Mosca, Gaetano (1858–1941)

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MOSCA, GAETANO
(1858–1941)

Gaetano Mosca, an Italian legal and political theorist and statesman, was born in Palermo. He was one of several social theorists, including Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels, who gave currency to the conception of ruling elites and their circulation as being the basic characteristic of politically organized societies. Mosca outlined his conception in Sulla teorica dei governi e sul governo parlamentare and elaborated it in his major work, Elementi di scienza politica, first published in 1895 and considerably expanded in the third edition, which appeared in 1923 (translated as The Ruling Class ).

The Elementi ranges over a large number of problems in the philosophy of history and in the analysis of political organization and development. Mosca speculated about the stages of political and social development, the types of political and social systems, the role of moral forces and religions in political organization and change, the function of international and civil wars, the causes and types of revolutions, race and nationality, and the causal significance of economic factors. However, the notion of the "political class," or "ruling class," is central to the Elementi.

Mosca asserted that every politically organized society of any degree of complexity is characterized by the existence of an organized minority that rules and a majority that is ruled. He rejected the Marxist position that the ruling class always derives from the organization of the economy. He held that in different types of societies, different qualities and functions characterize the members of the ruling class. In certain societies, warriors occupy a central role within the ruling class; in others, economic functions are important in determining membership; and still other societies have been characterized by a hereditary ruling class. In modern societies an important section of the ruling class is always the bureaucracy, the body of salaried officials professionally entrusted with the administration of the machinery of political, economic, and social life. (Mosca was particularly interested in the emergence of modern bureaucratic states and treated bureaucratic societies as one of the chief social types.)

It appears that Mosca loosely identified the ruling class with those who occupy the controlling or governing positions within the political organization of society. At times, however, he spoke as if the ruling class were a multiplicity of political, social, and economic elites, as when he wrote, for example, that "below the highest stratum of the ruling class there is, even in autocratic systems, another that is much more numerous and comprises all the capacities for leadership in the country." Without a ruling class, Mosca claimed, all forms of social organization would be impossible. He added that the democratic tendency—the tendency to replenish ruling classes from below—"is constantly at work with greater or less intensity in all human societies." Mosca, unlike Karl Marx, did not think of classes as necessarily conflicting social forces; nor did he think of the ruling class as always imposing its will on, and maintaining its distinctive class interests against, the rest of society.

He said that every organized political society has its "political formula," a doctrine or body of belief that legitimizes the political structure and the authority of the ruling class; there are, for example, the doctrines of divine right, and of democracy. It may often be the case that the power of the ruling class requires the use of force or violence; but Mosca thought that in stable, progressive, and flourishing societies the position of the ruling class may be founded on its intellectual and moral preeminence as well as on its care for the collective interests of the nation; the political formula that legitimizes the authority of the ruling class may be accepted by all members of the society.

In fact, in arguing that all developed societies are governed by a ruling class (and that the idea of democracy in the literal sense of government by the majority is an illusion) Mosca did not wish to imply that all societies are authoritarian or autocratic. Throughout the Elementi he argued strongly in support of a society marked by a high measure of what he called "juridical defence"—a society in which members of the ruling class are limited in their exercise of authority and power by moral codes that protect individual rights and liberties; a society that is pluralistic, or "open," in the sense that power is widely diffused throughout the community, and hence many different interests or social forces are able to express themselves within the political framework. Mosca was critical of parliamentary government in his early work, but later, especially in the material added to the 1923 edition of the Elementi, he spoke strongly of its merits; he saw it as the one form of organization able "to utilise almost all human values in the political and administrative departments of government, … [in which] the door has been left open to all elements in the governed classes to make their way into the ruling classes" (The Ruling Class, p. 389). Thus, although Mosca thought that recognition of the inevitable existence of the ruling class in any society was sufficient to destroy the illusions of democratic ideologies, his conclusions are not easy to distinguish from the standard doctrines of liberal-democratic political philosophy.

See also Marx, Karl; Michels, Robert; Pareto, Vilfredo; Philosophy of History; Social and Political Philosophy.

Bibliography

works by mosca

Sulla teorica dei governi e sul governo parlamentare. Turin: Loescher, 1884; 2nd ed., Rome, 1925.

Le costituzioni moderne. Palermo: Amenta, 1887.

Elementi di scienza politica. Rome, 1895; 2nd ed., Rome, 1896; 3rd ed., Turin, 1923; 4th ed., with preface by Benedetto Croce, Bari, 1947. There is a translation by Hannah D. Kahn of the third edition, edited and revised and with introduction by Arthur Livingstone, titled The Ruling Class. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939.

Lezioni di storia delle istituzioni e delle dottrine politiche. Rome: Castellani, 1933. A revised, corrected, and retitled edition appeared in 1937 as Storia delle dottrine politiche (Bari, Italy: Laterza).