Media Review: Richard Lachmann First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers

Abstract

Lachmann’s book offers a macroanalysis to comprehend the institutional and political logic with which organizations interact. Lachmann’s text is a historical and sociological approach to understanding the role of elites in the rise and fall of countries and empires. Elites that come to be identified through their capacity to exert direct control over other agents and through their distinctively extractive power to reap the benefits generated by the rest. At this juncture, any reader intrigued by the ambition displayed by the author, will be able to read a convincing analysis on the capacity of a limited number of individuals to either benefit large segments of society or just follow their personal interests in opposition to those of the majority. Lachmann tries to connect this behavioural pattern across different historical periods and geographies. By the end of the book, we are left with an interesting illustration of how historical sociology can explain social and institutional change. Against the Gramscian view on elite hegemony as routinised and socially accepted leadership, Lachmann argues that it is old-fashioned and straight-forward coercion which determines how hegemony is going to be exercised by a given geopolitical hegemon, dictating the fate of its empire (pp.50-51). 
 Historical analysis is an effective method to help us understand how elites behave. In an interesting deviation from the Marxian tradition, Lachman does not treat all elites as a homogeneous consortium, but as separate bodies of competing interests (Chapters 1&2). Emerging disputes can trigger a homogenous oligarchy or, more often than not, converge into unstable types of competition. When such competition takes place, elites tend to concede on important social issues that maintain social stability.