Elitism refers to the belief that leadership positions within a society, or in government more specifically, should be held by those possessing the highest levels of education, wealth, and social status. According to elitism, a select subgroup should make or influence decisions for the whole society. Overall, elitism as an ideology advocates that select citizens are best fit to govern.
First noted in Western philosophy by Socrates (c. 470—399 BCE), who described the good society as one headed by philosopher kings, elitism is distrustful of the masses and is in clear opposition to egalitarian or pluralistic principles. Contradicting democratic theory, elitism contends that the capacity to effectively control a dynamic and multifaceted political arena is absent in the average citizen and should be reserved only for a limited few. Thus elitism defers to those individuals whose backgrounds and experiences are believed to make them superior. Depending on the society in question, superiority can be based on perceived intellectual aptitude, skin color, or other factors. Most commonly, characteristics of the elite include educational achievement, family background, and economic affluence. In some societies ethnic heritage, religious affiliation, or gender are the basis of a classification system that distinguishes the elite from the nonelite. In sum, elitism can be defined as an asymmetrical relationship in which a select few, who are considered superior, exercise control over the many, who are considered inferior.
In practice, elites pervade most societal institutions in industrialized Western democratic nations, according to Jack C. Plano and Milton Greenberg (1997). Elites may wield significant influence in such specific arenas as commerce, the military, and government operations. Sociology and political science scholarship has analyzed the role of elites in decision-making processes in various institutional settings. A seminal work by the sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916-1962), The Power Elite (1956), argues that a single elite, rather than a variety of competing groups, makes key decisions for the nation as a whole. The governing elite includes political leaders, corporate leaders, and military leaders.
Due to its advocacy of the virtues of the select over the "commoners," elitism as a normative theory often comes under fire for its antidemocratic tendencies. Critics argue that elitism leads to corruption, greed, intolerance, racism, and other undesirable social outcomes. Many political reform movements have been defined by their desires to eliminate elitist political structures. The historian Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970), in his book The Age of Reform,, gives as an example of antielitism the late nineteenth-century populist movement in the United States. The populists, he argues, believed in the "people versus the interest, the public versus the plutocrats, the toiling multitude versus the money power—in various phases this central antagonism was expressed" (1955, p. 65).
