Ruling class/ Translated by Hannan D. Khan

Gaetano Mosca's theory of the ruling class was evolved in
its first form during the years 1878-1881, while Mosca was a
student under Angelo Messedaglia at the University of Palermo.
It occurred to him at that time to generalize the method which
Taine had used in the Ancien régime. There, it will be remem-
bered, Taine sought the origins of the French Revolution in the
decadence of the groups of people that had ruled France during
the golden age of the old monarchy, a class which he considered
and analyzed under three headings, the crown, the clergy and the
nobility.
The first thought of the student Mosca was that perhaps any
society might be analyzed the way Taine had analyzed monarchi-
cal France; and his second was that, in view of the vogue that
doctrines of majority rule had had in the nineteenth century, he
had hit upon a most fertile and suggestive hypothesis. If one
looks closely at any country, be it commonly known as
archy, a tyranny, a republic or what one will, one inevitably
finds that actual power is wielded never by one person, the
monarch or head of the state, nor yet by the whole comm
mmunity
of citizens, but by a particular group of people which is always
fairly small in numbers as compared with the total population.
Taine had shown, also, that the traits of the brilliant French
civilization of the age of the Great King were the traits less
of the French people at large than of the same French aristocracy
and, in fact, seemed to be connected with the special conditions
under which that aristocracy had functioned during the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries.