Robert Michels, Socialism, and Modernity

Abstract Robert Michels (1876−1936) is best known for his 1911 book Political Parties, which is still a standard reference in political science as a work that propounds an ‘iron law of oligarchy’ that governs the organizational evolution of democratic political parties. The work was closely informed by Michels’ engagement with the German Social Democratic Party in the early 1900s, but also by his involvement in radical politics in France and Italy in this period, and by his interest in a range of intellectual and social movements—including feminism, nationalism, racial theory, and the emerging disciplines of sociology and political science. This new study, using archival and printed sources hitherto overlooked in earlier works on Michels, presents a new interpretation of Michels’ intellectual evolution which contests previous arguments which have sought to explain Michels as a disillusioned adherent of ideas of direct democracy or as an extremist moving from revolutionary syndicalism to fascism. The biographical and intellectual influences on Michels are shown to be more complex, and more transnational, than such schematic explanations have allowed.