Elites,non-elites,and power

The subject of this symposium is our edited volume, Elites, Non-Elites, and Power (Emigh and Riley 2024), which gathered a series of cutting-edge papers devoted to critiquing and extending elite theory as a way of appreciating the groundbreaking work of Richard Lachmann, who tragically passed away in 2021. In what follows, we briefly describe the volume as a way of contextualizing the symposium.

Elite theory arose in the late nineteenth century at a time of great skepticism about democracy. All three of the original theorists (Pareto, Mosca, and Michels) emphasized the hypocrisy of formal democracy in a context of sharp social inequality. Although this observation was somewhat like Marx’s critique of “political emancipation” as the superficial liberation of the merely political person, unlike Marx’s approach elite theory was basically conservative with all its founders ending their political careers on the right and even radical right.

Despite their political provenance, the ideas of this tradition were taken up again in the mid and late twentieth centuries by two iconic figures of the left: Charles Wright Mills and Pierre Bourdieu. Elite theory’s pitiless unmasking of the pieties of democratic politics is what attracted these scholars to the tradition. Both used elite theory to develop a critique of the complacent self-image of democracy espoused by the pluralist tradition in political sociology and political science. However, neither Mills, nor Bourdieu, was very historical.

This is where Richard Lachmann made his fundamental contribution. Lachmann converted elite theory into a properly historical sociology by combining it with elements of Marxism. In so doing he developed an account of the rise of capitalism and the rise and decline of hegemony. This was the first time that elite theory was articulated as a comparative and historical research program.

From our perspective, even Lachmann’s expanded form of elite theory, despite its advance over what had come before, suffered from two problems. First, it tended to treat power exclusively as a matter of organizational power. Second, like most other elite theorists, with the partial exception of Mosca and Bourdieu, Lachmann tended to focus mostly on control over material resources. In so doing, he did not concentrate on other vectors of power.

Indeed, the most general problem with elite theory, including Lachmann’s historical version, in our view, is that it did not have a fully explicit account of power. To redress this problem, in the introduction to our volume, we expanded on the elite concept of power introducing a variety of mechanisms and modes of expression of power relationships. By mechanisms we refer to the specific means that power employs. By modes of expression, we mean the phenomenal form in which the underlying mechanism expresses itself. For example, control over material resources can express positively as the attempt to influence specific political decisions, or negatively as the removal of certain options from the realm of realizable alternatives. We use this framework to organize and analyze the papers from the volume; our respondents in this symposium take issue with various aspects of our proposal. In our response, we seek to justify our interpretation of power in an effort to overcome elite theory. We mean this in a precise Hegelian sense as negation/preservation. Understanding elites, their internal structure, their interests, and their capacities is fundamental. But to grasp what elites are, they must be placed in relation to nonelites along a multiplicity of power dimensions.