SOURCE: "Gaetano Mosca and the Political Lessons of History," in Teachers of History: Essays in Honor of Laurence Bradford Packard, edited by H. Stuart Hughes with the collaboration of Myron P. Gilmore and Edwin C. Rozwenc, Cornell University Press, 1954, pp. 146-62.

In the following essay, Hughes contrasts the theories of Mosca and Pareto, arguing that their differences stemmed from Mosca's view of history as an "experienced reality."

Among American students of political science and history, Gaetano Mosca is usually considered as a kind of second-class Pareto. The leading ideas ascribed to the two thinkers are similar—the theory of elites, of the role of force and deception in history, in short, of a neoMachiavellianism derived from a common Italian heritage. As sharp critics of parliamentary democracy and socialism, Pareto and Mosca appear to occupy similar places among the precursors of fascism—half-unconscious, perhaps, of what they were doing...