The Elite and the State: Who Really Holds Power?

When we talk about “the state,” we tend to picture parliaments, elections, and government ministers making decisions on behalf of the public. But political theory raises a more uncomfortable question: is it really elected officials who hold ultimate power, or is it a much smaller, less visible group sitting at the top of the state’s permanent machinery? Understanding who actually staffs the state – and what biases and interests they bring with them – is one of the most important debates in political science and, increasingly, in journalism.

What is the “state elite”?
Elitist theories of power
C. Wright Mills and the power elite
Weber and the bureaucratic elite
The Marxist challenge: does the elite really matter?
Structural Marxism and “relative autonomy”
The state-society relationship: who serves whom?
Totalitarianism and maximum state control
Can the state challenge inequality?

What is the “state elite”?

The state does not run itself. Behind every elected government is a vast apparatus of judges, senior civil servants, military chiefs, and departmental heads who keep the machinery of power turning regardless of which party wins an election. These individuals collectively form what political theorists call the state elite – those who occupy the commanding positions within state institutions and, through those positions, exercise enormous influence over law, policy, and public life.

A critical starting point is asking: who are these people, and where do they come from? This is not idle curiosity. Elite theory in political science is built on the observation that if the people occupying the most powerful positions share a nearly identical social background, they are very likely to share similar assumptions, values, and blind spots about how society should work. The result is not necessarily a deliberate conspiracy – it is something more subtle and arguably more powerful: a shared worldview baked into the very institutions of the state.

A concrete and frequently cited example is the British judiciary. Data reported by openDemocracy shows that for decades, senior British judges were overwhelmingly white, male, and educated at private schools – with a significant proportion having attended Oxford or Cambridge. The UK government’s own diversity page once described the typical judicial office-holder as “pale and male” – a white man, likely educated at a public school and Oxbridge. This homogeneity raises a pointed question: can a judiciary drawn almost entirely from one narrow social class be reliably impartial when ruling on matters like industrial disputes, poverty, or corporate regulation?

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu tackled this directly in his landmark work The State Nobility. As Stanford University Press summarizes, Bourdieu examined how elite education systems – the grandes écoles in France, the Ivy League in the United States, and Oxford and Cambridge in England – perform a “work of consecration,” making the reproduction of the elite appear to be a natural, merit-based process. In reality, he argued, these systems systematically favor those who already belong to privileged social groups, ensuring that the state elite tends to reproduce itself from one generation to the next.

Elitist theories of power

The formal study of the state elite has its roots in classical elite theory, which holds that in any society, power is inevitably concentrated in the hands of a small minority. According to Britannica, Italian theorists Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto were among the first to argue systematically that elite rule is not an accident but an inevitability, driven by the organizational requirements of modern political life. Mosca’s core observation was blunt: in every society, a small class performs all political functions and monopolizes power, while the larger population is directed and controlled by it.

The German sociologist Robert Michels pushed this further with his iron law of oligarchy: he argued that all organizations, regardless of how democratic their founding intentions, will eventually evolve into oligarchies because effective decision-making demands leadership, and leadership naturally concentrates power. As documented in a peer-reviewed analysis published by the National Institutes of Health, classical elite theory holds that the primary objective of every ruling class is to preserve its own power and privilege, typically through a combination of force and ideological legitimation – the construction of myths, religions, or political formulas that make elite rule appear natural and just.

C. Wright Mills and the power elite

The most influential 20th-century application of elite theory to a modern democracy came from American sociologist C. Wright Mills. In his 1956 work The Power Elite, Mills identified three interlocking groups – political leaders, major corporate executives, and high-ranking military officers – as forming a distinguishable power-wielding body in the United States. Crucially, Mills found that these groups were not separate: elites circulate from one sector to another, consolidating power in the process. Cabinet members become corporate executives; military chiefs move into policy roles; corporate owners move into government. This circulation of elites, Mills argued, helps ensure their collective dominance over national life.

A landmark empirical study of U.S. policy by political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page supported this concern. Their analysis of 1,779 policy issues found that economic elites and organized business interests have substantial independent influence on government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent impact on outcomes – a finding with significant implications for how we understand democratic representation.

Weber and the bureaucratic elite

Max Weber approached the question of elite power from a different angle – not through the lens of class, but through the lens of organization. Weber saw that modern states require a vast, complex bureaucracy to function. As Wikipedia’s synthesis of Weber’s work explains, he considered bureaucracy the most rational and efficient form of organization – but he also feared it deeply. He worried that this perfectly rational system could become an “iron cage”: a structure of rules and regulations so totalizing that it traps individuals, stripping away human creativity, values, and freedom in favor of cold efficiency and impersonal control.

For Weber, the critical political question was: who controls the bureaucratic machine? The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Weber believed only strong, charismatic political leadership could control an otherwise omnipotent bureaucracy. Without a powerful political elite capable of directing the bureaucratic apparatus, Weber feared that the bureaucrats themselves – the permanent civil servants and technocrats – would take over and run the state on pure procedural logic, without democratic accountability or moral vision. This is why Weber argued that strong political leadership was not an optional luxury, but a structural necessity in the modern state.

The Marxist challenge: does the elite really matter?

Elitist theories assume that the individuals at the top of the state make a difference – that their backgrounds, decisions, and personalities shape political outcomes. Marxist theory challenges this assumption at its root. For Marxists, the more important question is not who sits in the state’s commanding positions, but what socio-economic structure those positions serve.

According to Marx’s foundational argument, the state is not a neutral institution serving all citizens equally. It is an organ of class rule – it legalizes and perpetuates the dominance of the economically powerful class by creating an appearance of order while managing social conflicts in ways that protect property and capital. In this view, the state elite – the judges, generals, and senior civil servants – are essentially high-level managers for the real ruling class: those who own the means of production. It matters relatively little whether a particular judge attended a state school or Eton; their institutional function within the capitalist system remains the same.

Structural Marxism and “relative autonomy”

Later Marxist thinkers recognized that this instrumentalist view was too crude. The French theorist Nicos Poulantzas developed the concept of the relative autonomy of the state. As summarized by PubAdmin Institute, Poulantzas argued that the state is not merely a tool of the capitalist class – it has a degree of independence that allows it to mediate between different class fractions and manage internal conflicts. The state sometimes needs to act against the short-term interests of individual capitalists in order to preserve the long-term stability of the system as a whole. By addressing some working-class demands through social programs or labor protections, the state maintains its legitimacy and prevents the kind of social unrest that would truly threaten the ruling order.

Ralph Miliband, writing in the New Left Review, acknowledged that Marxist theory had tended to under-emphasize the fact that the state has interests of its own – that the people running it genuinely believe it has purposes and goals distinct from any single class. This structural perspective shifts the analytical focus away from the intentions of individual elite actors and toward the constraints that the social and economic framework places on what any government – regardless of its personnel – can realistically do.

The state-society relationship: who serves whom?

Underlying all of these theories is a fundamental debate about the relationship between the state and the society it governs. Does the state reflect and reinforce existing social inequalities, or can it act as an independent force to challenge them? The answer varies dramatically depending on both the theory one applies and the type of state under examination.

In liberal democratic theory, the state is meant to be a neutral arbiter standing above particular class interests, enforcing rules equally for all citizens. In practice, as LibreTexts’ sociology resource notes, evidence of elite influence on political and economic systems suggests that government is not always “of the people, by the people, for the people,” however much we may wish it otherwise. Even defenders of the pluralist view – which holds that power is spread among competing interest groups – acknowledge that the range of groups with real influence is “amazingly narrow,” biased toward business and upper-class interests.

Totalitarianism and maximum state control

The most extreme version of state power over society is the totalitarian state, where the boundary between state and society effectively disappears. In totalitarian systems, the state does not merely govern society – it seeks to penetrate and control it at every level: economic, cultural, educational, and personal. The state elite in such systems becomes the most powerful class in society precisely because the state monopolizes all resources and suppresses all competing centers of power. This represents the clearest possible case where the composition, ideology, and interests of the state elite directly determine the fate of entire populations – and makes the question of who holds power within the state a matter of profound consequence.

Can the state challenge inequality?

Structural theories suggest that even well-intentioned governments face powerful constraints. A state operating within a capitalist economy is heavily dependent on business confidence to generate the tax revenues it needs to function. As sociologist Fred Block argued in a landmark essay discussed by Jacobin, capitalists don’t need to mobilize politically to block radical reform – state managers themselves will be deterred from policies that undermine business confidence because economic collapse would destroy their own political position. This structural constraint operates regardless of who fills the state’s elite positions, which is precisely Marxism’s central point: the socio-economic context shapes what is politically possible far more than individual personnel do.

Yet history also shows that states have enacted significant reforms – welfare systems, labor protections, anti-discrimination laws – that do challenge entrenched interests. This suggests the relationship between state and society is not fixed or one-directional. The composition of the state elite, the pressures of organized social movements, the relative autonomy of state institutions, and the structural constraints of the economic order all interact dynamically to produce political outcomes that no single theory fully predicts.

What do you think? If the people running a country’s courts, civil service, and military all share the same narrow educational and class background, does that make truly impartial governance impossible – or is institutional design and the rule of law enough to override personal bias? And if structural forces constrain what any government can do, does it ultimately matter which individuals or which party holds state power?

References

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Table of Contents

What is the “state elite”? 🔗

Elitist theories of power 🔗

C. Wright Mills and the power elite 🔗

Weber and the bureaucratic elite 🔗

The Marxist challenge: does the elite really matter? 🔗

Structural Marxism and “relative autonomy” 🔗

The state-society relationship: who serves whom? 🔗

Totalitarianism and maximum state control 🔗

Can the state challenge inequality? 🔗