Crowds and Party · 第 107 页

The Iron Law of Oligarchy

The best-known version of the argument that democracy leads to oligarchy comes from Robert Michels’s Political Parties, originally published in 1911.¹⁶ A student of Max Weber’s, Michels taught in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland; he was a member of the German Social Democratic Party, the Italian Socialist Party, and, later, Mussolini’s Fascist Party.¹⁷ Lenin dismissed him as “the garrulous Michels,” disparaging Michels’s Italian Imperialism as just as superficial as his other writings.¹⁸ Social science treats Political Parties as a classic, even “one of the twentieth century’s most influential books.”¹⁹

Political Parties explores the “nature of the party.” Michels deduces the nature of the party via an analysis of the “nature of the human individual,” the “nature of political struggle,” and the “nature of political organization.” On the basis of this analysis, he posits an “iron law of oligarchy” or rule of the few. Unlike ancient Greek visions of democracy as the response of the people against oligarchy’s owners of property, Michels construes oligarchy as intrinsic to democracy. Democracy, of any kind, tends to oligarchy. Democracy “necessarily contains an oligarchical nucleus.”²⁰ So while Political Parties concentrates primarily on socialist parties, particularly the German Social Democratic Party, Michels’s argument is broader, a political version of the Pareto principle or 80/20 rule: in any human association, the few will have more— whether this “more” is of goods, influence, or power—than the many.²¹ Parties one might most expect to incorporate rule by the workers in their basic structure, organizations animated by ideals of democratic participation, even groups with aspirations to anarchism, all ultimately take on a whole slew of oligarchical characteristics. Rule by the few is unavoidable. Michels surmises: “the appearance of oligarchical phenomena in the very bosom of the revolutionary parties is a conclusive proof of the existence of immanent oligarchical tendencies in every kind of human organization which strives for the attainment of definite ends.”²² Socialist parties and working-class organizations are not unique. They are representative, clear instances where oligarchical tendencies can be isolated and observed precisely because they conflict with party ideology. If democracy means rule by the many, democracy is impossible.

Michels presents tendencies to oligarchy as technical and psychological. Technical tendencies concern the indispensability of leadership in groups. Psychological tendencies involve people’s responses to leadership. They are effects of the fact of leaders back on the people. So there are tasks, means of accomplishment, and there are feelings about, responses to, and interpretations of these means of accomplishment. Both connect the party to the crowd. And both are matters of number: the problem and force of many, the complexity of mass organization, and the prestige accompanying that to

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