Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie Untersuchungen über die oligarchischen Tendenzen des Gruppenlebens by Robert Michels

Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie Untersuchungen über die oligarchischen Tendenzen des Gruppenlebens Reviews

• 
  Griffin Wilson

  This is now probably one of my favorite books of political theory It contains some excellent insights into the oligarchical nature of democracies and of human organization in general from a psychological and sociological point of view The author Robert Michels was a member of the Social Democratic Party in Germany and later the Italian Syndicalists until he left both in 1907 This book was published in 1911 Later in life in 1924 Michels joined the fascist party in ItalyThe book sets out to discover why it seems that even the most professedly egalitarian and democratic of organizations socialist and revolutionary groups in 19th early 20th century Europe who considered themselves the heirs of the French Revolution's liberté egalité fraternité all seemed to devolve into oligarchical organizations where the party leaders put their own interests ahead of the general will; this was without exception across EuropeHe says At the outset revolutionary leaders arise spontaneously; their functions are accessory and gratuitous Soon however they become professional leaders and in the second stage of development they are stable and irremovableThe book is famous for its proposition of the 'iron law of oligarchy' which in the author's words states Reduced to its most concise expression the fundamental sociological law of political parties may be formulated in the following terms Who says organization says oligarchyHe concludes that oligarchies arise out of organic necessity in human organization and that democracy eventually necessitates aristocracy Ideally he says the ideal government would be an aristocracy that is morally good and technically efficient; however based upon the study of history one realizes that this is never possible in the long run and rarely possible in the short run Therefore Michels believes that democracy is the lesser of two evils between itself and outright aristocracy because in democracy at least the public can occasionally exert its will and convince the aristocracy to act in the interest of the masses It would be interesting to see how Michels' thought developed over the next 13 years of his life at which point he joined the fascist party Unfortunately his other books are difficult to acuire even in Italian and French the languages which he originally wrote in
• 
  Allie

  Great commentary on the crustiness of political parties the emergence and maintenance of political power Makes a great foundation for current literature by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson Why Nations FailGreat uotesIt is not the principal aim of science to create systems but rather to promote understandingDemocracy leads to oligarchy and necessarily contains an oligarchical nucleusWith democratic mien he must descend into the electoral arena must hail the farmers and the agricultural labourers as professional colleagues and must seek to convince them that their economic and social interests are identical with his own Thus the aristocrat is constrained to secure his election in virtue of a principle which he does not himself accept and which his soul abhors His whole being demands authorityNevertheless since he recognizes that in the democratic epoch by which he has been overwhelmed he stands alone with this political principle and that by its open advocacy he could never hope to maintain a political party he dissembles his true thoughts and howls with the democratic wolves in order to secure the coveted majorityThe democratic external form which characterizes the life of the political parties may readily veil from superficial observers the tendency towards aristocracythe pathology of the crowd The individual disappears in the multitude and therewith disappears also personality and sense of responsibilityFor technical and administrative reasons no less than for tactical reasons a strong organization needs an eually strong leadershipFor democracy however the first appearance of professional leadership marks the beginning of the endAll power thus proceeds in a natural cycle issuing from the people it ends by raising itself above the peopleestablishing his strength with the weapon of his indispensabilityamong the citizens who enjoy political rights the number of those who have a lively interest in public affairs is insignificant Though it grumbles occasionally the majority is really delighted to find persons who will take the trouble to look after its affairsThe crowd always submits willingly to the control of distinguished individuals
• 
  Yotpseudba

  “The democratic current of history resembles successive waves They ever break on the same shoal They are ever renewed” So is the sobering message Michels leaves us with at the end of this book Political Parties is about the so called ‘Democratic Problem’—That every attempt at democratic political organisation is doomed to decay into the very oligarchy it was meant to combat In a word that democracy is impossible Drawing on his own long history in the Socialist Party of Germany Michels aims to demonstrate this ‘Iron Law of Oligarchy’ through the institution of the political party In doing so he hits on many enduring uestions of political power and participation Michels initially outlines three causes for the development of oligarchy in political parties Organisational Psychological and Intellectual Of these the most spurious and least interesting are the psychological causes which follow the typical late nineteenth century crowd psychology of le Bon The two other causes are less dated compelling and fitting of the idea of an ‘iron law’ Organisational causes are the chains and strictures introduced in any kind of collective social organisation If a political party is to have any coherent direction and force it reuires a nucleus that can mobilise and impel all its members in a single direction While the party is still small it is likely that this could be accomplished by all members meeting to discuss important matters freuently to reach a resolution But the the party grows in numbers the difficult spontaneous agreement becomes the difficult freuent meetings become and the important this directing nucleus becomes This nucleus is properly known as the bureaucracy and has been a feature of any political organisation of appreciable size throughout history With the swelling size the perfunctory tasks of this nucleus become full time affairs get dissected and divided between several people and a hierarchy begins to develop uickly this bureaucracy sprawls so extensively and specialised that it becomes impossible for the rank and file of the party to easily replace or even supervise properly; every problem with the division of labour is realised in micro within the party structure itself The party leaders—having at their disposal the entire bureaucratic apparatus— now stand at such a disproportionate advantage to the common member that their position at the top becomes defacto beyond reproach And just like that the transformation from a democratic to oligarchical structure is fait accompliIntellectual causes spring from these organisational changes The distinction between the majority of the political party and its bureaucratic apparatus grows ever wider with time as the complexity of their tasks grow As complexity grows and party work intensive the once voluntary positions are converted to payed positions Freed from ordinary labour the leaders and bureaucrats can dedicate themselves to politicking full time and uickly become adept in the management of opinion and men The ordinary party member has no such advantage exhausted from their ordinary labour they have no time or energy to attend properly to these subjects Conseuently they must defer in decision making to the technocratic elite forming in the upper echelons on the party Soon deserters of the old ruling classes are drawn into the apparatus as the native leaders are in their turn slowly converted by the ruling class through their interactions in politics With every incentive to hold onto their position the bureaucracy becomes conservative and self serving tending to its own preservation than the good of the members they ostensibly serve These disparities in political and social education simply repeat the prevailing wind of oligarchies pastMichels calls this tendency or democracy towards oligarchy “simultaneously depressing and encouraging” I’m not sure what is so encouraging about it but it certainly is a depressing account The book hits on a perennial problem of politics and one that has been discussed since politics has been written about The practice of politics is a demanding task that reuires a great deal of attention and education how do we guarantee that the political class is adept enough to attend to them In much of history this has been achieved through exclusion the political class is simply a single royal family or a collection of wealthy plutocrats comprising an aristocracy who can attend to politics at their own expense Aristotle solved it by having the citizens supported by a vast underclass of slaves à la the helots of Sparta Plato by having a sole Philosopher King But as the franchise expanded and ideas of moral euality started taking root the problem of political participation and education compounded—how do you transform a nation dominated by uneducated subsistence farmers into a liberal utopia of knowing and educated voters? Rousseau seemed pessimistic on this front as shown by his problem of the lawgiver; Mill was optimistic thinking that participation in the political process will serve itself as an education over time; Kant and all the other champions of enlightenment optimism put their trust in the melioristic impulse of rationality All this reminded me of a uote from Baudrillard “after several revolutions and a century or two of political apprenticeship in spite of the newspapers the trade unions the parties the intellectuals and all the energy put into educating and mobilising the people there are still only a thousand persons who stand up and twenty million who remain passive” Though great gains have been made since the early enlightenment the average citizen of any democratic nation still falls far short of the dreams of democratic theorists And Michels has perhaps hit on several of the reasons It may be that until resources are so plentiful and moral advancement so divine true democracy and representation isn’t possible And in lieu of these a pseudo oligarchic structure will have to do And that is the problem with democracy though I’m not sure if it constitutes an ‘iron law’ Unfortunately much of the book itself is bogged down in problems peculiar to the socialist parties of Europe at the time making it a slog to get through It also tended to be uite repetitious and polemical But an interesting and sobering perspective nonetheless Elitist sociology a strange mirror to the writings of anarchists; both make the same prognosis about the state but suggest vastly different cures
• 
  Thomas

  Really interesting and lots of great information that shows things have not changed a lot Everything you think is new or cool in the modern socio political sphere isn't It has all been done and thought of before and than once You should have a dictionaryand a translation program Michels uotes a number of people in their original language That is something that has changed I am sure he thought people would still learn other languages This has some dry sections and you may want a notepad for all the names but there are sections that made me laugh This is 113 years old and still a very useful read Check it out
• 
  Andy Oram

  It's provocative to assign two stars to one of the classics of political theory but I am just reacting to the arguments as I found them I was hoping for something that went deeper than standard left wing criticisms of staid bureaucratic Social Democratic parties of pre war Europe but found uninspiring polemics One would probably say to me that the arguments seem familiar today but were novel when the book was written in 1915 But how novel is it to suggest that working people are too busy and ignorant to study the political and social uestions of the day? Or to say that once someone gains a cushy salaried position in an established organization he'd like to keep it? Or that modern life is so complicated that you need training to manage a political career? Those are the sorts of observations Michels makes and his references to current events while intelligent do not constitute a thorough going sociological analysis
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  Steven Peterson

  The iron law of oligarchy Who says organization says oligarchy Roberto Michels enunciated such thoughts This work Political Parties is a real classic in the study of politicsHe examined democratic socialist political parties assuming that here democratic practices would be at their zenith However he found a small cadre of party leaders most influential He used these observations to develop his theory of hierarchical leadership The end result? The iron law of oligarchy stating that all organizations even if nominally democratic become oligarchies with a few having power and the multitudes not having powerStill worth rereading after the many decades since its publication
• 
  Christopher

  Groundbreaking in its time and still worth delving into if you can stomach the near constant bombardment of repetition about various minutia of long dead political parties that is
• 
  Yalin

  Michels' work is undoubtedly one of the cornerstones of elite theories in political sociology his greatest contribution being the iron law of oligarchy which ha has set out in this work Although his work largely centers around the socialist party structures himself being one and thus having the experience to write on these parties specifically the lessons learnt and conclusions drawn are definitely of a universal nature Although his focus leaves out solutions to the oligarchical tendencies which would have made him wildly utopian he masterfully manages to dissect the political leadership and understand the dynamics which necessitate and help create the political elites which come to dominate over the massesSome reviewers have found this work polemical not deep enough cyclical hard to read and my personal favourite rambling on about people long dead Criticisms of the first four type in my opinion show an impatience towards reading and the expectation that Michels hold the key to life and everything While he most certainly does not have such omnipotence what he has is a clear grasp on facts and a keen sense of authorship which makes this book a delightful and insightful read For the last type of criticism you can laugh until you drop dead because someone expects a book on politics especially one that uses such in depth knowledge of firsthand knowledge of politics and published in 1911 to not make reference to people of the era which are long dead Perhaps they would have like it if the names of Lasalle Proudhon and Bebel were exchanged for Trump Clinton and Obama One cannot ask for what is such a masterful ualitative work to act as if it was simply theoretical or uantitative and then whine because it includes the names and acts of so many long dead people
• 
  Jared Tobin

  This book has some important stuff in it but it is not an easy nor particularly pleasant read Probably most useful for researchers doing serious work on late 19th early 20th century socialist political parties in Europe There is some useful and easily gleaned content eg Michels' Law of Oligarchy but I think the summary of his work in Burnham's The Machiavellians is sufficient to be honest
• 
  Christoph

  Why this is considered some sort of landmark text in any sort of genre is beyond me At best its an early text in political science not sociology and a fairly demagogic version at that Think the first Ann Coulter not the first Hannah Arendt Political Parties is less an analysis of how political organizations form and evolve based on specific metrics or a scientific analysis of populations and a tirade against Socialists capital S The pertinence of these arguments today is on the one hand on the specifics so devoid of correlation to contemporary culture as to be essentially useless but on the other hand in general so eerily reminiscent of current accusations of socialism as to certainly evoke the facepalm The sad fact that our political discourse has not evolved much beyond a century ago really gives one pause; although for conservatives I guess by definition this is the strategic aim of their actionsAs I read Michels analysis of politics in a foreign land across numerous decades and cultural developments the commutation of their signifiers for political groups to today is remarkable By just translating Michels arguments on anarchists into the Libertarians of today or Socialists into the Democrats of today you basically have the trappings of just about any off the shelf right wing best seller of today So while their tactics have remained about the same fill some dead air with hand waving arguments supposedly based on deep psychological or sociological truths; make an incessant unending barrage of baseless accusations; intersperse some meaningless and sourceless data on all kinds of arcane facts and you too will have a political scree worth doping up the masses withAlthough the context and structure of the book is complete garbage the actual substance of the thesis that organization leads to oligarchy is an important issue There are some points where you can glean something of value from this work on why this is the case such as a group organized for a certain end becoming a mean in itself or the glorification of leaders and the structures developed to wean such leaders to the forefront of such an organization But they are so buried in a pile of nonsense about the true nature of humans or some conspiratorial purpose to socialist organization as to be not worth the time to investigateI am imagining a future 100 years from today in the year 2112 where a young boy manages to find a corrupt but eventually recoverable ebook by a nameless ideologue of old named Glenn Beck and reads the rantings of a deranged mind so contextualized in the dogma of its day yet inspired by teachings nearly a half century older than it as to be almost uninterpretable to the boys ultra post modern life yet so oddly familiar to the nonsense spouted by a neo puritanist of his time named something like Abe Zolan and feeling like maybe nothing has changed despite their technological advances such as jet packs for personal travel and bases on the moon Lets just hope there is a Corey Robin of his time to console that poor boys mind to say that history does not have to repeat itself merely to endure As long as the labor that has built those moon colonies are organized against the trans planetary corporatists of the day such as Megaburton and Solarsanto or a rabble rouser named Buck Rader is circulating a exonet site called Unsafe At Any Elevation against those jet pack manufacturers then so be it