The Iron Law of Oligarchy

Political growing up

As promised, this is the first in a series of instalments on political theory for Jewish Fundamentalists.

The Iron Law of Oligarchy was formulated by Robert Michels in 1911, and is one of the main achievements of the Italian ‘Machiavellian School’ of political science that flourished in the early 20th century. In the English-speaking world, Machiavelli is best known for The Prince, the message of which is generally simplified into ‘it’s OK to do bad things to achieve desired political ends’. In Italy, however, Machiavelli was also well known for his much longer Discourses on Livy, a detailed historical study of what makes republican government work and what doesn’t, written at a time when the Italian republics that had produced, among other things, the greatest flowering of the visual arts in history, were succumbing to strongmen rulers within, and the great monarchies of Spain and France from without.

Most importantly, these scholars followed Machiavelli because he was the first, and for centuries the only, writer who defined his task as understanding how politics works, rather than how it is supposed to work, or works in an ideal sense. Thus, for example, the Machiavellians did not ask what makes a government ‘legitimate’, but under what conditions a government’s rule will or won’t be accepted by its subjects. Instead of asking what the rights and duties of a sovereign are, they sought to discover what a government can and cannot do under a given set of circumstances.

Defining the Iron Law

As Aristotle first taught, logically, government can either be by one man, a minority of the population, or the majority of the population. Any form of government can either be for the benefit of the state as a whole, or for the benefit of the governors themselves. This gives six forms of government, three good (monarchy, aristocracy, polity) and three bad (tyranny, oligarchy, democracy).  The Iron Law of Oligarchy states that there is a constant tendency in all large organisations towards being governed by a minority who rule the organisation in their own interests.

Michels established his law by study of socialist parties and labour unions, all of which started as explicitly democratic institutions, but which over time evolved into oligarchies in which labour bosses paid themselves large salaries and used the membership to serve their own interests. If oligarchy has an irresistible tendency to emerge in organisations that are most hostile to it, then a fortiori it is present in organisations with fewer or no democratic beliefs. In pop culture, the most famous illustration of the Iron Law is George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

The Mechanism of the Iron Law

The first condition for the Iron Law of Oligarchy to kick in is leadership. Leadership is necessary whenever it is not logistically feasible for all the members of an organisation to be consulted about all decisions. The two conditions that make this so are (a) the organisation has too many members to meet in one place (even virtually) and/or (b) decisions have to be made too frequently for it to be feasible to consult all the members each time. It follows that the tendency towards oligarchy is stronger the larger the organisation is, and the more it does. Since the state is the largest and most active organisation in any society, the Iron Law works most powerfully at the state level.

In organisations that pretend to be democratic or non-oligarchic, the problem of oligarchy is solved not by escaping the need for leadership (since this either limits the size of the organisation to a few dozen people, or renders it impotent, or both), but through the principle of representation. Though the organisation is governed only by a small group of people relative to its total membership, there are mechanisms to make sure that they govern in accordance with either the will or interests of the membership as a whole.

Michels’ empirical studies showed in detail that these mechanisms do not work in the long term. The ways they are overcome are manifold, determined by the precise nature of the organisation and the personality of its leaders, but they all boil down to one thing: the mechanisms for ensuring that the leaders act in the interest of the membership as a whole are themselves in the hands of the leaders. If the organisation has elections to keep the leadership to account, the leadership can time the elections to their own advantage. If the organisation’s constitution mandates elections at pre-determined intervals, the leadership can use the organisation’s resources to propagandise the members. If the organisation’s constitution forbids this, the leadership can use their own personal funds and then allot themselves higher salaries. Whatever obstacles are put in the place of the tendency towards oligarchy can be surmounted in this fashion.

The only way to stop the tendency towards oligarchy, in fact, is for those who oppose it to concentrate their energies on rendering the organisation dysfunctional by constantly frustrating the ability of the leadership to manage the organisation. This can be achieved, but only at the expense of the organisation not achieving its goals. For the very same reason leadership exists in the first place, it needs to have the effective ability to manage the organisation in such a way that there cannot be effective opposition to the consolidation of oligarchy. In the unlikely event that a leadership emerges consisting of people purely motivated by the good of the organisation, and they are not subsequently corrupted by power, they will consolidate power so as to be able to use it effectively, power which in due course will inevitably be handed over to those with oligarchical inclinations.

The only forces strong enough to resist the tendency to oligarchy in a given organisation come from outside the organisation. While a union can shape the public opinion of its members by controlling the flow of information, and using the resources of the organisation to run marketing campaigns, the members are also exposed to information from outside sources. If a more powerful organisation wants to crush the oligarchy of a less powerful one, they have the resources to do so. It follows that the tendency towards oligarchy is strongest at the level of the state and, in an international order, in the most powerful state.

Democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy

If all organisations exhibit a tendency to oligarchy, what about the other kinds of government? Michels’ conclusion was that democracy was not a stable form of government at all, but always an eruption that eventually defaulted back to oligarchy. This fits the data of history nicely, and predicted the trajectory of socialist states to a tee. It is, though, in need of revision in light of post-WW2 history, which has seen constant expansion of ‘democratic’ government. ‘Democracy’ can also refer to a system of government in which rival factions of oligarchs compete by mobilising coalitions of supporters among the lower orders, agreeing to minimise violence by simply counting their supporters rather than engaging in other forms of competition. This is also not a very stable state of affairs, and its perpetuation across the globe requires explanation. This will be discussed in due course.*

But what about monarchy, which is the most common form of government in all parts of the world in almost all historical eras? For this we need to turn to another Machiavellian, Gaetano Mosca, whose principle of ‘the governing class’ was a forerunner of the Iron Law. Mosca observed something fairly obvious, namely that a monarch cannot literally do everything by himself, but needs a whole ‘governing class’ to exercise the functions of government, no less than in an oligarchy. Monarchies are best regarded as a special type of oligarchy, in which a management structure within the oligarchy exists that terminates in one man at the top with ultimate responsibility.

Fundamentalist Jewish takeaways

The Iron Law is a basic part of the toolset for a grownup who wants to think about politics. Once you have understood it, it becomes obvious that most Right Wing (and Left Wing, but I hope that this goes without saying) politics is just inane nonsense babble. Kahanism and its contemporary offshoots are not exceptions. Most other implications will have to wait until we have introduced further important concepts, but we can elaborate on one here.

Everyone knows the objection to monarchy which runs ‘but what if the monarch is a depraved, sadistic maniac?’ This is a serious objection, since it has happened plenty of times, including in Jewish history. The dominant approach to this problem in the Anglo-American tradition under which we were all raised is to put in safeguards limiting the power of the monarch, or a mechanism in place for removing him if he loses the plot. The Iron Law demonstrates why this is pointless: either it works, in which case the monarchy will be rendered dysfunctional, or it won’t work in which case the monarch will find a way to get round it. What actually happened is a combination of the two: the monarchy itself became dysfunctional, and the state as a whole found ways to get round the limitations that were imposed upon it. Try telling the Feds you ain’t paying no import tax on tea, mate.

Jewish sources, by contrast, consistently emphasise the power of the King and seek to mitigate this not by constitutional safeguards, but through education: in essence, making sure the King is gut un frum and thus chooses to rule according to halacha. Our ideological training tells us that this is ridiculous and naïve: absolute power corrupts absolutely. The Iron Law tells us, by contrast, that this is the only realistic approach to managing the problem of uncontrollable power. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to achieve, but that’s all the more reason to focus on doing it right.

*Spoiler: it’s fake.