Politics

1. Politics is the Study of Influence and the Influential

The study of politics is the study of influence and the influential.

Defining politics. Politics, at its core, is not merely about government structures or legal frameworks, but about who wields power and how. It delves into the dynamics of influence, examining how certain individuals or groups—the "influential"—secure and maintain their positions, and how their actions shape the distribution of societal values. This analytical approach moves beyond prescriptive philosophy to state the conditions of power.

Beyond institutions. Traditional political science often focused on formal institutions like states and governments. However, a more comprehensive understanding requires analyzing the informal networks and processes through which influence is exercised. This includes understanding the subtle mechanisms of persuasion, coercion, and resource allocation that determine who "gets what, when, how" in any given community.

Dynamic analysis. Influence is not static; it is a constant process of re-examination and adaptation. Political analysis, therefore, must be a continuous inquiry into the shifting landscape of power, identifying how different actors—whether individuals, groups, or entire classes—vie for control and how their strategies evolve over time. This dynamic perspective is crucial for understanding both stability and change in political systems.

2. Elites are Defined by Unequal Shares in Deference, Income, and Safety

The influential are those who get the most of what there is to get.

Defining the elite. Elites are not simply those in formal positions of authority, but rather those who disproportionately acquire society's most valued resources. These "available values" can be broadly categorized into:

• Deference: Prestige, status, respect, and positions in formal hierarchies (e.g., Pope, President, Supreme Court Justice).
• Income: Wealth, economic resources, and financial prosperity.
• Safety: Security from violence, harm, or deprivation.

Unequal distribution. The distribution of these values is inherently unequal, forming steep pyramids where a small number of individuals or groups accumulate the most. While deference might be highly concentrated (e.g., a single president), safety can sometimes show a negative relationship, with high-ranking individuals facing greater risks (e.g., monarchs dying by violence). Income distribution also varies sharply, with a small percentage of the population often controlling a significant portion of national wealth.

Multifaceted influence. No single index can fully capture influence. An elite of deference is not necessarily an elite of safety, and different combinations of values yield different elite comparisons. Political analysis must consider these various dimensions, acknowledging that the "influential" can be identified through multiple, sometimes overlapping, criteria, leading to a nuanced understanding of power structures.

3. Symbols and Propaganda are Primary Tools for Elite Control and Challenge

Any elite defends and asserts itself in the name of symbols of the common destiny.

The power of myth. Elites, whether established or challenging, rely heavily on "symbols of the common destiny" to legitimize their rule or mobilize opposition. These symbols form the "ideology" of the established order and the "utopia" of counter-elites, eliciting loyalty, work, taxes, or applause from the masses. A well-established ideology perpetuates itself with minimal overt propaganda, as it becomes ingrained in daily life from nursery to grave.

Propaganda's psychological levers. When conviction wanes, elites resort to planned propaganda, astutely manipulating fundamental human emotions:

• Aggressiveness: Directed outward against a perceived enemy (e.g., "scheming, treacherous, malevolent influence").
• Guilt: Projected onto external foes, moralizing destructive impulses (e.g., "immorality" of the enemy).
• Weakness: Transformed into certainty of victory by projecting defeat onto the enemy.
• Affection: Concentrated on national or collective symbols, especially during crises.

Ideology in daily life. In bourgeois societies, symbols of personal achievement and responsibility are constantly reinforced through education, media, and social gossip, attributing success or failure to individual effort. Conversely, in collective societies like the Soviet Union, efforts are made to remodel the psychological environment to emphasize collective responsibility and communal identity, shifting focus from individual problems to the fate of movements.

4. Violence is a Calculated Instrument of Elite Power, Not Pure Destruction

Violence, a major means of elite attack and defense, takes many forms.

Instrumental violence. Violence, encompassing war, revolution, and criminal justice, is a pervasive element of politics, not merely an act of wanton destruction. It is a calculated means to an end, employed by elites to achieve coercive predominance and enforce their will. Historical data reveal the extensive scale of armed forces and conflicts, yet emphasize that war is often a "continuation of policy by other means," conditioned by political objectives rather than absolute military effort.

Strategic coordination. Effective use of violence demands careful coordination with other aspects of influence, such as organization, propaganda, and intelligence. Military objectives are always dependent on broader political circumstances, as seen in the American Civil War where Lee's strategy adapted to political goals of prolonging resistance and seeking foreign intervention. Neglecting these interdependencies, as McClellan did by failing to secure Lincoln's confidence, can lead to strategic failure.

Technological shifts. The balance of fighting effectiveness is constantly altered by technological advancements, such as airplanes and gas. While new weapons promise decisive offensives, their success still hinges on psychological and social factors, not just mechanical superiority. The development of gas, for instance, offered authorities a means to suppress segregated opposition without mass slaughter, temporarily shifting the advantage in urban conflicts.

5. Control Over Goods and Economic Systems Shapes Elite Stability

The use of goods in elite attack and defense takes the form of destroying, withholding, apportioning.

Economic leverage. Elites maintain or challenge power through the strategic control of goods and services, employing methods like rationing, pricing, sabotage, boycotts, and bribery. Elite security is intrinsically linked to economic stability; mounting insecurities due to economic fluctuations can trigger discontent and threaten the established order, compelling a focus on "economic" strategies.

Rationing vs. pricing. Two principal means direct the flow of goods:

• Rationing: Direct assignment of specific goods or services. Highly efficient during emergencies (e.g., wartime food cards), but can concentrate discontent against visible authorities.
• Pricing: Assignment of non-specific claims (money). In a competitive market, it can veil responsibility for distribution, making outcomes appear "impersonal" and guided by an "invisible hand," thus diffusing blame.

Capitalism's contradictions. The competitive market's tendency towards monopoly undermines its "impersonal" defense, shifting blame to "private hierarchies" of big business and finance. In governmentalized societies like the Soviet Union, pricing systems supplement rationing, creating complex, differentiated access to goods that can manage discontent by reducing populations to anxious preoccupation with basic necessities, thereby limiting collective self-assertion.

6. Institutional Practices Serve as Dynamic Mechanisms for Elite Defense and Adaptation

The ascendancy of any elite partially depends upon the success of the practices it adopts.

Practices as defense. Elites use institutional practices—from recruitment and training to policymaking and administration—to defend themselves through "catharsis" (harmless discharge of tension) or "readjustment." Minor modifications, such as democratization (universal suffrage, education) or sumptuary legislation (prohibiting gambling, drink), can divert discontent from the underlying property system, preserving the established order.

Adaptation and evolution. The 19th and 20th centuries saw capitalistic nations avoid revolutionary upheaval through such adaptations. Legal disabilities were slowly removed, and "social legislation" broadened the state's role in welfare. Regulatory commissions, while seemingly curbing monopolies, often served as "bulwarks of defense" for business against popular demands, demonstrating how practices can be manipulated to maintain elite interests.

Crisis and control. Crises demand specific procedural adjustments: dictatorship, centralization, concentration of authority, and emphasis on obedience and bias. Inter-crisis periods allow for concessions towards democracy, decentralization, originality, and objectivity. Revolutionary regimes, like the Soviet Union, utilize mass criticism and purges to mitigate bureaucratic inefficiencies and manage internal contradictions, demonstrating the "accordion rhythm" of expansion and contraction in party control.

7. The Ascendancy of Elites Shifts with Dominant Skills and Technical Progress

A skill is a teachable and learnable operation, and skills include the technique of manipulating things or the symbols of things...

Skill and eminence. Political analysis examines how values are partitioned among exponents of various skills. Historically, those who manipulate "men" (e.g., violence, organization, bargaining, propaganda, analysis) have been far more prominent in elites than those who manipulate "things" (e.g., manual workers, engineers, physical scientists). Engineers, despite their societal importance, have rarely articulated a demand for high policy control, often leaving such advocacy to others.

Shifting skill values. The prestige of different skills fluctuates with societal conditions. While warriors were central in feudal Europe, the accumulation of property in Western civilization diminished their prestige until internal and external crises re-elevated them. The rise of modern industrialism, for instance, made "skill in bargaining" a primary path to wealth and distinction, fostering the plutocracy.

The rise of symbol specialists. The modern era has seen a dramatic increase in specialists in "symbol manipulation," including propagandists, public relations counsel, and social scientists. These individuals, whether inventing justifications for authority or describing complex social routines, gain influence by shaping collective attitudes and providing analytical insights, often secularizing intellectual skills previously held by religious elites.

8. Class Revolutions Fundamentally Reshape Elite Composition and Governing Myths

A revolution is a shift in the class composition of elites.

Class as a lens. Political analysis profoundly considers the "class consequences of events," viewing a class as a major social group with similar function, status, and outlook. World revolutions, such as the French (late 18th century) and Russian (1917), represent epochal shifts where new social formations rise to dominant influence, fundamentally altering the composition of elites.

Transforming vocabularies. These revolutions are marked by dramatic changes in the "ruling vocabulary" of the elite. The shift from "divine right of kings" to "rights of man" (French Revolution) and then to "proletarian dictatorship" (Russian Revolution) illustrates how languages of protest become the ideologies of established orders, used to elicit loyalty and resources from the populace.

New practices and policies. Beyond rhetoric, world revolutions introduce profound innovations in practice. The French Revolution established universal manhood suffrage, church disestablishment, and policies favoring commerce and individual proprietorship. The Russian Revolution governmentalized all organized social life, equalized money incomes (comparatively), and monopolized legality under a single party, aiming to abolish the peasant class through collective farms.

9. Political Personalities, Driven by Deep Motives, Rise and Fall with Crises

Political life, in the narrowest sense of the word, is a life of conflict, and presupposes men who can bring themselves into active relationship to their surroundings.

Personality and power. Political analysis delves into the "dialectics of personality," examining how specific personality types succeed or fail in the political arena. Effective political personalities combine externalized impulses with manipulative skill, displacing private motives onto public objects and rationalizing them as collective advantage. This distinguishes them from individuals absorbed in inner struggles or detached from reality.

Types of political personalities:

• Conciliatory (e.g., Lincoln): Firm in public, but gentle and passively enduring in intimate relations; often masochistic, channeling aggression into firmness while suffering inner anguish. Favored in initial phases of crisis or heterogeneous societies.
• Imperious/Ruthless (e.g., Napoleon): Driven by insatiable craving for deference, often from early willfulness; prone to externalizing aggression and grandiosity. Favored as crises intensify and unity is demanded.
• Agitator (e.g., Greeley): Displaces strong cravings for emotional response to the wider public, projecting inner guilt onto the world and attacking it. Effective in mobilizing discontent but may collapse in adversity.
• Obsessive/Compulsive (e.g., Stanton): Holds destructive tendencies in check through order, routine, and intense work, expressing aggression by annoying others.

Crisis and personality. The ebb and flow of crises favor different personality styles. Initial phases of stress may elevate conciliatory types who can unite diverse factions. As crises deepen and demand decisive action, ruthless and agitational types gain ascendancy, often from previously inhibited individuals whose destructive impulses find social sanction. The contemporary world's perpetual crises, fueled by economic instability, tend to favor agitators and men of ruthless violence.

10. Collective Attitudes and Loyalties Determine the Scope of Elite Influence

Politics is a changing pattern of loyalties, strategies, tactics; and political analysis may quite properly review the succession of predominant attitudes through the stream of time.

Attitudes as political drivers. Political analysis examines how social life shapes collective attitudes and loyalties, which in turn drive political action. These attitudes can be "local," "regional," "national," "international," or based on "class" or "skill," and can manifest as "militant" or "conciliatory." Understanding these shifts is crucial for comprehending the dynamics of elite influence.

Forms of collective response. Communities, like individuals, respond to deprivations and indulgences through various forms of action:

• Privately internalized: Morbid self-accusations, physical ailments, escapist fantasies.
• Privately externalized: Quarrelsomeness, socially stigmatized acts (theft), personal aggression.
• Socially internalized: Religious revivalism, sects focused on confession, singing, dancing.
• Socially externalized: Organized protests, demands for institutional reconstruction, armed uprisings, adoption of foreign techniques.

Factors influencing loyalty. The geographical distribution of loyalties is dynamic. Modern nationalism consolidates loyalties around larger community symbols, often disrupting older empires. Functional loyalties, such as class consciousness, also emerge from new divisions of labor, challenging parochial allegiances. The choice between geographical or functional symbols for expressing insecurity depends on a group's position relative to world-revolutionary processes.

11. World Revolutions Face Inherent Restrictions and Partial Incorporations

World revolutions have been accompanied by sudden shifts in the ruling vocabulary of the elite.

Dialectic of diffusion and restriction. While world revolutions, like the French and Russian, proclaim universal ideals (e.g., "rights of man," "world proletariat"), they never achieve total global hegemony. A "dialectic of restriction" limits their scope through:

• Geographical differentiation: Surrounding elites stigmatize the revolution as "foreign" or "alien," emphasizing local identity to rally their own masses against the external threat.
• Partial incorporation: Elements of the revolutionary pattern are selectively borrowed as concessions to local sentiment, but adapted to national contexts (e.g., "German National Socialism").

Evolution of governmental forms. Post-1917, there was a global shift from absolute/limited monarchies towards parliamentary republics, reflecting a partial diffusion of democratic forms. However, the more novel aspects of the Russian Revolution—such as the governmentalization of all social life, equalization of income, and single-party monopolization of legality—spread more slowly and erratically, often being adapted or resisted.

Challenging universality. The very act of labeling the French Revolution as "bourgeois" challenged its universalist claims, exposing it as serving a specific class. Similarly, questions arise about whether the Russian Revolution truly benefits the entire proletariat or primarily certain "skill formations" (intellectuals, organizers). This functional differentiation lays the symbolic groundwork for future revolutionary edifices, challenging the dominant myth.

12. The Middle-Income Skill Group Emerges as a Potentially Dominant Force

It may be that the common factor in the seeming political confusion of our time is the rise to power of the middle-income skill group.

A new class emergent. Lasswell posits that the "middle-income skill group"—comprising small farmers, businessmen, low-salaried professionals, and skilled workers—is a rising force in modern world politics. Despite internal contradictions and lack of self-consciousness, this group is increasingly asserting itself against both aristocracy and plutocracy, often through movements like Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, which, though rejecting Moscow's command, embody tendencies towards equalization and governmentalization.

Psychological lag and disunity. This group has suffered a "psychological lag," remaining loyal to individualistic vocabularies even as economic practices generated vast discrepancies between sacrifice and reward. Their energies have often been diverted into secondary issues (e.g., sumptuary laws, "unfair competition") or split between Republican and Democratic wings of a "Republocratic" party, preventing a unified political identity or program.

Path to self-realization. For this group to achieve its "historic mission"—the "remoralization of society" by re-establishing proportionality between sacrifice and reward—it must overcome its disunity. This requires:

• National organization: Independent bodies with their own executive staffs and communication means.
• Clear demands: Using taxing power to curb big business, providing credit to independent groups.
• Inspiring myth: Acknowledging their shared experience of self-discipline in acquiring socially useful skills.

Such a "skill revolution" could lead to a distinctive American path, where devices of corporate control are adapted for integrated national policy, potentially involving "every citizen a shareholder" and functional-territorial groups influencing policy, thereby preserving a healthy middle class against the widening cleavage between rich and poor.