SOCA01H3 Lecture : Social Stratification Terms
Document Summary
Was an italian political scientist, journalist and public servant. He is credited with developing the theory of elitism and the doctrine of the political class and is one of the three members constituting the italian. School of elitists together with wilfred pareto and robert michels. In his most famous book the ruling class (1896), he argued that there are inevitably two classes of people, the rulers and the ruled. The former is a highly stable, privileged stratum, which enjoys wealth, power, and honour. In other words, he criticized marxists who failed to explain the persistence of dominance, and liberals who assumed that the transition to industrial society would lead to the demise of rule by an lite separated from the masses. A political theory that states that all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic or autocratic[c] they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop into oligarchies.
