I think it worth expanding upon the "elite" concept a bit more.
A ruling "elite" can be contrasted with a ruling "class", where the former is dynamic and the latter is static. Hence why it is also more difficult to point to concrete persons, families or groups which makes up said elite. People move up and down from, or in and out of the elite all the time. It makes the most sense to speak of a ruling elite, rather than a ruling class, in societies such as ours that are marked by a high degree of social mobility and individual atomization.
If you do a Google Ngram search for elite, you'll see that usage increases from around 1920 and then takes off from around 1950. This strongly indicates that the notion of a ruling elite is tied to how modern mass democracies functions, but that it has lesser relevance to how most societies e.g. pre 1900 functioned.
When it comes to the contemporary Left, I think you describe many of their deficiencies quite well. They seem to not want to admit that they actually are the elite.
Yes, I think this framing is reasonable, though I'd prefer an even finer taxonomy, which I didn't bother to detail as it felt outside the scope of my review. I think there are competing groups of elites, and elites in certain contexts that are non-elite (or just less influential) in other contexts. How status shakes out this granularly is complex and controversial to map.
There is of course individual mobility in and out of elite groups, but depending the resolution one uses to evaluate/quantify social mobility, it can be argued to be fairly low across almost all societies across time. Here, I am referring to the economist Greg Clark's work, which is summarized in his books A Farewell to Alms & The Son Also Rises (yes a Hemingway puns and there's another one coming).
One of the factors that Clark points to as a source of resilient transmission of social status across generations is the high rate of assortative mating (pairing off by phenotypic similarity in this case class or educational status). Many social scientists have theorized and produced some evidence to the effect that assortative mating is high in human populations and has probably increased over the 20th century in America. On top of this, there is evidence to show Americans are increasingly sorted along class and cultural markers (The Big Sort, Coming Apart, Chetty's Opportunity Corridors).
I'm not so familiar with most of those books apart from quickly looking them up, but I agree that certainly there are limits to social mobility also today, largely because you run into biological constraints or simply physical reality, such as intelligence or cultural background, which is again enhanced via assortative mating patterns I would presume. There is however _in principle_ unlimited social mobility due to the prevalence of democratic and egalitarian attitudes, which is from my own knowledge, a historical novelty, at least in more advanced/complex societies. It is possible to see how this situation may even lead to increased sorting along certain genetic or biological traits.
It's tempting to read this as a defense of wokeness – as force that largely moderates Marxist and other radical elements on the left. One cheer for elite capture?
Although I'm not sure how well it is empirically demonstrated, I take intuitively to the Italian elite theory school and the Americanized version of this political theory (namely James Burnham articulation). This sort of neuters most of my normative opinions about "elite capture" as I view it as largely inescapable.
My broader takeaway ends up being that a given polity will benefit from elite competition that has a reasonable parity and the various competing elites are of high quality/competence/character. Unfortunately, we're in a situation where there is deterioration on both these fronts.
However, I'm not especially pessimistic because there is a parallel narrative to tell about institutions (or maybe more broadly cumulative cultural evolution and various material factors), which is positive in the main.
Yes, I think definitionally, elite theory is generally a critique of the mechanisms of all democratic systems. Now I guess, there is potentially a way to reconcile the two (given a representative system where the only elites are the representatives themselves). I think the clear issue there is that some amount of elite power is outside of the political system.
Obviously, I'm not an expert in poli-sci empirical literature (my background is science), but my read is that the historical and empirical records would favor elite theory as a better model for explaining political and societal outcomes.
I think it worth expanding upon the "elite" concept a bit more.
A ruling "elite" can be contrasted with a ruling "class", where the former is dynamic and the latter is static. Hence why it is also more difficult to point to concrete persons, families or groups which makes up said elite. People move up and down from, or in and out of the elite all the time. It makes the most sense to speak of a ruling elite, rather than a ruling class, in societies such as ours that are marked by a high degree of social mobility and individual atomization.
If you do a Google Ngram search for elite, you'll see that usage increases from around 1920 and then takes off from around 1950. This strongly indicates that the notion of a ruling elite is tied to how modern mass democracies functions, but that it has lesser relevance to how most societies e.g. pre 1900 functioned.
When it comes to the contemporary Left, I think you describe many of their deficiencies quite well. They seem to not want to admit that they actually are the elite.
Yes, I think this framing is reasonable, though I'd prefer an even finer taxonomy, which I didn't bother to detail as it felt outside the scope of my review. I think there are competing groups of elites, and elites in certain contexts that are non-elite (or just less influential) in other contexts. How status shakes out this granularly is complex and controversial to map.
There is of course individual mobility in and out of elite groups, but depending the resolution one uses to evaluate/quantify social mobility, it can be argued to be fairly low across almost all societies across time. Here, I am referring to the economist Greg Clark's work, which is summarized in his books A Farewell to Alms & The Son Also Rises (yes a Hemingway puns and there's another one coming).
One of the factors that Clark points to as a source of resilient transmission of social status across generations is the high rate of assortative mating (pairing off by phenotypic similarity in this case class or educational status). Many social scientists have theorized and produced some evidence to the effect that assortative mating is high in human populations and has probably increased over the 20th century in America. On top of this, there is evidence to show Americans are increasingly sorted along class and cultural markers (The Big Sort, Coming Apart, Chetty's Opportunity Corridors).
I'm not so familiar with most of those books apart from quickly looking them up, but I agree that certainly there are limits to social mobility also today, largely because you run into biological constraints or simply physical reality, such as intelligence or cultural background, which is again enhanced via assortative mating patterns I would presume. There is however _in principle_ unlimited social mobility due to the prevalence of democratic and egalitarian attitudes, which is from my own knowledge, a historical novelty, at least in more advanced/complex societies. It is possible to see how this situation may even lead to increased sorting along certain genetic or biological traits.
Good review.
It's tempting to read this as a defense of wokeness – as force that largely moderates Marxist and other radical elements on the left. One cheer for elite capture?
Although I'm not sure how well it is empirically demonstrated, I take intuitively to the Italian elite theory school and the Americanized version of this political theory (namely James Burnham articulation). This sort of neuters most of my normative opinions about "elite capture" as I view it as largely inescapable.
My broader takeaway ends up being that a given polity will benefit from elite competition that has a reasonable parity and the various competing elites are of high quality/competence/character. Unfortunately, we're in a situation where there is deterioration on both these fronts.
However, I'm not especially pessimistic because there is a parallel narrative to tell about institutions (or maybe more broadly cumulative cultural evolution and various material factors), which is positive in the main.
Do you read elite theory as in conflict with the median voter theorem?
Yes, I think definitionally, elite theory is generally a critique of the mechanisms of all democratic systems. Now I guess, there is potentially a way to reconcile the two (given a representative system where the only elites are the representatives themselves). I think the clear issue there is that some amount of elite power is outside of the political system.
Obviously, I'm not an expert in poli-sci empirical literature (my background is science), but my read is that the historical and empirical records would favor elite theory as a better model for explaining political and societal outcomes.