Roberto Michels' First Lectures in Political Sociology was first published in 1949. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. A number of papers on key ideas in the social sciences are made available to Americans for the first time in this book. Representative of Western European culture, Roberto Michels, author of the famous Political Parties and many other works, asks and gives answers to a number of questions basic to the further study of political behavior, socialeconomic institutions, and public law. There parade before the reader of this volume the really great European contributors to social science of the last century: Saint-Simon, Karl Marx, Gabriel Tarde, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Max Weber, Werner Sombart, Georges Sorel, and many other critics and scholars. At every step the sociologist, the economist, the psychologist, and the political scientist -- for Michels was all of these--intermingle and reinforce each other. German born, Roberto Michels studied at Paris, Munich, Leipzig, Halle, and Turin, and taught successively in some of Europe's greatest universities. In 1927 he lectured in America at the University of Chicago and elsewhere.

Contains, with other papers, lectures delivered at the University of Rome and published in 1927 under title: Corso di sociologia politica. Errata slip inserted. Bibliographical references included in "Notes."

Excerpt from First Lectures in Political Sociology The materials of political science are so vast in scope and unlimited in detail as to depress a beginning student in search of generalities. Yet his political studies may benefit from an early understanding of certain key ideas. It is to political sociology that we may resort for this purpose, for political sociology treats of the social foundations of politics. It asks and gives answers to a number of questions the essential comprehension of which is the preliminary to further study of political behavior, political institutions, and public law. Among the basic questions it considers are: What is the relation between economics and politics? How do economics, politics, and religious ideologies interact and affect one another? To what extent does the social configuration of society - its classes, occupations, and levels of opportunity - permeate and condition political activities? Where does political power reside and how is it wielded? What general social changes are occurring and what political changes are associated with them? And who are the political leaders and what are their origins? Possessed of general answers to these questions, even though they be valid only for the time being, a student of political science gains certain advantages. He can reject or shed a volume of the data that crowds him from all quarters, holding it to be irrelevant or superfluous. He can relate the data he retains to categories which are intellectually useful and capable of being remembered. He can guard himself against the dangers of one-sidedness, the curse of narrowly trained and formally preoccupied minds. He can congratulate himself that he is being realistic, escaping the accusing "qu'importe?" of critical laymen and scholars alike. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

These essays by the brilliant historian of political science Juan Linz comprise a remarkable intellectual review of the life and work of Robert Michels, his major book Political Parties, and the dimensions of democracy as a functioning system.Linz elucidates the importance of Michels in a way that offers more than a mechanical view of political parties as some sort of precisely ordered system of authority and influence. Instead, Michels offers a view of politics that is bottom up and untidy, what he calls a "reciprocal deference structure." Michels is not simply the father of the iron law of oligarchy, but the idea of politics as a less than orderly network of responsiveness, responsibility, and accountability. Linz demonstrates, with magisterial power, why Michels must be ranked as a foremost thinker in classical political sociology. The remaining three segments of the volume cover areas with which Linz has also long been identified. Each in its own way illumines aspects of Michels as well. "Time and Regime Change" articulates differences between change within a regime and change of a regime--sometimes hard to identify because of the elongated time frames involved. The next essay explains why Spain is neither a traditional society nor a successful modern nation. The reliance upon central authority displaced the hoped for evolution of a society based on representative democratic institutions. The final section. "Freedom and Autonomy of Intellectuals and Artists" is a topic that gripped Michels and Linz alike. Freedom as a goal of the intelligentsia has been frustrated by those who provide ideological justification for repression of ideas and actions in the name of higher values. This segment provides a bridge between Michels and Weber--not to mention both of these major figures with Linz himself. The role of state power in mediating intellectual freedom is the leitmotif that blankets the twentieth century. The work is graced by a full-length bibliography o