Elite is a group of individuals, more or less organized, who, as a small minority, possess an overwhelming amount of resources – power, status, wealth, or knowledge – which they use to control all of society or some specific field. Those fields include art, science, politics, sport, business, etc. Elites vary in several features: how closed off they are to newcomers, how much influence they have over their field, and how internally organized they are.  

                               Conservative View of Elites

Gaetano Mosca rejected the idea of ​​social progress. He presented his theory of power and elite in the books Theory of Governments and Parliamentary Government (1884) and The Ruling Class (1896, 1923). Mosca believed that in every society there is an organized minority that rules over an unorganized majority. The mass (majority) can never be organized, because it lacks the will and instinct for it, while there are always individuals who, due to their personal qualities (intellectual or material), stand out from the mass. The ruling class, in any society, strives to legitimize its power by invoking an abstract principle that represents a "political formula", and the very nature of that principle is different in different societies and historical situations. In some societies the divine will is emphasized, and in some the ancient traditional power of the monarch. There are different cultural and material conditions in different societies, which lead to the existence of a different political organization of government and the ruling elite. One society can go through different cycles - periods in which circumstances are stable, so the elite and its source of power are petrified, as well as its stable attitude towards the masses, while there are also periods of sudden change. Sudden change can be caused by external or internal factors, but once it happens, the old elite is replaced or destroyed, and the new elite rises.

According to Mosca, a good ruling class should be composed of brave, persistent, rational, educated, and sincere politicians who are committed to the common good and gradual reforms and are suspicious of the masses. In modern society, such a group is represented by the professional middle class, which, although it would be the best ruling class, has no power, because democracy has enabled the corrupt political elite to abuse democracy and win power. Mosca saw both democracy and socialism as enemies of the meritocratic rule of the middle class.

José Ortega y Gasset researched the topic of relations between the masses and the elites in the books Invertebrate Spain (1921) and The Revolt of the Masses (1930). At the core of his understanding of the relationship between history and politics is the belief that the division of society into elite and mass is present in every society and that the dialectical relationship of these two groups has a key impact on political events and historical development. Ortega y Gasset defines members of the elite, not in the context of the political or economic power they have, but according to individual qualities. Members of the elite, that is, selected and excellent people, have a desire for "authenticity", a desire to achieve a higher ideal of living based on the moral principle. In every society, there is a prominent minority, which makes up the elite, and a majority of the society which makes up the masses.

The elite has an innate predisposition to lead society, while the representatives of the masses have an innate predisposition to be led. In the period when the masses refused to be led by the elite, the state and society disintegrate. In Invertebrate Spain, Ortega y Gasset concluded that this was exactly what was happening in Spain at that time. The disintegration of society can also occur when the ruling classes degenerate, that is, they lose their vitality and turn into a mass. He believes that different human races have different proportions of selected and excellent people, so races that have relatively more "elite" people are superior to other races. Similar relations exist between different peoples of one race.

Ortega y Gasset believed that the entire history is characterized by two types of epochs - epochs in which there is a rise and domination of the elite and a period of decline of these elites and the parallel rise and rebellion of the masses against the elite. The changing of these two epochs forms historical cycles. The modern rise of the masses began in the 19th century and is connected with several factors: demographic population growth; increasing social wealth; increasing material security and living standards of all classes; the rise of cities; and the expansion of education. However, the two most important factors are the development and spread of liberal democracy and the rise of technology, understood as the application of scientific methods in industrialization. He also believed that equalizing the quality of life and life chances between different classes, genders, and countries, leads to the rise of the masses.

Vilfredo Pareto, like other theorists of the elite, divides every society into two separate strata - the elite that should lead the masses and the masses that should obediently follow the leadership of the elite. He believes that the elites that lead always exist, even when society seems completely democratic, or when mass revolutions take place. In both cases, the elites who direct political and social actions events are at the forefront of creating social order, or at the forefront of change. However, relations between the elite and the masses are never static. There are always several parallel processes that change this dynamic.

The first type of process is what Pareto calls the "circulation of elite." In the circulation of elites, we can single out two sub-processes. The first refers to individuals who fall out of the elite, because they lack personal qualities, while, at the same time, some members of the masses, also because of personal qualities, join the elite. The second sub-process occurs when the self-isolation of the elite occurs (the first sub-process is stopped), because, in that case, inferior individuals accumulate in one elite or ruling class, and superior individuals accumulate in the subordinate class, and, finally, there is a complete change of ruling class, with another, who then becomes the new elite. Paret's famous quote describing this shift is that "history is the graveyard of aristocracy."

Another type of dynamic within the elite are divisions and conflicts that occur within the elite itself. In cases where such conflicts are pronounced, the subordinate classes can derive some benefit for themselves. The next type of change within the elite is related to what means (force or cunning), and in what proportions, the elite uses to maintain its elite position. In that sense, Pareto refers to the division that Niccolò Machiavelli introduced between "lions" and "foxes" as different types of leaders. Lions use only force to stay in power, while foxes use cunning to trick the masses into following them. The application of either of these two strategies depends on many circumstances, so neither has a permanent primacy over the other. When one elite becomes conservative and applies only one type of leadership, and when that type of leadership ceases to be effective, then that elite is replaced by another. This new elite came to power because it used the type of leadership, force, or cunning, that was more appropriate to the circumstances.

                                  Left Critique of Elites

Charles Wright Mills, in his The Power Elite (1956), researches the elite in the United States. This elite controls large bureaucratic organizations within three sectors: private corporations, state administration, and the military. Members of all three mentioned elites share many common features: they were born in the upper classes, they went to the same private schools and the most elite universities, and they belong to the same private social clubs. Members of the elite who are not from the upper classes most often perform technocratic jobs: managers, professionals, and lawyers. Elites keep their positions, intergenerationally, by mostly getting married within the elite, but also on the intergenerational level, so that the same person changes positions during his career and moves from one to the other two elites. The integration of the elite is accompanied by the growing integration of these three sectors. The elite within the state administration pursues policies that suit the economic interests of corporations, the corporate elite finances the political elite, while the military elite depends on the political elite and creates a "military-industrial complex" with the corporate elite. Of these three sectors, the sector of private corporations has the greatest power.

Conflicts within the elite take place at the middle level of power, mainly over the division of spoils, and the media and political scientists pay the most attention to these conflicts, while no one questions the fundamental basis of the system itself. Conflicts within the elites are becoming increasingly integrated into the bureaucratic state apparatus, which replaces the real political struggle between political parties. Trade unions and other professional organizations tend to integrate into the state, and their leaders fight only for their own interests or for the interests of their own members. Below the elite is the class of white-collar workers, which, compared to the earlier middle class of small capitalists and professionals, has lost its autonomous power. At the bottom of the pyramid is a huge mass of ordinary people who are disorganized, uninformed, completely apathetic, indifferent, and without any real power, but are completely controlled and manipulated. The very high concentration of power that the elites have and the apathy and powerlessness of the largest part of the population, represent an exceptional threat to democracy. The bureaucratic rationality of the elite seeks to prevent huge masses of people from approaching life's problems autonomously and rationally.

In the second edition of his book Elites and Society (1993), Thomas 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.

                                            Global Elite

In Globalization: The Human Consequences (1998), Zygmunt Bauman explores how the process of globalization has led to a lack of control and planning at the level of the entire planet. The globalization of capital and the reduction of regulations lead to the "end of geography", that is, the end of the idea that geophysical boundaries can limit and slow down the flow of global capital. Even at the political level, the distinction between foreign and domestic policy is increasingly lost. For the global capitalist elite, political boundaries are as porous and unimportant as geophysical ones. Telecommunications and the Internet have enabled the transfer of information at the local level to be as fast as at the level of the entire planet. However, the technological revolution and reduction of spatial and temporal distances lead to increasing polarization at the global level. Thus, the differences between the poor and the rich are growing at the local level, where the rich elites are locked in fenced neighborhoods, which leads to increased rivalry and enmity between the elite and the masses of the poor. Withdrawing the elite and upper class to the rich suburbs almost always leads to an atmosphere of fear, paranoia, intolerance, and isolation, directed at those who do not live in those rich, racially and ethnically segregated suburbs. The artificially created demographic uniformity leads to conformism, and intolerance and calls for the preservation of order and peace, all in order to maintain that illusion of security and equality within those suburbs. This class-geographical segregation leads to an increase in poverty and crime in the poorer parts of big cities.

Saskia Sassen argues that two global classes - the transnational network of the most important civil servants, and transnational professionals and managers make up what she calls the "global elite".An 

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     -     Why Americans Still Don't Vote: And Why Politicians Want it That Way (2000);

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