SOURCE: An introduction to The Ruling Class: Elementi d Scienza Politica by Gaetano Mosca, translated by Hannah D. Kahn, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1939, pp. ix-xxxvi.

I. TAINE AND MOSCA: THE TEORICA

Gaetano Mosca's theory of the ruling class was evolved in its first form during the years 1878-1881, while Mosca was a student under Angelo Messedaglia at the University of Palermo. It occurred to him at that time to generalize the method which Taine had used in the Ancien régime. There, it will be remembered, Taine sought the origins of the French Revolution in the decadence of the groups of people that had ruled France during the golden age of the old monarchy, a class which he considered and analyzed under three headings, the crown, the clergy and the nobility.

The first thought of the student Mosca was that perhaps any society might be analyzed the way Taine had analyzed monarchical France; and his second was that, in view of the vogue that doctrines of majority rule had had in the nineteenth century, he had hit upon a most fertile and suggestive hypothesis. If one looks closely at any country, be it commonly known as a monarchy, a tyranny, a republic or what one will, one inevitably finds that actual power is wielded never by one person, the monarch or head of the state, nor yet by the whole community of citizens, but by a particular group of people which is always fairly small in numbers as compared with the total population. Taine had shown, also, that the traits of the brilliant French civilization of the age of the Great King were the traits less of the French people at large than of the same French aristocracy and, in fact, seemed to be connected with the special conditions under which that aristocracy had functioned during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That principle, too, could be generalized into the thesis that the dominant traits of the civilization of a given society during a given period will be the traits of the group of people who govern it (politicians, rulers).

Today Mosca is eighty years old; but at no time in the course of his long life has he ever been quite able to forget the thrill of discovery that he experienced away back in the seventies as he found himself in possession of what he thought to be a golden key to the arcana of human history. To tell the truth, the originality of his discovery has not seldom been a subject of dispute among his colleagues and competitors; and during the fifty years that have intervened since those days, many writers have busied themselves compiling lists of thinkers who have explicitly noted a fact which has always been perfectly apparent to everybody, viz., that in all human groups at all times there are the few who rule and the many who are ruled.

The maxim that there is nothing new under the sun is a very true maxim; that is to say, it covers about half the truth, which is a great deal of truth for a maxim to cover. All human beings who have lived on earth have lived, by and large, on the same earth. They have all beheld, at least out of the corners of their eyes, the same realities; they have all experienced the same emotions; they have all thought, we may imagine, the same thoughts. But what the history of human civilization shows is the unending variety with which individuals evaluate the various things that everybody sees. Probably no human being since Adam has been without an approximate knowledge of the law of gravity; but no one till Galileo's day thought of centering his whole attention upon the falling object and making it the pivot of a scientific revolution. No human being since the day of Cain and Abel has been unaware that people preach moral principles and then use such power as they have often, if not always, without regard to moral principles. Yet no one before Machiavelli ever thought of taking that fact and founding upon it a scientific politics which would eliminate ethical considerations. I believe Croce has said it somewhere: The originality of thinkers lies not always in their seeing things that nobody else has ever seen, but often in the stress they give now to this commonplace and now to that. I consider it useful to make this little digression for the benefit of an ever-lengthening roster of source hunters who spend their time drawing literary and scientific parallels without considering questions of stress or the uses that men of genius make of commonplaces. The medieval Venetians or the ancient Romans were so much in pos-session of the concept of class and of the concept of ruling classes that they devised meticulous legislation to cover class relations and even the movement of social atoms from class to class. All the same, no Venetian and no Roman ever formulated Mosca's theory of the ruling class. Class is a visible external fact of everyday life in Europe, and few European writers have been able to discuss social problems at any great length without eventu-ally encountering the fact of class, of class struggle, of class circulation, in some form or other. None of them, however, not Guicciardini, not Marx, not Taine, made the use of the fact of class that Mosca made. And conversely, one may say the same of those who have paralleled or utilized Mosca—of Michels, of Sorel, of Pareto.

Why do individual thinkers come to stress certain relations and facts which everybody observes and takes for granted? Usually these problems of personal evolution are beyond recovery by history. We shall never know why Voltaire became a mocking skeptic while his brother remained a pious "enthusiast." We know, indeed, that, in periods of intense and free cultural activity, if a certain number of intellectuals are placed in one general environment in the presence of the same general problems, certain numbers of them will evolve the same solutions. This fact is ordinarily taken account of in the remark that at certain periods certain concepts, certain manners of thinking, seem to be "in the air." Sorel developed the concept of the political myth in the first decade of the twentieth century. Mosca had developed his concept of the "political formula" twenty years before. Sorel was not a methodical scholar. He knew nothing of Mosca. Evidently the concept was "in the air." For two generations before Mosca's time, socialism had been emphasizing the conflict of classes, and in Italy in particular the educated classes had become explicitly aware of their duties and responsibilities as "leading" or "directing" classes (classi dirigenti). One should not be surprised, therefore, at such evident parallels as exist between Mosca and many other thinkers before him or after him.

While the details of individual evolution most often re-main undiscoverable, apart from individual memoirs or confessions which are themselves not too trustworthy in such regards, one is usually able to note certain general environmental circumstances that seem to influence individual choices of stress in certain directions. When we find Mosca in possession of Taine in 1878, we should not forget that Mosca was an Italian while Taine was a Frenchman. I find it very French in Taine that he should never have been interested in the general bearings of the method that he was using. So true is this that, as he proceeds to rear his intellectual structure about the old regime, he is continually led into the fallacy of assigning particular causes (associated with the fact of the exclusion of the French aristocracy from their feudal functions) to phenomena that are general and worldwide—preciosity, for instance, rationality, politeness, display, all of which recur in times and places where ruling classes are situated far otherwise than was the French aristocracy of the golden age. I find it also very French in Taine that he should never free himself, in the Origines, from the preoccupation with good citizenship. Aspiring indeed to a stern and rigorous historical method, Taine can think of history only as at the service of certain high moral ideals.

Mosca instead was an Italian, to whom the analytical method of thinking came naturally. He leaped upon Taine's method as a tool for straight thinking and sought to be, and, to a surprising extent in one still so young, succeeded in being "objective." I find that very Italian. Italians do easily and as a matter of course what other human beings do rarely, if at all, and then only with great effort and after hard and sustained discipline: they think by processes of distinction. While the rest of the world is hunting for ways to show that the true is good and the good true, and that both are beautiful, the Italians are busy keeping virtue, truth and beauty separate and in the heart as well as in the mind. Perhaps that is the great Italian "contribution to civilization," which Italian nationalists are always trying to discover.

One may as well add that Mosca is a Sicilian (born at Palermo in 1858). That too is a determining factor in his individuality which Americans especially should bear in mind. Americans as a rule stand at an opposite pole to the run of Sicilians in their manner of approaching life through thought. Americans are impatient of theory and suspicious of philosophies and general principles. We study history and almost never the philosophy of history. Few American lawyers will have anything to do with the philosophy of law. Let an American show a definite propensity for theoretical generalizing and he will be barred from public life as an impractical menace. It is amazing, on the other hand, with what a dearth of theoretical discipline certain famous Americans can get along through life and go far. To that deficiency we partly owe the reputation for ignorance and navet that we enjoy, as a nation, in a more sophisticated Europe. The level of theory in the United States is much lower than the level of theory on the Continent. The Continent in its turn is, on the whole, in the rear of Italy in this respect, and the great Italian theoreticians tend to be southerners. In a charming "confession" with which he prefaced the 1884 edition of the Teorica, Mosca tells of his great interest as a boy in history and boasts of his retentive memory. But what strikes one in Mosca, the historian, is the fact that history has no meaning whatever to him until it has be-come general principle, uniformity, philosophy. So it was with Vico and Bruno, and so it is with Croce—all men of the Italian South.

Two other determinations, one professional, the other Sicilian, have perhaps a more direct bearing upon Mosca's development of the vision he owed in the first instance to Taine. In the Teorica of 1884, Mosca kept strictly to problems of government, and that interest is paramount even in the Elements. This narrowing of his field is all the more striking as one contrasts the uses to which the concept of class, or of the ruling class, has been put by thinkers all the way from Marx to Pareto. The reason undoubtedly is that Mosca began life as a student of constitutional law and of political theories. He became an unsalaried lecturer on those subjects, first at Palermo (1881-1886), then at Rome (1887-1895). From Rome he went on to be a professor of constitutional law at Turin (1895-1923), returning to Rome (1923-1931) as professor of political theories. Now it is clear that government proper is only one phase of social life, while the implications of the theory of the ruling class as Taine had applied that theory in the sixties and as Mosca had conceived it in 1881, lead out into society as a whole and beckon toward a general sociology. Mosca was never to follow them in that direction beyond the limits reached in the Elements. Perhaps in a spirit of professional specialization, perhaps for practical reasons, he always kept turning backward and inward upon the strictly constitutional or political problem, leaving some of his richest and most suggestive ideas in the form of hints, assertions, or casual observations, but at any rate undeveloped.

Sicilian again one may call the political bent which Mosca's placid biography shows. Not all Sicilians are politicians, but when a Sicilian is a politician he is a good one. The Sicilian takes to politics as a duck to water. North Italians, too, of course, have been seen in Italian public life. But they make a great to-do about it. They shout and wave their arms from soap-boxes, they fill the newspapers with their publicities, their polemics, their marches on Rome, they fight libel suits and duels; and finally they get into the government, only to be upset, as likely as not, at the next turn of the wheel. The Sicilian, instead, simply takes the train and goes to Rome, where a coach-in-four is waiting to drive him to what Carducci called "the summit of the Capitol." That, more or less, was Mosca's experience in public life. Editor of the journal of the Chamber of Deputies from 1887 to 1895 (a bureaucratic post—it maintained him during his unpaid lectureship at the university), he became a deputy himself in 1908, and sat with the Liberal Conservatives during two legislatures till 1918 (those included the war years), serving also as under-secretary for the Colonies under the Salandra ministry (1914-1916). And there he was, in 1918, senator for life by the usual royal appointment, and all without any great clamor, any boisterous quarrels or exposures, without even any particular public fame.

Prezzolini and Papini tried to publicize Mosca in 1903-1904—"to valorize him as a public asset," as the language went in those days. Prezzolini made a second ef-fort in his Voce series in 1912 (see Il nuovo nazionalismo). One need mention this aspect of Mosca's career, always eminent yet never prominent, simply as reinforcing the mental attitudes that inclined him to leave his work permanently in a somewhat embryonic form, and even to subordinate it, in some few respects, to the outlook of a political party.

The Italian and Sicilian background, the professional outlook, the political talent, which are revealed by this forward look from Mosca's student days, help us to understand the developments that Mosca gave to his theory of the ruling class in the years 1881-1883. At that time he was in possession of three or four simple concepts which he thought he could use for the construction of an outline history of the rise of the modern state. Contrary to theories of majority rule, he perceived, societies are always ruled by minorities, by oligarchies. The current classification of governments, therefore—Aristotle's (monarchies, aristocracies, democracies), Montesquieu's (absolutisms, limited monarchies, republics), Spencer's (militant and industrial states)—could be dispensed with in favor of a classification of oligarchies. Essaying this classification, Mosca distinguished a number of types: military and priestly aristocracies, hereditary aristocracies, aristocracies of landowners, aristocracies of liquid wealth (money), aristocracies of merit (allowing, that is, free access to power to all elements in society and notably to people of the poorer classes). Now the various political theories that have prevailed in history—"chosen people" theories based on conceptions of race or family, divine-right theories or theories of popular sovereignty—by no means reflect the realities underlying this classification. Mosca, therefore, went on to develop his theory of the "political formula." There is always a ruling minority, but such minorities never stop at the brute fact of holding power. They justify their rule by theories or principles which are in turn based on beliefs or ethical systems which are accepted by those who are ruled. These "political formulas" contain very little that could be described as "truth," but they should not be regarded as deliberate deceptions or mystifications on the part of scheming rulers. They express, rather, a deep need in human nature whereby the human being more readily defers to abstract universal principles than to the will of individual human beings.

Mature in 1881, these ideas were formulated in the Teorica dei governi e governo parlamentare, which was complete in 1883 and published in 1884 (2d ed., 1925). In spite of its age and the writings of Mosca that have followed it, this book still has its interest and its points of originality. Eleven years later, 1895, Mosca completed and published his Elements (Elementi di scienza politica, 1896).

As compared with the Teorica, the Elements presents the theory of the ruling class in more rounded form, along with a series of new concepts that are exceedingly suggestive.

II. THE CONCEPT OF HISTORY

In the Elements, in line with an outstanding preoccupation of European scholarship during the nineties, Mosca confronts the problem of constructing a political science (which he prefers to keep distinct from sociology). The content of that science will be the discovery of the constant tendencies or laws that determine the behavior of the human masses and regulate the organization of political authority. These tendencies or laws can be discovered only from a study of "social facts," which in turn can be found only in the history of the various nations: "It is to the historical method that we must return."

Actually, Mosca's practice is better than this incomplete statement would indicate. He will of course take the facts about society from any source or method that can supply them, only so they are facts—from economics, from anthropology, from psychology, or any similar science. He does explicitly reject for the politico-social field any absolute or exclusive acceptance of climatic or north-and-south theories, anthropological theories based on the observation of primitive societies (the question of size is important), the economic interpretation of history (it is too unilateral), doctrines of racial superiorities and inferiorities (many different races have had their moments of splendor), and evolutionary theories (they fail to account for the rhythmical movement of human progress—biological evolution would require continuous improvement). However, apart from some keen remarks (as, for instance, those on the limitations of the experimental method or on the applicability of science to the control of social living), the main interest in this statement of the problem of scientific sociology lies in the fact that it undoubtedly influenced the penetrating and altogether novel discussion of the same problem in Pareto's Trattato (chap. I), which, in turn, is the final enlargement of an essay by Pareto written in 1897.

The interest of Mosca's view comes out if we consider it not from the standpoint of social science, but from that of historical science. Now if one were to say that this view is new and original, a host of scholars would appear with no end of citations to show that Mosca says nothing that has not been known to everyone since the days of Herodotus. Historians have always felt more or less vaguely that their work ought somehow to enrich human experience, that one can, after all, learn something from the fact that billions of human beings have lived out their lives on earth before us. Historians as metaphysical and theological as Bonald have always contended that history confirmed their arbitrary creeds. On the other hand a very respectable list of authorities could be quoted to show that history can teach us nothing; that life is always new; that where there is a will there is a way; that no impulse of the present need be checked in the light of analogies from the past. If one examines the present outlook of historical science in the United States, one observes a considerable variety of attitudes and practices. Of the routine and elementary task of the historian, the construction of the historical record, there is general awareness, and one notes many distinguished performances in this field. As to the meaning of the record, its utility—why "to know all about Poussin" is any more important than to know how many cigarette butts are thrown daily on the subway stairs—the greatest bewilderment prevails. There is the anecdotic interest in history, the sentimental titillation that comes from reliving exciting episodes in the past or retraversing the lives of unusual or successful individuals (the common rule in literary or freelance productions). There is the propaganda history, where the writer is meticulous about the accuracy of the record and even makes contributions to it, but then feels it necessary to give the record an apparent meaning by saucing it with reflections which amount to saying, "I am a pacifist"; "I am a socialist"; "I am a Catholic"; and so on. There is the pseudoscientific or semi-artistic history where the record is again accurate and fairly complete, but where the writer gives it an arbitrary meaning by organizing the facts around more or less unconscious sentimental attitudes borrowed from his environment, now ethical, now romantic, now optimistic, now (if the author is unusually intelligent) ironical or cynical. Finally, there is the Robinsonian history, the most scientific of these various types, where the past is taken as the explanation of the present, and, to a certain extent, the present is taken as the explanation of the past, but where the matter of choosing ideals is regularly left hazy and doubtful.

Into this atmosphere Mosca's conception of history should come as a clarifying breeze. The record of human experience is now from three to ten thousand years old. It is probable that during that time human nature has been able to make a fairly complete revelation of its general traits, its basic tendencies and laws. What are those tendencies, those laws? It is the business of the historian to tell us, and history is a mere amusement, a purposeless activity, unless its record is made to contribute to knowl-edge of tendencies and laws. To complete this theory a remark or two may be necessary. The construction of the historical record, the determination of facts in their sequence, motives or causes is a research by itself. In itself it has no purpose and envisages no utility. It has its own methods, its own technique, which reign sovereign over the research. As regards what can be learned from his-tory, it is clear that the latter can supply only the general forms of human behavior—the specific situation will al-ways be new, without exact precedent or analogy in the past.

Mosca feels that history is probably better able to tell us what not to do than what to do in the given case. But, really, it always remains a question of tendencies, of psychological, social forces which man may conceivably learn to master some day, the way he has learned, and marvelously learned, to master and utilize the material forces of nature. At any rate, Mosca's conception of his-tory suggests the proper attitude to take toward his various theses. "Human societies are always governed by minorities"; "Rapid class circulation is essential to progress"; "Human societies are organized around collective illusions"; "Level of civilization corresponds to grade of juridical defense"; "Human societies show a tendency to progress toward higher and higher levels of civilization"; "Over-bureaucratization facilitates revolution." These and the others like them would be so many tentative statements of general laws. They are subject to objective scientific criticism, emendation, refutation.

III. SOCIAL FORCES AND BALANCE OF SOCIAL FORCES

The concept of social forces was already present in Mosca's early Teorica. In the Elements it is amplified, and its implications are more fully perceived.

A "social force" is any human activity or perquisite that has a social significance—money, land, military prowess, religion, education, manual labor, science—anything. The concept derives from the necessity of defining and classifying ruling classes. A man rules or a group of men rules when the man or the group is able to control the social forces that, at the given moment in the given society, are essential to the possession and retention of power.

Implicit in the theory of the ruling class is the law (I like to call it "Mosca's law") that "type and level of civilization vary as ruling classes vary." Ruling classes will vary in respect to the number and grade of the social forces which they control, tolerate, stimulate or create. The internal stability of a regime can be measured by the ratio between the number and strength of the social forces that it controls or conciliates, in a word, represents, and the number and strength of the social forces that it fails to represent and has against it. Progressive, and one might even say "successful," regimes regularly create social forces which they find it difficult to absorb; governments often fall because of their virtues, not their defects (a drastic emendation to Taine and to ethical interpretations of history in general). Struggle is one of the continuous and never-failing aspects of human life. Social forces, therefore, regularly manifest themselves in aspirations to power. Soldiers want to rule, and they are a hard group to control since they hold the guns and know best how to use them. Money wants to rule and it is hard to control money because most people succumb to the glamour and influence of wealth. Priests want to rule, and they have the weight of the ignorant masses and the majesty of the mysteries of life in their favor. Scientists want to rule, and, from Plato to Comte and from Comte to Scott, they have dreamed of dictators who will establish their technocracies and their "rules of the best." Labor wants to rule and would rule did it not always encounter the law of the ruling class and fall into the hands of its leaders. Public officeholders want to rule, and they might easily do so for they already sit in the seats of power.

When we have Mosca safely ensconced among the im-mortals, a mystery will confront the historian of social theories: Why, having reached this point in his meditations, did Mosca not throw his political research away and set out to write a sociology? The answer will prob-ably be found in the professional and temperamental determinations to which we have alluded. Mosca was thinking primarily of the political aspects of society and could never wholly divest himself of that interest.

Montesquieu had supplied him, already in his student days, with the concept of balance—with Montesquieu it was a balance of powers, of which the American constitution was eventually to supply an impressive example. Mosca transfers the concept to social forces.

In certain cases we see social forces that do succeed in usurping power, and one symptom of the usurpation is their imposition by force of the political formula that they happen to hold as an absolute principle to which everyone must bow and which everyone must believe or pretend to believe. That means tyranny, and it also means a reduction in the number of active social forces and, therefore, a drop in level of civilization. In other cases we see, for example, military power checked and balanced by money or by religion; or money, perhaps, checked and balanced by taxation imposed by land; or an obstreperous religious hierarchy checked and balanced now by superstitious sects which grow up within itself, now by coalitions of external forces of enlightenment. At certain moments—they are the heavenly interludes in history—we see fairly stable balances of forces where nearly everyone can do as he pleases and have his say so that the whole infinite potentialities of human nature burst into bloom.

IV. JURIDICAL DEFENSE: THE IMPORTANCE OF POLITICAL ORGANIZATION

This beneficent balance is attained, Mosca decides, at times and in people where it has become law, where, that is, the aggressiveness of social forces, or of the individuals who embody them, is checked, not by the sheer manifestation of force applied case by case, but by habit, custom, acquiescence, morals, institution and constitution—in a word (his word), juridical defense (government by law with due process). Contrary to Marxist, evolutionary and other materialistic or sociological interpretations of history, Mosca holds that the problem of political organization is paramount. If ruling classes can be appraised by noting the number and grade of social forces which they recognize, the governments which various ruling classes manage can be appraised by the grade of juridical defense which they provide. This Mosca seems sometimes to regard as very largely a technical problem of government. A blossoming Mohammedan civilization first became stationary and then declined because the caliphs failed to solve the problem of the army. The armies in the provinces followed their generals, the generals became independent and arbitrary des-pots; social forces contracted in numbers and then languished. There is no reason to assume that the evolution of the Mohammedan peoples was any more predetermined than that of the Christian peoples. The fact is that at certain moments in their history they, or rather their ruling classes, must have made wrong political decisions that headed them toward decline instead of toward higher levels of civilization. In the case of the Mohammedan world one mistake, according to Mosca's system, would have been the failure to separate church and state, since that separation he regards as one of the basic essentials for a proper balance of social forces.

A high grade of juridical defense depends also, Mosca contends, upon a sufficient division of wealth to allow of the existence in fairly large numbers of people of moderate means; in fact, the numbers of such people will prob-ably supply the gauge for measuring the effectiveness and stability of the balance of social forces. The presence of a strong middle class in a society means that education is discovering and utilizing the resources of talent which, quite independently of race and heredity, are forever developing in the human masses at large (resources which backward societies somehow fail to use; that is why they are backward). It also means that the ruling classes always have available materials with which to restock and replenish themselves as their own personnels deteriorate under pressure of the multiple forces that are always edging aristocracies toward decline. Middle classes represent the variety and the intensity of a society's activities and the maximum variety in types of wealth and in distribution of wealth. Standing apart from the daily clash of the more powerful interests, they are the great repositories of independent opinion and disinterested public spirit. One hardly need say it: In developing these postulates and their many corollaries, Mosca has written the classic of Italian conservatism, which functioned as an influential minority in Italy's political life just before the war.

But supposing we bring these arguments back to the strictly objective plane. We have spoken of "mistakes" and of choices as though the lawgivers of Mosca, like those of Rousseau or of the many writers who antedated the rise of deterministic theories, were free agents who could do with society just as they pleased. Suppose it be conceded that the separation of church and state and a distribution of wealth that allows the existence of a strong middle class are essential in a society if it is to attain a high level of civilization. How is science to obtain the recognition and application of those "laws" in the face of the religious interests which will in all pious enthusiasm continue to strive for uniformity of dogma and for control of education and the state, and in the face of the greed of human beings, who will go madly on amassing great fortunes and then using them to acquire power and dominion? Mosca leaves us no hope except in the enlightened statesmanship of those who wield power over the nations. Instructive in this connection is the distinction he draws between the politician and the statesman, the former being the man who is skilled in the mere art of obtaining power and holding it, whereas the latter is the man who knows how to manipulate the blind instincts of the human masses in the direction of conformity with the laws of man's social nature, much as the navigator manipulates the brute forces of tide and wind to the advantage of his ship and its passengers. Mosca has little confidence in the inborn good sense of the masses and despairs of ever bringing any great number of people to a rational and scientific view of public problems. His-tory shows not a few ruling classes, on the other hand, the Venetian and English aristocracies, for instance, which have been able to lay interests and sentiments aside to a very considerable extent and to govern scientifically and objectively.

V. STANDING ARMIES

Ampler consideration of the problem of juridical defense leads Mosca to one of the most brilliant and original investigations in the Elements. From the standpoint of struggle, military power is the best equipped of all social forces to assert itself and claim dominion. Why then is the military dictatorship not the normal form of human government? The peoples of the western world have for some generations now been familiar with systems where armies and navies are rigidly subject to civil authorities, and they are wont to regard the military rebellion as something exceptional and monstrous. Actually the human beings who have lived on this earth in security from the brutal rule of the soldier are so few in number, on the background of the whole of human history, as hardly to count. The military tyranny in some form or other is in fact the common rule in human society; and even in the best-ordered societies, as we are only too easily able to observe after the experience of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe, any serious disturbance of an established order of a nonmilitary type is likely to result in a reversion to the military dictatorship. The process by which the modern civilized nations have escaped from this grievous law of man's social nature Mosca rightly regards as one of the most interesting in history. Paradoxically enough, and contrarily to the modes of thinking of those liberals who dream of total disarmaments, Mosca finds the solution of the secret in the growth of the standing army.

Croce, somewhere in the Ethics, classifies human beings into four types, corresponding to the stresses of the four "forms of the spirit" which he makes basic in his system: the artist, the scientist, the statesman, the saint. That classification overlooks the adventurer, the warrior, the man who instinctively resorts to violence in his relations with his fellow men and prefers dangerous living to any other mode of existence. The antics of this individual on the stage of history are so conspicuous and withal so fascinating that a virtual revolution in historical method has been required in order to win some attention from the thoughtful for the types whom Croce recognizes. Give the adventurer a good brain, a good education, a supply of genius and an historical opportunity, and he becomes a Napoleon or an Alexander. Give him a great ideal and he becomes a Garibaldi. Give him a chance and he be-comes a Mussolini. Give him a job and he becomes a soldier and a general. Ignore him and he becomes the gangster and the outlaw. A believer in final causes might soundly assert that the man of violence was invented by a wise Creator as a sort of catalyzer for human progress. The adventurer is never in the majority. The majority of human beings prefer peaceful orderly existences, and, when they dream, they dream of heavens where there is only light and music and no sorrow or toil, where the lion lies down with the lamb, where manna falls now from the sky and now from the government, where, in short, we are free from the competition of our neighbors and from the wearying struggle of life. Eras of prosperity are continually recurring in human history when the dream of security and idleness seems almost realizable; then, just as regularly, the man of violence comes along and sets the wheels to grinding again. So in our day, the citizens of the prosperous democracies had referred the movement of history to the social workers and the lawyers at Geneva in order to settle back in the night clubs to enjoy the nobility of their peaceful sentiments and the dividends of science. But a Hitler, a Mussolini, a Japanese general rises and tells them that to win or retain the right to drink and dance and be self-complacent they have to get out and fight.

On the other hand, the man of violence is not much more than that. The world that he creates is a pretty wretched affair. Give him the power and he regularly enslaves the rest of men, leaving them only the bare means of subsistence. Quite regularly he stultifies thought into hypocrisy and flattery, and the stimulating lift of organized public spirit he replaces with some form of mob fanaticism.

Mosca conceives of the standing army as a device automatically arrived at by the modern world for disciplining, canalizing and making socially productive the combative elements in the peoples. In loosely organized societies violence concentrates around a large number of different focuses and differing interests, and the anarchy of the Middle Ages and of feudal societies at large results. In our own day, in Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, we have seen that as soon as the stability of a society wavers power recreates itself in small centers, and periods of rule by local gangs ensue for greater or lesser lengths of time. The standing army, instead, tapers up to control by the state and therefore becomes part and parcel of the social order. Strong enough to enable the state to master local or sporadic manifestations of violence, it is itself under the direct control of all those mighty social forces which create and maintain the state itself. Recent history again confirms this conception of the status and objective role of the standing army. The national army of our time is an organism of incalculable might. The human forces which it embraces, the weapons and other material agencies of which it disposes, are incredibly powerful. Yet we have seen two revolutions take place in great and highly civilized countries in the face of the army and against the army. Certain observers of the rise of Fascism and National Socialism in Italy and in Germany looked to the loyally monarchical or republican armies to crush those movements, and undoubtedly they could have with a mere show of force. But the submersion of the German and Italian armies in the established order was complete, and, lacking the impulse from the apex of civil authority, they did not move. Not only that: Once new rulers were established in the seats of power, the armies responded obediently to their new orders.

What is the secret of the amazing subordination of the armies of the West? Mosca finds the answer in the aristocratic character, so to say, of the army, first in the fact that there is a wide and absolute social distinction between private and officer, and second that the corps of officers, which comes from the ruling class, reflects the balance of multiple and varied social forces which are recognized by and within that class. The logical implications of this theory are well worth pondering. If the theory be regarded as sound, steps toward the democratization of armies—the policy of Mr. Hore-Belisha, for instance—are mistaken steps which in the end lead toward military dictatorships; for any considerable democratization of armies would make them active social forces reflecting all the vicissitudes of social conflict and, therefore, preponderant social forces. On the other hand, army officers have to be completely eliminated from political life proper. When army officers figure actively and ex officio in political councils, they are certain eventually to dominate those councils and replace the civil authority—the seemingly incurable cancer of the Spanish world, for an example.

VI. SOCIAL TYPE AND POLITICAL FORMULA

The concept of social type is basic in Mosca's thought, and, since the phenomenon of the social grouping is one of the facts that the historian encounters at the most superficial glance at society, there is nothing remarkable in that. An elementary discussion of what Mosca calls social type is already present in Machiavelli. Mosca's analysis of the elements that constitute the greater social groupings was complete in the nineties. It is interesting that at that early date he was discounting race as a factor in the sense of nationality and emphasizing the greater importance of the myth of race. But he was also, with remarkable insight, foreseeing an intensification of nationalisms in the twentieth century as a sort of compensation for the decline of faith in the world religions which, under the pressure of experimental science, were losing their utility as cohesive forces in society. Quite original and too much neglected, I believe, is Mosca's conception of the modern sense of nationality as a product of the world religions, to the extent that those religions, with their doctrines that transcend race and nationality, came to embrace the most diverse groups within the same social type and so inclined those groups to coalesce individually around political formulas of a nonreligious character. That doctrine throws light upon the conflict of church and state in the Middle Ages in the West, a conflict that was essential to the growth of secular civilization which rescued Europe from the fossilization that settled upon the Mohammedan and eastern worlds. In this regard Mosca, one may say, has formulated rather than prosecuted the research into the complicated interplay of group instincts within each separate society. His conclusions, at any rate, are susceptible of almost indefinite elaboration.

The methodological advantages of Mosca's concept of social type are very considerable. In the first place it points the way to sound scientific solutions of conflicts that cannot be solved by ethical methods. For instance, the United States prohibits the immigration of Asiatics. Whenever our diplomats go prattling about democratic principles or even Christian principles they expose them-selves to devastating rejoinder from the Japanese diplo-mats, who can quite properly observe that democratic or Christian principles would require unlimited Asiatic im-migration. It is well to note, therefore, that the questions at issue are not questions of democratic theory or Christian ethics, but questions of social type, which latter are always settled either by force or by accommodation and reconciliation of apparent interests.

To complete our examination of conscience we might go on and ask what, then, we are to do with our democratic principles and our Christian ethics? The answer is that these latter are formulas which have a very limited scientific validity and function as guides of conduct within strictly limited fields. What those limits shall be, just how and where they shall be drawn, are problems for statesmen, not for pastors or for professors of ethics. Our civilization subsists only so long as our social type subsists. Whether or not certain social types "ought" to vanish in the interests of civilization is a cosmic question that could be answered only by some neutral divinity looking at our planet from afar off. What we know is that social types good and bad insist on existing and that the measure of that insistence is a measure of force (or of accommodation as a substitute for force). So it is with any conflict between a universal ethical ideal and the instincts and the interests of social type.

The extent to which political formulas of universal pre-tension are serviceable for specific groups is an interesting and important one which the events of our time have raised to a critical prominence. Hitler's Germany seems to have concluded that a national myth in which only Germans can believe is of stronger cohesive potency than universal myths such as Christianity, democracy or socialism. Apparent to the eye is the advantage of ease of enforcement, in that such a myth makes a direct appeal to group instincts without mitigations or attenuations from rationality. But equally apparent are the disadvantages. Strictly national myths, like the "chosen people" myths of the Jews or Greeks, tend to sharpen international antagonisms unduly. Hitler is building up the same universal detestation that the pan-Germanism of the first decade of the century aroused. Such myths, besides, have in the past been effective only on very low planes of civilization where they have had very few social forces to fuse or coordinate. One may wonder whether German civilization will not in the end be oversimplified by the long inculcation of an exclusively national myth.

Fascist Italy is working on the theory that the universal myth can be subordinated to the national myth (subjugation of church to state) and then used as a channel of influence upon the countries that accept or tolerate it.

Says Mussolini (to Professor Starkie, The Waveless Plain): "The Latin tradition of Imperial Rome is represented by Catholicism.… There are in the world over 400,000,000 men [i.e., human beings] who look towards Rome from all parts of the earth. That is a source of pride for us Italians." Soviet Russia is using a universal political formula, communism, and explicitly claims leadership over the minorities which accept the myth in other coun-tries. The myth intrinsically has considerable potency, as resting on powerful combative sentiments (hatred of the poor for the rich), reinforced by humanitarian sentiments of aversion to suffering (poverty can be abolished). In this sense it has its analogies with early democratic theory, which rested on those same sentiments. It is less fortunate than democratic theory in respect of the sentiments of property. These it openly flouts, whereas democratic theory takes full advantage of them. It is curious that Russian nationalism has grown in intensity under the communist political formula much as the western nationalisms grew up inside the Christian and democratic formulas. However, all such formulas are absolute and strive to achieve uniformity of acceptance. When their universal character is taken too seriously, believed, that is, with too great ardor, they suck the life blood from the social type, either by absorbing too much of the type's combative energy or by oversimplifying its structure and so lowering its civilization level.

Mosca's concept of social type has another methodological advantage in that it supplies the general form and, therefore, emphasizes the common nature of many varied phenomena. Two men see each other at a distance in Hong Kong. They meet in Cairo, and the fact that they had seen each other at a distance in Hong Kong constitutes a bond between them that justifies closer contacts. They form thereby an embryonic social type, which rests upon a single, inconsequential fact. At another extreme we find millions of people bound together by millions of ties, memories, interests, common experiences. It is the same phenomenon but with a differing inner structure. Mosca's concept of the social type supplies a tool for severing the common from the differing elements. It stops, however, one step short of Pareto's concept of group-persistence—persistence of relations between per-sons and things, which would be an hypothesis for investigating the basic psychological phenomena involved in human associations of whatever type. Parties, sects, religions, movements, nations, states, are still often regarded as separate phenomena. "Nationalism began with the French Revolution," writes an American historian. Actu-ally nationalism began with Adam, in the sense that it rests upon a fundamental law of human nature, which can be seen at work in thousands of other manifestations.

Mosca repeatedly emphasizes the historical utility of the social type as coordinating a multiplicity of wills and efforts for the achievement of common ends. On that basis it can be seen that history will be a play of two contrary forces, a trend toward unity and expansion, and a trend toward diversity and concentration. The Abyssinians, the Armenians and the Californians are Christians, and humanity surely profits in many ways from that advance toward world solidarity—group and even class isolation seem regularly to be elements in social fossilization and decline. On the other hand, the world has profited even more from particularity of social type—the existence of separate and powerful groups, all on the offensive and on the defensive, each struggling first for independence and then for domination, each living in a fever heat of life and death struggle in which the talents and moral traits of its individual members are stimulated and utilized to the utmost. Even within particular types a very considerable play of subtypes is an advantage, as implying multiplicity of social forces. This is just the reverse of the doctrine of Bossuet who viewed multiplicity of social types (or rather of political formulas) as disastrous. Bossuet wanted Europe to fossilize at the level of the Council of Trent. The prosperity, rising civilization level and world dominion of the Protestant coun-tries after Bossuet's time refute his thesis. Obviously questions of proportion are involved: The social type must be large enough and compact enough in structure to survive in the struggle of types; it must be diversified enough, that is, tolerant enough, to utilize all its social forces and increase their number. The western world today threatens to fly to pieces from the violence of its antagonisms. It would gain by a little more unity which a hackneyed democratic formula, with its disastrous doctrine of minority determinations, seems unable to supply. The eastern world would surely gain, as it is in fact gaining, from more diversity. The great civilizing force in Asia at present is nationalism.

In dealing with the relations between social type and political formula, Mosca halts on the brink of a great research. The external manifestation of the existence of a type, at least of the larger types, will be the acceptance of a given formula. Does the type create the formula or the formula the type? Mosca answers quite soundly with a theory of interdependence: The type partly creates the formula in that the latter is usually a dogma put forward by some seer or prophet—now Mahomet, now Rousseau, now Marx—in response to certain "demands" of the given era. Once the formula exists and is accepted, it helps powerfully in molding the type by formulating maxims and precepts to which individuals more or less necessarily and successfully conform. The formula normally contains a large amount of nonsense mixed in with a certain small amount of verifiable truth. Observing the same facts Bentham considered in some detail the specific case where politicians talk the nonsense involved in the formula for the purpose of swaying mobs (scientifically, one should say, for the purpose of utilizing the social type for a given purpose). Making this difficulty the center of a research and centering all his interest upon it, Pareto evolved his epoch-making theory of residues and derivations.

VII. LEVEL OF CIVILIZATION

Mosca is one of the few (if any) political theorists to take level of civilization frankly and squarely as a criterion of evaluation. In not a few passages in the Elements he seems to assume that the desirability of high levels of civilization is self-evident, and that would be a very venial departure from the objective standpoint that he strives to maintain in his work. As a matter of fact relatively few people care very much about level of civilization—the great majority are interested in achieving some ideal—communism, democracy, peace, "happiness," "spirituality," "the salutary captivity of the faith," to quote Monsignor Moreau—regardless of the level at which civilization will find itself when those ideals are achieved or as a result of the effort to achieve them. The "nostalgie de la boue" is an organized human sentiment that snipes at the outposts of every free society when it is not slinking into the inner fortress under the guise of idealism and love of "higher things."

But subjective or metaphysical as this preference on Mosca's part may be, the concept of level of civilization nevertheless contributes, almost more than anything else, to maintaining the objective attitude in the Elements. It is a criterion that is definable to a high grade of approximation as multiplicity of activities; grade or quality of achievement in each; size and stability of social cohesion and, therefore, offensive and defensive power; standard of living and distribution of wealth; control of nature and utilization of that control; and so on—so on even to the "higher things" themselves. (Why be so disheartened over the number of our airplanes, telephones or bathtubs, when in addition to them we are producing humanists, neo-Thomists and even saints in fair abundance?)

The methodological advantages of the concept are enormous: and prime among them is the need which the concept creates, and the analytical method which it supplies, for viewing the given historical phenomenon or appraising the given proposal in the light of the total social picture. The literature of science and the literature of opinion suffer continually from their very virtues of specialization. In restricting the field of fact with which they deal they often develop unilateral methodologies which end by establishing arbitrary relations between facts. If we consider the Christian unity, so called, of the Middle Ages and linger on the metaphysical or logical implications of medieval political formulas, we may get a very distorted view of the importance of Christian unity or even of unity itself. Any consideration of the general level of civilization in the Middle Ages would certainly correct that view. So, for that school of writers which magnifies Greek thought and art as though those were manifestations of a heavenly state which mankind has lost forever. So, for those orientalists who propound the sublimities of the wisdom of the East without remembering that the eastern peoples have for ages been a sort of herring on which the sharks of the world, domestic and foreign, have feasted at their will and leisure. So, also, for those who regard literature, the arts, and philosophy as the distinctive representatives of level of culture. It is certain that arts, letters and metaphysical thinking can flourish among limited numbers of individuals in civilizations of very low level. It is also certain that when any great proportion of a nation's energies are devoted to arts, letters and metaphysics, its cultural level will decline. To be sure, it is just as certain that no highly diversified and intensely cultivated civilization will fail to show eminence in those activities.

Level of civilization is a dynamic, not a static, level, and in no civilization are all activities at the same level, or even at a level where they can automatically meet all the needs of the given historical moment. The ancient world needed more physical science than it possessed, if it was to perpetuate its achievements in the political and social fields. As Mosca points out, the great political upheaval at the end of the eighteenth century became more drastic through a lag in historical science. Napoleon's empire collapsed for the reason, among others, that transportation was in arrears both of industry and of military science—the steamboat and the railroad came a generation too late for the united Europe of which Napoleon dreamed. In our own time one may wonder whether the economic and social sciences will have attained a level to meet the great crises which our highly geared civilization periodically produces. One clings the more willingly to Mosca's concept of level of civilization in that, on a subjective plane, it is optimistic as to man's future on earth. In spite of the tremendous forces of inner expansion and disgregation that are continually rocking the societies of our day, Mosca very soundly feels that, in view of the scientific and moral resources that our time has at its disposal, the man of the present is far better placed than any of his historical predecessors have been to deal with the destructive material, social and psychological influences that have wrecked civilization so many times in the past and are threatening to wreck our own.

VIII. DEMOCRACY AND REPRESENTATIVE SYSTEM

Mosca's theory of the ruling class enters a third stage of development with the 1923 edition of the Elementi, which was enlarged by a "second part" (chaps. XII to XVII of the present translation). This second part contains a tentative history of the theory of the ruling class. It contains an outline of the rise of the modern state from the standpoint of types of ruling classes and types of political organization. Interesting here especially is the essay on the rise of the bourgeoisie and the origins of the French Revolution. As for the classification of governments, which in Mosca's earlier works had been reduced to two types, the feudal and the bureaucratic, Mosca now tries out another order of distinctions—autocratic and liberal principles, democratic and aristocratic tendencies. This discussion gives him occasion to add some interestingly objective reflections on class or social circulation in its bearing on the prosperity and decadence of nations.

But the most significant portions of the "second part" are a clarification, and first of all in Mosca's own mind, of the import of the criticism of democracy that he had made in the past and his impassioned appeal for a resto-ration of the representative system in Europe.

Mosca was on safe ground in asserting that great human masses can be organized and utilized for the attainment of specific purposes only by uniting them around some formula that will contain a large measure of illusion. He was also right in asserting that one element in that fact is the further fact that human beings more readily defer to abstract principles that seem to have an abiding validity than to the will of individual persons, which not seldom functions capriciously, may be valid only case by case, and, in any event, may shock the self-respect of the plain man who has a right to feel that he is being overridden by brute force. But in this regard all systems of political metaphysic are in the same boat: The "will of God," the "will of the people," "the sovereign will of the State," the "dictatorship of the proletariat," are one as mythical as the other. Perhaps of the lot, the least mythical is the will of the people, if by it one agree to mean that resultant of sentimental pressures, beliefs, habits, prejudices, temperaments (the general will of Rousseau or MacIver), on which common action can be based, and almost always is based, in tyrannies as well as in republics. In refuting a metaphysical thesis, one may be left in a metaphysical position oneself if one attaches any great importance to the refutation, on the assumption that political action must be based on formulas that are "true." Mosca is well aware of that. He repeatedly emphasizes the fact that the historic role of Christianity is there, whatever the scientific soundness of its dogmas. More directly to the point he urges that statesmen should beware of trying to enforce all the apparent implications of metaphysical formulas. The Church would not last a week if it tried to live up to its doctrine of poverty. No democracy would endure if it followed the "will" of the ignorant peace-loving masses instead of the aggressive leadership of the enlightened few. So, he argues in the Teorica and again in the Elements, the mere fact that universal suffrage follows from the premise of majority rule or the will of the people is in itself no recommendation for universal suffrage as a practical measure. Other considerations of a utilitarian character have to be introduced. Democratic metaphysics would require that the voting of budgetary expenditure be in the hands of the people's representatives, of Congress, let us say. In practice, it might easily be more satisfactory to have the budget in the hands of a responsible minister or president than in the hands of an irresponsible Congress. At least the sense of responsibility will be more active and effective in one conspicuous individual than in six hundred less conspicuous individuals.

But in spite of this very considerable consistency and objectivity, Mosca, in the Teorica and in Part I of the Elements, was undoubtedly swayed by certain prejudices of nationality, region and party and so lapsed into meta-physical errors. It is an error to argue that a limited suffrage is any sounder, theoretically, than universal suffrage (an error arising in sentiments of liberal conservatism). It is an error to argue that the history of a social system which is based on universal suffrage will necessarily follow the apparent logical implications of the theory of majority rule. Between the publication of the second and the third editions of the Elements the political equilibrium was upset in Europe—in Russia, in Italy, in Germany and Austria. In none of those cases did the upset occur because of the application of universal suffrage and the growth of the demagoguery required for governing by universal suffrage. The Fascist and communist regimes have come into being and have governed in joyous indifference to universal suffrage. The upset in Italy in particular did not come either from socialism or from the church. It came from those public-spirited young men whom Mosca was inclined to laud for their attacks on socialism, and those young men were working on a myth, not of democracy, but of nationalism. Far more fortunate were Mosca's prophecies when he stuck close to his theory of social forces and foresaw, in Russia, all the anarchy and horror that would follow from the attempt to establish communism by force, and in Italy all the consequences of the establishment of a single abso-lute formula to which absolute adherence would be forcibly required—and the end is not yet.

On the basis of the Teorica and the first form of the Elements it was easy to classify Mosca among those many Italian writers who have combatted the theory of democracy. The democratic system always had a stronger hold on the Italian head than on the Italian heart. Strong in all classes in Italy was the sense of social subordination (the sense of equality is more characteristic of France and the Protestant countries). Especially in rural Italy and on the Italian latifundia one still encounters many of the phenomena of class dependence that went with the older feudal world and, as Stendhal in his day perceived with a homesick yearning for old times, were not without their charm. The Italian intellectual and upper classes never embraced democracy wholeheartedly. They never applied the theory of mass education with any real conviction. One may therefore explain the antidemocratic intonation of Mosca's earlier works as partly a matter of fashion and partly a matter of youth. Democratic theory was generally accepted—it was original, therefore, to attack it. Democracy was unpopular, especially in south Italy. One was therefore swimming with the current in overstressing the corruption and inefficiency of parliamentary politicians and in waving the menace of socialism in the face of those who were eager to strengthen popular education and extend the suffrage.

All the same, the defense of the representative system in the second part of the Elements is not a mere case of the "jitters of '22," nor is it exactly a palinode. It is a bona fide return to the implications of Mosca's theory of social forces, freed of metaphysical divagations. "A maturer contemplation of history" has convinced Mosca that, of all forms of political organization, the representative system has shown itself capable of embracing the largest social units at incredibly high levels of civilization; and that, as compared with competing systems today, it gives promise of allowing freest play to increasing numbers of social forces and of providing more readily for that rapid social circulation which is essential to the stability of ruling classes and to rein-forcing culture with tradition.