In Defense of Elite Theory: A Reply to Cammack

Abstract

Cammack's (1990) attack on new elite paradigm provides a welcome opportunity to engage his criticisms and clarify our version of elite theory. At bottom, we are trying to pin down the elite structures, outlooks, choices, and actions that may account for gross disparities among the political records of societies that in economic, class, cultural, and other respects appear remarkably similar. Looking first at European societies after the sixteenth century, we ask why the political records of Britain and its English-speaking offshoots, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, are from early dates marked by more gradual, peaceful change than other European societies, and why politics in most of the other societies become benign only after World War II. Second, we ask why the political records of Latin American societies are uniformly characterized by instability and violence during the nineteenth century, and why a handful of them establish stable, increasingly democratic regimes in this century, while others do not. Third, among the many developing countries that achieved independence after World War II, we ask why countries so similarly situated as India and Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, Senegal and Nigeria, Botswana and Ghana, have strikingly different political records. Fourth, we ask why the major revolutions and counterrevolutions of the modern period had such diverse political outcomes even though their causes and processes in most cases had a strong family resemblance. Finally, we ask why politics in the prosperous, globally-dominant, post-industrial societies of northwestern Europe, North America, and Australasia swing from a placid phase during the 1950s and early 1960s to a much more fragmented and turbulent phase during the late 1960s and 1970s, only to reach what today looks like immobility in the face of profound social and economic problems. We believe that cogent and parsimonious answers to these questions can be found in a modified version of elite theory that ties the diverse patterns of regimes and their broader political context to continuities and transformations of national elites. We do not claim that elites alone run the political show, or that some simple, readily falsifiable explanation that holds for political change in all places and times can be derived from elite (or any other) theory. We argue only that elite theory illuminates the flow of modem political history and contemporary events better than competing theories, and that by synthesizing elements of elite and class theories, it may be possible to build a more powerful theory. In his attack, Cammack gives the impression that he is striking at the heart of our position. But his criticisms are based on a partial reading and caricature of our work. He ignores our attempted synthesis of elite and class theory, and he says nothing about the closeness or remoteness of our theoretical stance as a whole to modem political history. Instead, he concentrates on methodological issues in the nexus between elites and regimes, and his only notice of historical or contemporary political change comes in a few remarks about competing interpretations of English politics in the late seventeenth century. Cammack first takes issue with our definition of elites, calling it too permissive because it ostensibly includes, in his words, of movements that may lack any permanent organizational structure, thereby making any fully consensual elite . . . unstable by definition. This is incorrect. Starting with an extended discussion of the subject 20 years ago (Field and Higley 1973), we have consistently followed Weber and Michels in conceiving of elites as rooted in bureaucratic organization. Movement leaders are elites only to the extent that the movements are bureaucratically struc-