Bio: (1920-1992) British sociologist. Thomas Bottomore is one of the most famous British sociologists within the Marxist tradition. He taught at the London School of Economics. Bottomore edited Marx's works but also wrote about Marx and Marxism. His fields of study were classes and elites, political sociology, and economic sociology. He saw Marxism as a theory of society and a political project, while he did not pay much attention to dialectics. He studied the socialist states in Europe and considered that their main problem was the lack of democracy and excessive centralization of economic decision-making.

In the second edition of his book Elites and Society (1993), Bottomore applies a neo-Marxist approach to elites and social power to study the new global political and economic order. He notes that at the end of the twentieth century, there was a huge concentration of wealth, while the world economy is controlled by the largest multinational corporations, as well as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which act as regulatory institutions of global capitalism. With the rise of the New Right and the collapse of socialist regimes, capitalism and the free market remain without a visible alternative. As other sources of power lose importance (such as control of the military), classes and class relations have the greatest impact on the political order. The class of very rich people begins to act as an elite and gradually shapes the political system. This elite achieves this by controlling all political parties, turning politics into a media circus, preventing electoral reform, marginalizing social movements operating outside institutional politics, and creating transnational political institutions that are far removed from ordinary people and whose representatives are not democratically elected. As a solution to this situation, Bottomore does not propose a communist revolution, but the introduction of participatory democracy and the strengthening of social movements that fight against the logic of global capitalism.

Main works

Sociology: A Guide to Problems and Literature (1962);

Elites and Society (1964);

Classes in Modern Society (1965);

Marxist Sociology (1975);

Sociology as Social Criticism (1975);

Political Sociology (1979);

Theories of Modern Capitalism (1985);

Elites and Society, 2ed. (1993).