The inevitability of oligarchy

Robert Michels

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Robert Michels (9 January 1876, Cologne, Germany — 3 May 1936, Rome, Italy) was a German sociologist who wrote on the political behavior of intellectual elites and contributed to elite theory. He is best known for his book Political Parties, which contains a description of the "iron law of oligarchy." He was a student of Max Weber, a friend and disciple of Werner Sombart and Achille Loria. Politically, he moved from the Social Democratic Party of Germany to the Italian Socialist Party, adhering to the Italian revolutionary syndicalist wing and later to Italian Fascism, which he saw as a more democratic form of socialism. His ideas provided the basis of moderation theory, which delineates the processes by which radical political groups are incorporated into the existing political system.

Biography

Michels, from a wealthy German family, studied in England, Paris (at the Sorbonne), and at universities in Munich, Leipzig (1897), Halle (1898), and Turin. He became a Socialist while teaching at the University of Marburg and became active in the radical wing of the Social Democratic Party of Germany; he left the party in 1907.

Michels was considered a brilliant pupil of Max Weber. In the early twentieth century, he achieved international recognition for his historical and sociological study, Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie. Untersuchungen über die oligarchischen Tendenzen des Gruppenlebens, which was published in 1911. Its title in English is On the Sociology of political parties in modern democracy: a study on oligarchic tendencies in political aggregations. In this study, he demonstrated that political parties, including those considered socialist, cannot be democratic because they quickly transform themselves into bureaucratic oligarchies. In Italy, he associated with it:sindacalismo rivoluzionario, a leftist branch of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI).

Michels criticized Karl Marx's materialistic determinism. Michels' socialism was more empirical, borrowing from Werner Sombart's historical methods. Because Michels admired Italian culture and was prominent in the social sciences, he was brought to the attention of Luigi Einaudi and Achille Loria. They succeeded in procuring for Michels a professorship at the University of Turin, where he taught economics, political science and socioeconomics until 1914. He then became professor of economics at the University of Basel, Switzerland, a post he held until 1926.

After World War I, he joined the Fascist Party, led by Benito Mussolini, the former leader of the Italian Socialist Party. Michels was convinced that the direct link between Benito Mussolini's charisma and the proletariat was in some way the best means to realize a real proletarian government without political bureaucratic mediation. He spent his last years in Italy as professor of economics and the history of doctrines at the University of Perugia and occasionally lectured in Rome where he died on May 3, 1936