The Concept of Elite

Abstract This article is an attempt to clarify the concept of elite. Elite is a concept that has been used through different centuries, by different people, in different cultural and intellectual environments. The result of this plurality of uses is that, in political science today, elite is a fuzzy concept. Concepts are not mere words. They stand for meanings and referents. These meanings and referents are what makes a concept useful to describe and explain phenomena. The clarification of the meanings and referents of “elite” is a way to give us better knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the concept of elite in explaining the empirical phenomena of elite. First of all the article offers an analysis of the main components of the concept and its sources of confusion. Following the most recent findings of philosophy of language, two main sources of concept confusion are identified: ambiguity and vagueness. In order to remove these sources of confusion the author deals, first, with the problem of apparent synonymy. A close analysis of the terms most commonly used as synonyms of “elite”: “ruling class,”“aristocracy,”“oligarchy” and “political class,” shows that these terms are not synonyms but that every one of them has a specific meaning different from the others. The supposed synonymy or the use of different words for the same meanings is not the only source of confusion of the concept of elite. Using the same words with different meanings seems to be quite common in the literature on the concept of elite. It is, in fact, clear that different people attribute different meanings to the same words. Among that variety of meanings attributed to “elite” seven are examined in the article: those of Pareto, Mosca, Marx, Wright Mills, Michels, Ortega y Gasset, and the Pluralists.