MOSCA, GAETANO (1858–1941)

Italian political scientist and jurist, and pioneer of elite theory, Gaetano Mosca was born in Palermo, Sicily, in 1858 and educated at Palermo University. He combined an academic with a political career, teaching constitutional law, public law and political science in Palermo, Turin and Rome, and serving from 1908 as a conservative-liberal deputy in Parliament. From 1914–16 he was under-secretary of state for the colonies, and in 1918 he was appointed a life senator. Mosca was also a regular contributor to newspapers, until increasing governmental censorship in the later 1920s induced him to stop. Although he was highly critical of democratic institutions in his early writings, Mosca came to regard parliamentary government as the least defective of political systems. However, he refused to take any public stance against fascism, simply confining himself to a few incidental remarks on the virtues of representative government in his writings on the history of political ideas, which constituted his only significant output in the fascist period. He remained a senator until his deathin 1941.

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Mosca’s two most important works were the Teoria dei governi e governo parlamentare (1884) and the Elementi di scienza politica (1896). In these he explored a similar line of thought to Pareto (whose views on the distinction between elites and masses appear to have been arrived at independently and more or less simultaneously) arguing that all societies, in every age, irrespective of their character (whether it was bureaucratic, plutocratic, military or religious) and of the myth that underpinned them (the will of God, or the will of the majority, or the dictatorship of the proletariat) were ruled by organized minorities. Pareto disliked the term ‘elite’, on the grounds that it implied an often unwarranted moral superiority, and preferred instead the more neutral concept of the ‘political class’. He accepted Marx’s idea about the ubiquity of class divisions and conflicts, but rejected the notion that these might be eliminated: a ruling class could be overthrown, but it would necessarily, he maintained, be replaced by another.

Mosca saw the composition and the manner of ruling of political systems as oscillating between alternative poles or ‘principles’. A ruling class could be based on inheritance (the ‘aristocratic principle’) or be open to talented individuals from the lower classes (the ‘democratic principle’); rulers might heed the wishes of the ruled (the ‘liberal principle’) or disregard them (the ‘authoritarian principle’). In common with classical writers such as Aristotle, Mosca—who considered himself a liberal—was inclined to see the best political system as one in which none of these principles was pushed to an extreme. The liberal and authoritarian principles should be balanced; and while the hereditary principle could result in the ossification of the ruling class, a degree of closure might be beneficial, in that it could reduce the intensity of the struggle for power and allow for the transmission of valuable skills and traditions.

Mosca had no interest in methodology or philosophy, and did not subject many of his generalizations to serious empirical scrutiny. Nevertheless his main work, the Elementi di scienza politica, remains unsurpassed as a general treatise on politics.

MOSCA, GAETANO (1858–1941)