ABSTRACT
The democratic republic happened to liberalism almost by accident. Liberalism as a specifically political doctrine came out of Enlightenment’s disappointed love affair with the enlightened despots. Vilfredo Pareto’s elite theory comes out of the perception that it is hard to tell who is calling the shots if all we look at is the formal ruling arrangements of a state. Elites come in different shapes and sizes. Some are ‘closed’, like castes, and some are ‘open’ as Pareto believes modern governing elites tend increasingly to be. Elites change. It was Robert Michels, in the work known in the English-speaking world as Political Parties, who produced the convincing evidence with a most elegant piece of experimental design. Michels decided to look for evidence of elitism in the human organisation whose principles were specifically designed to attack all elitism. This human organisation was obviously the socialist mass party. All socialism is anti-elitist.
