Mosca Revisited

Abstract

Notwithstanding his status as a pioneer of modern political science (with his The Ruling Class, English edition 1939, hereafter RC), Gaetano Mosca has never been a fashionable thinker. Democrats dislike him for ridiculing their vision of human relationships as ‘a great conglomerate of dreams and falsehoods’, ‘not in the slightest degree justified by the facts’ (RC: All, 326). Some commentators even hold him partly responsible for the advent of fascism in Italy (Mannheim 1936: 119). Did he not – for all his verbal opposition to 77 Duce - attempt to revive ancient ideas of social hierarchy and to erect obstacles to the spread of democratic notions? Did he not sit comfortably in the Italian Senate during the darkest days of Mussolini’s regime? A furious C.J. Friedrich resorts to the argumentum ad hominem by referring to ‘the deferential peasants on estates of large landowners in Sicily where Mosca’s cradle stood’ (Friedrich 1950: 264f). How could the offspring of such a backward and corrupt society possibly appreciate the finer points of liberal democracy?