SOURCE: "The Elite and the Ruling Class: Pareto and Mosca Re-examined," in The Review of Politics, Vol. 29, No. 3, July, 1967, pp. 354-69.

In the following essay, originally presented at the fiftieth annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Montreal, Canada, in 1964, Kolegar argues against the prevailing view of Mosca and Pareto as anti-democratic, claiming instead that their theories ushered in a significant modern sociological concept.

Mosca's and Pareto's elite conceptions have had a curious fate. Mosca's work, in many ways an anticipation of Pareto's, has been overshadowed by his more brilliant and renowned antagonist from the very beginning, and perhaps only the circumstance that his American editor chose as the title for his Elementi di scienza politica the two words which fairly epitomize his theory ("the ruling class") enables many a student of sociology to associate Mosca's name with at least a vague notion about the nature of...