Abstract
The Occupy movement, Thomas Piketty, the 2008 financial collapse, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and more have returned issues of inequality to the forefront of academic and journalistic discussion. The New Power Elite: Inequality, Politics and Greed, by Alan Shipman, June Edmunds, and Bryan Turner seeks to contribute to that debate by building on the scholarly tradition of elite theory, with a nod to Pareto’s circulation of elites theory and by proposing an update to the American variant, first developed by C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite (1956) and elaborated most fully by G. William Domhoff. The authors begin by asking the questions of this moment: how did a tiny financial elite manage to appropriate trillions of dollars in bailout funds to further enrich themselves, and why in reaction did voters in the United States and much of Europe forsake the left and instead support right-wing parties often headed by members of the elite?
Unfortunately, the authors never deliver clear answers to those or any other questions. The authors present a range of theories and often agree with “all of the above” rather than explaining how and where different explanations are effective or inadequate. The United States is the main case, with Britain as the principal secondary case, but numerous other countries are mentioned; and the time period ranges from the early Middle Ages to the present, with cases appearing and reappearing in different chapters without the authors offering clear reasons for the examples they select. The authors contradict themselves, sometimes within the same chapter, on matters large and small. Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim is grouped with Donald Trump as an extreme example of the uncharitable rich (p. 211) but on p. 218 is called a “mega-donor.” More significantly, the authors never determine if contemporary elites are closed off to new entrants or if the elite still is being revivified by the circulation of dynamic new members in and the removal of incompetent and tired old ones.
Buried within this book is the skeleton of an original argument, one that suggests that Mills’s coherent and cohesive power elite now faces challenges from within and below. The authors view Trump’s election and the vote for Brexit as signs that the masses no longer see elite governance as legitimate or fair. The authors don’t engage with Mills’s analysis, nor do they address research by Domhoff and others that identifies the organizations able to formulate and enact policies without having to present them to non-elites for debate and approval. We read a lot about populist rhetoric, but this book doesn’t identify specific elite projects besides Britain’s EU membership that have actually been derailed by mass pressures.
Why are masses no longer passive, even if their protests are mostly inefficacious? The authors point to several factors. Globalization undercuts national governments’ abilities to deliver widespread prosperity, evidenced by the decades-long stagnation of wages. This leads ordinary people to see elites as incompetent, though the authors also argue that elites are as competent as before but public expectations have risen beyond any government’s capacity to fulfill. Evidence, or at least assertions, of elite corruption are mentioned throughout the book, but there is no effort to determine if the problem is worse now than in the past. Rising inequality also undermines elites, but the authors also claim that resentment (at least in the United States and Britain) is directed less at the super-rich, whom most people never encounter, and more at snotty Ivy League and Oxbridge graduates. The authors provide little concrete evidence for this theory and do not link it to their overall argument about fissures and alliances among elites.
The thread that binds the authors’ various observations together is their contention that elites are becoming stagnant and weak because potential new entrants are blocked from joining existing elites. That in turn disrupts elites’ ability to bind middle and lower classes into stable “distributional coalitions.” This discussion is pitched at a highly general level. Unlike Mills, Domhoff, and their successors, the authors of this book offer vague and shifting criteria of elites, in part because they refer to so many cases across broad spans of time and space. Often they point to structural or organizational position, which they then don’t specify. They also emphasize networks centered on individuals who they think have extraordinary personal qualities that allow them to amass ties to other powerful people. They raise the possibility that celebrities are another sort of power elite, inverting Mills’s argument that the celebrity of the powerful is a form of Weber’s charisma of office. (While Mills hardly mentions Weber in The Power Elite, it is a purely Weberian argument.)
Elites, the authors contend, most often are challenged by other elites. In a variant of Pareto’s circulation of elites theory, the authors argue that elites are strengthened (albeit in the long term) rather than weakened when they are challenged by rival elites. Successful elites manage to enlist non-elite allies that create distributional coalitions that cement alliances by creating opportunities for people with new sets of entrepreneurial, organizational, or political skills to enter or remain in the elite. The authors draw on numerous examples ranging from feudal Europe to the present, but none of them are analyzed in enough depth to show how such transformations work or to refute opposing explanations of any of those historical episodes. Instead, the authors, in Chapter Four, draw on complex theories of multi-tiered class structures to argue that the increasing size of middle and affluent working classes, along with a declining old-style proletariat, creates numerous openings for oppositional elites to form coalitions that challenge incumbents while those in power can try to reform old alliances that were undermined by an array of economic and cultural changes. Again, the authors combine abstract claims that are imprecise and overly complex with rapid presentations of cases chosen seemingly at random, none of which offer much clarity or precision.
The authors contend that the lines between business and government were blurred after 2000, transforming plutocracy into oligarchy. They offer various examples but fail to identify the agents and processes that accomplished that structural transformation on a more general level. Chapter Five addresses the question of how, and the extent to which, oligarchs or the rich more broadly influence government. The authors tack back and forth between arguing that money buys elections and that it does not, but there is little attention to the use of money to buy policies after elections.
The most incisive part of the book is Chapter Seven, which makes the valuable point that bargaining between elites and masses is complicated by the existence of middle classes. Democratization, then, is an effort by elites to stabilize their rule by limiting alliances between lower and middle classes. The formal mechanisms of democracy allow for the circulation of elites, although the authors never explain how that happens. Globalization makes democracy less efficacious in delivering benefits to lower and middle classes, which then in some (again unspecified) way disrupts the effectiveness of electoral democracy in revivifying elites by allowing new entrants.
The authors conclude with a look at a new wave of philanthropy by the super-rich paralleling that of the previous gilded age. They see this charity as above all a way for elites to try to restore solidarity among themselves in a turning from competitive profitmaking and grabs for state power to a conciliatory effort to redeem themselves in good works.
This is a frustrating book to read. It is not a contribution to Mills’s, Domhoff’s or any other sort of elite analysis. It is a book that uses the word “elite” and claims to be doing elite theory but in reality is just an almost stream-of-consciousness set of observations, claims, and examples that are not guided by clear theory or tested in any even slightly rigorous way.