Anti-Elitism Revisited

ARE ELITES AND LEADING MINORITIES A NECESSARY EVIL, A LIABILITY, or are they a vital and beneficial asset? Ultimately, the question is: should we downgrade or uplift leadership? The list of authors who speak in favour of the latter view is impressive, both in time and in eminence. For the ancients, it is the major Greek historian, Thucydides, who reminds us that the greatness of Athens reached its height with Pericles precisely because ‘by his rank, ability, and known integrity he was enabled to exercise an independent control over the multitude’. After we had begun again, Bryce reviewed the most advanced experience of his time in this concise sentence: ‘Perhaps no form of government needs great leaders so much as democracy does’. Fifty years later, in 1937, after the downfall of democracy in Italy, Germany and Spain, de Madariaga wrote : ‘Despite appearances, liberal democracies are dependent on leadership even more so perhaps than other, more authoritarian forms of government; for . . . their natural tendency to weaken the springs of political authority must be counterbalanced by a higher level of. . . authority on the part of their leaders’.