Second-hand
bookshops do not get enough credit – first for their shelter from the juggernaut
marketing of fashionable titles and then with the delight of a text found which
has languished unappreciated after a decade or so…..
Two titles
caught my eye this week in a new downtown outlet opposite Bucuresti University –
the first Who Runs this
place? The Anatomy of Britain in the 21st Century (2004) was the final contribution of a famous journalist, Anthony
Sampson, who was of south African origin and had started in 1962 what became a
series of efforts to capture the anatomy of the UK power structure. ….Extracts can
be read here. Sampson himself became so ensconced
in his role as voyeur that he almost became one of the institutions of which he
wrote – as can be seen in
this tribute. New Labour was half-way through its
13 years as he was drafting the book and the impact of its media manipulation
was already in evidence. But a quick skim suggested that it might suffer from
being a tad incestuous – with the references consisting of either newspaper
articles or political biographies. Not a solitary academic reference
The Triumph of the
Political Class by journalist Peter
Oborne (2007) was the other (smaller) bargain
which I swept up – first read and blogged about in
2014. It has a much more
powerful tale to tell - of the destruction by Thatcher in the 1980s of the
traditional power of trade unions, universities, local government, the
judiciary and the civil service. And of the huge rise under Blair et al since
1997 of the power of the political class and media – and the further
emasculation of parliament, the Cabinet and the civil service. Interestingly,
he coins the phrase “manipulative populism” – and identifies the significance
of Peter Mair’s writing to the fate of the Western political party
The nature and location of power fascinated
me from an early age – I had studied Elite theorists in the early
1960s on my political sociology course at University. Although Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923)
and Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941) had
led the way, it was Robert Michels’ (1876-1936) Political
Parties (1911) which made the lasting impression on me - with his close
study of trade unionists and social democrat politicians and derivation of “the
iron law of oligarchy”.
For more than a century, one of the central
issues of our time has been that of how “the masses” might be “controlled” in
an age of democracy….These authors,
thoroughly “Real” in their “Politik”, hardly suggested that the
political and commercial elites had much to worry about – but this did not
prevent writers such as Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion 1922) and Ortego
y Gasset (Revolt of the Masses 1930) from
conjuring up frightening narratives about the dangers of the great unwashed
masses. Lippmann’s
full book can
be read here…
The scintillating prose of Joseph Schumpeter’s
(1883-1950) Capitalism,
Socialism and Democracy (1943) was also a favourite of mine –
with his theory of the “circulation of the elites” reassuring the elites that
all would be well….
But
the populism evident
since the start of the new millennium has sparked new anxieties on this
count amongst the liberal elites – and indeed raised the question anew as to whether
capitalism is consistent with democracy…
One guy whose words are worth reading
on that question is SM Wolin – whose book on the history of political thought -
Politics
and Vision - held me spellbound in the 1960s. In his 90s he produced this
great critique of the US system – Democracy
Inc – managed democracy and the specter of inverted totalitarianism (2008) –
reviewed here.
And this is an interesting recent article, Why
Elites always Rule which reminds the new generation of the significance
of Pareto’s work…..
Since
starting this post, I’ve noticed quite a few new books on this topic and will
do an annotated reading list shortly of the dozen or so more interesting of
these….
