Hi, Hugo. Congratulations on the publication of your important new book, Elites and Democracy. It was wonderful to read and engage with. My first question is, what would you say is the book’s main contribution to political theory scholarship?
First, Maor, thank you so much for the kind words.
For political theory, as opposed to the history of political thought, the main contribution has to do with what I’ve called dynamic democracy: the idea of trying to rethink what democracy might mean and what theory of democracy might come from that. If it is the case that elites always rule—if it’s factually true, and people may disagree with this—then what can democracy mean in that context?
The idea of the sovereignty of the people or majority rule seems a bit out of touch with reality. Maybe true in the abstract, but not necessarily in touch with reality. What I propose in the book is this idea of dynamic democracy. The idea is that what you see is a perpetual challenge by rising elites to established elites. There’s a dynamic element: I try to focus on the interaction between social movements and established elites as mediated through political institutions, most commonly political parties, because that’s what you associate modern democracy with, but there are other institutions within which this could take place.
Social movements put pressure on the political system. This is why I use the term “dynamic,” because dynamism means the application of force to a system, usually to speed it up. So it’s movement. Movement is the key term here. Social movements put pressure on the political system, but on their own, they’re not enough to change the political system in a profound sense.
I argue that what you need is another element. A faction of the established elite must be willing to break with the established elite and come over to the side of the social movement, and together they can then challenge or overthrow the established elite, although with no guarantee of success.
This goes beyond a more usual left-right divide, because you could have circulation of elites within the right or the left without there necessarily being any change. You may even have a kind of continuity between left and right. In the UK, we often have this line about Margaret Thatcher saying her biggest success was Tony Blair, that even though Labour had taken over from the Conservatives— or New Labour had taken over from the Conservatives—her policies seemed to continue. Or you can even see changes, profound changes, within political parties themselves. In the Conservative Party, David Cameron is quite liberal in the pre-Brexit context, and figures such as Theresa May or Boris Johnson are more either populist or authoritarian.
One of the ways of characterizing that change comes from Vilfredo Pareto, best known as an economist. He said that you could divide elites into lions and foxes. That’s what I’m saying about dynamic democracy. That it’s rising elites who challenge established elites. One way of characterizing that is social movements versus established elites with a key role played by political institutions as mediating between the two.
In Bernard Manin’s book The Principles of Representative Government, he said that representative governments have a dual aspect. There’s an aristocratic side and there’s a democratic side. I want to maintain those two by saying, yes, there’s obviously a democratic side understood as social movements, but there are also elites. And if we want to understand what’s going on in our real democracies, what we call today democracies, we have to keep sight of both of those things.
But that doesn’t mean we give up. It means that there’s a perpetual challenge, and there’s a possibility of change. Maybe instead of thinking about democracy and oligarchy as a dichotomy—either we have a democracy or we have an oligarchy—we should think about more of a continuum: more political, economic, and social equality or less of it, and the normative challenge then that we have is to try to push towards more political, economic, social equality without—I think that’s the claim—without thinking that we’re actually ever fully going to get there. The striving itself, I think, is worthwhile and can have democratic benefits.
Thank you very much. I’ll move on to my next question, which touches on some of the things you’ve already discussed; perhaps you’d be willing to elaborate. The book takes up thorny questions related to democracy, putting forth an original position regarding what democracy realistically can and cannot accomplish. What is democracy to you, and what is the most it can hope or aim to accomplish?
I think democracy operates on two different levels here. We have the ideal of democracy, which remains political equality. And I say we can strive towards that, but I do not think, realistically, we’re ever going to achieve it. It’s just impossible for certain reasons. The main stumbling block is the fact that there are always elites that are there for structural reasons, perhaps even for psychological reasons, depending on which author you draw on, which line you follow. But they’re there, and that obstacle I don’t think is ever going to fade.
In some ways, it’s not simply an obstacle, but it’s something that’s positive within the system, too. Elites are a feature, not a bug. They’re always going to be there, and they may play a positive, stabilizing role or a role as intermediary, and that may be positive.
So that’s the ideal democracy. And then we have the reality of our democratic institutions or democratic experience. And there I want to move the focus a bit. Often we look at institutions and say, “Oh, there’s an election, so that’s democracy.” I want to say that another way of looking at things is to see this striving, this competition between rising elites and established elites. That’s what I want to bring to discussions of democratic theory.
There’s this nice metaphor that I use, which Robert Michels uses from Aesop’s fables. There’s a peasant on his deathbed who tells his children there’s a buried treasure in the field. He dies, and the children are very excited. They go to the land, and they dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, looking for this treasure. Of course, they never find the treasure, but in having tilled the land, they make themselves richer. That’s a nice way of thinking about the two senses of democracy I have. True democracy, true political equality, is buried treasure in a field that you never find. However, in striving towards it, tilling the land, tilling the democratic land, there are some real worthwhile benefits—democratic benefits—that come from it. And I think that’s something that we need to focus more on.
Can you say a few words about how dynamic democracy differs from other models and understandings of democracy?
The main division is that there are dynamic understandings of democracy and more static understandings of democracy. The dynamic understanding is that there’s always change, there’s always movement, there’s always challenge. It’s never a fixed point. Other theories of democracy tend to have fixed points.
To give you an example, Robert Dahl, when he was talking about polyarchy, had a number of different criteria, and he said, if this regime meets these criteria, then it’s considered to be a polyarchy, not a democracy. But those criteria never really change. It’s a fixed point. John Rawls himself wasn’t really a democratic theorist but had these two principles of justice which have inspired a lot of democratic thought, and, again, those two principles of justice don’t really change.
There are other theories of democracy that dynamic democracy is closer to but still diverges from in some ways. You might think of agonistic democracy, for instance, which also has this idea of striving. I think that agonistic democracy sometimes overlooks—and this is valid for democratic theory more broadly—its elitist foundations, because the time and resources one would need to fully engage in agonistic democracy is beyond the reach of most people. And that’s one of the positive things about representative government. Yes, it’s not full participation, but it allows people to participate mediated through institutions in a way that agonistic democracy does not.
The democratic theory that’s the closest to mine was developed by John Medearis: oppositional democracy, as he calls it. He also has the static/dynamic difference. I would point out two differences between his theory and mine. The first is that the kind of figures I look at, the so-called elite theorists of democracy—Mosca, Pareto, Michels—are seen as part of the static conception of democracy, because they want to slow things down, whereas I think, no, actually, they’re the ones who really set the groundwork for the type of dynamic democracy that I want to advocate. And another one is that oppositional democracy, I think, as Medearis theorizes it, is quite defensive in certain ways, quite reactive. It tries to defend certain things. I want to see mine as a kind of more forward-looking and engaged with the process itself.
This is very helpful and interesting. Thanks so much. At its best, at its most robust, what can the relationship between democracy and social movements look like?
In dynamic democracy, one of the key elements is social movements. This is partially drawn from one of the figures I look at, Gaetano Mosca, who has a theory that there are always what he calls social forces that emerge over time. The theory also takes history as its starting point, whereas some other democratic theories sometimes are a bit more abstract. Here it always has to be rooted in certain historical moments in time. Mosca thinks there are always new social forces developing. These can come about from new ideas, new technological innovations. The internet or AI for him would have been a new social force, which would lead then to a new type of elite, and the question then is how would that rising elite challenge the established political system, and would it fit into the schemata that I tried to elaborate.
One of the ways of thinking about the US in the last ten years or so is that there’s been something like an established elite that’s been challenged by a rising elite. Somebody like Trump, who is also an elite but is an outsider, not a political elite—he’s an economic elite—he’s a social media personality who probably would never have come to power if there wasn’t this new social force, Twitter or X as it’s now called. But Donald Trump, particularly in 2016, I don’t think ever comes to power unless certain members of the Republican Party establishment throw in their lot with them, whether it’s Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan. If he just ran as a third candidate, I don’t think he would have gone very far.
I want to emphasize that this is a realist point. There’s energy coming from the social forces, social movements, new rising elites. Then there’s a bit of resistance on the elite side, but there’s the combination of hope and then realism or pessimism. But I think if we are serious about what a theory of democracy should look like— i.e., a theory that offers us an account of how democracy actually works—we need to hold those two things together and work with them. It’s not to dampen any kind of democratic expectation, but it’s to be clear in terms of what we can actually achieve.
And I think that could be liberating—as opposed to having ideals which we don’t fulfill, and then we become desperate and despondent and depressed about democracy, and we end up looking for salvation somewhere else. Instead, these are the things we can strive to do, and they’re worthwhile, and we should do them. And if we succeed, then we’ll feel very good about ourselves in a way that wouldn’t be the case if we just have these unrealistic ideals that we fail to achieve.
What can the political left hope to learn from your new book?
One thing they can learn is that politics is in constant flux. Although the situation at the moment looks depressing in the US, things will change. Take Pareto on this idea of the circulation of elites: His whole historical theory is to say sometimes the foxes are in power and sometimes the lions are in power. But this always circulates. There’s something hopeful about that. When Trump first came to power, it seemed there was nothing to do, but now the Trump coalition is breaking up, and he’s stuck on Iran.
There’s always a possibility of change, and you have to hold on to that. I’ve tried to identify where true change can happen, in this interaction between social movements and political elites, mediated through political institutions. One of the questions I had in articulating this kind of schemata was, why is it that MAGA seems to bring a kind of a political candidate directly to power and to hold the White House whereas Black Lives Matter, however much impact it had, didn’t. There wasn’t a specific Black Lives Matter candidate. There are certain places in the US where the African American vote played an important role, but it didn’t seem as direct as MAGA. This is one of the things I was trying to think through.
So the descriptive element is saying, okay, you need these elements, you need a social movement that’s applying pressure to the political system, but you also need an element of the established elite to break off and then come over to your side. That’s the configuration one needs for there to be more profound political change than simply a kind of a left-right change. That’s not only simply a descriptive claim, it’s also meant to be normative. If you’re on the left today in the US and you’re out of power and you’re looking at Trump, you might ask: Where is the social force we can take energy from? Which part of the establishment? Where’s the political institution? Historically, that’s been political parties, but there could be other institutions. I have to figure out what needs to be done if I want something to change. That’s what the theory of dynamic democracy offers.
I’ve talked about democracy and oligarchy being on a continuum, so the question must be, What type of policies and what type of institutions would move us towards political equality, social equality, economic equality? I’d like to think what’s nice also about dynamic democracy is that it doesn’t just focus on political equality but has a broader scope. That’s part of my critique of Joseph Schumpeter, who’s very interesting but has a very narrow political scope, whereas I think my so-called elite theorists of democracy—Mosca, Pareto, Michels—had a much more societal, broader view: economic, political, and social.
I try to say that “democracy” may be the wrong term. We should instead think about democratization. How do we democratize? And we don’t simply mean that politically, but economically and socially too.
Machiavelli is a contested and interesting figure in political theory. What aspects of his thought inform your analysis and positions?
The book tries to reconstruct three figures, Mosca, Pareto, Michels. They’re the first to say, actually, even though there’s a democracy in the modern setting, the elites always rule. They have also been described as Machiavellians or Neo-Machiavellians. This was the term that was given to them by James Burnham, a Trotskyist who became a reactionary. He had a book that came out not long after The Managerial Revolution called The Machiavellians in which these figures are key.
Pareto talks about elites, but he thinks political elites are basically of two different kinds. You have the foxes, who are more cunning. Their rule then is characterized by decentralization—combinazioni is the Italian term for the sentiment which animates their rule. It has more to do with combination, compromise, skepticism, and an unwillingness to use force, whereas lions are more willing to use force, tend toward centralization, and are more faith-based.
These two figures are drawn directly from Machiavelli. In The Prince, he talks about the ideal prince being the combination of both the lion and the fox. You need to be a lion to scare off the wolves who are trying to take you down, but you also need to be a fox to avoid the traps that a lion might fall into. Pareto says, okay, but that’s an ideal ruler. Actually, sometimes the lions and sometimes the foxes are in power.
Another figure I look at, Raymond Aron, who in North American political circles is more known for his theories of international relations—he was a confidant of Henry Kissinger—writes a lot on democratic theory and looks specifically not at Machiavelli’s Prince but at The Discourses. Machiavelli has this famous line in The Discourses where he says the Roman Republic’s liberty was based on the fact that there was tumult, that there was conflict between the plebs and the patricians. I think that’s ultimately the normative position my book lands on, which is to say, I think that there are elites and a struggle between elites, but precisely in that struggle, in that conflict, is where liberty may appear. That’s still normative, which is an important point the book is trying to make.
What is a bad way of reading your arguments? Do you expect misreadings?
Some of the pushback has been, okay, this is not a theory about democracy at all. It’s a theory about competitive elitism. Certain people say that democracy is only the social movement aspect of it. I’m trying to say, if we’re realistic about how our democratic systems—our so-called democratic systems—work, the political systems that we happen to live in, most of us in the Western world, we should think about these two aspects, elites and democracy.
I could see how certain people, who are more aligned with participatory democracy want to say, no, we want participation. What I’m trying to warn people about is that these might be great ideas, but do not be fooled into thinking that you’re going to get rid of elites. You’re just going to have new elites that are going to emerge through these new institutions. They may be better elites or they may be worse elites, and that’s very much worth exploring. But it would be naive to think you’re going to get rid of elites altogether. We ought to be realistic about what can be achieved.
Another view is to ask whether this focus on elites is the wrong one. Should we be focusing more on class? Should we be focusing on other things? Does it hide more than it provides? Obviously, I’ve written this book, so I don’t think that’s the case. Indeed, the three authors, Mosca, Pareto, and Michels, are all very, very interested in Marx and Marxism. Perhaps Marxism more than Marx as such.
Their pushback is to say that just because you get a proletarian revolution does not mean you’re going to get rid of rulers as such. You just get a new type of elite. Historically, that’s been borne out: think about things that happened in Eastern Europe after the Second World War and in Russia. You got rid of private property, but you just had a new type of elite.
I think that naming the problem, and then naming the obstacle, which I call “elites,” is not the end of the discussion, as people often take it to be. I think it’s the start of the discussion. What type of elites do we have? How do they come to power? What’s the relationship with the people? That makes for a much richer, much more nuanced, and I think much more fulfilling type of discussion.
Class is very interesting. Race, gender, all these things are very, very interesting. I don’t want to deny that. And I often think of political theory as a way of looking at things slightly differently, offering a theory. That doesn’t mean it’s all-encompassing. It might be simplified, but because it’s simplified, it focuses our attention on something. To the question of elites, you can add the other ones on top. It gives you a richer picture. So that’s at least the claim, which I’m obviously open to being refuted on, but I hope it’s the start of a richer discussion, and a different discussion than perhaps the ones we usually have.
You mentioned Donald Trump in your book and earlier in our discussion today. How does his recent political success relate to your main arguments?
The theory of dynamic democracy that I developed wants to take seriously populism. I’m not one of the people who wants to say populism is outside of the democratic field. It’s part of it and will always be part of it. If you’re trying to say, we want to overthrow the established elites, you’re going to have a type of populist language. It’s bringing to light certain aspects or sentiments that have been overlooked for a long time.
That doesn’t mean that we just celebrate it. The theory allows us to analyze it and to judge it vis-a-vis the continuum we’ve been talking about. Is it something that’s pushing towards more political equality or equality more broadly, or not?
Perhaps one way of characterizing this, and I do it in the book, is to say that after a long period of the foxes seemingly ruling, it seems like the lions have come back to power. There’s a lot more strongman rule and much more willingness to use violence.
Secondly, democracy is always indeterminate. We never know. The challenge is important, and the challenge is key. That’s the motor of democracy. We never know beforehand whether it’s going to be good for equality. We have the tools to analyze it, but we can’t predetermine whether it’s going to be good or bad, even though we need to continue to seek change. It’s only within the challenge that there’s a possibility of change.
What do you expect non-academic audiences to get out of this book, and how do you expect them to engage with it?
I do have this little paragraph at the beginning of the book where I say that this is an academic book, and I don’t want to deny that. But if you say to people that democracy is something that we will never really achieve, but we keep striving towards it and something good will come out of that, that’s something that people instinctively get. We’ll never really get there, but we keep fighting for it. That sentiment, I think, does exist more broadly. As I say in that short paragraph, here’s an attempt to give a systematic, academic account of what’s going on, of that sentiment that people have. I then try to apply this framework to current events.
In France, there is this publishing house called Grasset. It’s a historic house that published the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and that has been bought up by this far-right billionaire who’s slowly buying up legacy media, legacy publishing houses. A lot of famous authors who have books with Grasset said they didn’t want to be associated with it anymore, including Bernard-Henri Lévy and Virginie Despentes, who wrote King Kong Theory. Can we understand that through the lens of dynamic democracy? You have these people that are trying to earn legitimacy by buying up not just legacy media, but legacy printing houses, and you have the established elite fighting back.
Similarly, Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella are the far-right candidates in France. Marine Le Pen apparently had lunch with Bernard Arnault, the richest man in France. He’s the owner of Louis Vuitton. Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella are the rising elite, and they’re trying to bring established economic elites over to their side in a way Donald Trump was able to bring the rising economic elite, the “tech bros,” over to his side in 2024.
