Although there are some conceptual flaws in Pareto's Circulation of the Elite, overall it is a useful framework upon which to hang the study of the distribution of privileges and influence in a society. This framework can help distinguish between a member of the actual elite who at first glance would be assumed not to be a member, say someone working a temp job in the government's Senior Executive Service, and those who would appear to be a member of the class but are actually just wannabe.*
From Compact Magazine
In the debate pitting defenders of racial preferences in college admissions against proponents of meritocracy, both sides implicitly accept the premise that there must be a single national elite. What divides the two sides is how the members of this single national elite are to be selected in their late teens or early 20s. But there is an alternative to a national oligarchy selected on this or that basis by admissions committees at a few prestigious universities: a plurality of separate elites, each with its own constituency, its own distinct entry requirements, its own internal career ladders, and with little or no lateral mobility between different elites.
Societies in which members of a single, homogeneous national elite with similar backgrounds circulate easily among all of the various centers of power—government, business, academe, and the media—are familiar in the modern world. In Britain, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge and a few elite private schools who live in a few neighborhoods in London dominate powerful institutions. In France, the grandes écoles play the role of Oxbridge in Britain. The University of Tokyo functions similarly in Japan.
Increasingly, the pattern in the United States is similar. It resembles a candelabrum: Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities in their youth can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation, including the arts, outside of the military and the clergy.
After attending Columbia University, Barack Obama went from being a community organizer to a state legislator to a US senator and president, to end up today in his latest career as a producer of documentaries in Hollywood. Both Bill and Hillary Clinton are now co-authors of political thriller novels. Did I mention that Obama and the Clintons also have their own nonprofit foundations? In this respect, they resemble their fellow Baby Boomer, Donald Trump, the Wharton grad who inherited the family real-estate business and has dabbled in television, menswear, golf courses, and hotels, and even founded his own university before becoming president in his first campaign for public office.
“The lateral circulation of members of the same elite … is a formula for oligarchy.”
It must be frustrating for ambitious screenwriters and directors and producers and talented novelists and nonprofit specialists who spent decades going through the paces in their respective vocations, only to be shoved aside in favor of dilettantish ex-presidents and ex-first ladies hopping from one occupation to another at the top. The lateral circulation of members of the same elite through revolving doors in the public, private, and nonprofit realms is a formula for oligarchy.
There is a better way: a system of plural elites, each with its own admissions standards and internal promotion mechanisms. Examples of vocations that are structured along these lines are the US military and the clergy of the more organized among the organized religions. In the case of the military, not only is working your way up through the ranks one way to become a general or an admiral, it is the only way. Likewise, the papacy isn’t an entry-level job open to people who spent most of their lives outside of the Catholic priesthood.
As the example of the US military suggests, the siloed career with internal upward mobility and little or no lateral mobility at higher stages is hardly a vestige of the past. On the contrary, it is perfectly modern. In the early years of the American republic, and even during the Civil War, the way to become a colonel in the militia was to be born into or married into a prominent local gentry family, and campaign contributors and influential politicians could be appointed as generals in the Army by friendly presidents like Abraham Lincoln.
In 21st-century America, campaign donors can still buy prestigious ambassadorships. But in today’s United States you can’t graduate from Harvard or Yale or Princeton, do a stint at McKinsey, work for Goldman Sachs, dabble in making documentaries about climate change or global poverty, invest in a startup, donate heavily to one party or the other and be appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, any more than you can become Archbishop of Boston with that résumé.
Labor unions are another example. Leaders of traditional labor organizations work their way up through the hierarchy. They don’t parachute into the top in midlife after another career in finance, real estate, or political campaign management, brandishing their Ivy diplomas.
As recently as the 1960s and ’70s, the American elite was a mosaic made up of parallel, siloed occupational and functional elites. Outside Wall Street and the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency and some yacht clubs, an Ivy League diploma wasn’t a particular advantage. Even on Wall Street in pre-regulation days, inheriting a seat on the stock exchange from your dad and predecessor in the Roman-numeral surname series was more important than where you went to school.
Trade-union leaders and church hierarchs and small-town courthouse gangs and big-city machine politicians were powers in the land on the basis of the numbers they represented, not their CVs. The working-class, shoe-leather reporters hadn’t yet been edged out of the media by the Yale-educated trust-fund babies who swarmed journalism after Woodward and Bernstein made it cool with their Watergate reporting....
....MUCH MORE
*See:
Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates: "University-educated millennials have absorbed elite values but will never enjoy the lifestyle"
And that probably accounts for some of the crabbiness we see from folks who, compared with our billions and billions of forebearers, back into the mists of time, are among the most privileged and advantaged ever to walk the earth.
They also get grumpy when reminded of that fact....
And if interested, a related post:
"The Fragmenting of the New Class Elites, or, Downward Mobility"
