Democracy and Oligarchy

The work of Michels itself has helped shape our understanding of these processes. The English edition was republished in 1962 with an introduction by the influential political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset. It soon became a semicanonical text in Cold War–era political science, dovetailing with contemporary analyses of system convergence and the exhaustion of ideology.

Political Parties served to help refute socialist projects of transforming society. According to this perspective, the parties that were originally formed for such a purpose would sooner or later depart from their democratic ideals due to the functional necessities of organizations and their innate tendencies to succumb to oligarchy.

Michels has also cast a long shadow over the historiography of the German labor movement. His book was a key influence on the landmark study of the party by Guenther Roth, a scholar of Max Weber, which was first published in 1960.

The life trajectory of Michels himself also helped dramatize his work’s core message of the impossibility of democracy and the inevitability of oligarchy. Attracted to socialism in the early 1900s as a bourgeois intellectual, fresh from his doctorate in history, Michels later became an adherent of Benito Mussolini. He died in 1936 as a professor at the University of Perugia, which was being transformed into an elite academy for future leaders of Italian fascism.

For Cold War–era political science, the path followed by Michels also served to confirm the adage of the proximity of the extreme left and the extreme right, a tenet of 1950s totalitarianism theory. Even today, one still encounters those who espouse the so-called horseshoe theory, which suggests that the extremes of left and right are closer to each other than to the center.

Crowd Psychology

Some of the core arguments made by Michels, as hypotheses of political sociology, are persuasive. However, when his work is examined more closely in its historical context, its limitations become apparent.

Even during his years as a socialist activist, Michels seems to have had a limited grasp of Marxist theory. He was a product of the widespread bourgeois generational revolt around 1900, drawn to the challenge of a political struggle against the prevailing conditions in the German Empire, with a Byzantine, authoritarian monarchy and a militarist culture that his own period of army service clearly led him to detest.

In Marx, Michels saw a kindred spirit — a bourgeois intellectual who had sacrificed his prospects of a comfortable academic career to take up the workers’ struggle. For Michels, socialism was above all an ethical endeavor, and middle-class men who took it up proved their ethical superiority. However, the same could not be said for the workers themselves, as they were only pursuing their own material interests in subscribing to socialist ideology.

The work of Michels is marked by some of the prevalent thought currents of the fin de siècle. His theory of oligarchy is clearly influenced by the “crowd psychology” of the anti-socialist and racist writer Gustave le Bon. Michels writes of the innate need of “the masses” to hero-worship their leaders and subordinate themselves to them.

Ethnocentric and racial stereotypes also permeate his writings, although he differed from German racial theorists in finding Italian national characteristics more appealing than German. Fluent in Italian, Michels ended up embracing Italy as his homeland of choice. While allergic to German nationalism and imperialism, he endorsed Italian national aspirations and eventually supported Italy’s attempts to join the ranks of the imperial powers.

His theory of oligarchy owed an intellectual debt to the Italian elite theorists Gaetano Mosca — a senior colleague of Michels at the University of Turin when he gained a lecturing position there in 1907 — and Vilfredo Pareto. He also benefited from his friendship with the German social scientists Werner Sombart and Max Weber. Weber was grappling with the processes of bureaucracy and rationalization inherent in developed capitalist societies around this time. Sombart had been an advocate of social reform but became increasingly nationalist and anti-socialist in his later years.

Comrade Herr Doctor

The question arises as to how reliable the depiction of the German Social Democrats by Michels actually is. He certainly captured one dimension of the party’s evolution. There was more than a mere generational difference between the great nineteenth-century people’s tribunes August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht and the party functionaries such as Friedrich Ebert who succeeded them. Michels polemicized against the German trade union leadership for its caution and its refusal to use the unions’ industrial muscle to push for political change in the German Empire.

On the other hand, Michels underrated the elements of democracy within the SPD, such as the annual party congresses — a few of which he took part in — and the often robust internal debates. Paid party officials, strike funds, and meeting halls also represented tangible gains in the labor movement’s capacity to organize, whereas Michels sometimes seems to have believed that revolutionary élan and fiery speeches alone could stir up the masses even in sleepy rural parts of Germany. While Rosa Luxemburg was unfairly accused of “spontaneism,” the term could be better applied to Michels in his radical phase.

During his active phase as a socialist (1902–07), Michels identified with the SPD’s left wing, but he was often at odds with other members of the left tendency. For example, Michels sided with the Left in the major debate against the revisionists at the Dresden party congress in 1903, but he disagreed with his comrades on one of the core issues of the debate: namely, the Left’s condemnation of Social Democrats who wrote for the bourgeois press.

At the time, Michels was living as a freelance writer and was remarkably promiscuous in contributing to socialist and bourgeois journals alike in Germany, Italy, and France (sometimes elsewhere as well). Rosa Luxemburg offered to help find Michels a job as an editor of a Social Democratic newspaper (of which there were literally dozens in the early 1900s). However, he never took up this opportunity, whether because he found freelance writing more lucrative, or because he never gave up on his ambition of becoming a professor at a German university. This was in spite of the fact that Social Democrats were banned by law from teaching at any Prussian university, and there was an unofficial ban on such employment in other states.

Perhaps part of the reason for his belief in the deferential stance of the masses toward their leaders was that his main experience of the party was in the small university town of Marburg, where Michels had taken up residence in pursuit of his dream of a German university chair. The local SPD group there was tiny, reflecting Marburg’s lack of industry and its rural hinterland, and the intellectual authority of Comrade Herr Doctor Michels seems to have gone unquestioned there.

Luxemburg and Michels

Michels quickly became disillusioned with the failure of the SPD to sideline the revisionist and reformist elements in its ranks, although he remained on good terms with the principal revisionist theoretician Eduard Bernstein and regularly contributed to Bernstein’s journal on the history of socialism.

Michels struck up cordial relations with the Italian revolutionary syndicalists around Arturo Labriola and contributed numerous articles to the French revolutionary syndicalist journal Le Mouvement Socialiste. Other contributors to Le Mouvement Socialiste included Georges Sorel, the author of Reflections on Violence. For all its radicalism, the journal lacked any significant working-class support base.

Despite his sympathies for, and friendship with, French and Italian radical syndicalists, Michels never really identified as a syndicalist, even when he represented the Italian syndicalists at the 1907 Stuttgart Socialist International Congress. A stern critic of the German trade unions, Michels did not believe that trade union work could replace the political struggle, and he believed that the iron law of oligarchy applied just as much to trade unions as to political parties.

Michels carefully distanced himself from syndicalism, despite his temperamental sympathy for the revolutionary zeal of its radical wing. This is a point that has been missed by interpretations of Michels that view him as jumping straight from the revolutionary left to the far right in an illustration of the notorious horseshoe theory. In fact, after Michels became disillusioned with socialism, he became closer to conservative liberal positions, taking up a professorship in economics in the Swiss town of Basel on the eve of World War I, only to move further right later.

Interpretations of Michels as a disillusioned democratic idealist — a man who essentially longed for direct democracy in the spirit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and abhorred the dilution of the people’s will that would inevitably occur in representative parliamentary democracy — underestimate his affinity with elite theory. Michels was also less committed to democracy per se than to an ideal of a life of struggle, which would enable the ethically superior individual to prove themselves.

Some recent writers on Michels have sought to emphasize the optimistic pedagogical aspect of his works, and his suggestion that the people could eventually be trained to govern themselves. But his own political trajectory suggests that his pessimistic assessment of the democratic socialist project ultimately got the better of him.

There are points of contact between his critique of the bureaucratization of German Social Democracy and the arguments of Rosa Luxemburg, who once viewed him as an ally. Both Michels and Luxemburg were scathing of the caution of the German trade union functionaries, for example, and the attachment of the latter to their organizations and strike funds as ends in themselves.

Yet while Luxemburg argued for a dynamic and reciprocal relationship between the party and its mass following, which would raise the revolutionary class consciousness of workers through activism, Michels seems to have retained his belief that the workers had an innate need to venerate their leaders, and only charismatic leadership could shake them out of their passivity. It is a matter of historical record that Michels ultimately found his own charismatic leader in the shape of Benito Mussolini.