The Myth of the Ruling Class: Gaetano Mosca and the "Elite." by James H. MeiselReview by: René de Visme WilliamsonThe Journal of Politics, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Feb., 1959), pp. 149-150Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Southern Political ScienceAssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2126660 .

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1959] BOOK REVIEWS 149

seen whether, at the time of their passing, elements of a genuine political order have had time to grow in the hearts and minds of the new German generation.

GERHART NIEMEYER University of Notre Dame

The Mytk of the Ruling Class: Gaetano Mosca and the "Elte." By JAMES H. MEISEL. (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1958. Pp. 432. $7.50.)

With his book The Mytk of the Ruling Class, Professor Meisel has made a significant and important contribution to scholarship. He has written the most complete, thorough and authoritative study of Gaetano Mosca available in any language. For this service, all American political scientists, particularly specialists in political theory, are indebted.

The subtitle of the book is actually more accurately descriptive than the title. Professor Meisel really has traced the development of Mosca's thought chronologically, including all his works and editions of his works. The personal life and public career of Mosca are also reviewed and analyzed, although these elements are not so prominent in a man like Mosca whose life was essentially what he thought rather than what he did. The relationship of Mosca to his contemporaries like Pareto is discussed and evaluated, as are also the reaction to the publication of Mosca's works and the controversies to which they give rise. Meisel's judgments on controversies like those between Pareto and Mosca are firm and yet judicious, and never evasive. Attention is drawn not only to the sources of Moscaa theories but to his emphases and omissions as well (notably in History of Political Doctrines). In all these respects Meisel's work is solid, interesting and stimulating.

The picture of Mosca which emerges from Meisel's vast research and erudition is one which arouses sympathy in the reader. Here was a learned, intellectually able, cultured and completely sincere thinker who wrestled with some of the most fundamental problems of political science but who did not receive the recognition he de- served and who lived to see the progressive disintegration of the kind of world he believed in. He tried unsuccessfully to reconcile a liberal (though not democratic) faith with a positivistic method- ology which yielded elitist conclusions incompatible with his faith.

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150 THE JOURNAL O0 POLITICS [Vol. 21

All his life Mosca the political scientist tried to come to terms with Mosca the man, and yet he was unable to do it in spite of his in- tellectual gifts. One admires the mixture of courage and moderation which characterized his relation to the Fascist regime, but here again was defeat. He was a kind of an apostle Paul, who never walk- ed the road to Damascus and who remained the prisoner of the in- adequate dogmas and conclusions of his youth.

Valuable, solid, full of insights as Meisel's book is, the reader will nevertheless experience considerable difficulty because of the constant shifting from exposition to criticism and back again. The author had two alternatives, to write an impersonal exposition of Mosca's thought or to write a book of his own on elitism with Mosca as a convenient peg for source material. Instead of choosing one or the other, Professor Meisel elected to combine them, and therein lies the difficulty. This is a problem which every analyst of someone else's thought has to face, and rare indeed is the one who can combine both alternatives successfully.

RENE DE VISME WILLIAMSON

Louisiana State University

Authority. Edited by CARL J. FREIRICH for the American Society of Political and Legal Philosophy. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1958. Pp. viii, 234. $5.00.)

This collection of thirteen essays on "Authority" is of primary interest to historians, legal and political philosophers, and social scientists. The book brings together suggestive ideas as to the nature of authority, stimulating discussion of its relation to reason, discretion, values, policy, law and free society. It reviews authority in historical perspective, from the ancient Greeks on to select Ameri- can and European thinkers and the new Asian and African elites. It examines the concept of authority in socio-political perspective, as it relates to political change and to legitimation, and as it appears in primitive societies.

Authority has a whole range of meanings, and the writers define it variously in their essays. Some see it as power vested in a do terminate agency (Charles W. Hendel); as approved power exer- cised according to convention (George E. G. Catlin); as the insti- tutionalized right to control others' actions in the attainment of collective goals (Talcott Parsons); as an efficient imperative, in-

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