Following up on a conversation with Yehoshua Kahan, I wanted to quote from James Burnham’s The Machiavellians, the best political science book written in the 20th century (available for free online, so there’s no excuse not to read it):
‘IT IS CHARACTERISTIC of Machiavellian political analysis to be “anti-formal,” using “formal” in the sense which I have defined in the discussion of Dante’s De Monarchia. That is, Machiavellians,* in their investigations of political behavior, do not accept at face value what men say, think, believe, or write.
Whether it is the speech or letter or book of an individual, or a public document such as a constitution or set of laws or a party platform, Machiavellians treat it as only one fact among the larger set of social facts, and interpret its meaning always in relation to these other |acts. In some cases, examination shows that the words can be accented just as they stand; more often, as we found with De Monarchia, a divorce between formal and real meaning is discovered, with the words distorting and disguising the real political behavior which they indirectly express.
This anti-formal approach leads Mosca to note as a primary and universal social fact the existence of two “political classes,” a ruling class-always a minority- and the ruled.
“Among the constant facts and tendencies that are to be found in all political organisms, one is so obvious that it is apparent to the most casual eye. In all societies — from societies that are very meagerly developed and have barely attained the dawnings of civilization down to the most advanced and powerful societies — two classes (pf people appear — a class that rules and a class that is ruled. The- first class, always the less numerous, performs all political functions, monopolizes power and enjoys the advantages that power brings, whereas the second, the more numerous class, is directed and controlled by the first, in a manner that is now more or less legal, now more or less arbitrary and violent, and supplies the first, in appearance at least, with material means of subsistence and with the instrumentalities that are essential to the vitality of the political organism.
In practical life we all recognize the existence of this ruling class. … We all know that, in our own country, whichever it may be, the management of public affairs is in the hands of a minority of influential persons, to which management, willingly or unwillingly, the majority defer. We know that the same thing goes on in neighboring countries, and in fact we should be put to it to conceive of a real world otherwise organized — a world in which all men would be directly subject to a single person without relationships of superiority or subordination, or in which all men would share equally in the direction of political affairs. If we reason otherwise in theory, that is due partly to inveterate habits that we follow in our thinking.”
The existence of a minority ruling class is, it must be stressed, a universal feature of all organized societies of which we have any record. It holds no matter what the social and political forms — whether the society is feudal or capitalist or slave or collectivist, monarchical or oligarchical or democratic, no matter what the constitutions and laws, no matter what the professions and beliefs. Mosca furthermore believes that we are fully entitled to conclude that this not only has been and is always the case, but that also it always will be. That it will be, follows, in the first place, from the univocal experience of the past: since, under all conditions, it has always been true of political organization, it must be presumed that it is a constant attribute of political life and will continue to hold for the future. However, the conclusion that there will always be a minority ruling class can be further demonstrated in another way.
By the theory of the ruling class Mosca is refuting two widespread errors which, though the opposite of each other, are oddly enough often both believed by the same person. The first, which comes up in discussions of tyranny and dictatorship and is familiar in today’s popular attacks on contemporary tyrants, is that society can be ruled by a single individual. But, Mosca observes, “the man who is at the head of the state would certainly not be be to govern without the support of a numerous class to enforce respect for his orders and to have them carried out; and granting that he can make one individual, or indeed many individuals in the ruling class feel the weight of his power, he certainly cannot be at odds with the class as a whole or do away with it. Even if that were possible, he would at once be forced to create another class, without the support of which action on his part would be completely paralyzed.”
The other error, typical of democratic theory, is that the masses, the majority, can rule themselves.
“If it is easy to understand that a single individual cannot command a group without finding within the group a minority to support him, it is rather difficult to grant, as a constant and natural fact, that minorities rule majorities, rather than majorities minorities. But that is one of the points — so numerous in all the other sciences — where the first impression one has of things is contrary ‘to what they are in reality. In reality the dominion of an organized minority, obeying a single impulse, over the un-organized majority is inevitable. The power of any minority is irresistible as against each single individual in the majority, who stands a one before the totality of the organized minority. At the same time, the minority is organized for the very reason that it is a minority. A hundred men acting uniformly in concert, with a common understanding, will triumph over a thousand men who, are not in accord and can therefore be dealt with one by one.
Meanwhile it will be easier for the former to act in concert and have a mutual understanding simply because they are a hundred and not a thousand. It follows that the larger the political community, the smaller will the proportion of the governing minority to the governed majority be, and the more difficult will it be for the majority to organize for reaction against the minority.”
Nor is this rule at all suspended in the case of governments resting in form upon universal suffrage.
“What happens in other forms of government — namely, that an organized minority imposes its will on the disorganized majority happens also and to perfection, whatever the appearances to the contrary, under the representative system. When we say that the voters choose’ their representative, we are using a language that is very inexact. The truth is that the representative has himself elected by the voters, and, if that phrase should seem too inflexible and too harsh to fit some cases, we might qualify it by saying that his friends have him elected. In elections, as in all other manifestations of social life, those who have the will and, especially, the moral, intellectual and material means to force their will upon others take the lead over the others and command them.
The political mandate has been likened to the power of attorney that is familiar in private law. But in private relationships, delegations of powers and capacities always presuppose that the principal has the broadest freedom in choosing his representative. Now in practice, in popular elections, that freedom of choice, though complete theoretically, necessarily becomes null, not to say ludicrous. If each voter gave his vote to the candidate of his heart, we may be sure that in almost all cases the only result would be a wide scattering of votes. When very many wills are involved, choice is determined by the most various criteria, almost all of them subjective, and if such wills were not coordinated and organized it would be virtually impossible for them to coincide in the spontaneous choice of one individual. If his vote is to have any efficacy at all, therefore, each voter is forced to limit his choice to a very’narrow field, in other words to a choice among the two or three persons who have some chance of succeeding; and the only one; who have any chance of succeeding are those whose candidacies are championed by groups, by committees, by organized minorities” (P, 154.)
Few who have paid attention to the political facts, rather than to theories about these facts, in the United States, will disagree with the account as it applies to this country.’
