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Morteza Hajizadeh
Welcome to the New Books Network hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh. Today I'm honored to be speaking with a special guest about a topic which is very important and very much talked about these days, about democracy and why elites always rule democracies and why recognizing this reality can help us to respond to the crisis of democracy today. The book we're going to discuss is called Elites and Democracy, published by Princeton University Press in 2026. And with me to discuss the book is Hugo Drucken. Hugo Drucken is an associate professor in political theory. He's the historian of modern political thought and also with interest in Nietzsche's politics and he teaches at the University of Nautica. Hugo, welcome to New Books Network.
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Hugo Drucken
Thanks so much Batista. To have me on.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about your background and more importantly, why you decided to write the book. There are lots of books about democracy from different angles and aspects, but you've written a book about elites and democracy. Tell us how the idea of the book came to you.
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Hugo Drucken
Yeah, thanks so much. As you said, I'm an associate professor of Political theory at the University of Nottingham. This is my second book. The first book was on Nietzsche's great politics, which came out of the PhD I did in Cambridge a while ago now. Why elite and democracy? I think like a lot of people, perhaps in the academy, 2016 seemed to be quite a watershed year in the UK. Obviously there was the Brexit vote. The UK leaving the European Union which caused it was quite A political earthquake in many ways. And if you think about the us, that's obviously the first election of Donald Trump. So within that kind of sphere, there's a lot of things that have seemed to change and like a lot of, I think academics was trying to make sense of what was going on at the time 2016 in particular, the main lens through which a lot of these events, and obviously it wasn't just restricted to the UK and the us. There's also in Europe there was this kind of populist wave against the eu across the world you can think about also there's obviously MODI in India, Russia and China where there seems to be this rise of these strong men. At the time, in 2016, at least it was. Populism was the main lens through which a lot of these events were understood. And I don't mean to deny that at all. I think that was very, very interesting. But it did strike me that a lot of the so called populist leaders who were speaking in the name of this pure people were themselves elites of some description. They didn't just appear out of nowhere. So in the uk, somebody like this is subsequent after obviously to the Brexit vote itself. But Boris Johnson was one of the leaders of the Brexit vote who was as established, but as it comes, in many ways he was educated at Eton, he went to Oxford, he did study PPE philosophy, politics and economics, which is what normally people study who go into politics subsequently. But he's studying Cossacks. And in many ways it's the fact that he moved over to the side, if you want, of Brexit, of the Leave vote, that in some ways he might have gone over the line. You might say the same about Donald Trump. I mean, yes, he's a political outsider in many ways, but he's clearly part of the economic 1%. He was also a media personality through the Apprentice. And you could say the same thing about lots of other people across not just the Western world, I think obviously in Marine Le Pen, these types of people, but also across the world more generally. So I was just intrigued by this id. And if you want the personal backstory, it just reminded me when I was doing my undergraduate in Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, one of the last courses I took was on contemporary democratic theory. And we had read the so called IB theorists of democracy. These people like Gaetana Mosca, Wilfredo Pareto and Robert McKels. And I remember being very, very kind of impressed by them. And in many ways they had somewhat disabused me, I think of some of the ideals I might have had of democracy at the time. And it just seemed like a nice way of putting those two together. That is, on the one hand, the moment seemed to have a focus on elites and obviously before that there was a lot of rhetoric of the 99 versus the 1%. There was a lot of anti elite rhetoric. Yet at the same time a lot of leaders seem to be elites of some description. So it seemed like a good time for me at least to try to make sense of what was going on, was to go back to these thinkers and see what lights they might shed on the politics we find or contemporary political situation we find ourselves in today. So that was the origins of the book, which it's 2026. So obviously it took me a bit of time to work through, but that's how I came to and that's what I've hopefully managed to do.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
That's a very good explanation. I guess it puts it into perspective in terms of the topic you've chosen. The thing is that there are a lot of books on democracy and crisis of democracy. Funnily enough, most of them are also published by Princeton University of France. There is this concept that you discuss in the book which is called dynamic democracy. Can you tell us what it means and how does that idea, this idea of dynamic democracy, challenge the traditional definitions of democracy, which is the rule by the people?
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Hugo Drucken
Yeah, so I think a couple of questions in there. Firstly, yes, maybe Princeton University Press have cornered a market on the challenges of democracy. And I think what I specifically did want to bring in was the focus on elites to say, okay, there are elites. And maybe we have to accept that as a fact about the societies within which we lead. Even modern democracies, there are still elites. But I didn't mean that to be the end of the conversation. I was hoping that would be the beginning of the conversation because just because you say there are elites doesn't mean, okay, there's elites for stubbs and noble. Which type of elites are there? How do they come to power? What is their relationship with the people? These are all very, very, I think, productive questions. And those are the questions I wanted to ask. So how does this length then to dynamic democracy? Dynamic democracy precisely tries to articulate this relationship between elites and the people. And it says that, okay, firstly, the way we need to understand politics more broadly actually is to say that in politics there's always established elites who are being challenged by rising elites. That's just kind of. It seems to be a natural process, and not necessarily only in democratic politics, but in politics more generally. And sometimes the established elites are able to maintain power, sometimes they're not, they're overthrown. So how do we try to make sense of that? That's how I've tried to make sense of it within dynamic democracy, which takes as a starting point also the idea that when we think about democracy and non democracies, whether it's oligarchic regimes or authoritarian regimes, I think it's perhaps a mistake to think of them as a dichotomy which is either you have a democracy or you don't have a democracy. Maybe it's better to think of this about it as a continuum that there are certain regimes that are more democratic or less democratic than others. More democracy here understood as obviously more political equality. If there's more political equality, which can manifest itself through more participation. And I think actually the authors that I look at broaden that perspective a bit and saying it's not just about political equality, we can also bring social and economic equality into it. So if you think about it as a continuum, then the democratic elements is trying to push the cursor on the continuum towards more democracy, understood as more equality, political, social or economic. Dynamic democracy then is trying to locate where that change may actually happen. Where? When there is a rising elite that challenges an established elite. When can we say there to be a change? And there's three aspects to it. Firstly, it says that you do need something like a social movement or change that is occurring, that is putting pressure on the political system. Then what you need is for this change to come about. So social movements on their own are not sufficient to change a political system. What they need is, is they also need a part of the established elite to break off from that established elite and join the social movements. And this is mediated through political institutions or institutions more broadly. But normally we think about this as mediated through political parties. That sounds a bit abstract if you want to give you a concrete example. If you look at what happened in Hungary quite recently, Viktor Orban had been in power for a very, very long time. 18 years, I think. Continual, continuous, perhaps 20 overall, if not more. And he's just been unseated by this new leader, Magyar. But if you think about how Magyar came to power, Magyar himself was a member of the established defeat. He was a member of Orban's Fidesz party, but he broke with that party because of scandals concerning paedophilia which they themselves had led to social protest movements. Right. And it's the so Magyar breaks and seizes the leadership you want of these social, social protest movements. He articulates it through a party that existed, but that he took over at Caesar and used that to challenge Orban. So you have the three elements there, the social protest movement, you have the political party as the mediating political institution, and the elite that is broken off from the established elite. And that's the model that dynamic democracy tries to capture. Obviously, the claim is not here that this is always going to work. The claim is you need those ingredients for a challenge to actually a challenge that's going to change how politics is occurring in that moment in time to come about. It may or may not work. We never know of democracy. It's a regime of indeterminacy. But that's at least the model. And that's what dynamic democracy is trying to point to as a way of saying, okay, how can change happen? And does that change then lead to more political equality? Yes or no?
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Another part of the book that I enjoy, which was, I guess, in your introduction, is where you study these dynamics between populism and elitism. And you argue that they're not really opposite, but they're very much intertwined. And a lot of people, at least uninitiated, those who are uninitiated into politics, might find it surprising because they usually find these two to be the opposite. Can you tell us how they are kind of intertwined?
- [11:58]
Hugo Drucken
Yes. The normal view would be there would be opposites. As you rightly say, Populism is this idea that politics is the true people against a kind of a corrupt elite, whereas elitism, on the one hand, seems to defend. Seems to think that the people are not in a capacity to rule and then elite should rule instead. That's a bit of a caricature view of what elite theory, which the people I look at, they don't actually really say that, but that's normally the opposition. But I want to say actually in some ways, they're kind of slightly mirror images of each other. But what does link them, as I've said already, is the fact that these populist leaders are not. They don't come out of nowhere. They're elites themselves. So there's a link between populism and elite theories because of the leaders, and I've given you examples already, if you want, of Donald Trump or Boris Johnson or again of my guard, there's a link between the two of them. So we need to go, I think, beyond that opposition and think more seriously. What is the relationship between the two, in some ways, you can. The dynamic democracy that I've just explained tries to articulate the relationship between two. Maybe populism is that kind of more social. Social movement, social protest movement, which we've seen throughout the world. And on the other hand, you have these kind of elites of some description that are there to challenge the established elites mediated through political institutions. I mean, I don't think, for instance, Donald Trump. I don't think Donald Trump comes to power if he's not able to take over the Republican Party. If he runs as a third candidate, I'm not sure that his presidency is actually successful. So the elements seem to be there. You have the one hand, the protest movement or the social movement, maga. And before that, you had the Tea Party movement. So that's there. It's putting pressure on the political system. You have an elite who is not part of the established political elite, but is a part of an elite, more broadly, an economic elite, who's there to challenge the political elite. And this is mediated through political parties, namely the Republican Party. So that's how I was trying to articulate the theory and put the relationship between populism and elitism together.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
I think I read a book some time ago which was called Democratic Elitism, the Founding Myth of American Political Science, where the author talked about a number of Italian political theories. And again, I found it interesting. And in your book, you sort of do the same. You talk about some political theories. Unfortunately, we won't be able to go through all of them, but some we can't discuss. And I'm sure I'm going to be mispronouncing a lot of names. So you forgive me, and you would correct me. One of the Italian theories that you discuss is, well, Moscow. How do you pronounce the first name? Is it Gaeta?
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Hugo Drucken
Gaetano. Gaetano Mosca.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Gaetano Moscow. Yeah. And I guess he had this core argument about why elites are inevitably. They inevitably rule in a political system. Can you briefly introduce him and tell us about his core argument?
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Hugo Drucken
Yeah, with pleasure. And I think the book you're referring to is by Natasha Piano, whom I know quite well. And indeed, we started working on these themes at similar times, and we've done conferences together, et cetera. Her perspective is to say that a lot of the same figures that we look at have been misunderstood. And she has this very nice turn of phrase where she says, these are not elite theorists of democracy, they're democratic theorists of elitism, that we've misunderstood them, that we should understand them. The Other way around. I have to say I don't share that perspective. I do think they are all saying that elites do rule. But then the question becomes, okay, well, which type of elites? How are they in power? What is their relationship to the people? Those types of questions. I don't think they're denying elite rule as such. They are perhaps rejecting the elites of their time, but that's not the same thing. So Mosca, Mosca is the father figure in some ways, although between him and maybe another figure who's better known and whom we might talk about, Wilfredo Pareto, because Pareto is an economist and we know Pareto's ideas of Pareto efficiency or the 80:20 rule. But Moscow is really the first to say, okay, except from these very primitive society, there's always a minority that rules over a majority. And the simple reason for, for him is that minorities tend to be organized and majorities are not. So he dismisses lots of other theories about race or the Darwinian struggle for existence or climate or anything like that. He said, no, it's to do with organization. And basically you have a ruling class. He's the one who gives us that term, you have a ruling class. But we need to understand how the ruling class rules. He talks about the political formula, which is a type of formula it uses to legitimize its rules, that it says it's ruling, it's got a divine right to rule, or it's ruling in the name of the people. And it's quite a developed theory actually that I think has been underlooked. And it's linked to the dynamic democracy I was trying to articulate. Because Moscow says, listen, there are always different, what he calls social forces appearing over time. So these are always very historical perspectives. They're not abstract, philosophical, they're historical. He says there's always new social forces arising. These may arise because of there's new ideas or there's technological change or whatever it might be. So you might think today, the Internet or social media as a new social force that has occurred and therefore that brings new elites to power or new elites arise from this. You think about Silicon Valley, you think about the so called tech Bros. And that's again another way to link it back to Donald Trump if you want, because in 2024, the campaign there, he's able to bring that new economic elite over to his side. So he says it's that. But the challenge for Moscow is to say, okay, there are these social forces and there's the ruling class and you can judge the ruling class by how well they're able to bring these social forces into society as a whole. So that there's not just one social force that would dominate everything. That you have a system which he calls juridical defense. Which to us would be translated to contemporary parlance would be a system of checks and balance, A system of rule of law and a system of pluralism. So that's his overall view. And he is very critical of the elites of his day. And actually at the end of his life, the final speech he makes as an Italian senator is denouncing the rise of fascism and denouncing Mussolini. Precisely because he accuses fascism and Mussolini of wanting it's a new social force, but of wanting to be the only social force that completely dominates politics, economics and society. And therefore becomes a tyrannical social force. And that's why he denounces it. So it just goes to show, just because you say there is a ruling class doesn't mean that you necessarily have to approve of the ruling class of your time. It gives you the tools to be able to offer nevertheless a critique of society. And then perhaps also a positive vision of which type of elite should rule. And in his case for Mosca, he thought their more educated and expert class should have a stronger role in the constitutional setup of Italy of his time. Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney. Let's go get ready for a new case.
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Hugo Drucken
New friends. You are Gary the Snake. And your last name the Snake Dream Team. Zootopia has a secret reptile population. You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home. You're clearly barking at. Zootopia 2, now available on Disney. Rated PG.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
How do you think he managed to sort of reconcile his critique of democracy with these later defense of parliamentary institutions?
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Hugo Drucken
Yeah, very good question. Because it also depends what we mean by democracy at the time. Democracy. Right. So these are people who are writing at the turn of the 20th century, late 19th century, beginning of the 20th century. So democracy, it's the beginnings of democracy as we know it today. When we think about democracy, we think about universal suffrage. We talk about political parties. These were all in somewhat embryonic form at the turn of the 20th century. There's limited suffrage, not many people are involved. Political parties are only just about coming about. So for them, democracy is something closer. And they even will use these terms. For them. Democracy goes back a bit more to Rousseau where it's kind of really direct democracy. The people Rule directly in politics and society and in economics too. So it's a complete takeover by the people who rule directly. In the same way that he was worried about fascism because he thought it would be one social force that would come to dominate all others and become tyrannical. It's the same critique he has there which is perhaps closer to what he calls corporatism or maybe even what we would today think about as socialism, to take over everything and completely change society as a whole. Against that, he defended what he would call representative government, which is probably closer to the form of what we call liberal democracy today. Right. Representative government, which is not direct democracy, but representative government, representative democracy within a constitutional framework. Within a liberal constitutional framework within which there are rights, there's the rule of law, there's counterbalances, and also a degree of pluralism. So what he was defending as a form of rule looks like the type of democracies, so called democracies, that we have today. And for them at the time, democracy meant something else, meant something closer to direct, perhaps a bit more transformative or even revolutionary democracy, which one end pointed out might have been more socialism. If you think back at the beginning of the 20th century. Right. Not socialism as perhaps as we understand it today, but at the beginning of the 20th century in their understanding of socialism.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And there was another thinker you just mentioned, Pareto, and he had this concept of circulation of elites, which was sort of different from Moscow's ruling class theory. Who was Pareto and what was his idea of circulation of elites?
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Hugo Drucken
Yeah, great. And as I mentioned Pareto, I think he's the more known figure. And I'm sure your listeners will have heard of these economic theories, Pareto efficiency or the 8020 rule, these types of ideas. But he is the first. So Pareto in 1902 is the first person to give us the term elite as we understand it today. And he's half French, half Italian. He's lecturing in Lausanne and Switzerland at the time. So it's the French word that he uses, elite with the accent. It's a French word and he really introduces it. And also then when he writes in Italian, he keeps the French word. And for a long time, elite was spelled with the accent. It becomes anglicized later. I think the only publication that I've kind of. Or one of the publications that still uses the word elite with the accent, I think is the New Yorker, which I think says more about the New Yorker than anything else. So he read the idea that an elite is that in every sphere of Activity of human activity, there might be an elite the best at what they do. That's really his idea. It doesn't really exist in that form before. And he really thinks about it beyond good and evil. It's not necessarily moral. So of course you can have the best chess player, but you can also have the best courtesan or the best thief or the best lawyer or whatever it might be. So he says, okay, well, it's very simplistic. He says, okay, look at every sphere of human activity and the best within those spheres, you give him a 9 or a 10, and those the worst, you give him a 0 or 1 or whatever it might be. But he does distinguish, and this is important, between those who are involved who are political elites and those who are not. So his example for a political elite is obviously it's Napoleon. He says, okay, Napoleon, you can agree or disagree with what he did or who he was, or whether how great he was, but he was obviously a kind of a world historical figure and he had huge consequences on politics, on, on geographical geopolitics, whatever it might be. So we will give him a 10. He's part of the ruling elite. Whereas other people who may be elites in their spheres may not necessarily obviously transition to a political elite too. I like to bring in the example of Garry Kasparov, who obviously was a chess elite, but he subsequently came into politics too. But that's an exception that confirms the rule, if you want. But then what Pareto adds to that. So that's the theory of the elite. But as you mentioned, there's also this idea of the circulation of elites. Pareto drawing on his Italian predecessor Machiavelli and these thinkers that we're talking about here. Some people have also name called it the Machiavellians or the Neo Machiavellians, because of this link to Machiavelli. But if you remember, and if your listeners will remember, I'm sure they'll remember reading the Machine. Machiavelli is the prince. And in the Prince, Machiavelli says the ideal ruler is a combination of two animal figures, the lion and the fox. You need to be a lion because you need to be strong enough to scare off the wolves who want to take you down. But you also need to be the fox to avoid the traps or the snares that may be there for you, which the lion may fall into. And so Machiavelli says the ideal prince is a combination of the two. Pareto takes that idea and says, okay, you have these elites, but you Never have an ideal elite, but you have different types of elites. You have lion like elites and you have fox like elites. And the circulation of elites is this idea throughout human history. Basically, sometimes the lions are in power and sometimes the foxes are in power. And this has real consequences to society and rule as a whole. Lions rule in a much more centralized, faith based way and are much more willing to use force, whereas foxes are obviously a bit more conniving combinationi they're more decentralized, more skeptical and less willing to use force. So depending on who's in power, you have different types of rule. And I think that allows us then to analyze the societies we find ourselves in. Are we ruled by foxes? Are we ruled by lions? And one of the suggestions I make in the book is that drawing from all these different theories, one of the ways that it sheds light perhaps on the societies we live in is that before the foxes were in power and now the lions have come to power, which is like the foxes, different political figures. It's not surprising perhaps that so many of the political leaders today hate the European Union. Right? Trump hates the European Union, obviously in Russia, Putin hates the European Union too. A lot of people hate the European Union. Within Europe, there are certain populous so called populist figures who hate the European Union too. That's because the European Union is a quintessential fox like project. It's all about combination, it's all about decentralization, it's all about compromise and it's less willing to use force. But one way I think of giving account of what's happened in the last why is that, yes, you have a rising elite that has challenged the foxes that have perhaps been in power since the Second World War. The lines are much more strong men in many cases, some strong women too, obviously with Marine Le Pen. And they've challenged and in many instances they've come to power. If you think about Trump's rule, it's much more centralized, much more willing to use force, much more spaced on faith than perhaps for instance, Barack Obama. And you might say the same thing in the uk I think it's quite interesting because this works across left or right or within left and right or within political parties too. David Cameron was perhaps more of a fox like politician where somebody like Theresa May or Boris Johnson, who replaced him as leader of the Conservative Party, but also leader, also prime minister of the UK were much more line like, it was much more about centralization, much more about faith than Cameron, which was much more about compromise. So that's hopefully Some of the lights that are shed by trying to do this historical recovery work.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And if I'm not mistaken, when we put Moscow's idea next to Pareto, I think with Muska, the idea of he highlights the inevitability of, like a minority governing a disorganized majority. But with Pareto, you see more fluidity of power and the idea that circulation of elites is that one elite replaces another over time, rather than power being truly democratized. Am I right to make that comparison?
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Hugo Drucken
It would seem so. On a superficial level, I'm not entirely sure, because Moscow does also talk about how the ruling class always has to be replenished from below. And he also then makes distinctions within the ruling class itself. He says, okay, you have the rulers as such, but then you have a second tier underneath that allows this ruling class actually to continue itself. And he has all this analysis of different types of society and whether he talks about the democratic tendency, where it is that elites are renewed rapidly or not. So Moscow has this element too, even though the ruling class, as you rightly point out, seems a bit more kind of static and homogenous. When you dig down into the theory, I don't think it's okay. I think both of them have this idea of circulation, even though Pareto uses it explicitly. Remember, with Moscow, as I was trying to emphasize earlier on, there's this idea that there's this continual developing of new social forces. So there's a sense of movement, too, that society is always evolving, always changing, and the challenge of the ruling class is to see how to adapt to it. Some of that comes about through renewal of the political class, and it's the different composition of it, too. So he doesn't have this as clear, if you want, or stark lines foxes circulation as Pareto does. But he has a lot of other elements that are very, very interesting too, including this idea of, okay, where does legitimacy come from? Does it come from below? Does it come from above? And also, is the ruling class being replenished and renewed quickly or not? If it's done quickly, then it's more democratic as a democratic tendency. If it's not, then it's a more aristocratic or oligarchic tendency. Which again, I think brings us back to the point about dynamic democracy. If we think about dynamic democracy on a continuum, the democratic element is about there being a renewal that's quicker, that opens up the possibility of change, and therefore, again opens up the possibility of the cursor being pushed towards more political equality, which is then the normative aspect that Dynamic democracy is trying to point to.
- [31:50]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Another thing that I was interested in was after you discuss Pareto and Moscow, you bring another thinker, Michelle's into. Into the conversation and. And the focus, I guess, for him, shifts on shifts. I mean, he's not that much concerned with Huroos, but more about how organizations evolve. And again, he had this famous idea of iron law, of oligarchy, which seems to suggest that, you know, even in movements that are founded on egalitarian democratic ideals, there will inevitably, inevitably be some sort of hierarchical leadership structure. But he's not, let's say he doesn't abandon democracy just because of that, but he talks about his ideas of palliatives that suggest that even within those oligarchic structures, there are still mechanisms that we can use to moderate and check elite domination. Tell us more about his idea of Arlov oligarchy and also his famous palliatives to moderate the oligarchic, let's say, or elite domination.
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Hugo Drucken
Yes, great. And it's great to bring Michaels in because if you remember at the beginning I was saying, well, how do we understand democracy? How did they understood democracy? And how we understand democracy today might be slightly different. But this is a period where you see universal suffrage and a rise of organized modern bureaucratic political parties. And in some ways, Mosca and Pareto, the part about the modern bureaucratized political party, they don't see as much. Whereas Michaels, who's a student of Max Weber. Right. So bureaucratization is a key element for him. He really studies political parties as such. And that's very interesting. And it also shows that there's a tendency, the three thinkers we've been speaking about so far, so Mosca, Preto, Michaels. There's a tendency in the literature, in the contemporary literature, to kind of lump them in together and call them either the elite theorists of democracy or the neo Machiavellians or whatever it might be. But when we separate them out, we see that they have different emphases and we have a much richer picture to draw upon to make sense of the world within which we live than if we just say, oh, they all just think minority rules, full stop. Because as you've rightly pointed out, Michaels is studying political parties as such. So what is Michael's. And the big political parties that people are studying at the time, obviously are the socialist political parties that are this new phenomena. They're really rising and they're becoming more powerful. Specifically the German Social Democratic Party, which at the time, which is the biggest, most powerful, richest Socialist Party of the world and is on the footstep of power. The Reichstag is getting more and more votes and is becoming one of the biggest parties so potentially could come to power. Which means, by the way, in the kind of Vulgate Marxist account, at least, it means that it's the furthest en route to the proletarian revolution. So Michael, who's a member of the party, even though he's slightly more on the anarchist kind of syndicalist wing, close to people like Sorel and the spontaneous strike, he's a member of it, and he studies and he wants to say, okay, this political party, the German Social Democratic Party, it claims that were it to come to power, it would rule in a democratic way, in a way that the older parties, the older conservative oligarchic parties do not. And he wants to test that claim. And his conclusion is, as you rightly pointed out, is this idea that there's an iron law of oligarchy, or who says organization, says oligarchy. And he says, well, it's just the nature of bureaucratic organization, that there's always going to be a small group of people who are basically going to control that institution or that organization, if you want. In the specific case of the German Social Democratic Party, it means there's a class of officials who come about and they control basically the party because they control the apparatus, they organize when the meetings are on. Michaels also brings in this idea that there's a psychological dimension to it, that these people, that the masses in general still need leaders, so they still look up. I think the more interesting part, if you put it within Marxist theory, if you remember, Marxism has this idea that you have the proletariat, those who sell their labor to receive a wage, and then obviously there's the capitalists or the bourgeoisie who own the means of production. For the Socialist Party. A lot of the officials are people who rise through the ranks, who are workers at first and then rise to the ranks. But Michael says, oh, in doing so, they change their class position. They become petty bourgeois, because they're no longer selling their labor to the bourgeoisie to receive a salary. Now it's the political party that's providing for their livelihood, which means that their economic interest is intimately tied with the political party. Therefore, they have changed class position and are now petty bourgeois, which means that the socialist political party is not fully in tune with the economic demands or the economic interests of the proletariat, at least in the Marxist account. So he says, okay, you always have this Oligarchy. But you've mentioned the palliatives, he says, at the end. And so this is in 1911, in a study of 19 of the German Social Democratic Party. In his book called Political Parties, he says, okay, but still, there's still positive things that are coming out of it, the two palliatives. He says, on the one hand, that members, that more and more people are joining these political parties. So they're being educated about politics, and they're learning more about Marxist ideology. That allows them then to keep the officials ideologically in check by saying, okay, but, you know, you're saying this, but that doesn't fit with, you know, the Marxist ideology that we've been taught. That's one of the palliatives. The second palliative, then is this idea that, again, there was a question you asked about Moscow. You know, is this a unitary class, ruling class? Yes or no? Is the oligarchy unitary? And Michael tends to suggest no, actually, there is. Okay, yes, there's oligarchies. There's a natural tendency within bureaucracies to produce oligarchy. But actually, there could be competing oligarchies within that. So there could be competing factions within the officials of the political party itself. And through that competition, they keep each other in check. Those are the palliatives. But to bring one final thing into the conversation, which Michaels concludes on in that book and which links directly to dynamic democracy that I was trying to articulate, he recounts the fable of Aesop, Aesop's fable of the dying peasant on his deathbed who tells his children that there is a buried treasure in the field. And so the peasant died and dies, and the children are very excited, and they go out to the fields and they dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, looking for the treasure, but there is no treasure to be found. However, in digging the field, that is, in tilling the land, they have made themselves richer because they've enriched the field. That is, I think, one of the metaphors that I want to use for dynamic democracy, that democracy as true rule of the people and true political equality is the buried treasure in the field. We will never achieve it. However, in striving towards it, in tilling the democratic land, in digging and putting pressure on the political system, we may get certain democratic benefits. So that's the metaphor I want to try to keep that Vikel's use, but I try to keep. For this notion that I'm proposing of dynamic democracy.
- [39:47]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And I just realized I kind of butchered his name, right?
- [39:51]
Hugo Drucken
Oh, no, there's different. No, no, there's different ways of pronouncing it. Yes, I had to check too. I think most people say Michel's, but I think it's because it's German and he has French background. So maybe it is Michel's. Maybe you're right, but I think the Germans try to say Michels is how they pronounce it.
- [40:06]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Well, there's another one, but I don't know if I'm going to. It's Joseph, you tell me before I. Schumpeter.
- [40:13]
Hugo Drucken
Schumpeter.
- [40:15]
Morteza Hajizadeh
So he's another theorist German or Austrian?
- [40:19]
Hugo Drucken
Austrian, yeah. He's part of the Austro Hungarian Empire, but would have considered himself German and German speaking at least.
- [40:27]
Morteza Hajizadeh
He seems to be a bit different from the way that democracy, the way that previous thinkers such as Pareto, Moscow or Mikael's that you just discussed. He seems to redefine. He seems to redefine democracy rather than maybe reject it outright. And he moves away from that classical ideal of democracy as the expression of a unified will of the people. And I think he presents it as a competitive process, pretty much maybe like a marketplace where elites VY for power through election. Tell us about how he redefined the idea of democracy and what is he rejecting that classical democratic theory.
- [41:11]
Hugo Drucken
Yes. And the important thing is the book is it's divided into two in many ways. First, I try to reconstruct the so called elite theorist democracy that we've been talking about so far, Moscow, Pareto, Michaels. And then the second heart of half of the book, I try to trace how their ideas had what I think is a foundational influence on the development of the social sciences and democratic theory post World War II. So during the period of the Cold War through these figures such as Joseph Schumpeter also. And maybe we'll talk about them. Robert Dahl, C. Wright, Mills and Remoirin. Joseph Schumpeter's so called minimalist theory of democracy is, remains one of the most one of the dominant paradigms of democratic theory today. And as you rightly pointed out, he starts off by saying, look, we have this classic account of democracy which is this idea is that the people come together and express a kind of Rousseauian general will. And then there are representatives that are elected to execute or to carry out that general will. And he basically says that's just not realistic, that's not how politics works. For lots of different reasons that have to do with there's no such thing as the general will and the people don't come together and they're mostly irrational, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, which perhaps we don't need to detain us here. And instead he said no, how politics actually really works. And he rightly said, I think you can draw an analogy again. Schumpeter is best known for his economic work. He's the one who is this idea creative destruction or Schumpeter's gale. And it's linked, I think, to his political theory, which is to say the way to think about politics is rather is that you have these political entrepreneurs, again a term that Schumpeter coins. You have these political entrepreneurs that they come about and they have these new ideas and they submit it to the marketplace of ideas and then the people buy it, yes or no. And there's a competition between elites. So it's a very instead of a bottom up, it's a very top down conception of democracy where basically you have politicians who compete for the votes of the people in the marketplace. That's one of the ways that this is his new theory of democracy. What I wanted to do in the book is to say, okay, that's a very, as I say, influential conception of democracy today. But we have to understand it how against the backdrop of the three first elite theories in democracy, Mosca, Pareto and Michaels. And I draw the link between them by saying how when Schumpeter is critiquing the conventional view of democracy as this idea of people expressing their general will that's then executed by elected representatives. Schumpeter explicitly names Pareto as being somebody who showed that the masses are irrational and that therefore cannot express a general will. And his proposed so called minimalist. I say so called because it's not a term that he actually uses. He talks about leadership democracy, but he talks about how politicians, so there's politicians. And he also talks about how for this system to work you need a good social stratum, a well educated and important social stratum that's going to maintain the system. That all looks very, very elitist. In fact, people subsequently have called this a kind of elitist conception of democracy, even though he doesn't use that term. So I'm trying to draw, to show how we have to understand Schumpeter's theory as a form of elite theory and how Pareto in particular influenced them. But what I also want to show is how I think Schumpeter in some ways reduced this field of competition or circulation to simply politics. Whereas I was trying to mention beforehand for Moscow and Peretz in particular, and Michael's to a certain degree too, circulation was a much broader concept. It wasn't just about politics. It was also economic and social. And so I want to suggest that Schumpeter's theory is perhaps a bit too restrictive for capturing broader changes that are having an influence on politics. And we need to bring those broader ideas and broader notions that are present with Mosca Pretto and Michael's back into our understanding of politics and democracy.
- [45:35]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Another think we discuss is Raymond Aaron, and he seems to offer a more defensive or even maybe a constructive account of democracy compared to the earlier elite theories that we just discussed. So he doesn't see elite rule as something that simply undermines democracy, but he reframes it as, or something that actually sustains democratic systems, particularly through his idea of divided elites. What did he mean by divided elites? And tell us about, let's say, and why are they crucial for democracy, according to him?
- [46:15]
Hugo Drucken
Great. So, yes, and as I say, this kind of historical reconstruction and the influence the earlier elites had on this later thinking, Aaron explicitly says that we need to take into account what he calls the fact of oligarchy, which he takes directly from Moscow. And Michael is to say, okay, there just is a fact of oligarchy in our societies and that's not something we can get away from. But again then it opens the door to an analysis of the society within which we live and allows us then to be able to judge it negatively or positively. So then he says, okay, we need to look. Remember, this is the context of the Cold War. So the big question was, what's the difference between so called Western democracy and so called Eastern democracy? We have the Berlin Wall separating East from the West. On the west you have a kind of a liberal bourgeois form of democracy. But if you remember at the time in the east, so East Europe and Russia, USSR and China, they were also saying, they were saying, no, no, we're the true democracy. You over there in the west, you're this bourgeois, you know, where the democracy or the people are excluded, whereas we've really brought true, true democracy to the people. So there's a competition as to what's really democracy. Aaron says, okay, look, both of these societies have elites. That's undeniable, right? And that's one of the force actually that comes out of the Mosca Preta. Michael's Michaels in particular, in terms of bureaucracy is used a lot. And in Eastern Europe, in Eastern Europe and in Russia, but also by theorists in the west who are trying to understand what's going on. They were Saying, look, Michaels was right. Even if you have a protagonist revolution, you basically still will have an elite. And what was called at the time, the nomenclature, right? Yes. Okay, it's a bureaucratic elite. So Ahoma says, okay, there are elites on both sides, but the question is, are these divided or united elites? What you mean by that is, okay, you have political, social, economic, et cetera, elites. Are they all in the same institution or not? If they're all in the same institution, that is to say, if the Communist Party has the political, social, economic elites all together, then you have a united elite. Whereas if those elites are divided, that is, there is a political elite, there's a social elite, there's an economic elite, and there's other types of elites, legal army elites, administrative elites, et cetera, et cetera. But they're not the same. They're elites, but they're separate. And they have their own institutions and they have their own basis of power. So, yes, you have political elites, and then you have economic elites who obviously have their own companies. And so there's a divided elite, right? On the one hand, the people who control the economy, who control politics and control society, are the same people in the same institution, the Communist Party, or they're in separate institutions. And so one is meant to be the east, right? The united elite. The other was supposed to be the west, the divided elite. And he says, okay, but on that basis, we can say that the Western divided elite is a better system because it offers more. So because of two reasons. One is because it offers more guarantee to the people who are being ruled. So there's always rule. But in the divided elite, for instance, if one elite comes after you, then maybe you can turn to another elite for a bit of defense. Whereas on the Eastern side, if the Communist Party comes after you for whatever reason, you have nowhere to turn. You have nowhere to turn, you have nowhere to go. So there's more security on the one hand, and an even more positive account. And this brings us back to Machiavelli. I mentioned that Pareto obviously seized upon this idea of Machiavelli, the prince and the lions and the foxes. Arron brings us back to Machiavelli via Mosca, but not to the prince. He brings us back to the discourses. The other, longer, much longer and much more historical text of Machiavelli where Machiavelli is looking at the Roman Republic. So the Roman Republic before Caesar takes over and transforms it into an empire. He's looking down, he says, well, the Roman Republic was this wonderful time, according to him. And the reason why it was able to maintain its freedom, according to Machiavelli, was because there was what he called tumult. That is to say, there was conflict between the plebs and the patricians, there was a conflict between the rich and the poor, if you want. Arron rearticulates that in the context of elites and says when you have competition between different elites, that's where liberty may emerge out of that. In the same way that Machiavelli thought, this is where. It's where liberty arose with the Roman Republic. It's because you have competition or conflict between different types of elites. So divided elites are not just offer more security. It's not absolute, of course, but there's a chance of more security for the people within divided elites, but also divided elites because there's competition between these elites, because there's tumult in the Machiavellian sense, there, there's a possibility of freedom to emerge. And that's why divided elites are what we need.
- [51:36]
Morteza Hajizadeh
I guess it's. Look, I myself, before reading your book and also the other book, Natasha Piano's book on lead democracy, I used to think of it as something really negative. Well, I still have my skepticism, but I guess one of the lessons is that we need to accept this fact that elites are always entangled or are always involved in some way with democracy. As a final question, and I like to go back to the beginning of the interview when we talk about the idea of dynamic democracy, I'm keen to know we live in that moment where everybody's calling it a crisis of democracy. The sidelining of democracy. How does this idea of dynamic democracy ultimately offer a new way of thinking about politics and also help us better understand the current geopolitical landscape with the rise of populist leaders, increasing concentration on wealth, and visible divide and tension among working class people and the elites who are somehow controlling the politicians as well.
- [52:43]
Hugo Drucken
The point then is to say we need to focus on if we want to understand what is happening and how we might think about it, understand it and try to do something about it. What we need to integrate into our thinking is the existence of elites. If we don't, if we just ignore that, I think we're going to face lots of problems. So we are faced with lots of problems. And it's also not the first time that the ratio between elites and democracy has been thought about before. It's an ongoing thing. It's a feature of our modern societies. It's not a bug, it's a feature. And Therefore, if we see it as a feature, we're able to identify precisely where the problem is lies, which allows us then to think about what the solutions to it might be. If we have the wrong diagnosis, it will lead us to the wrong solution. I'm proposing that thinking about the role that elites always exist in modern societies and have a role in democracy is the right diagnosis, which then allows us to think about what the solutions might be. And my solution then is to try to think. I've offered this framework of dynamic democracy to try to identify, pinpoint where change may occur. And obviously nobody knows whether a change is going to be good or not. But it allows us to see where change may occur and then evaluate what type of change there will be, namely by saying, okay, here is a challenge that's going on. There's always challenge by rising elites against established elites. That is also a future of politics more generally, and it's a future of democratic politics that challenge occurs. We have this framework to say, okay, where will real change happen? Namely in this interaction between social movements and established elites mediated through political institutions. But if we think about democracy as a continuum where one side is towards political equality and the other side is towards political inequality, we can use that to say, okay, there's a new challenge that's happening if we evaluate it, is it a challenge that seems to be pushing towards more equality or less? If we do that, then I think we can evaluate, for instance, Donald Trump as a challenge, or Magyar as a challenge. Donald Trump, his policies and his Persona and his form of rule clearly seem to be going against bidding equality. Whereas Magyar, even though he's a conservative center right politician in terms of what Orban was before, seems to open up the possibility of greater political equality. So that's the framework I'm trying to open. But the point is to say if we do not recognize the existence of elites, if we do not see that as a feature of our political systems and for democratic regimes, then we're kind of barking up the wrong tree. We don't see it. And what I hope to do with the book is to bring that element into the conversation and shine a light or put the focus on elites. And if we do that, then we have the right, hopefully diagnosis which will then allow us to think about what the right solutions might be.
- [55:54]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And just one final question. You've recently finished this book. Is there any other project or books you're working on that might come sometime soon?
- [56:04]
Hugo Drucken
Thanks for this. Yes, well, actually, I think I might do. It's clearly that this book had different elements to it. Some of it was a historical reconstruction through the numerous conversations that I had. I think it might be nice to try to write a kind of more standalone, more essay type book entitled Dynamic Democracy, where I try to give a systematic account as possible and perhaps elaborate a bit more and then put it within the context of I've tried already in the book, try to put in the context of how it's different to other democratic theories we might have today. But it might be also nice to put it back in the history of political thought. How does this idea relate to some of Plato, Aristotle's, Hobbes? I've mentioned Machiavelli, but do it in a kind of more essay style account. So I'm hoping to do that in the next while the next big project that I have is I want to think about politics beyond left and right. And you see some of this already in the Elites book where I'm trying to say, okay, this gives us a conception of change which is beyond purely left right party politics, which identifies change within political parties or across political parties. I like this line about Margaret Thatcher in the UK always said that her biggest success was Tony Blair, that even though Labour had taken over from the Conservatives in many ways her policies continued, her neoliberal policies continued. So how do you capture that beautiful beyond left and right? And I think there's another way of conceptualizing politics today which is not just left and right, but perhaps center extremes. That that's another way of thinking about political divides that has its own dynamic which is different to left and right. Left and right. There seems to be a bit of mutual recognition and a center ground that there's an agreement on, but then different interpretations, policy interpretations of how what should be done about that. Whereas some of the politics we've seen today, whether it's Trump or whether it's across the UK for instance, or across Europe, across the world. Just to give you one example, the Brexit vote in the UK if you look at how the different positions the political parties adopted, in many ways most political parties were in favor of remain. There were dissent within them. But most people were where most political parties were in favor of remain, whereas the vote, as we know, was only partially but nevertheless in favor of leaving. How is it that a subject that was absolutely, if you go back to 2016 or before it, nobody was discussing it was leaving the European Union. In the UK it was a completely peripheral position. Yes, Nigel Farage had been advocating this for a long time. But Nigel Farage was a relatively peripheral figure who was in European Parliament, ironically elected to the institution. He wanted to take it down. It was very peripheral. Nobody had a strong view of this. And yet now a very peripheral position has become the center ground of UK politics. Brexit is the center ground of UK politics, and I think left right doesn't seem to capture that as well as perhaps another division which I would call center extremes, which I think has its own dynamic. So I'm interested in developing that historically, again, because as we know, the left right divide was famously born during the French Revolution. It's do we keep the king or do we not keep the king? If you're in favor of getting rid of the king, you're on the left. If you want to keep the king, you stay on the right. Obviously he ends up in the guillotine. But it's not the only divide at the time. There's also divides which are much more top, bottom, the mountain versus the plain. So it's there. And there's a relationship between center extremes, left right throughout, I think, Western history and then throughout the world. And I'm interested in exploring that historically, but also, again, as a way of shedding light on the societies within which we live.
- [60:04]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Thank you very much for taking your time to speak with us. Hope to be able to speak to you about your future book as well.
- [60:10]
Hugo Drucken
We have great pleasure. Mathieuzza, thank you very much for the wonderful interview.
- [60:13]
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