Gaetano Mosca

Italian scholar and politician

• Born: April 1, 1858
• Birthplace: Palermo, Sicily
• Died: November 8, 1941
• Place of death: Rome, Italy

Mosca was one of the founders of modern political science. His writings on the concept of elite rule were crucial contributions to a modern theory of government. Mosca combined a university position with an active political life, serving in the Italian parliament for fifteen years and eventually opposing Benito Mussolini and fascism.

Early Life

Gaetano Mosca (zhuh-TAWN-oh MOH-skah) was one of seven children in a middle-class family; his father was an administrator in the postal service. Mosca’s Sicilian background played a crucial role in his later intellectual development. Sicily entered the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 with hopes for the island’s resurgence as part of a newly unified country; however, the northern rulers proved to be every bit as harsh and corrupt, and as insensitive to Sicily’s needs, as their Bourbon predecessors. Indeed, for much of the 1860’s, and occasionally over the next two decades, Sicily rebelled against northern rule and was placed under martial law. Elections, when held, were fraudulent, results falsified, and coercion openly practiced.

All of this imbued the young Mosca, a bright and energetic student, with the strong distrust of politics common to most Sicilians. In the late 1870’s, Mosca entered the University of Palermo, where he studied law. His degree, awarded in 1881, was based on a thesis whose central theme was nationalism. Mosca argued that national identity was largely a political myth of less real importance than people’s regional or even local allegiances. This emphasis on the true rather than the apparent in politics remained with Mosca for the rest of his life.

In 1883, Mosca moved to Rome to take up advanced study in politics and government administration. The following year, he published a treatise on the theory of government, which was quite well received and established something of a name for the young and clearly talented Mosca. Though he hoped for a position in the national university system, Mosca had to return home to Palermo for financial reasons and spent one year teaching history and geography in a local secondary school.

The call to the university, however, came soon afterward, and in 1885 Mosca became a lecturer in constitutional law in Palermo. He stayed two years, publishing monographs on constitutional issues while at the university. Disappointed at not receiving a full professorship, Mosca competed in a national civil service examination and won a position as editor of the official publications of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. He moved to Rome in 1887, took up his new duties, and embarked on further, direct study of the operation of government within the halls of parliament itself. This experience culminated in the publication of his first major work, Elementi di scienza politica (elements of political science), in 1896. In this book he outlined both a theory of government and a scientific methodology for the study of politics. These two issues would remain constant features in Mosca’s later writings.

Life’s Work

The most productive period of Mosca’s life coincided with one of the most turbulent periods of European history: 1895 to 1925, the years of la belle époque, its disintegration in World War I, and the rise of fascism on the Continent. A single concept informed all of Mosca’s adult work the existence and importance of minority rule in government and politics. Indeed, for the forty years of his active intellectual life, Mosca continued to elaborate and expand on this one idea.

Underlying his work was a simple and profoundly modern conception of the purpose of political science: to examine government, not as the state appears or according to what it claims to do but rather as it really operates. In particular, Mosca maintained that modern governments, behind the appearance of majority rule and representative democracy, were really the expression of the power of a small, well-organized minority.

Mosca embarked on a detailed historical investigation into government in the past to see if minority rule was a constant feature in human societies. He insisted on grounding all political theory in actual history rather than on subjective impressions. This approach marked the first serious effort to give the study of politics a real methodology akin to that of the natural sciences. Mosca, first in the 1896 Elementi di scienza politica and then as a university professor in Turin from 1898 to 1923, looked at government over a wide sweep of time, starting with the Greek city-states, and then studying the Roman Empire, European feudal societies, absolutist monarchies on the Continent, representative government in England, and finally ending with considerations on democracy in the United States. His conclusion was simple and profound: “Everywhere and in every time,” Mosca wrote in Elementi di scienza politica, “all that is called government, the exercise of authority, command and responsibility, always belongs to a special class that always forms a small minority.” Mosca labeled this minority the “political class,” though it is better known today as a ruling elite.

In his teaching at the University of Turin and also at Italy’s most prestigious private academy, the Bocconi in Milan, Mosca developed his ideas on the “political class.” His mature writings focused on the formation and organization of elite rule in modern society. Mosca maintained that the concentration of power in the modern state and its vast influence over the lives of its citizens made elite rule the most important single issue for contemporary political science.

Initially, Mosca’s contention that minority rule was a permanent feature of society made him a strong critic of what he considered to be the democratic pretensions in modern representative government. Most people, he believed, had neither the resources nor the education to rule adequately; as a result, they were thoroughly unqualified to govern themselves. Indeed, Mosca, as a deputy to the Italian Chamber from 1909 to 1919, was one of only two representatives to vote against the extension of the suffrage to all adult males shortly before World War I.

Mosca offered an original and telling criticism of modern democracies with the assertion that the electors’ free choice among candidates an essential foundation of democratic theory was quite simply “a lie.” He pointed out how various groups in society politicians, influential social and economic figures, and trade unions had a determinate voice in the selection of those candidates who would appear before the electorate. The influence of these groups guaranteed the reproduction of the already established ruling elite.

Mosca also argued that increasingly complex technology was an important element in maintaining elite rule in contemporary societies. Knowledge of such technology and mastery of certain vital productive skills, what Mosca referred to as both “personal merit” and “special culture,” gave certain individuals and social groups great influence in the political affairs of society. Additionally, Mosca noted that the consent of the governed was crucial to the maintenance of minority rule. Governing elites justified their position in society by developing and disseminating “political formulas,” which legitimized their rule and gave their power a “moral and legal base.” Mosca left this potent insight undeveloped, turning his attention instead to how elites organize themselves. Modern political and social theorists have used Mosca’s conception of political formulas as a springboard for their own work on the social function of ideology.

Mosca found nothing morally objectionable in his assertion that all societies were governed by a ruling minority for him, this was merely a statement of historical fact. Mosca did distinguish between good and bad forms of elite rule. Minority government was good when it blocked the emergence of disruptive elements and deviant behavior, both of which threatened society’s existence; the political class was also “good” when it allowed for a gradual renewal of the ruling elite without violent clashes or revolutionary change. Minority rule was bad when it tended to confer too much power in the hands of one social group, leading to despotic or even dictatorial rule.

Mosca most clearly revealed the prejudices that underlay his claim to an objective theory of government. Mosca was a social and political conservative, a middle-class gentleman and intellectual who mistrusted both the masses and the privileged. Mosca’s ideal government was one in which other middle-class, university-trained intellectuals (men like himself) would manage the state. World War I demolished the possibilities for this kind of enlightened elite rule. Mass politics were the order of the day after 1919, and Italy was the first European country to experience the rise of fascism out of the ruins of a representative democracy.

Mosca was a senator in the Italian parliament from 1919 to 1925, and directly witnessed the destruction of parliamentary rule at the hands of Benito Mussolini. This experience led Mosca to a final development in his theory of government the advocacy of a mixed form of political rule. The second edition of his Elementi di scienza politica, published in 1923 (and issued in an English translation in 1939 with the title The Ruling Class), included Mosca’s writings on the need to include in the governing minority members of all the major “social forces” in society. Mosca was most concerned to keep political power separate from clerical influence and to avoid mixing politics with either military or economic strengths. Mosca maintained that only a balance of social forces would ensure that elite rule would tend toward social stability and block the drift toward dictatorship. Therefore, Mosca ended his academic and political career strongly supportive of one interpretation of a classic element in democratic theory the separation of powers.

Significance

The tragedy of World War I and, immediately afterward, the rise of fascism in Italy forced many European intellectuals, Gaetano Mosca included, to choose among the alternatives outlined in their academic studies. Despite his constant focus on elite rule, Mosca, to his great credit (and unlike the other elite theorists Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels), moved increasingly toward an acceptance, albeit a reluctant one, of mass parliamentary democracy. In 1925, Mosca opposed a law granting Mussolini full executive and legislative powers; he then resigned his seat in the senate and spent the rest of his active life teaching political theory at the University of Rome. He retired from teaching in 1933 and in 1937 published a collection of his lectures, Storia delle dottrine politiche (history of political theory), which included a strong criticism of the fascist racial theory of government. Mosca died at his home in Rome late in 1941.

With his theory of a “political class” and elite rule and the outlines of a historical methodology for the study of government, Mosca offered the beginnings of a truly modern science of politics. The real significance and fuller development of political science along the lines sketched out by Mosca waited another decade after his death, but modern political theorists of elite rule and democracy owe much to the work of Mosca.

Bibliography

Albertoni, Ettore A. Mosca and the Theory of Elitism. Translated by Paul Goodrick. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1987. A good introduction to the work of Mosca, written by one of the foremost Italian specialists. Includes a bibliography of Mosca’s principal works, a list of critical studies in English and Italian, a summary of the major interpretations of Mosca’s theories, and a brief biography.

Bellamy, Richard. Modern Italian Social Theory: Ideology and Politics from Pareto to the Present. Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1987. Bellamy presents a concise treatment of several major Italian social theorists, including Mosca. The combination of intellectual history and political theory gives this book strengths that few others in the field achieve.

Bobbio, Norberto. On Mosca and Pareto. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1972. A short paper on the two major Italian theorists of elite rule in modern societies, written by the leading contemporary political philosopher in Italy. Bobbio contrasts the political implications (and actions) of these two men whose understanding of elite theory was so similar.

Finocchiaro, Maurice A. Beyond Right and Left: Democratic Elistism in Mosca and Gramsci. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999. Finocchiaro examines the ideas of Mosca, a conservative, and Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist, and concludes that the two share a tradition of democratic elitism.

Hughes, H. Stuart. Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958. One of the best and most succinct accounts of Mosca’s work in English. Of particular value is Hughes’s approach, which situates Mosca in the context of general intellectual trends and social theory in Europe from 1890 to 1930.

Meisel, James H. The Myth of the Ruling Class: Gaetano Mosca and the “Elite.” Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980. The new edition of the 1958 volume, which was the one of the first critical studies in English. Meisel’s book contains detailed treatments of Mosca’s work and thought.