Gaetano Mosca's classic, Elementi di scienza politica, originally published in 1896, with successive revisions until 1923, is here reprinted in paperback from the hard-back translation first published by McGraw Hill in 1939. While the decision to make available a less expensive paperback edition deserves to be welcomed, it is unfortu-nate that the publishers did not commission someone (James Meisel, whose magisterial study of Mosca, The Myth of the Ruling Class, Ann Arbor, 1958, provides a much needed corrective of earlier impressions of the Sicilian's political thought, immediately comes to mind in this connection) to add an introduction more relevant to the concerns of contemporary students of politics than that composed in the 1930s by Arthur Livingston. It is further to be lamented that the publisher's description on the cover of the paperback edition erroneously states that Mosca's "conception of social forces and of the rulers who acquire power to control them served as a theoretical foundation for Italian fascism." Even if one accepts the arguable proposition that Fascism had a "theoretical" (as opposed to an ideological) foundation, it has never been convincingly demonstrated that Mosca's work served as a major intellectual basis for Fascist thought. On the contrary, Mosca himself, as Meisel shows, opposed Italian fascism and retired from the Senate in 1925 after courageously denouncing Mussolini's regime for destroying parliamentary democracy. As early as 1904 Mosca had offered a reasoned defense of the practice (as opposed to the rhetoric) of parliamentary democracy (Mosca, Partiti e sindacati nella crisi del regime parlamentare, Bari, Laterza, 1949 ed. pp. 334-335. For a general discussion of Mosca and elite theory see Germino, Beyond Ideology, New York, 1967 Chapter 6). To "link" Mosca to fascism in this way is, therefore, fundamentally to distort his teaching; yet one all too frequently comes across this kind of attribution by careless interpreters.

The heart of Mosca's political theory is the concept of the classe dirigente, usually translated as "ruling class," although the Italian means literally "leading class" and "leading" sounds less "authoritarian" than "ruling." The term "class"—a political sociologist's nightmare—also has a static, fixed ring about it which is quite foreign to Mosca's view of the permeability of elites to accession from below in any but the most rigid and repressive society. For Mosca, as for Machiavelli before him, context was all, and his achievement as a political theorist consists in his extraordinary capacity for evoking the flavor and vitality of the concrete political struggle, coupled with his unrelenting drive to free himself and his readers from the self-serving illusions of the conventional wisdom and its typically mushy analytical categories. Despite frequent claims to the contrary, political theory is an empirical enterprise, concerned with illumining through critically clarified symbols man's participation with his fellows in the drama of existence. The differences between theorists (e.g., Aristotle vs. Plato, Machiavelli vs. Hegel, Mosca vs. Voegelin) have to do, not with whether one is "empirical" and the other "normative," but with the accent of their analysis. To speak metaphorically, if we conceive of political reality as an immense canvas, theorists may be divided into those whose gaze is concentrated on the foreground, with the larger existential background at the periphery of their observation, and those whose intellectual priorities are the reverse. Mosca is clearly a "foreground" theorist: the immediate political and electoral struggle in all its aliveness and vitality is clearly at the center of his concern.

Mosca is at his best when "demythologizing" current political clichés, and he can be devastating when he comes upon reductionist theories which seek to explain all in terms of "race" or economics. Ever puncturing self-righteousness, ethnocentricism, and complacency, he acidly reminds allegedly "superior" societies of their weaknesses. An example of his salubrious acerbity in this regard is his remark that the belief that all non-Western societies "—the Egyptian, the Babylonian, the ancient and modern Chinese—have been, and still are, uniformly stationary seems … to be due to nothing less than an optical illusion arising from the fact that we view them from so far away."

Mosca's concept of the "ruling class," "social forces," "juridical defense," and the "political formula" have become part of our cultural inheritance. Nothing would be served here in attempting briefly to recapitulate them, for their original exposition in all its complexity and subtlety continues to be worth reading and pondering. Nor has "elite theory" stood still since the days of Mosca and of his more verbose, pretentious, and less interesting fellow countryman, Pareto. Guido Dorso, Norberto Bobbio, and Giovanni Sartori (to speak only of Italian scholars) have quietly and perceptively made refinements, elaborations, and revisions to Mosca's famous theory about the predominance of elites. Mosca deserves continued study by political scientists not only for what he wrote but also because of the creative reflection which he helped to inspire.