Robert Michels, the iron law of oligarchy and dynamic democracy
2020; Wiley; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1467-8675.12494
ISSN1467-8675
Autores Tópico(s)Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory
ResumoConstellationsVolume 27, Issue 2 p. 185-198 ORIGINAL ARTICLEOpen Access Robert Michels, the iron law of oligarchy and dynamic democracy Hugo Drochon, Corresponding Author hugo.drochon@nottingham.ac.uk Correspondence Hugo Drochon Email: hugo.drochon@nottingham.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author Hugo Drochon, Corresponding Author hugo.drochon@nottingham.ac.uk Correspondence Hugo Drochon Email: hugo.drochon@nottingham.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author First published: 21 May 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12494Citations: 1AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat On 5 April 2018, the online site of the Merriam-Webster dictionary reported that lookups for a certain term had risen by 3,000% over the past week, placing it at the number one spot in its "Trending Now" rubric (Merriam-Webster, 2018). The rise was associated with US Attorney Robert Mueller's probe into Russia's meddling in the 2016 US Presidential Elections, and how he had taken the unusual step of interviewing Russian businessmen with links to Putin who had travelled to the USA at that time – businessmen who now faced potential sanctions. The word being searched for, which was the descriptor used to denote these businessmen, was "oligarch" – "Russian Oligarchs" – and the dictionary helpfully explained that it was drawn from the Greek "oligarchēs", made up of "olig" ("few") and "archēs" ("ruler"). An oligarch is a "member or supporter of an oligarchy", and "oligarchy" is "a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes". The greatest theorist of modern oligarchy is Robert Michels (1876–1936). It is he who, in his classic 1911 text On the Sociology of the Party System in Modern Democracy, coined the phrase the "iron law of oligarchy" (Michels, 1962, p. 356). Michels is often paired with Gaetano Mosca (1858–1941) and Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), and collectively they are known as the "elite theorists of democracy", although they have gone by other appellations too: "Machiavellians", "theorists of minority domination" or again "sociological pessimists" (Burnham, 1943; Dahl, 1989; Linz, 2006; Lipset, 1962; Stuart Hughes, 1961). Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, they were the first who, in a modern context, tried to grapple with the fact that, although we live in a democracy, it is still the few who rule. In contrast to the ancient Greeks, these thinkers were addressing the question of minority rule within a specifically modern setting, one marked by the spread of universal suffrage and the rise of the modern, highly centralised, bureaucratic and disciplined mass party to organise it – two novel developments at that time (Michels, 1962, p. 334). That context – universal suffrage and political parties – is still the context we operate in today, so that, although much has undeniably changed since then, in many ways this setting, and its problems, remains our own. Indeed, although Marxists had been talking about the state as the "executive arm of the bourgeoisie" since the mid-nineteenth century (Michels, 1962, p. 346), many of the terms the "elite theorists" first coined – "ruling class" (Mosca), "circulation of elites" (Pareto) and the "iron law of oligarchy" (Michels) – are still the terms through which we try to articulate our own politics today; that is to say: it is Mosca, not Marx, who gives us the term "ruling class". The aim of this article is to return to these thinkers – in this specific case Michels – to see whether their ideas can help shed light on our current political predicament. From Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and its slogan of the 99% versus the 1%, to 2016 and the Brexit referendum in the UK, where Leave campaigner and politician Michael Gove declared that the people had had "enough of experts", and subsequent Prime Minister Theresa May using her Conservative Party Conference speech to attack the "rootless cosmopolitan elite", to finally the US Presidential Election of the same year and Trump's campaign against the "establishment" and claiming that he will "drain the swamp", the relationship the "few" entertain with the "many" has been forcefully brought back onto the political agenda. The first section will offer an account of Michels' "iron law" by placing it within the context of turn-of-the-century European socialism and syndicalism, paying particular attention to Michels' relationship with the German Social Democratic Party, the largest, richest and most powerful socialist party of that time. The second section will turn to evaluating the "iron law" itself – notably through the criticisms Max Weber, Michels' mentor, opposed to it in a letter of December 1910 thanking him for an advance copy of the book – suggesting that it is perhaps not as ironclad as it might at first appear. And although Michels will later convert to Italian Fascism, his Sociology of the Party ended on a cheerier note, with Michels articulating how democracy will naturally give rise to two "palliatives" – an increase in education and competition between different oligarchies – something that has often been overlooked in the secondary literature, and which the third section will explore. In conclusion to his masterpiece, Michels begins to articulate, through two metaphors, what might be termed a "dynamic" theory of democracy, one grounded in continually challenging elite rule. If it is always the few who rule, then democracy must be understood as the movement that continually challenges the extent of that rule. This conception of democracy is, the article will argue in the fourth section, a highly original and stimulating one, and one that can help us think about our own political situation. It is furthermore away from the more static institutional or procedural accounts of democracy we currently have, and the conclusion will attempt to address some of the questions and issues that arise from such a new conception of democracy. 1 MICHELS AND THE IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY Michels is best remembered today – if at all – as the theorist of the "iron law of oligarchy". A protégé of Max Weber, he wrote his masterpiece, On the Sociology of the Party System in Modern Democracy: Investigations into the Oligarchic Tendencies of Group Life (Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie. Untersuchungen über die oligarchischen Tendenzen des Gruppenlebens), in 1911. That book was first translated into Italian in 1912 by Alfredo Polledro as Sociologia del partito politico nella democrazia moderna: studi sulle tendenze oligarchiche degli aggregati politici, and then from Italian into English in 1915 by the British Communist translating couple Eden and Cedar Paul as Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchy Tendencies of Modern Democracy – the change of title, one might surmise, to give the book more visibility. Its thesis can be found in the subtitle – the oligarchic tendencies of group life – and Michels presents the "iron law of oligarchy" in conclusion to the book as follows: "reduced to its most concise expression, the fundamental sociological law of political parties…may be formulated in the following terms: 'It is organisation that gives birth to the domination of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organisation, says oligarchy'" (Michels, 1962, p. 365). The specific political party Michels had in mind when he wrote the book was the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), which, alongside the German Labour Union, was at that time the largest, richest, best organised and most powerful socialist party in the world (Michels, 1962, p. 357). By the time Michels published his Sociology of the Party in 1911, the SPD had three million members and in 1912 won one-third of all votes, thereby becoming the biggest German political party of the time (Angaut, 2015, p. 547). From a Marxist perspective, one Michels shared, this meant that the SPD was the most advanced party en route to the forthcoming proletarian revolution, and thus represented the future development of the others, leading him to neglect developments within other socialist parties in Europe at that time (Beetham, 1981, p. 91). The SPD claimed to be organised on a democratic basis, and that if it were to come to power, it would rule in a democratic manner: the party was, in essence, a "state in miniature" (Hands, 1971, p. 170). The problem was that although the SPD dominated the Reichstag, power was still in the hands of the Chancellor and the Junkers in large part due to the "three-class franchise" in operation in Germany, and especially in Prussia (Beetham, 1977, p. 6). The "democratic party" was in contrast to the older conservative parties, which were organised – and therefore ruled the state – in a highly oligarchic fashion. The SPD would bring a "democratic revolution" to the state itself, transforming it into a "democratic state" (Femia, 2001, p. 97; Hands, 1971, p. 156; Michels, 1962, pp. 50, 335). What made Michels' critique so devastating was not solely that it came from one of its own officials and sympathisers, but that he sought to demonstrate that in its internal ruling it was no different to the older, oligarchic, parties the SPD so decried (Michels, 1962, p. 339). The reasons the SPD was no better than the other parties were twofold. Influenced by Gustav Le Bon's psychology of crowds (Beetham, 1977, p. 14; Michels, 1962, p. 205), Michels posited two "psychological" explanations for the iron law of oligarchy. The most important is the "psychology of organisation itself, that is to say, the tactical and technical necessities which result from the consolidation of every disciplined political aggregate" (Michels, 1962, 365). This is not what we might immediately recognise today as a psychological reason, and indeed the emphasis on organisation clearly carried with it Weber's stamp. But Michels' desire to talk of psychology as a "science" stemmed from his recent encounter with Pareto's Les systèmes socialistes (1902), in which the latter attempted to found a new science of mankind based on the persistence of certain constant psychological traits, which he dubbed "residues" (Beetham, 1977, p. 14). Following Le Bon and Pareto's lead, Michels viewed the mass as generally immobile and passive, in need of a leader to guide them and towards whom they felt gratitude (Michels, 1962, p. 364). Indeed, throughout the book, Michels tried to show how in general the masses, even when organised within a party, were apathetic about the running of their own affairs – committees set-up to organise the day-to-day running of the party were systematically unattended – nor indeed, to Michels' surprise, did they seem particularly interested in debating the finer points of revolutionary praxeology, preferring instead to go listen to their heroes speak (Michels, 1962, pp. 88, 105, 110; Hands, 1971, p. 162). He explains attempts to run referenda within the party as abject failures because of the "incompetence of the masses and lack of time" (Michels, 1962, p. 309; Lenski, 1980, p. 7; Linz, 2006, p. 51). The principle of oligarchy in modern democratic parties, therefore, arises from the "technical indispensability of leadership" (Michels, 1962, p. 364). As Michels puts it: "at the outset, leaders arise spontaneously; their functions are accessory and gratuitous. Soon, however, they become professional leaders, and in this second stage of development they are stable and irremovable" (Michels, 1962, p. 364). In other words, every efficient organisation needs a hierarchical – and permanent – bureaucracy with a division of labour and a chain of command. This is both a technical – to ensure the smooth running of the party through a process of delegation – and a tactical necessity – democracy is too slow a decision-making process to react to political events. It is that bureaucracy that will form the ruling oligarchy, such that the end result is that there is an inverse proportion between the size of an organisation and democracy: the larger and more complex an organisation is, the less democratic it will be: "where organisation is stronger, we find that there is a lesser degree of applied democracy" (Michels, 1962, p. 71). It should be clear that Michels has what he calls a "Rousseauian" understanding of democracy, namely that the people, or in this case the members of the party, in some sense directly rule ("applied democracy"; Hands, 1971, p. 158; Michels, 1962, p. 73; Mommsen, 1987, p. 127). The concept of representation was foreign to him, as S. M. Lipset correctly saw: Michels and the Machiavellians "prove the impossibility of democracy within a larger polity by definition, by seeing any separation between leaders and followers as ipso facto a negation of democracy" (Lipset, 1962, p. 34). The second reason for the iron law of oligarchy Michels attributes to what we would more easily recognise as a directly psychological phenomenon: "oligarchy derives, that is to say, from the psychological transformations which the leading personalities in the parties undergo in the course of their lives" (Beetham, 1977, p. 13; Michels, 1962, p. 365). What Michels meant by this is that the growing professionalisation of the party/labour union leads to the creation of a distinct class of bureaucrats, leaders and politicians who are separated from the rest of the party members they represent. As they live different lives, their psychological make-up is different from the regular party members. These party officials are recruited, in the case of the German socialist party, from the proletariat itself, and, to a lesser degree, from the intellectual bourgeoisie. The end result is that both of these groups become déclassé, at least from a conventional Marxist class analysis: Michels likens the class of the party official to the level of a petty bourgeois, leading to a certain embourgeoisement of the proletarians and a fall in class for the intellectuals (Hands, 1971, p. 161). As Bakunin put it, "there can never be a worker's government, only a government of ex-workers" (Beetham, 1977, p. 16; Beetham, 1981, p. 85). The case is accentuated in the children of these officials, who tend to have quite bourgeois upbringings, leading to a reproduction of elites that in effect creates a party "caste" (Michels, 1962, pp. 279, 301, 338). The party officials henceforth no longer belong to the same class as their former colleagues they claim to represent, meaning their interests will differ. Most importantly, their loyalties will no longer be directly with their past comrades, but now lie with the party itself, which provides them with a living. They will come to believe, as Michels puts it paraphrasing Louis XIV, "Le Parti, c'est moi" (Lenski, 1980, p. 7), and the party will become a "state within the state" (Femia, 2001, p. 195; Michels, 1962, p. 335). As such for them the survival of the party will always come first, over and above any demands from the regular members of the party, whether economic or ideological. The simple reason, as anticipated above, is that the party is no longer a means but has become an end in itself (Michels, 1962, p. 338). Michels discusses this in the context of World War I, explaining that the European socialist parties did not oppose the war, as their ideology would have suggested, because the parties were dependent upon the national framework for their own existence. He writes: "the outcome of this regressive evolution is that the party is no longer regarded as a means for the attainment of an end, but gradually becomes an end-in-itself, and is therefore incapable of resisting the arbitrary exercise of power by the state when this power is inspired by a vigorous will" (Michels, 1962, p. 358). The raison d'être of the political party is to control the state; thus, it cannot vote against a policy that would harm it. There are three different resources that, according to Michels, ensure the leaders keep control of their party. These are as follows: (a) Officials have superior knowledge, in that they are privy to much information that can be used to secure assent for their programme; (b) they control the formal means of communication, because they dominate the organisation's press (parties still had their own newspapers at the time), and as full-time salaried officials, they can travel from place to place presenting their case at the organisation's expense, where their position enables them to command an audience; and (c), they have skill in the art of politics, in that they are far more adept than nonprofessionals in making speeches, writing articles and organising group activities (Lipset, 1962, p. 16).11 The second element identified by Lipset explains why, in his view, there is a strong link between the iron law of oligarchy and that of spokesmanship. An oligarchy thus rules the SPD. A "small group exercises control", to return to our opening definition, because a party needs a permanent bureaucracy – intermediaries (Michels, 1962, p. 278) – in order to function, and that bureaucracy becomes permanent and irreplaceable over time, and comes to dominate all proceedings. The oligarchy rules if not for corrupt – Michels is quite clear they rule with the best intentions (Linz, 2006, p. 54), but it is the logic of organisation itself that perverts their original intentions in what has become known as "goal displacement" (Hands, 1971, p. 167; Linz, 2006, p. 40) – but for "selfish purposes", in that they put the survival of the party, which provides them with their livelihood, above all other considerations, whether ideological or socio-economic. Their salaried dependence on the party turns them into déclassé petty bourgeois, removed from the (class) interests of their former working colleagues or more bourgeois intellectuals. 2 MICHELS AND WEBER Although considered a classic of political sociology, Michels' Sociology of the Party has given rise to a number of criticisms (Beetham, 1977, p. 4; Cook, 1971, p. 773; Hands, 1971, p. 155). A recent piece has looked at Marburg, where Michels was active as an organiser, speech-giver and agitator – he even ran as the Social Democratic candidate in the neighbouring, highly rural, Lauterbach-Alsfeld to test the field, what is known in German as a Zählkandidat (he won 8.5% of the vote) – and concludes that the small membership there was dominated by small artisans and independent craftsmen (Bonnell, 2011, pp. 23–35). This was thus very far from the type of significant industrial working class to be found in larger cities such as Berlin, meaning that Michels' first-hand experience of the labour movement and trade-union organisation was quite limited, and may help to explain why the "spontaneity" of syndicalism was more appealing to him: France and Italy, where syndicalism dominated, did not have much of an organised labour movement either, and it is quite revealing that although Michels regularly contributed to the French and Italian syndicalist journals, he wrote quite infrequently for the German equivalent, Einigkeit (Cook, 1971, p. 782). Moreover, he seems to have grown quickly disenchanted with the "slow boring through thick boards", as Weber later characterised political activity. The Marburg membership itself, which comprised a significant number of printing workers, had a natural deference to university-educated intellectuals, whom they relied upon to write the books they would print, which the city industrial proletariat did not, and might have biased Michels' view in terms of the docility of the membership towards their officials, Michels included. But already these types of criticisms had been picked up by Weber himself, who wrote a letter to Michels in December 1910 thanking him and praising him for the book, which had been dedicated to him, and offering a number of objections (Michels, 2015, pp. 535–540). That letter and those objections – Michels' first – still contain most of the criticisms levelled at Michels today. Aside from the two points raised above – how there is a difference, as Weber puts it, between "academic revisionists" (i.e. Michels) and "syndicalist leaders", and how the industrial proletariat is more defiant in the big cities – three points stand out. The first concerns the conservative basis of organisation, which had been one of Michels' conclusions: "political organisation leads to power. But power is always conservative" (Michels, 1962, p. 333). To that Weber objected that both the "power of the Trust Directors has a revolutionary effect, the power of the Jacobins did too" (Michels, 2015, p. 538–539; Scaff, 1981, p. 1281). Perhaps, but Michels might have responded that neither of these were political parties in the modern sense, i.e. highly centralised and bureaucratised mass parties. Sociology of the Party was first published in 1911, but by the second German edition of 1925, an event Michels could not ignore had occurred, namely the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution (Beentham, 1981, p. 91). In the preface to the second edition, Michels tried to tackle that head on, explaining that Bolshevism was not a democratic movement (Michels, 2015, p. 32). That, needless to say, is a point of contention, but one might conceive how Lenin's restricted card-carrying and unitary vanguard party, with its emphasis on a top-down "democratic centralism" of a cadre of "professional revolutionaries" leading the masses – the reason for their break with the Mensheviks, who favoured looser party discipline and a larger base – might still be interpreted through the lenses of the "iron law of oligarchy".22 We can note that legend has it Pareto's Les Systèmes socialistes, where he first exposed his theory of the "circulation of elites" that influenced Michels, "caused Lenin graver worry than any other anti-Marxist writing, and that he took more than one sleepless night to work out his own counter-refutation" (Hughes, 1961, p. 78). Nevertheless, what Weber had put his finger on was the fact that the leadership of the party might be more revolutionary than the membership base. This brings us to our second point, namely whether the interests, and specifically the economic interests, of the base and the leadership must necessarily align (Michels, 2015, p. 539; Segre, 2001, p. 110). One need not be a Marxist to see how the interests of the officials, who, dependent for their livelihood on the party and dominated by craftsmen-bourgeois types, might differ from those of the broader membership, composed of 54% unskilled factory workers, but does this imply an irreconcilable clash of interests (Cook, 1971, p. 791)? Michels is at his best when pointing out the tension between the official revolutionary ideology the party propagated and its much more conservative rule, yet, and in the same manner the party leadership like the Bolsheviks might be more revolutionary than its base, it would be a mistake to think that the base must be more revolutionary than its leadership. Michels believed that because he had swallowed whole the Marxist view that the proletariat were the revolutionary universal class, and that they were therefore being betrayed by their leadership (Beetham, 1977, p. 11; Michels, 1962, p. 351). But if they are not, then beyond the propaganda, perhaps the leadership was in fact responsive to their more reformist demands (Linz, 2006, pp. 49–51). Michels actually concedes this point when he explains that the leadership will resort to demagogy to keep the masses on side, instead of pursuing the revolution their ideology demanded of them (Day, 1965, p. 427; Michels, 1962, p. 173). But it turns out that the move away from the revolutionary platform to focus on improving living conditions was in reality in line with the desires of the rank and file itself (Cook, 1971, p. 793). Indeed, Michels fully recognises that organisation "is the weapon of the weak in their struggle with the strong" (Hands, 1971, p. 164; Michels, 1962, p. 61). There is a debate here of course between revolutionary versus reformist trade unionism, and whether the role of leaders is precisely to instil the revolutionary consciousness into the masses – a view Michels seemed to have shared (Beetham, 1977, p. 17). But the concession on the notion that the membership at large preferred reform rather than revolution has led to someone like Day to argue, somewhat counterintuitively, that Michels should in fact be understood as the theorist of party democratisation (Day, 1965). Certainly, this depends on where one starts from. If the starting point is a small equal organisation – Cassinelli estimates this as having to be lower than 1,000 members (Cassinelli, 1953, p. 782) – then the move to a much larger organisation will undoubtedly reduce the equal distribution of democratic power across the membership that Michels so well diagnosed. However, as Weber points out, democratic parties are often founded by intellectuals, that is to say, an "aristocracy" (Michels, 2015, p. 536): if the starting point is rather a charismatic leader trying to found a party around him – whether it is Lassalle, Liebknecht or Bebel, as Michels himself admits (Michels, 1962, pp. 93–5, 117) – then the bureaucratisation of the party might indeed integrate more people into the democratic process, and that membership might prove to be more socially plural than the original faithful (Day, 1965, 423). Party democratisation was, thirdly, ultimately Weber's view too (Mommsen, 1987, p. 126). His main objection to Michels was that he had a too unequivocal view of "domination" [Herrschaft], which he considered to be more ambiguous (Mommsen, 1987, p. 130). For Michels, the officials in the party dominated their members, but for Weber, domination is extensible both ways. Seemingly anticipating Foucault, Weber explained that every human relationship has elements of domination, sometimes reciprocal ones. Channelling Sieyès, he gives the example of the shoemaker: "is the shoemaker that makes my boots necessarily my 'master'?", he asks. "In a sense the shoemaker dominates me, but in another I dominate him" (Michels, 2015, pp. 593–640; Scaff, 1981, p. 1282): if the shoemaker dominates Weber through his knowledge of how to make a shoe, Weber also dominates the shoemaker in that he pays him to make it. So if party officials dominate members because of their superior technical expertise, in another – and perhaps lesser – sense (voting, participating in debates, paying their membership fees etc. to draw on the "paying" analogy), the members also dominate the officials. This explains the move from revolution to reform within the party, which is in response to the desires of the members. Thus, Weber, in contrast to Michels, welcomed the bureaucratisation of the SPD, which he thought would see it abandon its revolutionary phraseology to concentrate instead in trying to concretely advance the plight of the working class, which he supported. He also thought that it would lead to the integration of the party, and thereby also its members, into the political system of the German Reich, which would be beneficial to all involved: it would mean the SPD, alongside the Empire, would reach a degree of political "maturity" he so cherished (Michels, 1962, p. 340; Mommsen, 1981, pp. 100–116). At this point, Weber, of course, was still looking for political parties and the parliamentary system to provide the type of leaders Germany needed. As such that parties should be "oligarchic" in the sense Michels described posed no real threat to him: leadership was a fact of life, and indeed Weber was quite concerned to ensure the freedom to act of the political leaders he was looking for, so the least they were constrained by their party, the better (Mommsen, 1981, pp. 110–111). But over time, Weber became convinced that the domination bureaucracy exerts over politics was becoming too preponderant, and that the future choice was between a "leadership democracy" and a "leaderless democracy", leading him to advocate a "plebiscitary democracy" in which a popularly elected charismatic leader should be given substantial presidential power to be able to break out from the "iron cage of modernity" (Green, 2010; Mommsen, 1981, pp. 112–115). That, in the end, started to look quite similar to Michels' later endorsement of Mussolini: Michels thought bureaucracy made his Rousseauian direct form of democracy impossible, whilst Weber thought bureaucracy jeopardised the type of leadership democracy he advocated. Both came to look for solutions outside the realm of bureaucracy to attain the ideal they were striving for (Scaff, 1981, pp. 1281–1284). 3 DEMOCRACY'S TWO PALLIATIVE There is no question that in his later life Michels rallied to Mussolini, something it is beyond the scope of this article to fully explore. Yet the first edition of Sociology of the Party – or at least the revised 1915 English translation of it – ended on a cheerier note. There Michels writes that, although the ideal government would be an "aristocracy of persons at once morally good and technically efficient", it is nonetheless true that "as a form of social life we must choose democracy as the least of evils" (Michels, 1962, p. 370). Recognising this – that democracy, whatever its
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