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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
Scholars of society and politics have over the years developed a large number of theoretical approaches to assist them in understanding their subject matter. These methodological orientations necessarily affect research findings and results. Social scientists have not always been known for their toleration of any approach that differs substantially from their own. Some, therefore, harden their own approaches into doctrines while those developed by others are treated as heresies. Dogmatism triumphs over open-mindedness.
Practitioners of the elite approach are as prone to this malady as are any other group of theoreticians. And for some very understandable reasons. In American political science, those who adopt an elite perspective have been unfairly but consistently attacked by the “pluralists,” i.e., those who adopt a group approach and in so doing disavow the existence and/or importance of elites. The attack takes on a nasty normative slant whereby elite scholars are insidiously identified as proponents of the phenomenon they study.
1. An early great scholar of elite politics, Vilfredo Pareto, for example, was accused of everything from exhibiting “a sadistic pleasure in finding faults with mankind” to “employing the psychology of the disappointed lover.”
2. Indeed, the book is considered an elite study by William Zartman, I. in his review article “The Study of Elite Circulation,” Comparative Politics, 6 (April, 1974), 465-488.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3. The inherent antipathy to group study harbored by elite scholarship is reflected in Marvin Zonis's own writing on Iran. In his study of the Iranian elite, for example, he at one point goes so far as to state that, “And, indeed, one is struck by the relative absence in Iranian life of meaningful and functioning groups other than the family. Iranian politics is not a process in which groups play an especially relevant role.” See Zonis, The Political Elite of Iran (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 214-215.Google Scholar
4. Since the entire article focuses on developing complementary definitions of group and class in the Islamic social context, I cannot dismiss the possibility that the reviewer looked at the wrong article. The possibility that this could have occurred is lent some credence by the fact that Professor Zonis cites the article as appearing in volume 4 of IJMES. It in fact appeared in volume 3.
5. Hutchins, R. M. et al., Science, Scientists, and Politics (Santa Barbara, Cal.: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1963), p. 3.Google Scholar
6. Moore, Barrington Jr. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 486.Google Scholar
7. Ibid., p. 487.
8. One of the strengths of Marvin Zonis's own scholarship is the forthright manner in which he admits many of the deficiencies of the elite approach which he adopts in his book on Iran. For an elaboration of this point as well as my brief evaluation of Zonis's book on Iran, see my review in The Middle East Journal, 26 (Autumn, 1972), 459-461.Google Scholar
9. Bottomore, T. B. Elites and Society (New York: Basic Books, 1964), p. 118.Google Scholar
10. Jandaghi, Ali (pseud.). “The Present Situation in Iran,” Monthly Review, 25 (November, 1973), 43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11. Bachrach, Peter The Theory of Democratic Elitism: A Critique (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1967), p. 2.Google Scholar
12. See also Berque, Jacques “L'Idee de Classes dans L’ Histoire Contemporaine des Arabs,” Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, 38 (1965), 169-184.Google Scholar
13. This paper was prepared for delivery at the 8th Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, November 6-9, 1974, Boston, Massachusetts. For an expanded but more preliminary version of Helfgott's analysis, see Helfgott, L. “The Rise of the Qajar Dynasty: The Political Economy of Tribalism in 19th Century Persia” (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, University of Maryland, 1973).Google Scholar
