Gaetano Mosca

Introduction

Gaetano Mosca (1858–1941) was born in Italy. In 1908, he was elected a member of the Italian Parliament, actively participating in politics, which contributed to making his theory of elites more flexible than Pareto’s. He devoted his work to refute prevailing democratic and collectivistic theories, particularly Marxism. He questioned the ideas of Rousseau and Marx, for whom the establishment of collectivism would mark the beginning of an era of universal equality and justice, an era also in which the State would no longer be an organism for stabilizing class interests and exploitation would have died out. All of Mosca’s intellectual production was a rebuttal of this utopia, against which he laid out his own more realistic theory, arguing that there will always be a ruling class.

As Pareto, Mosca rejected the logic, theory, and philosophy of socialism in its radical and Marxist version, because of its abstractionism and for what he considered as its little practical...