SOURCE: A review of Political Parties, in Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XXXII, No. 1, March, 1917, pp. 153-55.

In the following review of Political Parties, Beard declares that he finds pessimistic Michels 's pronouncement that, regardless how much education is given to the masses they will ultimately yield to inept leaders.

[Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy] is an elaborate defence of the thesis that

the majority of human beings, in a condition of eternal tutelage, are predestined by tragic necessity to submit to the dominion of a small minority and must be content to constitute the pedestal of an oligarchy. . . . History seems to teach us that no popular movement, however energetic and vigorous, is capable of producing profound and permanent changes in the social organism of the civilized world. The preponderant elements of the movement, the men who lead and nourish it, end...