Exhibit 1166 ยท Book (primary theory text, public domain)
Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (English translation by Eden and Cedar Paul)
It is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy.
Michels argues that organization divides every party or union into a directing minority and a directed majority, and that the organization becomes an end in itself with interests of its own. The phrase "iron law" appears in the translators' chapter title (Part Six, ch. II, "Democracy and the Iron Law of Oligarchy", p. 377, and its running heads); the body formula is "the fundamental sociological law of political parties". Full text read in the Toronto scan.
- Source
- Robert Michels, Hearst's International Library (German original 1911)
- Date
- 1915
- Quoted from
- Part Six, ch. IV ("Final Considerations"), p. 401. Also p. 32: "Organization implies the tendency to oligarchy." And pp. 389-390: the party "is created as a means to secure an end. Having, however, become an end in itself, endowed with aims and interests of its own..."
- Grade
- Primary record
- Document
- https://archive.org/details/politicalparties00michuoft
- Accessed
- 2026-11-10
- Cited by
- Findings citing this exhibit
- Note
- Standing note: tendency well supported in parties and unions, "law" is not. Standard counterexample is Lipset, Trow and Coleman, Union Democracy (1956, Free Press; the International Typographical Union), bibliographic record checked, text not read. Revisions: Voss and Sherman 2000 (exhibit voss-2000-breaking-iron-law) and Leach 2005 (exhibit leach-2005-iron-law-of-what-again). State as a tendency with named exceptions. One OCR artifact (w^iich) corrected in the quote.