Robert Michels, the iron law of oligarchy and dynamic democracy

Abstract

On the 5 April 2018 the online site of the Merriam-Webster dictionary reported that lookups for a certain term had risen by 3,000% over the past week, placing it at the number one spot in its 'Trending Now' rubric. 2 The rise was associated with US Attorney Robert Mueller's probe into Russia's meddling in the 2016 US Presidential Elections, and how he had taken the unusual step of interviewing Russian businessmen with links to Putin who had travelled to the US at that timebusinessmen who now faced potential sanctions.The word being searched for, which was the descriptor used to denote these businessmen, was oligarch -'Russian Oligarchs' -and the dictionary helpfully explained that it was drawn from the Greek 'oligarchs', made up of 'olig' ('few') and 'archs' ('ruler').An oligarch is a 'member or supporter of an oligarchy', and 'oligarchy' is 'a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes'.The greatest theorist of modern oligarchy is Robert Michels (1876-1936).It is he who, in his classic 1911 text On the Sociology of the Party System in Modern Democracy, coined the phrase the 'iron low of oligarchy'. 3 Michels is often paired with Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941) and Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), and collectively they are known as the 'elite theorists of democracy', although they have gone by other appellations too: 'Machiavellians', 'theorists of minority domination', or again 'sociological pessimists'. 4 Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, they were the 1 These papers were first presented at a conference in Cambridge, 'Elites and Democracy in Modern Political Thought', which took place in CRASSH on 7 December 2017, and at a subsequent APSA panel 'Elites, Political Parties, and Democracy's Discontents' on 31 August 2018.We would like to thank everyone who participated in both, alongside two anonymous referees for their helpful comments.Thanks also to Nadia Urbinati for putting this special issue together, and to audiences at the Yale Center for Representative Institutions in April 2018, the Nottingham 'Engage' Series and the Political Theory Workshop at Sheffield in March 2019 for specific comments to this paper.