Pareto and Elitism

Letters

Vol. 2 No. 17 · 4 September 1980

From G. Lowell Field

SIR: Your reviewer, Geoffrey Hawthorn, in reviewing Elitism, which appeared under our joint authorship, and also Elites in Australia (LRB., Vol. 2, No 13), was careless enough in reading our book and free enough with derogatory words in comment to entitle the authors to some room to reply.

Although the reviewer does not seem to take a drastically different view of the problems and difficulties of advanced industrial society from our own, he characterises us as fools for supposing that the prescriptions that we advance might be helpful in reducing these problems. Speaking of the manifold varieties of opinion which Pareto, late in life, conceded could never be totally suppressed (a manifestly sentimental notion if the brutal possibilities of history are taken seriously), Hawthorn says we are fools to think that we can ‘at once preserve’ such ideas and ‘render them inconsequential’ with ‘something called “élitism ”’. We never thought of élitism as a cause, movement or ideology, but only as a handy classification of certain recently neglected ideas. Such a reification of such a notion would, indeed, be foolish. We merely point to the factual predominance of élites in most political decision-making and suggest that élites might make a better job of what they do if they had a clearer conception of their position.

Dropping ‘merely’ from one key quotation and similarly dropping ‘in such matters’ from another, Hawthorn makes us read somewhat more ‘élitist’ than is actually the case. Then he spends some words chiding the straw man of our alleged intention to curtail democratic rights of free expression. Yet it remains the case that recognising that the outcomes of many matters depend more on them than on shadowy ‘popular forces’ might well lead élites to take better care of the public business.

Hawthorn’s brief references to Elites in Australia are nearly all factually incorrect. Whereas he asserts that the 370 national leaders interviewed agreed only that ‘whoever was in the élite they were not,’ in fact they mainly agreed that no single élite group runs Australia; three-quarters of them felt that they, as individuals, had significant influence on national policies and were in this sense part of the élite. Hawthorn asserts that the ‘central circle’ of 418 leaders did not include trade-unionists: in fact, 9 per cent were trade-union leaders and another 12 per cent were closely affiliated Labour Party leaders. He implies that the authors were eventually led to doubt the utility of their survey method: in fact, at the cited page (261) they say that, like any method, survey research ‘provides only rough approximations of social phenomena’. If Hawthorn knows another method which would yield a more accurate cross-sectional picture of a large national élite, there are many researchers waiting to learn it from him.

G. Lowell Field
Storrs, Connecticut

Geoffrey Hawthorn writes: Professors Field and Higley accuse me of misrepresenting their views, misreading their facts, and misunderstanding their remarks about method. I do remain puzzled as well as annoyed by their views. I still do not see how a recommendation to élites lo realise their position and act accordingly, although in ways that these authors never explain, is self-evidently compatible with preserving such democratic virtues as we now have. And I certainly do not see how such a recommendation can blandly be called ‘a handy classification of certain recently neglected ideas’. Either Field and Higley believe what they say or they do not. When I said that none of those interviewed in the Australian study thought that they ran Australia, I had in front of me the authors’ repeated remarks to this effect. Many of these people conceded that they might have some influence, but that is a different matter. When I said that the central circle of 418 identified by Higley excluded union leaders, I was, I agree, oversimplifying. It did not. But such leaders seemed to be disproportionately under-represented in it, and, most surprisingly for Australia, scarcely figured at all in an inner 100 which I decided, for reasons of space, not to discuss apart from the 418. I remain convinced that a survey which identifies an élite solely from replies to questions about who the élite are and from replies to questions about whom the respondent talked to about a particular issue is worse than a ‘rough approximation’. It presupposes in the decision about whom to ask in the first place who is likely to be in the élite, and it says absolutely nothing about who actually does what how with whom to what effect. As Field and Higley must surely know, such an approach was effectively discredited by Dahl and others more than twenty years ago. No political historian would for a moment consider relying on it.