Gaetano Mosca

Works

• 1884On the Theory of Governments and Parliamentary Government

  First formulation of the thesis that an organised minority governs in every regime, applied to the parliamentary system of united Italy.

• 1896The Ruling Class (Elements of Political Science)

  A systematic theory of the political class, its recruitment and its “political formula”, enlarged in 1923 with a defence of representative institutions.

Position

Mosca is on the map as a founder of elite theory and of political science as a discipline in Italy. Against the classical division of governments into monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, and against the doctrine of popular sovereignty, he argued that in every regime an organised minority governs an unorganised majority. What distinguishes regimes is how this political class is recruited and renewed, and by which “political formula” – divine right, say, or the will of the people – it justifies its rule. Unlike Pareto, with whom he had a long dispute over priority, Mosca drew a liberal conclusion: free institutions matter not because the people rule, but because they allow “juridical defence”, the subjection of power to law through a balance of competing social forces. Gramsci criticised the vagueness of the concept of the political class in the prison notebooks; C. Wright Mills discussed Mosca’s approach in “The Power Elite” (1956) but explained the elite by institutional positions rather than by Mosca’s thesis of the organised minority, and Norberto Bobbio placed him in the history of Italian political science. Because the thesis of minority rule applies to every regime, it has been objected that it says little about the difference between democracy and dictatorship; Mosca’s distinction of 1923 between autocratic and liberal principles of authority can be read as his answer.

Life & context

Gaetano Mosca was born on 1 April 1858 in Palermo and studied law at the university there, graduating in 1881. His first book, “On the Theory of Governments and Parliamentary Government” (1884), already contained his thesis of the ruling minority. After teaching constitutional law as a lecturer in Palermo and Rome, he worked from 1887 to 1895 on the parliamentary records of the Chamber of Deputies in Rome, an experience of political practice that shaped his work. In 1896, the year of the “Elements of Political Science”, he obtained the chair of constitutional law at the University of Turin; from 1923 he taught the history of political institutions and doctrines in Rome until his retirement in 1933. Mosca was also active in politics as a liberal conservative: he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies before the First World War, served as under-secretary for the colonies in Antonio Salandra’s government from 1914 to 1916 and was appointed a senator in 1919. In 1925 he spoke in the Senate against the law that extended Mussolini’s powers as head of government, and he then withdrew from active politics. In his last years he worked on the history of political doctrines. He died in Rome on 8 November 1941.

Further main works

• The Ruling Class (Elementi di scienza politica, 1896; enlarged edition 1923)
• The Aristocratic and the Democratic Principle (Il principio aristocratico ed il democratico nel passato e nell’avvenire, 1903)
• History of Political Doctrines (Storia delle dottrine politiche, 1937)