National elite power studies

The study of national elite power networks has long been a focus of study in the United States and Britain. The key concern of this literature has been to identify the degree to which national elite structures are unified or diver­sified.

It was the work of the radical elitist C. Wright Mills, however, which had the most impact on future studies. His theory involved a three-level gradation of the distribution of power. At the top level were those in command of the major institutional hierarchies of modern society - the executive branch of the national government, the large business corpora­tions, and the military establishment. The pluralist model of competing interests, Mills argued, applied only to the ‘middle levels’, the semi-orga­nized stalemate of interest group and legislative politics, which pluralists mistook for the entire power structure of the capitalist state. A politically fragmented ‘society of the masses’ occupied the bottom level.

Mills (1956: 167-9) work suggested a close relationship between economic elites and governmental elites - the ‘corporate rich’ and the ‘polit­ical directorate’. He maintained that the growing centralization of power in the federal executive branch of government had been accompanied by a declining role for professional politicians and a growing role for ‘political outsiders’ from the corporate world (ibid.: 235). However (ibid.: 170), he believed that it would be a mistake ‘to believe that the political apparatus is merely an extension of the corporate world, or that it had been taken over by the representatives of the corporate rich.’ Here Mills wanted to distin­guish his position from what he termed the ‘simple Marxian view’, which held that economic elites were the real holders of power.

The Power Elite provided the most important critique of pluralism written from an elitist perspective. It emphasized that, far from being an independent arbiter of the national interest, the state was actually domi­nated by a power elite comprised of politicians, military and corporate bosses who moulded public policy to suit their own ends:

The conception of the power elite and of its unity rests upon the corre­sponding developments and the coincidence of interests among economic, political, and military organizations. It also rests upon the similarity of origins and outlook, and the social and personal intermingling of the top circles from each of these dominant hierarchies. (Mills 1956: 292)

The existence of a broad, inclusive network of powerful persons with similar social origins, in different institutions, is an important feature of this view of the power structure. However, the power-elite literature identifies three key dimensions of political elite integration: social homogeneity which emphasizes shared class and status origins; value consensus which focuses on agreement among elites on the ‘rules of the game’, and, personal interaction among elites both informally through social and personal interaction and formally through membership of common organizations. This third dimension is reflected in the interlocking directorates of major US corporations. These ties are seen to foster integration, cohesiveness and consensus within the business community. Many social scientists, particularly in the US, have examined these sociometric ties among elites in individual communities (see Kadushin 1974; Laumann and Pappi 1973, 1976; Laumann etal.

The pluralist critique of elite studies rests on the view that these elites are not cohesive; that is that they fail to act in concert. Each elite group is distinct and narrowly based, with its influence confined to the issues most relevant to its membership (see Dahl 1961a; and Polsby 1963). Thus, elites are seen as fragmented rather than integrated since each is involved primarily with its own relatively narrow concerns and constituencies. In a critique of elitism, Dahl (1958) argued that elite theorists frequently make the mistake of equating a capacity for control with facilitative power. The formation of a ruling elite requires not only control over important resources but also the establishment of unity and cohesiveness among its members. Clearly, the Marxist account of ruling class theory would place less emphasis upon the importance of social origins among members of the political elite in a society with a capitalist economy. The Marxist approach would argue that bias in favour of capitalist interests is built into the policy-making process, guaranteeing that those interests are protected by occupants in key positions within the state apparatus, whatever their origins (see Miliband, 1969).

In the UK, power elite studies have rarely reached any degree of sophisti­cation. Several historians have considered the fate of the English aristocracy dwelling on the changing nature of the relationship between landed and mercantile interests or the declining role of the landed aristocracy in the government of rural England. William Gutsman (1963), for example, studied the decline of the upper class and the rise of the middle class as a principal source of elite renewal. While Anthony Sampson (1962, 1965, 1971, 1982) in his exhaustive accounts of the anatomy of Britain argued that the aristocracy no longer rules and, indeed, that there is no longer a real social elite at all. Further, Sampson contends that the various hierarchies of British society have become gradually more open in their recruitment and the diversity of these hierarchies is such that there is no single centre of power.

John Scott (1991), remains the most imaginative of contemporary British social scientists working within the power elite tradition. Scott (1991: 1) argues that there is a widely held view in Britain that, ‘there is a small minority, which holds a ruling position in its economy, society, and political system’. This minority has been described in numerous varying ways: ‘The establishment’, ‘the powers that be’, ‘the ruling few’, the ‘elite’, or more prosaically, ‘them’. His work is structured by an interest in two key issues which characterize modern elitist thought: is the elite a nominal category of office holders or a real, cohesive active and self-perpetuating social group?; and, do members of the elite use their power for sectional or public purposes? Scott (1991: 119) identified two central forms of power elite, exclusive and inclusive. The former exists, ‘where the power bloc is drawn from a restricted and highly uniform social background and so is able to achieve a high level of solidarity’; the latter where ‘a solidaristic power bloc is not dominated by any particular class’.

Scott’s analysis (1991: 4-5) epitomizes the convergence between elitist and Marxist theories of the state drawing on the work of both Weber and Marx, ‘[s]pecifically, I use Weber’s analytical distinctions between class, status, and party as ways of clarifying the Marxian concepts of the capi­talist state and the ruling class’. Indeed, for Scott, the concepts of ‘capitalist class’, ‘upper circle’ and ‘state elite’ are interchangeable terms for describing privileged groups, which exercise power deriving from class, status, and politics. His conclusion (1991: 151-2) to the question ‘Who rules Britain?’ reflects the balance of these concerns: ‘Britain is ruled by a capitalist class whose economic dominance is sustained by the operations of the state and whose members are disproportionately represented in the power elite which rules the state apparatus. That is to say, Britain does have a ruling class.’