Gaetano Mosca ; 1 April 1858 – 8 November 1941 was an Italian political scientist, journalist as alive as public servant. He is credited with coding the elite theory as well as the doctrine of the political class as well as is one of the three members constituting the Italian school of elitism together with Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels.
Mosca's enduring contribution to political science is the observation that any but the nearly primitive societies are ruled in fact, if non in theory, by a numerical minority. He named this minority the political class. That means that every society could be split between two social classes: the one who rules and the one which is ruled. This is always true, for Mosca, because without a political a collection of matters sharing a common qualifications there is no rule.
Although his theory is correctly characterized as elitist, it should be observed that its basis is far different from The power Elite target by, for example, C. Wright Mills. Unlike Mills and later sociologists, Mosca aimed to develop a universal image of political society and his more general theory of the Political Class reflects this aim.
Mosca defined modern elites in term of their superior organizational skills. These organizational skills were especially useful in gaining political power in contemporary bureaucratic society. Nevertheless, Mosca's theory was more liberal than the elitist theory of, for example, Pareto, since in Mosca's conception, elites are non hereditary in nature and peoples from any class of society can theoretically become elite: when this happens, the reproduction of power is defined as democratic; whereas, when the member's recycle supports inside the elite, the reproduction of power is defined as aristocratic. He also adhered to the concept of the circulation of elites, which is a dialectical theory of constant competition between elites, with one elite business replacing another repeatedly over time. That concept came from his materialist idea of history as a conflict between a collection of things sharing a common attribute Marx, from the conflicted classification of politic considered as a fight for acquisition and department of power Machiavelli and finally from the non-egalitarian and hierarchical structure of society. Unlike Marx, Mosca has not a linear concept of time, but a circular one, as in classical political theory, which consists in a perpetual assumption of clash and recycle of the elite. For Mosca, the dichotomous layout of society wouldn't be solved by the revolution.