ABSTRACT
While the classical elite theorists Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels held the masses in contempt and sided with the ruling classes as the engines of social development, V. I. Lenin (1870-1924) and Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), like Karl Marx and Frederick Engels before them, threw in their lot with the laboring masses and saw the working class as the leading revolutionary force to transform capitalist society. This chapter takes a brief look at the central arguments of Gramsci and Lenin on the nature and role of the state and ideological hegemony and explores the underlying class contradictions of capitalist society, which, they argued, would lead to its revolutionary transformation.
