single member, any single essential organ, should stop doing its duty, the brain and all the nervous centers that depend on it would be paralyzed.

 E.g., unions going on strike.

To prevent breakdown, the ruling class must prevent the growth of intermediate loyalties, such as the vassal gave to his baron, and not to his king, in the Middle Ages. Thus, 

it is absolutely indispensable that the heads of our present governments should at all times receive greater obedience from the members of the unions than the heads of the unions themselves receive. Devotion to the national interests must always be stronger than devotion to class interests.

With the decline in religion, patriotism is left as "the chief factor of moral and intellectual cohesion within the various countries of Europe... It satisfies... a yearning of the human soul to love the group to which it belongs above all other groups."

Of course, love of country "often goes hand in hand with diffidence towards other countries and sometimes with hatred of them." As was proved in World War I.

5. The World War visited enormous dislocation and suffering upon the peoples of Europe, most particularly upon the middle class with its modest savings. Not surprisingly, many have called for a radical change in the inherited institutions. There are, Mosca thinks, three such radical solutions. One is the Bolshevik "dictatorship of the proletariat" in Russia and its experiment in communism. Another is a return to bureaucratic absolutism. The third would be syndicalism, "replacing individual representation by class representation in legislative assemblies."

The violent implementation of communism in Russia has divided socialists, between those favoring a violent implementation and those advocating a "slow and gradual application." The implementation of communism in Russia "brought about a rapid and complete disorganization of every sort of production, and want and famine came in its wake." The same would likely accompany any similar attempt in Europe. 

[T]he new Russian ruling class has had to govern tyrannically, override all scruples and enforce obedience by terror... In Russia the old bourgeoisie has been replaced... by the Jewish petty-bourgeoisie and by... elements such as Letts, Armenians, and Mohammedan Tatars.

"Moderate socialism" in Europe would have less of a chance of lasting than a dictatorship. It would degenerate into pure communism or convert the current economic system into a bureaucratic and military dictatorship.

This last system would correspond to the second solution mentioned above. It would be a sort of "Caesarism" such as prevailed in France under the Napoleons with the supremacy of permanent bureaucracies. This would seriously hamper liberties, for the lack of representative assemblies combined with the much larger resources commanded by the modern state would have the power to "shatter all individual and collective resistance.

The third radical solution would be the syndicalist solution with a class assembly, and would create a "possible basis for the organization of sovereignty intermediate between the individual and state" which Mosca regards as the most serious present threat to our political life.

In view of the importance that separate classes have acquired in the economic life of every civilized country, it is not far-fetched to assume that the syndicalist chamber would easily prevail over others.

In a syndicalist assembly the better-educated elements, such as scholars, lawyers, and engineers, would not be able to balance the power of railway men, seamen, stevedores and miners: for what counts is numbers. If the unions, inspired with Marxist doctrines, should work together, "they would be able to seize control of the state outright" -- and then start to quarrel with each other, leading to economic disorganization and political anarchy.

6. Any of the three radical solutions of the post -WWI crisis in Europe would result in a less perfect, more primitive political system than the pre-war one. But if Europe can overcome its difficulties then it would prepare the ground "for other political systems that may be far preferable to any now existing."

But, to get its house in order, Europe needs a period of peace and prosperity as was enjoyed in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Mosca advises "the rising generation to restore and conserve the political system which it inherited from its fathers." And the first task is to cool off the class and national hatreds that the Marxians and the wars have encouraged.

Mosca proposes some improvements. The first is to make writers responsible for their writing and not the publisher's agent, the "responsible manager." Another issue is freedom of assembly and association, about which present laws are vague, allowing authoritarian governments to suppress any sort of association and weak governments to submit to violent elements. Another question is the limitation of suffrage, which Mosca supports but realizes would be impossible.

But the main thing Mosca wants is for the ruling class to raise its game, improve its political competence and understanding, and try "to see a little beyond its immediate interest." To be worthy of high political office it is not enough to have a university degree, or run a business, or fought in the trenches. "Long study and great devotion are also necessary."

Every generation produces some "generous souls who are capable of loving all that is, or seems to be, noble and beautiful" and working to improve society, even while the "best" people have no definite and clear perception of the needs of their times.

Let us hope that that that clear perception will not be wanting today in the nobler elements among our youth, and that it may so enlighten their minds and quicken their hearts that they can think and act in peace as resolutely and courageously as they fought in war.

Back to Contents.

The Ruling Class XVI: Ruling Class and Individual

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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The Ruling Class XV: Principles and Tendencies in Ruling Classes

 1. Mosca starts out by defining what he means by "principles" and what he means by "tendencies."

For Mosca there are two types of political principles defining the types of regime. There is autocracy, where authority is transmitted downwards from the top; then there is liberalism, where ultimate political authority is transmitted upwards, where "the authority of the governor derives from the governed." 

Then there are two tendencies, meaning the way that the ruling class changes over time, with "democracy" as tending "to replace the ruling class with elements derived from the lower classes, and "aristocracy" as tending to "stabilize social control and political power" to the descendants of the current ruling class.

Mosca proposes dichotomies between the political principles of autocracy vs. liberalism, and the political tendencies of aristocracy vs. democracy as the criteria for determining the type of political system.

2. Autocracy is the basis of the first great empires: Asia, Egypt, Persia, Arab caliphates. And the recent governments of Japan, China, and Turkey were all autocratic. Plus the Roman Empire after Diocletian, the Byzantine Empire, Russia under Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Alexander III, and the early days of Nicholas II.

Early post-feudal European nations were autocratic. In the Americas, Europeans found Mexico and Peru organized autocratically, all except the state of Tlaxcala, ruled by tribal chiefs, that allied with Cortez against the Aztecs.

That autocracy occurs all over the world tells us that it "must somehow correspond to the political nature of man."

[A]autocracy supplies a political formula, a principle of authority, a justification of power, that is simple, clear and readily comprehensible by everybody. There can be no human organization without rankings and subordinations. Any sort of hierarchy necessarily requires that some should command and other obey.

And there is no shortage of men that "love to command" nor those that "can be brought to obey."

The objection is that, however effective at creating great political organizations, autocracy "does not allow the peoples that have adopted it, and especially their ruling classes, to attain all of the moral and intellectual development of this civilized mankind is capable." However, it also seems that periods of moral and intellectual development are "exceptional periods" that are followed by periods where humans seem to need "a long sleep" and a reversion to autocracy.

Where an autocrat has life tenure there is a tendency toward hereditary succession; this reduces the temptation for civil wars. Thus the monarchies of Europe tended to be more stable than the monarchies of the Near East. There is a tendency for Asian dynasties to start with a strong adventurer and then slowly decline; in Europe the more frequent case is a dynasty that starts small and grows bigger: Capets and Hohenzollerns.

Those inheriting a state are not likely to possess the qualifications for leading it effectively. Thus the titular autocrat is often assisted by a council of ministers, or a single powerful individual, or vizier. And yet in Europe there were often kings that inherited their kingdoms and ruled effectively. They had, Mosca proposes, a capacity for sustained exertion, and a "strong will to rule."

This vizier is likely to acquire ascendancy over his boss, in particular because he will "fill all high positions with persons bound to him by ties of family, gratitude, or... complicity in questionable acts or actual crimes."

The formation of a clique... who monopolize the management of the state and occupy the more important offices, sometimes in rotation, is a thing that occurs in all autocracies, and, in fact, in all forms of government.

For anyone getting an appointment in high office, "those who already belong to the clique have to be satisfied."

In cases where autocracy and aristocracy combine, the clique will usually be the high nobility, and the arena of their rivalry is the court. But sometimes the autocrat will succeed in cutting out the clique by appointing a commoner: Louis XIV and Peter the Great did this. Sometimes the vizier overturns the autocrat and takes titular power in a coup.

3. Below the ruling clique is another leadership level that is much more numerous, and critical. Any "intellectual and moral deficiencies in this second stratum" is an existential threat to the regime. This second stratum is, says Mosca, like the officers in an army that "personally lead the soldiers under fire." You could remove all the generals and replace them with the best regimental commanders, but remove the officers that command the men and you are in trouble.

In ancient autocracies the second stratum was usually priests and warriors, but as time went on these "Aristocratic autocracies therefore almost always develop into more or less bureaucratic autocracies" as did the Roman, Byzantine and Chinese empires. But this development requires a level of taxation to pay for the salaries of the bureaucrats and the expenses of a standing army. This more efficient state machine will be able to direct the governed masses more effectively "toward the purposes that their governors wish to achieve."

The large bureaucracy requires specialists, and this creates an opportunity for talents from the lower ranks, appeasing the universal desire for distributive justice. Unfortunately the judgement of personal merit is subjective, and judges of merit tend to value their own qualities best.

That is one of the chief reasons for the blind conservatism, the utter incapacity to correct one's faults and weaknesses, that is so frequent in bureaucratic regimes.

Given the various well-known weaknesses of bureaucracies, Mosca notes that much depends on the moral level of the bureaucracy, and that depends on the moral level of the ruling class, its honor and probity, its generations in the service of the state. Adventurers and people from the lower orders are more likely to be corrupt.

Bureaucracies are disposed to believe "in their own infallibility" and loath to accept criticisms and suggestions.

4. The liberal principle has a more brilliant record than the autocratic, but it is a shorter record and less widespread. In states organized on the liberal principle,

the law is based upon the consent of the majority of citizens, though only a small fraction of inhabitants may be citizens; and then that the officials who apply the law are named directly or indirectly by their subordinates, that their posts are temporary and that they are personally responsible for the lawfulness of their acts.

In states where the liberal principle prevails -- that the state recognizes limits to its powers against individuals and groups -- we still see the two strata of the ruling class. The upper stratum is smaller and the second stratum much bigger.

There are still closed cliques that select the highest officials, but selection requires not just court intrigue but to steer the inclinations of the whole second stratum of the ruling class.

If the electorate is "narrowly exclusive" then a large part of the ruling class is kept out of the selection of high officials; the system is almost like autocratic rule. Indeed almost all the voters are themselves eligible for office. Generally, either a single clique forms or two cliques with the "out" clique offering "a spiteful and systematic opposition."

If the electorate is broad -- universal suffrage -- then the task is to win the votes of the more numerous classes, necessarily poor and ignorant. Those classes desire to be "governed as little as possible" and also "to profit by government in order to better their economic situation" and vent their resentments and envies. Thus all parties "make promises... play to their crudest instincts and exploit and foment all their prejudices and greeds."

Thus, only with a limited electorate confined mainly to the ruling class can the liberal principle really work, with those who represent responsible to the represented.

Another advantage of the liberal principle is the public discussion of the acts of the rulers, "in political assemblies and administrative councils and it the daily press and periodicals." It helps if the press institutions are not mere organs of cliques "nor blind instruments of faction."

5. The democratic tendency -- to replenish ruling classes from below -- is always at work in human societies. Sometimes the replenishment is violent.

In the old days, the violent replenishment tended to involve invasion, as a ruling class became weak. In our day it is more likely to be revolution.

But violent replenishment is unusual; the more interesting question is faster versus slower replenishment of the ruling class from below. In unsettled times, new manners undermine the old concepts, and new science and techniques create new ways of making money and change military organization. Such changes are easier in new countries.

Confined within moderate limits the democratic tendency is indispensable to "progress," because it prevents aristocracies from being "closed and stationary." 

It enables ruling classes to be continually replenished through the admission of new elements who have inborn talents for leadership and a will to lead, and so prevents that exhaustion of aristocracies of birth which usually paves the way for great social cataclysms.

However, under the "dogma of human equality" many people have come to believe that all advantages of birth can be eliminated. But this is unlikely: nepotism even exists in the Catholic Church.

Mosca believes that under absolute equality the struggle for place would be "intensified to the point of frenzy." And maybe there are certain intellectual and moral qualities that can best be nurtured by families that "hold fairly high social positions for a number of generations."

6. What about the aristocratic tendency? What are its dangers and disadvantages? First, there is a tendency in aristocracies for the development of a caste spirit, to "think of themselves as infinitely superior to the rest of men," of feeling that everything is due to them. And it is amazing how quickly those who climb from humble origins acquire that aristocratic spirit. And the aristocrats tend not to understand or sympathize with the lower orders.

Rarely have hereditary upper classes, conscious of their "intellectual and moral superiorities," been equally conscious of their obligations towards the lower classes, or for the sentiments of brotherhood and oneness of the world's great religions.

The great vice of aristocracies is idleness, and yet sometimes the freedom from "physical labor" prompts intellectual and moral endeavor, a diversion into paths of no immediate utility that turn out to discover laws that regulate the universe.

We are obliged to admit that science and social morality originated in aristocracies, and that even today they normally find their most consistent practitioners in aristocracies.

This is not to say that people of lower class cannot contribute, but Mosca feels that "genius" while exceptional, reveals itself more often in peoples with high average levels of intelligence, and aristocracies attract such people into membership. On top of that, aristocratic women have an aversion to lower-class, and perhaps less educated, men.

Mosca also feels that families that maintain themselves in the aristocracy over many generations "maintain a sense of restraint and proportion."

They must have been people, in other words, who knew the art of commanding themselves and who practiced it. 

Families that don't practice self-command "soon lapse into obscurity."

The Catholic Church has always been open to talent from the lower classes, but "the majority of popes and cardinals have come.. from the upper and middle classes."

The ideal, then, is for penetration into the upper classes to proceed in due proportion so that newcomers assimilate good qualities but do not bring too much of their plebeian ways with them.

Two indispensable qualities in a ruling class are honesty "in its relations with subordinates" and personal courage. Courage often goes with the military life, and Mosca believes that aristocracies with a military origin last longer than those with industrial or plutocratic backgrounds. The Venetian elite, though merchants and bankers, also down the years commanded their ships and fleets and armies. They stopped this in the eighteenth century.

It is "absurd" to accuse a ruling class as being "unproductive;" that is not their job.

In maintaining order and keeping the social structure united they create the conditions under which productive labor can best be prosecuted. 

And the question arises as to how much a ruling class should spend on itself. For Mosca,

the class that rules politically has to be allowed a sufficient share to enable it to give its children a long, careful, and therefore expensive education and to maintain a dignified standard of living.

It needs, in other words, enough to spare it "an attachment to petty earnings."

7. The great political thinkers all believed that the best government was a balance between competing principles. Plato in the Laws believed in a balance between autocracy and democracy. Aristotle proposed a modified democracy where workers, slaves and metics would not be allowed public office. Polybius, Cicero, and St. Thomas all spoke for mixed governments. So also Montesquieu and Cavour.

To support this doctrine Mosca proposes that violent upheavals -- such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the Russian revolution -- with their associated "unutterable suffering" 

arise primarily from the virtually absolute predominance of one of the two principles, or one of the two tendencies

whereas stability and absence of catastrophe require a balance of principles and tendencies. 

By "principles" he means the opposition of autocracy vs. liberalism; by "tendencies" he means aristocracy vs. democracy.

It is only an opposition -- or competition -- between these contrary principles and tendencies that can prevent an accumulation of the vices in each one. Mosca closes with this advice for political weather watchers.

[W]hen everybody is singing hymns of praise to some great restorer of order and peace, then we may rest assured that the autocratic principle is prevailing too strongly over the liberal, and vice versa when everyone is cursing tyrants and championing liberty. 

[W]hen the novelists and poets are vaunting the glories of great families and uttering imprecations upon the common herd, we may safely consider that the aristocratic tendency is too strong; and when a wild wind of social equality is howling and all men are voicing their tenderness for the interests of the humble, it is evident that the democratic tendency is strongly on the upgrade and approaching the danger point.

If we pay attention to this, we "can keep mankind from going to the dogs every other generation... For in political life, the mistakes of one generation are almost always paid for by the generation that follows."

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The Ruling Class XIV: Evolution of Political Organization

This chapter covers the rise and fall of Rome and European history up to the end of the nineteenth century. 

1. The setup and development of political institutions of the "Italic city" is similar to the Greek. Of course Sicily and other parts of Italy were Greek colonies before they were conquered by Rome.

In the primitive Italian city, "we find a king, a council of notables, and a popular assembly." But by the early third century, as Italy was coming under the domination of Rome, there is no mention of kings. "What we do find are rivalries between aristocracy and plebs." In its quarrels with other cities, Rome sided with the aristocrats and often granted Roman citizenship to notables.

Initially Rome had its kings, its senate of the heads of the patrician clans, and a popular assembly. Then the kings were replaced by consuls and other magistrates that were elective, temporary, and "multiple," meaning the same office was entrusted to multiple persons. There were class conflicts between the old patrician citizenry and the new plebeian citizenry descended from settlers from elsewhere and freed slaves.

Rome had a four-stage citizen assimilation policy, as follows:

1. Private rights of Roman citizen -- jus commercii
2. Allow marriage with Roman citizens -- jus conubii
3. Allow participation in the assembly -- jus suffragii
4. Allowed to hold public office -- jus honorum

This system seduced people into Roman citizenship and allowed people to become Roman citizens that lived far from Rome itself, and expanded the rolls so that Rome had nearly 300,000 citizens available to fight the Punic wars.

The Roman maintained the aristocratic nature of its regime. It reformed the senate by expanding its membership from the ancient clan leaders using a "censor" that chose men who had already held high office. The popular assembly -- comitia -- was also reformed over the years to include less propertied members. A law had to be proposed by a magistrate, passed by the assembly and approved by the senate. Elective offices were only available to patricians and usually men who had been military tribunes, selected from the patrician class.

2. The aristocratic order began to break down, because the appropriate political institutions of a city-state could not work for an empire. Citizens scattered over the empire could not in practice attend the assembly. And annual election of magistrates could not work when incumbents were absent for years in the provinces. Nor could the army be an annually recruited citizen militia. Thus, at the end of the civil wars, the republic was transformed into the Empire.

The assembly was convoked from time to time, but less and less as time went by, and then after about 100 AD, not at all. Executive and judicial powers were divided between the senate and the emperor, with the senate influential for Italian questions. But in "imperial provinces" the power of the emperor was absolute from the beginning: after all, they were under military occupation. The emperor ruled through a bureaucracy whose directors were sometimes senators, but usually not. As time went by the senate began to be recruited from the higher bureaucracy, and from the great families of the whole of Italy, and then from the whole Roman world. In due course, the senate's authority became what the emperor decided it was.

After a political crisis in the second half of the third century only two principles survived from the old days. One was that the "emperor derived his authority from the people." The other was that "every magistrate has a sharply defined sphere of jurisdiction and should, at least theoretically, exercise his authority in accord with the law."

The power of the Roman system is that "it succeeded in spreading the language, laws, manners, and customs of Rome" throughout the Empire, and brought it all into a single "moral unity."

3. The question of the decline of the Roman Empire is "perhaps the most intricate and obscure problem in human history." The great questions are: "Why that falling off in the supply of superior men? Why that artistic and literary decadence?" Mosca has no answer, but recites the burdensome taxation, the brigandage, the low birth rate, the wage and price controls, the official corruption. And that the eastern Empire did not decline.

But perhaps empires are like aging individuals.

There are times when moral bonds seem to slacken, when the religion, or the patriotic sentiment... and the natural healing force, the power to react, fails to operate. This is because the better elements in society are paralyzed, and they are paralyzed because they have turned their activity and their energies to purposes other than the things essential to the salvation of the state.

But when the empire was crumbling, "the church glitters with a constellation of superior men... [yet] there is hardly a native Roman of any character or brains who devotes himself to the service of the state."

4. The barbarians that invaded the Roman Empire tried to continue the Roman civil administration but failed. In any case they needed to reward their followers with grants of land, and that transformed the local landed proprietor into the local sovereign. Charlemagne attempted to revive the Roman tradition of unity and centralization, but disintegration continued with invasions of Hungarians, Normans, and Saracens.

By the tenth century the old system had become "feudal." But it was not the status quo before the Romans. Serfdom, binding tillers to the soil, had a Roman origin. Feudalism created the political supremacy of a warrior class, and the religious supremacy of the Church, preserver of the "bits of culture" that survived the catastrophe. An important feature of feudalism was that local leaders were bound by loyalty to their immediate feudal superior, not to the king. So they would fight for their liege lord against the king.

5. Charlemagne attempted to revive the Roman Empire in 800, and Otto I of Saxony tried the Holy Roman Empire in 962. But they failed.

They had neither a sound financial organization nor a regular bureaucracy, nor, finally, a standing army that was capable of enforcing obedience to imperial edicts.

But civilization would rise again, this time reabsorbing local powers into the central organ of the national monarchy. Meanwhile the medieval town began to rise -- federations of guilds, neighborhood associations and trade corporations -- middling people neither nobles nor serfs that provided for mutual defense, and become most powerful in northern Italy, Germany, and Flanders. 

The national monarchs began as the nominal head of a federation of great barons -- as was the King John that signed the Magna Carta in England -- and it took six centuries of struggle "for the feudal king to develop into the absolute king, the feudal hierarchy into a regular bureaucracy." They did it by building up material resources, by getting the support of the trading towns, and invoking the divine right of kings. And then there was the firearm and the cannon that could batter down the walls of a baronial castle.

In Japan, "monarchical centralization, with the shoguns of the Tokugawa family, prevailed over feudalism shortly after the introduction of firearms, which were made known to that country by the Portuguese."

6. The absolute bureaucratic state is fully established with Louis XIV in 1661, with central authority absorbing local authorities throughout Europe except places like Poland or Venice, that lost power and disappeared.

Even as the absolute monarchy was established a new age began within it.

Inside it, and under its wing, new ruling forces, new intellectual and moral conditions, rapidly grew up, so that in less than a century and a half its transformation into the modern representative state became inevitable.

This transformation was symbolized by a new class that arose between the common people and the descendants of the old feudal aristocracy.

The bourgeoisie, in the broad sense of the term, comprises the numerous class of people who find employment in the liberal professions, in commerce, and in industry, and who combine moderate means with a technical and often a scientific education that is far superior to all other classes.

And once it got established and conscious of its power and importance "it perceived that it was the victim of a great injustice." The old nobility, deprived of territorial sovereignty, now had jobs in the absolutist government. That might have been OK had not the new class begun to surpass the old nobility in "education and technical preparation."

The new bourgeois class might have pushed the nobility aside without radical change in the absolute state had not England developed a practical model that seemed to realize the aspirations of the new class and thus attracted its support.

First, the absolute monarchs based their political formula on "divine right;" yet religion "had been greatly weakened in the eighteenth century." Meanwhile the new class began to study the "classical political doctrines of Greece and Rome." Then there was the Contrat Social of Rousseau that developed the idea that the only legitimate government was one that expressed the will of the majority of citizens "for a specified length of time." This differed from classical democracy, under which the manual laborers and slaves were forever barred from participation. 

As the absolute monarchies had destroyed the power of the intermediate feudal powers, they had created a gap in which to imagine popular sovereignty as the sovereignty of the numerical majority of the people in a country. This popular sovereignty was different from the Middle Ages, that conceived of the "people" as legitimately led by its natural leaders, the "barons and the heads of corporations and communes." In the absolute monarchies the intermediate leaders had no place in the system.

But where was the practical model, to get from the absolutist regime with its bureaucracy, standing army, and authoritarian traditions, to a new popular sovereignty? Right there in England.

The constitution of England seemed to demonstrate that the constitution of the absolute state could be worked over into something that was fairly consistent with the ideas that had been inherited from classical antiquity and, more important still, with the desire of the bourgeoisie to participate extensively in sovereign powers.

7. England was different. First its feudal system under the Normans was colored by the need of the Norman nobility, "encamped in enemy territory," to unite around the king. Then there was Magna Carta, that established reciprocal rights and duties between king and baron. Then there was parliament, primarily a House of Lords with a lower house of lesser notables that "were the allies and tools of the lords and the high nobility rather than of the kings."

In the latter half of the fifteenth century the continental kings were struggling with their great vassals.

In England a long civil war, called the Wars of the Roses, split the great lords into two bitterly hostile parties, which exterminated each other.

Thus the Tudors found a House of Lords full of upstarts without the resources and prestige of the old barons, and a docile House of Commons in a country without a developed urban bourgeoisie. And since they did not face powerful barons they neglected to create a powerful standing army and bureaucracy.

In the early sixteenth century the Stuarts attempted and failed to establish an absolutist system, and ran into opposition from the rural and urban middle classes. The English Civil War began with urban militias of Parliament against the rural militias of the Cavaliers. But then Oliver Cromwell established "a real standing army in England," and that was that. The middling forces in parliament overcame the "supporters of royalty."

Thus did England gradually transform itself from a feudal system into a representative system. However, its representative system only included the property owners in the boroughs and on the land.

When Rousseau came along with his mathematical demonstration of legitimate authority issuing from a numerical majority of citizens, and Montesquieu issued his doctrine of the separation of powers between legislative, executive, and judiciary based in part on his analysis of the English constitution, their influence helped create constitutional systems that blended the separated powers of the English model with "a thread or two of principles of pure democracy."

8. Although the nineteenth century liked to view the overthrow of the absolutist regimes "as the greatest of cataclysms," really they were nothing compared to the collapse of the Roman Empire and the barbarian invasions -- let alone the Mongol invasions. Mosca suggests that the transition upon the end of "liberal institutions and the representative system" will be more interesting.

The most violent transfer from absolutist to representative government was in France, because it was unprepared for change and the old system collapsed. Napoleon had to "reconstruct virtually the whole state" using elements from both the old nobility and the new middle class. But other nations were able to inaugurate the new system without such disorganization.

The representative system... resulted from notions and concepts that had been inherited from classical antiquity but were adapted for the requirements of nineteenth century.

But it all worked pretty well, maintaining a fairly good public order, and with scientific discoveries and a material prosperity unmatched in all other ages and civilizations. And then the Europeans established a world supremacy throughout the world.

Of course, the actual political system is quite a bit different from its theoretical assumptions. The wealthiest and the middle classes maintain most of the power, and dominate "the controlling cliques of political parties... the reporting and editorial staffs of the daily press, the personnel of the bureaucracies and army officers." Yet the "combination of bureaucratic and elective elements" of the representative system utilize "almost all human values" in government with "the door open" to "all elements in the governed classes to make their way into the ruling classes."

All in all, the modern state is "the most complex and delicate type of political organization" in world history. It might be a bit lacking in "artistic and literary forms," but it is far superior in "its wise organization of economic and scientific production and in its exact knowledge and shrewd exploitation of the forces of nature." Of course there are organized minorities that prevail over the collective interest. But still the state machine is so powerful and perfected that it can attain remarkable collective purposes -- as in, unfortunately the World War. Nothing comes close to the current system, except perhaps Rome at the height of her glory.

But every human organism contains the germs of decay. Economic decline is likely to bring on some sort of dictatorship, especially when linked to universal suffrage. An especial danger is the detachment of a clique from the middle classes seeking power by "seeking leverage in the instincts and appetites of the more populous classes," and insisting that political equality must mean economic equality.

The idea of democracy plus liberalism, that the numerical majority ought to rule and that "the good sense of the people is enough to distinguish truth from error," has become a religion. And, for Mosca, it is "unfitted for reconstructing a better, and especially a more moral, system of social and political organization" than the present ones. Certainly the present present religion of democracy plus liberalism "could not be better fitted for destroying the present system."

And the present complexity and specialization of the modern economic system makes it peculiarly vulnerable to "small minorities" wrecking the system simply by "folding their arms."

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