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The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c7.s16.t4: (d) The Paretian Doctrine of the Circulation of Élites Modified

The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c7.s16.t4

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(d) The Paretian Doctrine of the Circulation of Élites Modified

c7.s16.t4.1

Here the facts of Hindu culture and politics find themselves in general agreement with the doctrines of the Italian sosiologist, Pareto, in *Les Systèmes Socialistes* (1902) and *Trattato di Sociologia Generale* (1916). No society has ever existed without dominant classes, the “*élites*,” says he. The distinction between the upper and the lower socio-economic orders furnishes the fundamental basis of all societal organizations. But the *élites*, says Pareto, have a tendency to degenerate, decay and disappear. The dissolution of the upper classes is not only moral but physical as well. They are ultimately replaced by new dominant classes such as emerge out of the people. Sociologically, Pareto never detects the government of societies in a democratic manner. The course is from aristocracy to aristocracy. Only, the aristocracies rise, have their day, cease to be, and give place to new aristocracies. In his doctrine of the “circulation of the *élites*” there is much that Indian history as the history of other countries can offer as corroborative data.

c7.s16.t4.2

We need not however be hundred per cent Paretians and admit that the *élites* of one generation or culture-stage are *entirely* replaced by those of the next. The emergence of new elements from the lower orders is a reality. For one thing, the army, as we have indicated above, has been one of the greatest “social ladders.” These new elements have, because of military, political, economic, sexual and other circumstances, many chances of getting admitted into and fused or mixed up with the already existing dominant classes. It is these fusions and inter-mixtures that enable the transition from generation to generation of *élites* to appear not as an abrupt breach with the past or a total replacement of old by new, but as a generally steady although often revolutionary process of societal transformation. Thus considered, the historical movements, the social mobilities, the dynamic processes, the *charaiveti* ("move on") activities ought really to be described as the continuous democratizations of world-culture through the rise of the lower and their absorption into the *élites* rather than as marches from aristocracy to aristocracy.⁵⁵

c7.s16.t4.3

⁵⁵ *cf.* the section on "Social Forces in Mediaeval Indian Poetry," *Infra*. See the present author's *Les Races, les Classes et les Forces Transformatrices au point de vue du Metabolisme Social* (International Congress of Sociology, Brussels, August 1933), as well as some of the data in N. K. Bose: "Caste as a Social Phenomenon," "Caste through the Ages," and "The Contact of Culture" (*Calcutta Review*, August and September 1934, January-March 1935).

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