Introduction

This book is about the exercise of power. As André-Jean Tudesq remarked in his monumental study of French elites in the first half of the nineteenth century:

Social power, the influence exerted by one man over other men, presents one of the most universal-and also the most complex-problems in the study of human relations…. The whole history of humanity could be written, or re-written, in the perspective of the subordination of men to a minority.1