ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights how American academia looked at elitism to investigate some significant aspects of the politics in Italy and in the United States. The context of the 1920s and 1930s not only confirmed the underlying assumptions of elite theory but also amplified its effects. According to the elitist paradigm, greater involvement of the masses in political life would not necessarily produce more democratic decision-making processes but, rather, a progressive bias in the behaviour of the ruling classes. Concerning the connection between masses and power, the political elites seemed to be at a crossroads: choosing the path of demagogic autocracies or tending towards a model of elitist democracy. In this perspective, elitism can be related with Fascism and the New Deal. On the one hand, the chapter considers how American scholars used elite theory to understand the fascist regime; on the other, it compares the theories of Mosca, Pareto, and Michels with some of the most significant works of American technocratic thought. In this, there is no intention to identify elitism with Fascism, much less with the New Deal. However, this chapter argues that elite theory constituted, if not the ideological basis of both these phenomena, their implicit theoretical premises.
