Suzanne Keller - Beyond the Ruling Class

It is a curious experience to return to a book committed in ones youth. Not only has ones own outlook changed but world events have transformed the physical, intellectual, and political contours of a globe beset with terrorism, revolutions in Eastern Europe, militant fundamentalism in the Middle East, oil crises, and the rise of new power blocs and baffling alliances. Such a retrospective assessment, sobering as it may be, is also, however, part of the responsibility of the serious intellectual.

One question of interest, then, is how, with the hindsight of experience, and having taught and thought about the complex topic of elites for some decades, do I now view my original hypotheses and conclusions? Can I stand by the insights of more than two decades ago or must I bury my head in sands of shame? In part the answer must rest on what academic scholarship has contributed to the discourse in the interim. What advances have been made? What new methods are there, what novel ideas?

One conclusion may be stated at the outset: studies of elites over the past several decades reveal fascinating leaves but few trees, statistics aplenty but no grand new theory to illumine them. Why not, one is led to wonder? Why was the nineteenth century preoccupied with the phenomenon of elites while the late twentieth-century largely ignores them? Was it the polemic between Marxists and liberals or between radicals and aristocrats that sparked the intense interest and brilliant theories of the last century? Was it the stunning upheaval of the French Revolution? Perhaps a less globally interconnected world made certain themes easier to grasp? Whatever the reason, there are fragments and nuggets of good work but no unifying themes or visions. To be sure, the giants in the elite hall of fame continue to radiate their influence. Marx, though toppled politically, is still alive in the ongoing debates over class power and elite rule and Michels has, if anything, gained ground, but they are honored more by repetition than by advancing their key ideas.

In contemporary social science, political scientists lead the rest in according elites a featured place as an object of conceptual and empirical scrutiny. All too often, however, there is a tendency to focus on a specific elite-typically the political elite-rather than analyze elites in the context of the wider society. And yet, the weight of the historic and sociological evidence leaves little doubt that to understand a particular elite requires a general theory of society and of the place of elites within it.

That there is an essential interconnection between elites and society is forcefully demonstrated in the case of revolutionary elites and revolutionary situations generally. In this very year (1990), we have witnessed numerous elites desert the stage of history, leaving headless bodies politic and social in their wake. What an extraordinary spectacle, to see this largely voluntary and peaceful (Rumania apart) abdication of political, ideological, and cultural power in full public view. It is a compelling illustration of Paretos proposition that elites lose their right to live when they have already lost their will to live.