Robert Michels Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Robert Michels (1876–1936) was a European political sociologist who started out as a Marxist member of the late-nineteenth-century German Social Democratic Party and ended up a professor in Italy and a proponent of fascism. He is best known for propounding the “iron law of oligarchy,” which held that nominally democratic organizations such as mass political parties end up being controlled by oligarchs. Thus, democratic parties not only faced opposition from external forces but also contained obstacles to accountability within their own structures.

Michels was born into a prosperous family in Cologne, Germany, in 1876 and studied in Paris, France; England; and Turin, Italy, as well as at three German universities. He became a follower of German sociologists such as Max Weber and Werner Sombart and was an active radical until he left the socialist party in 1907. Unable to gain academic advancement in Germany because of his politics, Michels taught at the University of Turin and then the University of Basel, Switzerland, until 1926.

In Political Parties, first published in German in 1911 and in English in 1915, Michels set out a theory explaining why organization leads to oligarchy. Organizations with many members require full-time personnel to carry out their activities. Their officials have the technical skills, information, and position to exert great influence on what the organization does. In order to protect their power base, party elites moderate their radicalism and oppose demands by party militants. If challenged, they can use their organizational advantages to retain control of the party as long as they remain united. Michels invoked a social psychological form of elite theory to argue that the mass of individuals, because of their lack of education, skills, and organization, could not carry out activities on their own and thus desired to be led. Oligarchs provide the leadership.

Michels’s emphasis on the assimilation of new elites into the status quo was consistent with Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto’s theory of the circulation of elites. However, by deeming his theory a “law,” Michels made it overly deterministic. He neglected the possibility of a radical elite repudiating ruling elites and their institutions. This was the way in which Russian Bolsheviks and Nazi Germans seized power. Once in power, communist leaders exemplified the rule of oligarchies behind the facade of a democratic party of all classes chosen by popular (albeit one-party) elections. Union Democracy, published in 1956 and edited by Seymour Martin Lipset, Martin Trow, and James S. Coleman, showed that organizational elites could be subject to electoral sanctions by members, but the conditions in which this was possible were atypical of trade unions.

In the 1920s, Michels became an advocate of Italian fascism and professor at the University of Perugia. He asserted that Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, an exsocialist, had a charismatic appeal to the masses that provided a legitimate foundation for popular representation without the distortions resulting from the intermediation of party officials. Michels died in Rome in 1936.

Bibliography:

Lipset, Seymour Martin, Martin Trow, and James S. Coleman, eds. Union Democracy. New York: Free Press, 1956.
Michels, Robert. First Lectures in Political Sociology. New York: Harper and Row, 1949.
Political Parties. New York: Collier Books, 1962.

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