Ethnicity and Race

Abstract Most treatments of Robert Michels’ thought have paid scant attention to the salience of concepts of race and innate ethnic characteristics throughout Michels’ works. However, ideas of racial and ethnic difference play a consistent and important part in Michels’ thought, even if they tended to be soft-pedalled in his writings for the German Social Democratic Party. This prevalence of Michels’ views on race has yet to be subjected to a systematic analysis. The fact that the biologistic influences on Michels’ thought came more from Italian sources than German is worth emphasizing in the light of recent historiography which has increasingly focused on the significance of the evolution of racial thought in Italy on the emergence of Italian fascist ideology, in contrast to older literature which depicted racism as imported into Italian fascism from German Nazism. Michels contributed to the German journal Politisch-Anthropologische Revue, which was a forum for racial theorists, but much of the racial-biological influence on his thinking seems to have come from Italian sources, from the criminologist Cesare Lombroso to Italian ‘social anthropologists’ such as Enrico Ferri. Michels’ willingness to make use of ethnic and racial categories assisted his drift to the right as he became disillusioned with socialist politics.