Conclusions

Abstract Both the common argument that Michels was a disillusioned believer in pure democracy and the view that Michels’ extremist tendencies catapulted him from revolutionary syndicalist positions to fascism stand in need of correction in the light of a close analysis of Michels’ evolution and the diverse intellectual influences to which he responded. In part, Michels’ career up to the publication of his Political Parties in 1911 was marked by the tension between his ambitions for an academic career in imperial Germany and his political activism. In his political activism, Michels displayed a belief in an agonistic conception of politics in which superior individuals were able to show their ethical qualities, a view of politics that was increasingly at odds with both Marxist theory and the realities of organizing a modern mass party. Michels became increasingly pessimistic about the masses and mass politics, a pessimism influenced both by elite theory and by Michels’ openness to ideas of racial and biological determinism.