ABSTRACT
Robert Michels (or Roberto, as he renamed himself on emigrating to Italy) occupies a special position among the contemporaries of Max Weber in the social sciences. It is impossible to classify him unequivocally under any single heading among the tendencies within the social sciences of his day. As David Beetham rightly emphasizes, his significance as a scholar must be sought primarily in his remarkable capacity to co-ordinate and combine divergent theoretical positions. 1 Throughout his life, he also played the role of a mediator between the German and Italian social sciences and, in a sense, between Germany and Italy in general. Born into an upper bourgeois Cologne family in 1876, he formed a special relationship with France and Italy at an early stage in his development. Having obtained a doctorate in history under Johann Gustav Droysen at the University of Halle, he went on to pursue extensive studies in history and the social sciences in France and Italy, where he came into close contact with syndicalist circles and became personally acquainted with Georges Sorel and Arturo Labriola. 2
At the age of 24, Michels joined first the Italian and then the German Socialist Party, becoming actively involved in Marburg with a group of socialist intellectuals of markedly anarcho-syndicalist coloration. As someone who had become a socialist on grounds of ethical and moral conviction, he found himself more or less on the margins of German Social Democracy. Almost from the beginning of his involvement in Social Democratic politics, he criticized it from the perspective of a political strategy with syndicalist leanings, which owed a great deal to his concrete knowled.ge of conditions within the Italian Socialist Party. His membership of the Social Democratic Party proved an obstacle to his Habilitation (qualification for university teaching) in Marburg. When, a little later, in 1906, he made a renewed attempt to obtain his Habilitation, in Jena, he was debarred on the same grounds during preliminary negotiations. As a result, Michels emigrated in 1907 to Turin, where he finally got his Habilitation with Achille Loria. Though he considered Italy his second home and felt 'at heart' an Italian, in his scholarly interests he remained primarily oriented towards the German scientific community. In Turin, he did, however, become acquainted with Gaetano Mosca and later also with Vilfredo Pareto. The writings of both men were to have considerable influence on his own work.
