Nicholas Tate 3rd Fisherman: Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea. 1st Fisherman: Why, as men do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones. (Shakespeare, Pericles, II/1)
The American philosopher and political theorist James Burnham chose this exchange as the epigraph for his book The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943). With utopian liberals, whom he detested, as his main target, he constructed a book on liberty around three early twentieth-century European sociologists firmly convinced of the inevitability and necessity of elites: Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca and Robert Michels. He called them “The Machiavellians” after a statesman and thinker who had seen republics as superior to monarchies, and political conflict within societies as a better guarantor of liberty than a pretend consensus.
These Machiavellians, of whom Burnham was also one, believed that all societies were run by elites, even when they had an absolute monarch or demos nominally in charge. They saw the character and history of all societies as largely determined by their elites. They were convinced that a tendency towards elite rule was inherent in all organisational structures. The German-Italian Michels called this the “iron law of oligarchy”. As Machiavellians, they expected elites to rule in their own interests, with force and guile if needed, and cover their actions with high-blown statements of principle. Elite rule, however, they were convinced, was compatible with a degree of liberty that might well be greater than in societies living under the illusion of altruistic rule. For Pareto in particular, freedom of expression was a crucial condition for the intellectual health of a society. Such freedom was best achieved, he thought, in societies where an elite faced a counter-elite and where social mobility upwards and downwards inhibited the development of an inward-looking hereditary ruling class.
It is interesting that such an explicit discussion about the necessity of elites took place when it did. It coincided with demographic expansion, the emergence of a “mass society” and fears of revolution on the part of the possessing classes. For most of human history, from Plato’s Guardians and Confucius’s junzi (exemplary persons) in the fifth and fourth centuries BC onwards, the focus had been mostly on how best to educate princes and gentlemen so that they would fulfil their functions properly, on the largely unchallenged assumption that these elites would always be with us.
For centuries, the male members of European elites had been nurtured on books that taught them leadership, such as Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, Cicero’s On Duties, and Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano. It was not until the nineteenth century, under the impact of major social and political changes arising from the industrial and French revolutions and consequent threats to the status quo, that the main attention turned more to the moulding of elites as a whole. Burnham’s Machiavellians were a late reflection of this, preceded in England in the nineteenth century by a group of writers – Coleridge, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Cardinal Newman, J. S. Mill – who, in their very different ways, had given much thought to how a learned “clerisy” might be formed and charged with the transmission and development of a cultural or national heritage, in large part through education.
The Machiavellians were highly sceptical that education might have a role in making ruling elites govern better, not surprisingly given the track record of Europe’s greatest educators with their pupils: Plato and the dictators of Syracuse; Aristotle and Alexander of Macedon; Seneca and Nero; Enlightenment gurus with young Prince Ferdinand of Parma. As cynics, the Machiavellians were particularly dubious about educational schemes designed to inculcate virtue.
One of their early twentieth-century contemporaries, who similarly had little time for moral education but who took elite education more seriously, was the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. Ortega, who had known Michels as a student in Germany, was concerned with what, in his The Revolt of the Masses (1929), he called the rise of a “mass society” dominated by el hombre medio (the average man) who had a strong sense of his rights but not of his duties and needed an elite to guide him. Ortega supported democracy and was pleased that Spain in the 1930s was no longer ruled by aristocratic and clerical elites, but, like his hero de Tocqueville, feared the tyranny of the majority. He was particularly concerned that the extension of egalitarian ideas into areas where they ought not to apply was also undermining elites from within. “Average men”, he pointed out, could be found among the highly educated as well as among the masses.
In the other book for which Ortega is now chiefly known, Mission of the University (1930), he was critical of Spain’s university education, arguing that it was too focused on producing specialists who lacked the wider vision needed by an effective elite. His solution was an obligatory course of what he called cultura general, a synthetic overview of the major disciplines. He was particularly concerned about a new generation’s loss of a sense of the past, writing in a lecture he was due to give in 1955, but which death poignantly prevented him from giving, that “man finds himself facing the future lacking a past tense”.
At the same time, towards the end of his career, when Ortega was continuing to think what an elite education might involve, at one point planning a postgraduate humanities course for a future American elite, T. S. Eliot in England was wrestling with similar issues. The two men had never met, though Eliot had earlier tried hard to get Ortega to write for his magazine Criterion. Eliot’s main concern in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1949) is with the transmission of the heritage of past civilisations in an increasingly egalitarian world. His fear was that the key vehicle for this transmission had always been a leisured class that saw itself as a model to the rest of society and that this hierarchical society was ceasing to exist. Eliot had put his finger on the central educational issue of the second half of the twentieth century: how to maintain a transmission-based education worthy of the kind of cultural elite that societies still needed while maintaining the equal treatment of all young people demanded by a more egalitarian world. Eliot did not propose a solution.
Sixty years after the publication of the second edition of Eliot’s book, Mario Vargas Llosa, a fellow Nobel Prize winner, used a re-reading of it as a basis for his book La civilización del espectáculo (2012), later translated into English as Notes on the Death of Culture. Vargas Llosa quotes Eliot as having said that he saw no reason why cultural decay might not continue to such an extent that at some point in the future it would be possible to say that there would be no culture left. That future, Vargas Llosa adds, has now arrived. It is “our own” and has happened for three reasons: the disappearance of the old “cultured” and “educated” class that had set standards; the spread of cultural relativism and its offshoot the omnipresence of a “civilisation of spectacle”; and the absence of the “glue” by which religion in the past had helped to hold societies together.
The old “cultured” elite had disappeared but elites had not. The “iron law of oligarchy” means that elites are always with us, but that they may be of a very different kind. Vargas Llosa was not alone in making these points. In France, for Alain Finkielkraut, essayist and public intellectual, the realisation that things had come to a sorry pass was in 2004 with the appointment of Fleur Pellerin – who admitted that she had not read a single book during the previous two years – as Minister of Culture, a post whose first holder had been polymath André Malraux. For Renaud Camus, recently banned from entry to the UK for views contrary to those of our current elite, it was in 2007 when President Sarkozy on his first official visit to the USA invoked Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe “to underline the affinity of his generation” with the USA. Never has cultural proletarianisation “been so strikingly manifested”, Camus wrote, “as on this occasion from the mouth of the head of state of an old nation of great and high culture”.
None of Eliot, Vargas Llosa, Finkielkraut or Camus have detailed proposals for how one might begin to reverse this situation. One of the few to do so in recent years is the American conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, the title of whose most recent book Regime Change (2023) points to what is needed. By this he does not mean abandoning democracy but trying to ensure that those who run it have different views and adopt different policies from our current progressive liberal elite. Deneen’s vision is of a “common-good conservatism” in which the virtuous few are expected to work on behalf of the socially conservative preferences of the many. It is a regime which combines the Left’s more egalitarian economic order with the Right’s stress on generational continuity and patriotism.
Unlike Eliot, Vargas Llosa and Camus, Deneen has some remarkably precise recommendations about how educational changes might help to shape a new elite: a return to a traditional liberal education in universities; a big shift in resources away from universities towards further education; measures to link high-performing elite students with the wider community. In Regime Change he was sceptical, however, about whether the Trump movement in the USA would have either the clarity of vision or the necessary personnel to bring these changes about.
In England, we await proposals for a revised school curriculum which looks set to bring more of the current progressive elite’s obsessions about the contemporary world into schools and to move us further away from a curriculum focused on the transmission of Matthew Arnold’s “the best that has been thought and said”. As it is, we are already deficient in provision for the most able by comparison with many European countries which still have systems closer to the more differentiated educational provision in secondary education we used to have with our grammar schools and who educate a smaller proportion of young people in universities, one of whose main functions is to induct their students into the latest radical progressive ideologies.
Hungary is the country with the clearest policy to ensure that talent, wherever it exists – in the furthermost corners of the country (and indeed among the post-Trianon Hungarian diaspora) as well as in its large metropolis – is identified and developed at every stage of education, from primary to postgraduate. Its talent development programme exists alongside the mainstream educational system, providing additional stimulus in students’ own time. One of its most attractive features is the inclusion in the programme of efforts to develop a student’s general culture and to avoid that development of narrow specialists that Ortega saw as a major threat to the effectiveness of elites.
For a conservative keen to improve the quality of the elites who run our country, one of this programme’s most attractive features is learning about one’s locality and one’s country and acquiring a sense of one’s duties alongside one’s rights. For England, with its massive discrepancies in attainment between different regions – 29% of pupils in London meeting the requirements of the EBacc (English Baccalaureate) measure at age 16 compared, for example, with 10% in Stoke-on-Trent, the current author’s birthplace – this Hungarian scheme has a great deal to offer, if people can only get beyond their mostly ill-informed assumptions about the nature of the Hungarian regime. It comes closer to tackling that central modern educational dilemma – maintaining a balance between the needs of future elites and those of majorities within societies profoundly shaped by egalitarian assumptions – than any other set of arrangements I have seen.
Dr Nicholas Tate was head of England’s school curriculum and assessment agencies 1994–2000. He is the author of The Conservative Case for Education: Against the Current and currently is an Advisor to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Hungary.
