The prime task of a reviewer is normally to discuss the contents and viewpoint of an author's work. In the present instance, however, it is perhaps not less important, as a preliminary thereto, to insist on what the work is not, particularly in view of the title given to this translation and edition [The Ruling Class (Elementi di Scienza Politica)], the nationality of the author, and a quotation on the jacket from Charles A. Beard to the effect that the book is important for an understanding of "the modern trends toward Fascism, Communism and other types of 'strong government'." For there seems a real danger that the unwary may infer that this is an apologia (or at least a foundation, since the first Italian edition appeared in 1895) for fascism and an attack on the democratic way. Nothing could be further from the truth, and, whatever the gains in emphasis in the English title, one feels that the Italian is more justly descriptive. For, while Mosca's central theme is, no doubt, that in any society there will be a ruling class, his essential objective is to analyze the various ways in which men are governed, to demonstrate methods by which ruling classes are created and preserved and by which they exercise their authority, and to give an account of the dangers to such classes, the means of their transformation, and the techniques of judicious coöption by which they attain stability.

The idea, indeed, that Mosca is a defender of doctrines of the absolute state is readily dispelled by a consideration of his very first chapter, which is at once one of the most moderate and, by reason of its very restraint, one of the most mordant attacks on various exaggerated and over-simple approaches to political science that have recently been used, many of them as defenses of absolutism of one sort or another. He denies with real insight the doctrine that the superiority of certain civilizations depends upon climate, and in particular argues that it is absurd to believe in the moral superiority of those who come from the cool climes of northern lands; and he insists, too, that the ability to preserve and profit from free institutions cannot be ascribed to those living in any particular area. Mutatis mutandis, the same considerations apply to topography. In both instances, however, Mosca recognizes fully that geography is a conditioning factor, though not a causative one, and that its significance changes with changing knowledge and technology.

Even more thoroughgoing is his attack on the doctrine of racial determinism and the superiority of certain peoples; and here it is particularly worth while noting that he rejects the idea of the Jews being a special people, discusses their real assimilability, and points out to how large an extent the Jewish problem is a consequence of enforced isolation. Indeed, his analysis of the fallacies of racial interpretation is as thoroughgoing as that of, say, Professor Boas, and far less emotional. Similarly, he attacks the whole organismic doctrine and the idea of social evolution as it has been used both by Spencerians and by the advocates of the organic state. That he is also skeptical of any pure doctrine of economic determinism, though admitting the significance of economic factors as part of the problem, and the fact that he cautions us against any facile application of the findings of anthropo-logical study of primitive peoples to the modern state, do not lessen the effectiveness of his criticisms. His own approach seems to be largely historical, though he carefully insists that the historical method may be perverted by an undue emphasis on biography or by an unwise narrowing of the scope of history.

The dominant characteristic of Mosca's position is his awareness of the complexity of the human being and his sad, but probably just, disillusion. Indeed, his essential argument is that naïve idealists who, Icarus-like, endeavor to reach the sun destroy themselves and, more important, undermine that organization without which men are unable to exist. Man is a finite animal; and, while he may aspire to perfection, he cannot hope to attain it. Certainly the great mass of mankind are unregenerate and tainted with irrationality; they must be governed, and, while governing involves giving satisfaction, it involves no less the creation of effective stereotypes and catchwords which will command attachments to a prevailing, though not static, order. The plea, therefore, is for gradualness, and is at once conservative and liberal. Its basis no doubt is temperamental, but it seems to involve a rational temper whose conclusions are documented and justified by vast learning used with discrimi-nation and with insight.

Dr. Mosca's chief prejudice is indeed revealing as to his bias, and that in two senses. For he condemns utterly what he calls social democracy, a term which apparently would embrace all change brought about by governmental action in the economic sphere, from the moderate policies of English pre-war liberalism and the techniques of intervention in the business world developed and established by the New Deal, to thoroughgoing state socialism and the practices of dictatorship of the proletariat. He is, that is to say, basically a defender of laissez faire; and, while this is doubtless anachronistic and would in the present age prove ruinous to any governing class that endeavored to practice it even in moderate purity, it is inimical no less to fascist theory and practice.

Secondly, however, Mosca's work is in a definite way a wholehearted plea for a government which governs and adapts itself to the needs of the civilization within which it functions; and, outside the context of the struggle against laissez faire, Mosca shows an extraordinary awareness of the dangers to a ruling class that arise from an inability to create an effective basis for consent and to insure adequate routes by which the abilities that are useful and appreciated in a particular age may enter it in sufficient numbers. His essential fear of social democracy rises, it is worth while to note, from a feeling that the extension of governmental functions means the extension of administration and administrators; and he seems to believe that, once one embarks on this undertaking, one is bound to end up, in one way or another, with government by a bureaucracy that becomes top-heavy, rigid, and lacking in comprehension of the feelings of the governed, to the final destruction both of itself and, in all probability, of the civilization which has produced and suffered from it.

Yet Mosca makes a strong case for republican as against autocratic government, and condemns the excessive ex-tension of so-called democratic techniques on the very ground that these lead to dispersal of authority and responsibility, and so open the way for an arbitrariness that may indeed restore order, but by reason of its narrowness cannot itself be stable. If, therefore, one discounts his particular prejudice and recognizes that it is the inconsistency of one who, while normally scientific, is in that particular area a doctrinaire liberal of the school of classical economics as popularly interpreted, one finds in the whole ethos of his work a powerful argument for the positive social welfare state under republican institutions, and with an ultimate judgment in the electorate, as the essential and desirable alternative to dictatorship. This becomes the more clear when one considers his attacks on hereditary aristocracy and his long analysis of the evils of a priori individualistic rationalism on the one hand and facile, unilinear theories of social determinism on the other.

The difficulties and seeming inconsistencies of Mosca's analysis are, nevertheless, real. They are, indeed, clarified, though not, in the present reviewer's judgment, solved in the final chapter, which constitutes part of Mosca's revised edition of 1923, from which the present edition is made, and embodies his reflections on the postwar world. That chapter is a renewed plea for representative government, for something closely approaching Madison's republican government. Mosca urges that, while a wide electorate exercising the suffrage is necessary and even desirable under modern conditions, it is especially dangerous to social solidarity in times of stress unless its function is narrowly and precisely confined to the selection and judgment of leadership. Secondly, he insists with renewed vigor that a ruling class disintegrates under the attacks of its own skepticism as to its right to rule and its lack of awareness of calling and duty. It is therefore necessary for it to develop a unity of feeling (though not a rigidity of structure and an exclusiveness in membership) and a strong sense of public obligation. Mosca is frankly skeptical as to whether either of these developments will take place. Thirdly, however, he sees a ray of hope: the present ruling class has a wide base, being created by the beneficent coalescence of a bureaucracy and a political leadership created and elected by reason of talents valued in the current order. Thus it becomes clear that Mosca finally approves, rather than deplores, the growth of a class of administrators as such. What he fears is that such a class may become first dominant in the ruling class, and then synonymous with it.

Yet it is just at this point that we encounter the essential question which he does not answer—a question unanswerable indeed in his terms. Bureaucracy, sound in moderation and under restraint, becomes the ruling class of a socialist state, itself created by a false pursuit of equality, and involves a suppression of liberty. Yet the participating bureaucracy of which Mosca approves is, surely, the outcome of a positive state, endeavoring to undo the consequences of an excessive inequality—an inequality he, as a defender of a strong middle class and a lover of the Aristotelian mean, formally condemns. Indeed, without the development of such a state to redress the balance of laissez faire, modern bureaucracies created under representative government would have no raison d'être. But, Mosca argues, the policy of gradualness, of progressively diminishing inequality by political techniques, is unsound and does not lead to stability or harmony—and this for political reasons. For such a policy does not please, but does give aid and comfort to the endeavors and convictions of the proponents of abso-lute socialism and of communism, while at the same time weakening the allegiance to the existing régime of considerable parts of the governing classes. Yet this is surely to argue (a) that, political and administrative leadership apart, there is in the ruling class a group of great wealth possessed of predominant economic and political power, and commanding the allegiance of a considerable section of the bourgeoisie, and (b) that class struggle is inevitable. The ruling class, he has urged, must be intelligent, must coöperate and concede. But, under conditions of representative government and industrial civilization, as produced in the nineteenth century, the very essence of that undertaking is the social welfare state. Mosca does not want absolutism, fascist or communist. Now, granted that pure justice and complete rationality do not characterize human affairs, it is none the less true that, unless the economic powers that be can be persuaded that concession is wiser than fascism—a difficult but not unreasonable inference, in view of the sufferings of business enterprise where it has put its confidence in fascistic leadership—and unless communists lose appeal, in so far as they are revolutionary, by the progressive removal of causes of extreme discontent, the adventure of representative government is doomed, since it becomes static, and is hence impotent.

Mosca, condemning socialism, and particularly the orthodox Marxian form, ends by giving away his case through unwitting agreement with his avowed opponents. He weakens scientific support, painstakingly built, for a governmental system suited to current needs, and capable of realizing a type of society which many of us, on ethical and rational grounds, would concede to be the best attainable in the world of the second-best.

A word should perhaps be added as to Professor Livingston's Introduction and as to the translation. The latter, as Professor Livingston stresses in the former, is not literal, while the material has been rearranged. Broadly, the work is readable and has continuity, though on occasion a section ends with a sentence opening new vistas not subsequently surveyed. The elimination of Mosca's discussion of Labriola's ideas is, in the reviewer's judgment, debatable, while one must, in view of recent events and of probable developments in the near future, deplore Mosca's insistence that his treatment of the Roman question be deleted.

Livingston's introduction is an excellent summary of the genesis and development of Mosca's ideas, with a very useful discussion of his debt to Taine and his parallelism with Pareto. It includes a significant analysis of Mosca's life, stressing both his habitat and his activities—though one fancies its emphasis on biographical explanation might not be completely acceptable to its subject. It clarifies his seminal concepts, and in particular emphasizes his first-rate contribution to an analysis of the rle of the military in different types of society, pointing out the general and unwise neglect thereof by most republican and democratic writers—a warning made especially timely by the problems and issues of these last months.