SOURCE: A review of The Ruling Class: Elementi di scienza politica, in The American Political Science Review, Vol. LXVIII, No. 1, March, 1974, pp. 261-2.

In the following essay, Germino reviews the paperback edition of The Ruling Class, noting that even the book's publishers erroneously claim Mosca to have provided the "theoretical foundation" for fascism in Italy.

Gaetano Mosca's classic, Elementi di scienza politica, originally published in 1896, with successive revisions until 1923, is here reprinted in paperback from the hard-back translation first published by McGraw Hill in 1939. While the decision to make available a less expensive paperback edition deserves to be welcomed, it is unfortu-nate that the publishers did not commission someone (James Meisel, whose magisterial study of Mosca, The Myth of the Ruling Class, Ann Arbor, 1958, provides a much needed corrective of earlier impressions of the Sicilian's political thought, immediately comes to mind in this connection) to add an introduction...