SOURCE: "Gaetano Mosca," in Modern Italian Social Theory: Ideology and Politics from Pareto to the Present, Polity Press, 1987, pp. 34-53.

In the following essay, Bellamy contends that Mosca's and Vilfredo Pareto's respective theories of elites were based on differing "personal political preferences"—Mosca's on moderate conservatism, and Pareto's on classical liberalism.

Mosca is habitually obscured behind the shadow of Pareto. Both are lumped together as the founding fathers of elite theory, and Pareto praised for his more rigorous and 'scientific' approach. This characterization misleads in several respects. Mosca developed his concept of the 'political class' from a quite different ideological stand-point to Pareto—that of the moderate conservative, rather than the classical liberal. As a result, in spite of a similar methodological commitment to create a science of society on the model of the natural sciences, his theory evolved in a manner divergent from his Swiss colleague's, and...