Gaetano Mosca
April 1, 1858—Nov. 8, 1941
Sicilian jurist and philosopher
One of the principal agencies by which revolutionary traditions and passions have been kept alive in many countries in Europe has been the political association, especially the secret society. In such societies ruling groups receive their education and are trained in the arts of inflaming passions in the masses and leading them toward given ends. When it becomes possible to write the history of the nineteenth century impartially, much space will have to be given to the effectiveness with which the Masonic lodges, for example, managed to disseminate liberal and democratic ideals, and so cause rapid and profound modifications of intellectual trends in a great part of European society. Unless we assume an active, organized and well-managed propaganda on the part of such groups, it would be hard to explain how it has come about that certain points of view that were the property of highly exclusive coteries in a select society at the end of the eighteenth century can now be heard expressed in the remotest villages by persons and in environments that certainly have not been changed by any special education of their own.
Reprinted from The Ruling Class by Gaetano Mosca, pp.219-220, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1939
