The Italian postrisorgimento provided fertile soil for the nurturing of elite theory. For Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto the melancholy years following Italy's unification were the context for the characteristic personal disillusionment that invariably figures in the biographies of the men who contributed to elite thought. By the mid-1860s the words and deeds of the Risorgimento had taken on a nearly mythical significance in Italian cultural life. The glorification of personal courage and the principles of idealized liberalism associated with the tortuous process of national unity were so entrenched in Italian intellectual life that they continued to serve as an ideal touchstone for Italians of all political convictions until the First World War. In contrast to those poetic inspirations, the prosaic reality of Italian political life after 1870 provoked a mood of bitter recrimination that took for its object the failings of the parliamentary system and its leadership. The reputation of the lower chamber as 'a fetid place where all virtue languished in an atmosphere of accommodation' (Thayer, 1964) was well-established by the mid-1880s, and the successive parliamentary epochs of Depretis, Crispi, and Giolitti appeared to surpass one another only in their ability to efficiently manage majorities, rig electoral campaigns, and benefit the private fortunes of deputies.

In the eyes of the generation weaned on the romantic philosophical pap of Risorgimento achievements but too young to actively participate, it was a simple matter to identify the failures of the political system with its gradual extension of political rights to the masses. In Italy as in Victorian England the same dialectical relationship prevailed between the political ambitions of the parliamentary left and their advocacy of the admission of newer classes of voters to the franchise. The franchise was enlarged from 600,000 to 2,000,000 in 1881 and increased piecemeal (with some temporary setbacks) until universal manhood suffrage was finally voted in 1912. In 1884 Gaetano Mosca was a recent law graduate and an unsuccessful aspirant for an academic post in the capital; for him the issue resolved itself into an analysis of the means by which the 'political class' gains and holds power. An uncompromising liberal political outlook, worthy of a Cavour or a Guizot in their heyday, sustained him throughout a career that only ended on the eve of Mussolini's fall from power.

Mosca first enunciated his principle of the 'political class' in his 1884 work Teorica dei governi e governo parlamentare. As Pareto was to do in his earliest work, the young Mosca generously acknowledged his intellectual debts. Chief among these is Hippolyte Taine, whose 'stupendous volumes on the Origins of Contemporary France' Mosca confessed to have picked over for facts and ideas. If one can judge from the internal evidence, it would appear that it was Mosca's intent to reach an audience with sufficient knowledge to appreciate his detailed examination of Italian political institutions, but which also harbored reservations about the developments in national politics since the advent of the Sinistra in 1876. His message was not, however, couched in terms calculated to appeal to the reactionary clerico-aristocratic cabal which had governed Italy briefly after 1870, but spoke the language of positivistic 'political science', more certainly intended for those politicians and informed men of affairs who believed with Mosca that only the 'scientific study of social laws' by men of 'merit' and 'technical ability' could ensure truly effective government. For the benefit of those members of the political class who did not share his love of social science, Mosca included some blunt warnings on the dangers of continuing the trend toward democracy.

In the Teorica, Mosca described the emergence of 'the strong, the domineering' leadership from the state of primitive anarchy that all contemporary social scientists assumed had prevailed in prehistoric times. This disaggregated body of men ruling their class by force eventually learned to pool their authority and rule by a combination of guile and consensus through a 'political formula' . At this stage of evolution their authority resided in a rather vague 'superior moral character' and the 'incalculable prestige' and 'inherent superiority' that derives from the advantage of organization enjoyed by the political class over the disorganized masses. Most recent commentators have chosen to interpret Mosca's comparatively 'neutral' argument on superior organization as the central 'sociological' insight to which other sources of political authority were merely 'auxiliary'. Mosca takes care to point out, however, as do all the later contributors to elite theory, that authority stems as much from the appearance of power which the political class 'must have, or in any case be presumed to have' by virtue of the prevailing criteria for the bestowal of 'prestige' and 'respectability' in a given time or place. Mosca's psychological realism, often downgraded despite his own protestations to the contrary, deserves a much closer examination.

At base, I would argue, Mosca is interested in exploring the psychosocial mechanisms of command and obedience that his historical survey indicates have always figured in human societies between the rulers and 'the plebians' who undergo the rule. Once he clarified the objective nature of political authority, it was his desire to offer his insights to Italian politicians and would-be politicians. Though he had originally chided his readers about the absurdity of seeing 'innate rights' as anything more than 'hypotheses of our minds', he saw a certain danger in their use of political formulas for governing the masses. In this connection he employed an historical metaphor which drew heavily on his mentor Taine and expressed his opinion of the use of 'equality' as a political formula by the French ruling class in 1789. This class was 'like an armed man in the middle of a hostile but unarmed crowd; he is able, up to a certain point to restrain them and keep them at a distance: but to use such a weapon with success, or with any power, it is an indispensable condition that one have resolution and energy; this was the very point that the nobles and privileged Frenchmen were lacking'.

Failing to perceive the self-serving nature of Mosca's 'historical' examples, Meisel wonders why Mosca did not treat the Jacobins as a political class in the Teorica when he acknowledged their ready ability to stir up the masses. In fact Mosca hoped to make the point that there is no room for frivolousness or irresponsibility within the ruling classes. Ability to move the masses is not a condition of wise leadership, only an aspect of the exercise of power by leadership. Thus, by inviting the masses into the political arena to share political power the Jacobins forfeited their own 'moral superiority' and rapidly abandoned the field first to anarchy, then despotism. This is history as polemic, meant to indicate the resources at the disposal of the political class, and the pitfalls of agitating 'the hopes and cupidity of the ignorant and poor masses' by holding out the promise of political equality. Though a mere 'hypothesis', democratic ideas, like an intoxicating beverage, stir in the plebes the 'most base passions' and 'most bestial instincts' which could only end in government 'by the ignorant crowd'.

While acknowledging the relatively narrow historical limits within which certain political formulas may be effectively employed, Mosca is urging the Italian parliamentary regime to draw the line on further enlargement of the franchise. The 'envy' and 'hatred' instinctively felt by the mass toward its masters proved the folly of democratic regimes and threatened the disappearance of quality, distinction and individualism in the levelling that would surely follow. Mosca had no cause for optimism between 1884 and the 1896 publication of his famous Elementi di scienza politica (The Ruling Class), but he had sharpened his arguments with information drawn from collective theory.

By 1895 the same conditions that were encouraging the development of anti-democratic collective psychology in Italy were prompting Mosca as he completed his Elementi. The franchise had been expanded further, providing the social base for Italy's first mass socialist party (PSI), founded in 1892. Giolitti's first premiership began the same year with Giolitti's friendly overtures to reformist socialism; but his government ended the following year amidst the humiliating circumstances of the Bank of Rome scandals. None of these events was calculated to please Gaetano Mosca, who had spent much of the decade in Rome as editor of the Chamber's parliamentary journal closely observing political activities. They merely added a new urgency to his warnings about the dire consequences of democratization.

It is important to understand that for Mosca, as later for Pareto, socialism was the natural extension of the logic of democratic sovereignty. The more immediate enemy, therefore, was Rousseau, not Marx, and Mosca wastes little time in polemics that would be appreciated only by Italy's tiny knot of Marxist intellectuals. Instead, as in the Teorica, he addressed his arguments to those members of the Italian ruling class who he felt would benefit from an exposure to the history of elitemass relations and a deeper knowledge of their nature.

Mosca is at pains to discredit purely racial or biological theories of social evolution, not simply because their insistent determinism leaves the practical politician helpless before events, but because they overlook or minimize the psychic factors in human affairs. He advances, in a rather vague way to be sure, a theory of historical change which is fundamentally psycho-social in nature and depends on the dynamic interaction of mass and elite. Far from being strictly sociological in nature, Mosca's Elementi may be more usefully considered a variety of what Morris Ginsberg has called 'differential social psychology'. A successor to simplistic biological theories of race, this body of theory sought to identify and evaluate the psychic natures of ethnic populations and races. Accordingly, Mosca concentrates heavily on the 'ideas, beliefs, customs, prejudices' that define historical peoples and exhibits a tendency to reduce social phenomena to psychological ones, and vice versa, in a way that was endemic to this mode of analysis. In this framework changes are brought about when new beliefs are introduced by men of genius or vision and universalized by a process identical to Gabriel Tarde's 'laws of imitation'. Citing Tarde's work, Mosca variously describes this process as 'suggestion, imitation or mimetism', working on man's 'sentimental and affective faculties'.

Mosca understandably pays particular attention to the growth and expansion of the great world religions, especially the capacity of their leaders for 'instilling his own convictions and especially his own enthusiasms into others…'. What is perhaps less obvious is Mosca's conviction that 'political-social' ideologies are 'religious too, though shorn of strictly theological elements'. They are similar in other significant ways. First, they are both 'illusions' (measured against empirico-scientific standards), the first of a supernatural order, the second cloaked in the guise of rational discourse, but nonetheless 'true' insofar as 'illusion is a need for almost all men, a need that they feel no less strongly than their material needs'. A generally unappreciated fact is that Mosca understood this need to believe as a psychological characteristic of collectivities. Thus, human sentiments 'taken individually, may be imponderable, hard to analyze and harder still to define, but … in sum are very powerful and may contribute to bringing on the most important social phenomena'. This tendency to merge social and psychological phenomena, already noted above, serves to give Mosca's conception of 'social forces' responding to 'political formulas' a firmer basis in contemporary theories of collective behavior than commentators have heretofore acknowledged.

Here and there Mosca sheds light on his conception of the nature of the masses under the sway of collective beliefs. They may be virtuous and self-sacrificing or cowardly and have 'lust for blood'; appeals to their 'loftier sentiments and low passions' will not be, therefore, without some success. These characteristics are in turn based upon what Mosca calls the 'herding and fighting instinct' which is 'the most primitive and, so to say, the most animal of the instincts'. Therefore, though the proselytes of a new dogma are 'the stronger element numerically … [they represent] the most negligible factor intellectually and morally'. Conversely, the elite leadership has a moral and intellectual superiority.

This non-rational and exaggeratedly passionate behavior of the masses suggested to Mosca certain postulates about contemporary politics which he was eager to pass on to his peers. First, electoral politics in a system of universal suffrage encourages the representatives to pander to the base 'sentiments and passions of the common herd' and therefore exposes them to the reciprocal suggestions of the mass which would end by jeopardizing their moral superiority and capacity to lead. Moreover, as political participation is made more universal, political leaders must adapt their ideas to 'a fairly low moral level' to 'play upon all the sensitive springs of conduct… [and] take advantage of all their weaknesses…'. In this infernal dialectic the least scrupulous, those who lie most persuasively, dissemble most effectively and pitch their appeals to the lowest passions will gain ascendancy. The only foreseeable result of this process, says Mosca, is the utter triumph of Rousseau's fantasy of the general will, for in the democratic arena victory goes to the most vulgar ideology: 'Collectivism and communism, like all doctrines that are based on the passions and the blind faith of the masses, tend to destroy multiplicity of political forces.' Thus, for Mosca, as for Pareto, it is democracy which leads inevitably to socialism and threatens the roots of modern civilization.

This is not to say that Mosca felt the ruling class would cease to exist; indeed, as its political and economic power grew in the wake of a dissolution of political 'multiplicity', the new leaders of the masses would prove all the more overbearing. Hence the inevitable futility of allowing the masses a legal expression of their profound hatred for their betters. The issue for Mosca, then, seems to have been one of seeking the improvement of 'juridical defense', which he understood to be those institutions and political processes that operated to protect personal liberty and defend a stable and orderly rule of law. Among these was resistance to further extension of the franchise, and a return of parliamentary initiative to the monarch, undertaken seriously on more than one occasion by the parliamentary right between 1895 and 1901. Over thirty years later, with Mussolini at the height of his power, Mosca was still arguing that the adoption of universal suffrage was the greatest error made by European parliaments. By lowering intellectual and moral standards, it had helped bring on the victory of socialist regimes with their diabolical tendency to make man 'according to the situation, an abject automaton or a ferocious beast'.

Much has been made of Mosca's 'horror' at Mussolini's fascism and his valiant defense of parliamentary prerogatives. This reputation rests largely on one rather mild speech (his last) made as a senator in 1925 and some scattered remarks in his later writings (Hughes, 1954; Meisel, 1958; 1965). It can be just as cogently argued that Mosca contributed to the pathetic liberal capitulation to Mussolini between 1920 and 1922 by his diehard position that the left was the 'greater' danger, his tacit endorsement of a manipulative conception of elite political authority, and his essentially pragmatic definition of the political utility of popular 'illusions'. As an example of the latter instance, a passage of the 1895 Elementi anticipated Mosca's later endorsement of the ameliorative social effects of the Libyan war of 1911 in L'Italia e Libia (1912):

Just as we do not combat a religion because its dogmas seem far-fetched, so long as it produces good results in the field of conduct, so the application of a political doctrine may be acceptable so long as they result in an improvement in juridical defense.

As in the case of Pareto's treatment of ideology as a 'derivation' of residues of collective behavior, Mosca's assimilation of the fundamental perspectives of collective psychology with its invidious distinctions between the disproportionate quantity of reason in elite and mass, helped perpetuate a 'myth of the ruling class' as much as any other influence.