ABSTRACT
There has been considerable debate and contention over the respective contributions of Pareto and Mosca to the idea of the elite, and the two authors themselves challenged each other’s claim to priority in discovering and stating the principles of elite theory. Mosca reputedly felt that he had been denied his proper recognition as the progenitor of the theory that all societies are ruled by organised minorities. Mosca did, indeed, introduce his idea of the ruling class (classe dirigente) in his Sulla Teorica dei governi e sul governo parlamentare (Mosca 1884), some years before Pareto examined the organised groups that were active in Italian politics (Pareto 1893). Mosca himself elaborated on his basic insight in the first edition of his Elementi (Mosca 1896), in the same year in which Pareto began to explore ‘aristocracies’ (Pareto 1896-7). It was in 1901 that Pareto first set out his more systematic account focused on the concept of the political aristocracy (aristocrazia) as an analytical category (Pareto 1901). Pareto further developed his ideas in conjunction with his doctoral student Maria Kobalinska, who completed her thesis on La circulation des elites en France in 1912. Not until the publication of his Trattato di Sociologia Generale (Pareto 1916) did he set out his most systematic formulation using the new terminology of the ‘elite’, developed with Kobalinska. It was following this major work that Mosca returned to the topic and set out as more fully developed account of his ruling class model; in the Second edition of his key work (Mosca 1923).
