Robert Michels, a Career

Abstract This chapter provides a brief biographical overview of Robert Michels’ career, which provides a perspective to enable the reader to find their way more easily through the more thematic chapters. The chapter traces Michels’ education and early academic career plans, his love of Italy and sense of affinity with the Italian people, and his transition from socialist activist in Germany, with connections with socialists and left syndicalists in Italy and France, to someone seeking to establish a career in the emerging discipline of social science. In this context, Michels’ relations with Max Weber and Werner Sombart, and his involvement in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, were of particular importance. Once Michels succeeded in getting an academic post at the University of Turin, he was also increasingly influenced by Italian elite theory, as espoused by Mosca and Pareto. The chapter finally turns to Michels’ conversion to fascism, while arguing that this evolution was not as simple or pre-determined as earlier scholarship has sometimes suggested.