Elite

The elite like model of the human one

All the ages of old Europe endeavoured to propose human models from the point of view of grow itself. In this first meaning, the elite is related to the idea of excellence: it is the Greek kalos kagathos κἀγαθός, indicating “what is beautiful and good” and by extension “the honest man”. This aspiration appears in the city of Athens at the 5th century. Athens of Périclès will carry very high this ideal: it binds the research of the esthetic perfection (architectural beauty, worship of the body) to the search of the spiritual exemplarity. The fault is in disproportion (Hybris), as recalled by the myth of Prométhée.

In the Roman Antiquity, a particular place is given to the citizen where the established among is not uniformly widespread. To be citizen is an ideal which is accompanied by a legal support. That which is citizen has obligations towards itself and the others. The exemplarity of the citizen is symbolized by the port of the Toge. The example of Cincinnatus illustrates these exemplary morals qualities well. Virgile is seized so much for this example which it calls the Romans people togata . The Roman citizenship is demanding: the fact of being citizen confers a prestige which rests on this exemplarity of behavior.

The concept of elite as model will be modified at the time medieval. One is interested less in the city of the men than in the city of God.

The 18th century proposes the model of the honest man. It is a concept difficult to define, but the expression is remained. The honest man is characterized by an external and interior elegance: distinguished without being invaluable, cultivated without being pedant, gallant without being insipid, measured, discrete, brave without forfantery. Noble of the heart, it with the elegance of not exhiber its me , decency not to spread out its pride. This design rests on the postulates of the classicism (measurement and elegance), is attached to Descartes and Pascal (spirit of geometry).

Starting from the end of one appears to observe a crisis of the elite, with the disappearance of a human model within the meaning of plenitude that this one can bring. The homo œconomicus , commun run with liberalism as with the Marxist analysis, which reduces the human being to its quality of producer or consumer and with the abstract and single objective of “maximization of the resources”, is a mutilated model. Homo ethnicus , homo democraticus , homo sexualis are also incomplete models, which do not comprise an ethical requirement and arise like seeking to rise to the top of the company.

Elites or the elite of the capacity

Today, the elite ends up indicating the occupation of an enviable position. “The elites” in the plural, is an expression built by the contemporary Sociologie to explain the political transformations of the companies developed from the point of view not Marxiste. The use of the syntagm " élites" " allows to embrace, under a more abstract concept, the various types of leader or dominant groups which followed one another and whose dated names changed with the wire of the modes. he points out the plural form of the groups in fight in the field of the capacity and their permanently disputed legitimacy. ”

The Marxist thesis clarifies in a certain way the analysis of the situations of being able in the company. It is a reading based on an economic analysis , which denies the specificity of the policy. The fact of holding the levers of the economic machine confers on the class which holds it the access to the political power (within the meaning of the control of the apparatus of state). The State cannot be a referee, it is only one means of political domination between the hands of the holders of the economic capacity. The economic capacity is concentrated in the hands of a small number of families which have the means of production, and transmit by heritage these means and the political power. The capacity belongs only seemingly to the elected officials, actually it is with the hands of the mediums of businesses. The whole of the social hierarchy, economic, political merges in only one class which thanks to the control of the apparatus of State exploits the remainder of the nation and withdraws this exploitation a material benefit but also of the honors and privileges.

It is against this grid that the set of themes of the elites was built. In particular, work of Vilfredo Pareto ( Treated general sociology , 1917) will refute this Marxist analysis. The two postulates of the Marxist reasoning (the economy governs the reports/ratios of the social classes, the ideology of a company is that of its dominant class) are disputed by Pareto. He affirms that the economy does not govern the reports/ratios of the social classes; he even came to sociology precisely because the economy does not explain all… the economic facts themselves are not explained solely starting from the economy.

Pareto works out the thesis of the mutual dependence: it builds an original grid to explain how psychological mechanisms will explain social realities. For him the problem of the circulation of the elites is not reduced to a Class struggle simplified. What counts before all it is a whole of preexistent diagrams: instinct of combination (faculty to adapt) and the persistence of the aggregates (made be tributary of last).

The analysis of Vilfredo Pareto is socio-caracterologic, and must little with the economic grid. Pareto is convinced that there is circulation, in any company, from one class to another (more or less slow) which supports the social mobility. For Pareto all the companies are élitistes; only the style can vary: “the elites, which they use the trick, violence, have of another end only to perpetuate their domination”. The parliamentary democracy itself is only one trick characteristic of what it calls “demagogic plutocracy”.

One can also locate in this register the analysis of the situations of being able at the the United States (C. Wright-Millet, The Power Elite ). For the author there is only one elite, which has the effect of controlling the three institutions which dominate the State and the company (while circulating between them): the policy, the soldier and the economic one.

Typology essay of the elites in the contemporary companies

Entrepreneurial elites

They are the decision makers in the company ( managers among Anglo-Saxons). Their appearance is described in the work managerial The revolution of James Burnham (1941), translated into French in 1947 pennies the title the Era of the organizers .

The thesis developed in this work shows that the contemporary time is a transition between two types of companies: the capitalist company and the “managerial” company: the increasing complexity of the contemporary economies gives rise to an elite of managers . These managers will not be long in constituting itself in class with its interests and privileges, involving a revolution because control which they exert on the instruments of production will make some early or late the Masters of the State (one joined the Marxist grid).

The New Deal is characteristic of this directorial ideology, since the President of the United States of America is surrounded economic material decision makers who assume the political power. Germany national-Socialist left the capacity to the heads of undertakings which dictate their conditions with the capacities (interviews of Hitler with German employers before its election). In the the Stalinist USSR planning is decided by an small group which will be opposed to the capacity Stalin. It refers there common between these various models of companies: the author considers that there is an irresistible walk, and that the planet will see early or late a new distribution of the forces. He predicts the creation of three super-States which will dominate the ground, where the managerial elite will hold the capacity: America, Europe and the Asian world.

Administrative elites

There is a continuity of the French administrative system: on this point the Revolution did not change anything. This system was born with the absolute monarchy, was reinforced by the Consulat and the First Empire. It comprises two characteristic aspects: a centralization of the apparatus of State, and an active interventionism in the economy.

If France appears inconstant on the constitutional level, the administration watch an astonishing continuity; the features of the current administrative system were worked as of the 19th century. The political community receives a legal and administrative formation (Republic of lawyers between 1870 and 1914, of the professors in the interval wars). The public agents result also from the very homogeneous large body of the State: Polytechnic École des Mines, , ENA after the Second world war, Ministry for finances, Council of State. Bourdieu will speak about “nobility of State”.

Intellectual elites

They are the higher intellectual professions: aggregate teachers of the cycles secondary and superior of teaching and holders of doctorates.

Elites " traditionnelles"

Concern here the families of the old nobility even upper middle classes where certain values, traditions and art of living are used as " codes".

The relationship between elites and democracy

The concept of elite implies necessarily the idea of a superiority: in prestige, richness, capacity, for the benefit of minorities, whereas the Démocratie appears to suppose the general equality of the statutes. When the élitiste qualifier “”, can there becomes pejorative be compatibility between the democratic ideal and the existence of elite?

Two approaches are possible. First of all, it is possible to consider that the concept of elite is not incompatible with the democracy, for two primary reasons:

the democracy is characterized not by the refusal of cleavages, but by a mode of selection of these cleavages: question of recruitment: democratization is fertile when it changes the distance between the elite and the anonymous mass and vagrant. Recruitment is based on competences (contest). In this case one cannot speak about heritage, nor of distance between the elites and the remainder of the social body.
There exists an extreme diversity of the elites, which constitutes a guarantee against the domination of the company by a single elite (it is the analysis of Raymond Aron).

The opposite thesis consists in considering that there is a domination of the elites, of a group dominating which is distributed between the great centers of the capacity: policy, economic, military (it is the thesis of Wright Mills, mentioned above). The capacity in the modern society is basically institutionalized; certain institutions are central (in the case of the american company: federal executive, great businesses, military institution), others not. There exist close links between these three great institutions, with the result that the elites are interchangeable there. This thesis underlines implicitly that the capacity in the developed companies is not the attribute of people, families, classes, but of Institution S (what calls into question of the Marxist analysis). But there is concentration of the capacity: “pluralism would be a component of the liberal myth”.

The elite and the hierarchisation of the companies

Are the developed companies which accept the domination of the elites uneven by-there same? One puts already the question in the Greek City: in the Republic , Plato, examining the model City, considers that this one must be treated on a hierarchical basis. It differentiates three social levels:

the craft industry
the warriors
the philosophers

To remain one in spite of the hierarchy, the City must observe certain conditions (suppression of the personal property; the women having the same role that the men, they must be able to devote themselves to it completely, it is thus necessary to remove the marriage (unions are decided by magistrates, planned times of procreation, the children of these unions raised jointly by the state)). It is not a question of closed classes, one can advance there. The triptych desire/passion/reason correspond to the social distribution of the roles.

This analysis is developed by Georges Dumézil: there would be in all the Indo-European companies a distribution in three hierarchical functions of the whole of the human activities: production of the richnesses, exercise of violence, spiritual sovereignty. Ironically, this diagram re-appears in the Communisme, whereas the preliminary draft wants to be levelling.

There are various perceptions of the term “equality”:

natural equality : that of humanism and Christendom: any man carries in him the whole form of the human condition (Montaigne);
civil equality : equal rights in the city (article 1 of the Declaration of the human rights and the citizen).
political equality : it is not always related to the preceding one. They are the civil rights in the participation in the public affairs (Vote for all, equal acces to the elective functions).
social/material equality : aspiration with an equality under the material conditions of existence. All the developed companies tend towards the idea to make disappear the strongest inequalities. Its supreme result would be the Classless society.

The Révolution of 1789 brings only the equality in front of the law. The Russian Révolution of 1917 seems the continuation of an unfinished revolution in 1789 (search of the social equality). Today one thinks more of the Méritocratie that with the egalitarianism strict and arithmetic.

The bankruptcy of the democratic elitism?

The appetite for the capacity does not disappear with the levelling fiction; our developed companies conceived artificial techniques of social rise.

These techniques are of two types: material , founded on the had goods; and intellectual , founded on the Instruction. The hyperconcentration of the means is the continued end, so much so that the implementation of these techniques amounts belonging to the elite : to have the means is to have the end.

material techniques : in all the developed companies, the richness is always object of desire but not admiration. In traditional morals, the continuation of gold is always denounced with strength: the temptation of the avarice as of prodigality are denounced. The Avare is a constant topic as of the old comedy ( the Pot of Plaute): the miserly one is ridiculous and méprisable, because the accumulated richness must accompany the creative effort so that which has which it raises in the social scale. To consider that the state of the had tangible properties is enough to rise is unimaginable. The spendthrift is condemned as much because it takes part of the same logic: it makes display of its richness believing that this one is identified with its being. In all the cases the research of the richness does that which devotes a surface being to it. The judgment of a so rudimentary technique of social rise is constant.
the intellectual techniques are those based on the knowledge and the instruction. The modern intellectual does not make any more receipt. The first temptation of intellectualism, it is the abstraction. It is not in oneself negative, but moves away sometimes too much from lived reality. Georges Bernanos affirms as follows: “I hold the modern intellectual for the complete and utter fool until it provided the proof of the opposite”. Jargons of specialities create for themselves, in economy, sociology, philosophy: there is a tendency to forge new terms, so that it is impossible to read specialized magazines without knowing the keys. When the culture byzantinise it puts a term at its immediate object: the exchange. This specialization is dangerous: the “specialist”, is thus denounced by Bernard Shaw as “a man who knows more and more things in an increasingly restricted sector, so that in extreme cases it knows anything very”. That led to a regression of the faculty of comprehension, since the part is set up in a whole, and leads finally to the depreciation of the image external of the intellectual elite.

Jacques Julliard observes this rupture between the function of the intellectual and the image which it causes. The ideal defined by Condorcet ( Draft of a historical table of progress of the human spirit (1795), Five Memories on the state education (1791 - 1792) ), according to which the acquisition of the knowledge is the average main thing to hoist humanity, and where the school is from this point of view the average privileged person for social rise, was perverted. For Julliard this functioned under 3rd and until the interval wars. Today that does not function any more, because “the alliance of the scientists and the proletarians” broke, whereas it was fundamental. For Julliard (taking again Auguste Count) the scientist is a systematic proletarian: he cannot not say what he knows with the greatest number. At the same time the proletarian is a spontaneous scientist. There is thus an alliance objectifies, one advanced the other, the irruption of the knowledge advances the history thanks to the member elects of this knowledge. The public school does not fulfill any more this function, by addition there is a collecting of the instruction for the benefit of a nobility of state which is not the place of the social advancement.

Quotation

“the thoughts of the dominant class are also, at all the times, the dominant thoughts. ” Karl Marx, the German Ideology

See too

political Elitism
: leading Class,

context of the French policy: Énarchie

Culture: élitiste Culture

External bonds

Bauquet NR., Bocholier F. (to dir.), '' [[Communism and elites in Central Europe] ], PUF, 2006 (www.histoforum.org).

Random links: