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All objective criticism of the party [or nation, if he is the leader of a nation] is taken by him as a personal affront.
“Once elected, the chosen of the people can no longer be opposed in any way. He personifies the majority, and all resistance to his will is anti-democratic. The leader of such a democracy is irremovable, for the nation, having once spoken, cannot contradict itself.
All this is much more than mere pretense. Once granted the principle of representation, Bonapartism can be regarded as the logical culmination of democracy.
Mature Bonapartism is a popular, a democratic despotism, founded on democratic doctrine, and, at least in its initiation, committed to democratic forms. If Bonapartism, in fact rather than in theory, denies democracy, it does so by bringing democracy to completion.
referendum
In practice, we find that it does not work. Usually only a small percentage of the membership participates in the referendum.
“renunciation,”
In the first place, except sometimes in small or persecuted organizations, the leaders never do renounce all privileges, and they can find very plausible excuses in both the nature and quality of their work for not doing so.
Even where they do, renunciation does not produce simple democrats but fanatics, often more tyrannical than those leaders who are sometimes mellowed a little by privilege.
tells the workers to have nothing to do with politics, but to confine themselves altogether to “their own” organizations, the trade unions (syndicates) and the labor co-operatives.
Anarchism,
This viewpoint, which the history of anarchism shows is capable of producing very noble human individuals, is wholly divorced from the reality of human society, which necessarily includes organizations.
All that we can say is that the means of dominion employed by the anarchist leader belong to an epoch which political parties have already outlived. These are the means utilized by the apostle and the orator: the flaming power of thought, greatness of self-sacrifice, profundity of conviction. Their dominion is exercised, not over the organization, but over minds; it is the outcome, not of technical indispensability, but of intellectual ascendancy and moral superiority.”
Social life cannot dispense with organization. The mechanical, technical, psychological, and cultural conditions of organization require leadership, and guarantee that the leaders rather than the mass shall exercise control. The autocratic tendencies are neither
arbitrary nor accidental nor temporary, but inherent in the nature of organization.
However, from the iron law of oligarchy, Michels does not at all conclude that we should abandon the struggle for democracy, or, more strictly, for a reduction to the minimum possible of those autocratic tendencies which will nevertheless always remain. “Leadership is a necessary phenomenon in every form of social life. Consequently it is not the task of science to inquire whether this phenomenon is good or evil, or predominantly one or the other. But there is
great scientific value in the demonstration that every system of leadership is incompatible with the most essential postulates of democracy. We are now aware that the law of the historic necessity of oligarchy is primarily based upon a series of facts of experience.”
Oligarchy will always remain; but it may be possible to put some limit and restraint on the absoluteness of oligarchy. This cannot be effectively done by a utopian and sentimental idealism concerning the possibilities of democracy.
If we wish to estimate the value of
democracy, we must do so in comparison with its converse, pure aristocracy. The defects inherent in democracy are obvious. It is none the less true that as a form of social life we must choose democracy as the least of evils.”
This restriction of the problem is more extreme than in the case of the other Machiavellians. They too, of course, try to describe and correlate social facts, and they never permit their goals or ideals or programs to distort their objective descriptions; they never, like Dante, mistake their wishes for reality.
A man’s conduct (that is, human action) is “logical” under the following circumstances: when his action is motivated by a deliberately held goal or purpose; when that goal is possible; when the steps or means he takes to reach the goal are in fact appropriate for reaching it.
Pareto not only shows that non-logical conduct is predominant; his crucial point is that the conduct which has a bearing on social and political structure, on what he calls the “social equilibrium,” is above all the arena of the non-logical. What happens to society, whether it progresses or decays, is free or despotic, happy or miserable, poor or prosperous, is only to the slightest degree influenced by the deliberate, rational purposes held by human beings.
Taboos, magic, superstition, personified abstractions,
myths, gods, empty verbalisms, in every culture and at every period of history express man’s persisting non-logical impulses. The forms change, but the fundamentals remain. Gods and goddesses like Athena or Janus or Ammon are replaced by new divinities such as Progress and Humanity and even Science; hymns to Jupiter give way to invocations to the People; the magic of votes and electoral manipulations supersedes the magic of dolls and wands; faith in the Historical Process does duty for faith in the God of our Fathers.
In the first place, we may note that so far as social development is determined by such factors as climate, geography, or in general by biological and physical characteristics, it is non-logically motivated. Temperature, rainfall, mountains and valleys are not logical products; they are simply given as the environment wherein human society
develops.
Or take “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” the great goals, it was believed, of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man,
and of the French Revolution. Anything, or nothing, can be meant by these terms. No two men are or can be equal in all things; all are equal in some. Michels reminds us that, after the Revolution, the three words appeared over the entrance of every French prison.
The point is not that these slogans, ideals, programs, and declarations do not influence action. Under certain circumstances they undoubtedly do, and tremendously. But they are not and cannot be part of logical or rational action. I am not taking logical steps in pursuit of a goal if the presumed goal is nothing definite.
We discover, to begin with, that men who profess a certain goal are just about as likely to take actions contrary to it as in accordance with it. Nor can we generally attribute these contrary actions to duplicity; those who act contrary to the goal can continue at the same time believing sincerely in it, and not noting any contradiction.
When the reformers tell us that society can be improved by education, by increasing men’s knowledge, by projecting the correct program and then taking action to realize that program, they are wrong because men in society do not act that way. Their actions, their socially decisive actions, spring not from logical but from non-logical roots.
This is not a question about which “one opinion is as good as another.” Pareto presents evidence, a mass of evidence, drawn not from one nation and one time, but from many nations and classes and cultures and times. If he is wrong, he can be proved wrong only by evidence equally cogent.
Pareto thinks that this is partly accounted for by the fact that few writers on society are content to describe and correlate facts, but are always going on to tell what ought to be, and how to reform society.
chief among them, probably, was that eagerness for premature practical applications which is ever obstructing the progress of science, along with a mania for preaching to people as to what they ought to do—an exceedingly bootless occupation—instead of
finding out what they actually do.”
Everyone will recognize that nearly all of non-verbal conduct, such as is found in animals or in the purely instinctive behavior of human beings, is also non-logical. The peculiar and deceptive problems arise in connection with conduct which is verbal but at the same time non-logical.
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Class I: Instinct for Combinations. This is the tendency which leads human beings to combine or manipulate
various elements taken arbitrarily from experience.
Class II: Group-Persistences. When once any combination has been formed, forces come into play to keep that combination sustained and persisting.
Class IV: Residues Connected with Sociality. This class, and also Class V, as Pareto treats them, are related to residues of Class II, and it is somewhat arbitrary to separate them in theory. Indeed, with the exception of Class VI (sex residues), all residues tend to fall into two main classes—(1) “combinations,” the tendencies to change, newness,
manipulations, speculations, upsets, progress; and (2) “group-persistences,” the tendencies to inertia, resistance to change, social solidarity, conservation, conformity.
Class V: Integrity of the Individual and His Appurtenances. In general, according to Pareto’s account, these are the feelings that lead men to guard their personal integrity, to maintain themselves and the conditions of their
existence, together with whatever they happen to identify with themselves and those conditions of existence.
Class VI: The Sex Residue. The merely biological sex urge is not, properly speaking, a residue.
Class IV: Verbal Proofs. These are the familiar derivations that depend upon verbal confusions and fallacies, ambiguous terms, the intrusion of emotive expressions in the place of statements of fact, metaphors and allegories taken for proofs, all of which have been recently so much discussed by the many writers on “semantics.”
It will be evident from the examples and analysis given in this and the preceding section that Pareto believes derivations to have little effect in determining important social changes. Residues are the abiding, the significant and influential factor. When the complex of residues is given and while it remains, the general course of conduct is decided; the derivations can come and go, change and be changed, but nothing much is altered. The
derivations cannot, it is true, be disregarded; but their importance is primarily as expressions of residues, not in themselves.
They insist on relating the ideals and theories to the whole complex of human behavior, and interpreting what men do, not merely by their words, but by their words related to the rest of their actions.
More plainly, in the case of such measures as tariffs and subsidies, is it pointless to speak of the community as a whole. There are benefits for some sections; hurts for others.
