Circulation of elites is Vilfredo Pareto's answer to an obvious problem in elite theory: if every society is ruled by a minority, why do ruling minorities keep changing? Pareto's reply is that elites are not permanent bodies but temporary accumulations of quality. Every elite possesses, at the moment of its ascent, the attributes its society rewards — energy, cunning, courage, discipline. Over generations those attributes dissipate: the descendants of the able inherit position without capacity, the elite becomes closed and complacent, and meanwhile people of exactly the required qualities accumulate in the classes below. Political history is the record of this mismatch being corrected.
Correction takes one of two forms. Where the elite remains open, it recruits the ablest individuals from below, co-opts them, and thereby renews itself while surviving as an institution. Where it closes itself off, the able are excluded, they organise as a counter-elite, they mobilise the mass with promises made in the mass's name, and the old elite is displaced by force or upheaval. Pareto's famous formula is that history is a cemetery of aristocracies.
Lions and foxes
Pareto explained the content of elite change through the residues — sentiments that govern conduct beneath its rationalising surface. Where Class II residues, the persistence of aggregates, predominate, an elite is conservative, loyal, religious in temper and willing to use force: these are the lions. Where Class I residues, the instinct of combination, predominate, the elite is inventive, calculating, adept at combination and manipulation, and inclined to buy off opposition rather than fight it: these are the foxes.
Each type contains the seeds of its own decline. A regime of lions is stable but rigid and eventually unimaginative; a regime of foxes is flexible and innovative but loses the nerve to defend itself and becomes corrupt. Pareto therefore expected an oscillation between the two, mediated by the entry of suitable men from below. This is not a theory of progress. Circulation restores equilibrium; it does not improve societies.
Two distinct processes
Careful use of the concept requires a distinction that Pareto himself sometimes blurred and that Raymond Aron and T. B. Bottomore later sharpened.
Circulation of individuals is the movement of persons between the elite and the non-elite while the structure of the elite, its recruitment channels and its values remain intact. A scholarship boy who enters the higher civil service, or a successful businessman who is invited onto a governing board, has circulated individually; the ruling group has been refreshed and stabilised, not changed.
Circulation of elites proper, or the replacement of a whole elite, occurs when one group is displaced by another with a different social base, different skills and a different political formula. Revolutions are the extreme case: for Pareto they occur precisely when circulation of individuals has been obstructed, so that accumulated ability below and accumulated incapacity above are corrected in a single violent movement.
Bottomore added a caution. The bare fact of high mobility into an elite does not prove openness, since the recruits may be selected precisely for their willingness to accept the existing formula. Co-option can be a technique of domination rather than evidence of its absence.
The Indian illustration
Independent India provides an unusually clear sequence. The elite of 1947 was narrow: English-educated, urban, disproportionately upper-caste, and dominant across the Congress, the bureaucracy, the professions and the universities. Under what Rajni Kothari called the Congress system, that elite recruited local notables and dominant-caste leaders as intermediaries, absorbing potential rivals rather than confronting them — circulation of individuals, functioning as a device of stability.
The absorptive capacity broke down. The 1967 elections ended Congress dominance in several states and brought to office coalitions led by intermediate peasant castes whose numbers, land and new access to education had outgrown the positions available to them. Charan Singh in Uttar Pradesh, the Jat and Yadav leaderships of the north, and the earlier non-Brahmin movements of the south represent counter-elites entering government on their own terms. The implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations in 1990, and the subsequent decade of coalition politics, extended the process to a wider band of Other Backward Classes and produced governments in the Hindi belt led by parties built explicitly on backward-caste and Dalit support.
Christophe Jaffrelot described this as a silent revolution, and Yogendra Yadav as a second democratic upsurge — a change in who governs without a change in the constitutional order. Pareto's framework captures the mechanism, but it also reveals its own limits here. The new elites arrived through elections rather than force; their claim rested on numbers and on caste as a political resource rather than on residues; and the displacement was partial, since business, bureaucratic, professional and media elites remained comparatively unchanged.
Criticisms
Three objections recur. First, the concept is tautological: whichever group rules is defined as possessing superior qualities, so the theory cannot be falsified. Secondly, Pareto's psychology is arbitrary — residues are inferred from the behaviour they are meant to explain, and the lion-fox typology is suggestive rather than analytic. Thirdly, Marxists object that circulation describes the turnover of personnel while leaving the structure of property untouched; a new set of rulers presiding over the same relations of production is change of a limited kind. Feminist and Dalit critiques add that the theory says nothing about the exclusions — of gender, of the historically stigmatised — that determine who is even eligible to circulate.
For the UPSC answer
Define circulation as the renewal of elites through decay and replacement, then immediately separate circulation of individuals from replacement of an entire elite; examiners reward that distinction. Attach lions and foxes to the residues rather than treating them as loose metaphors, and state Pareto's causal claim plainly: blocked circulation produces revolution. For the Indian illustration, move from the Congress system as elite accommodation to 1967 and then to Mandal, naming Jaffrelot's silent revolution and Yadav's second democratic upsurge. Close with the Marxist objection that personnel changed while property did not — it converts a descriptive answer into an evaluative one.
References & further reading
- Pareto, V. (1935). The Mind and Society. Harcourt, Brace. (Italian original 1916.)
- Pareto, V. (1968). The Rise and Fall of the Elites. Bedminster Press. (Italian original 1901.)
- Mosca, G. (1939). The Ruling Class. McGraw-Hill.
- Bottomore, T. (1964). Elites and Society. Watts.
- Aron, R. (1950). Social Structure and the Ruling Class. British Journal of Sociology, 1(1).
- Jaffrelot, C. (2003). India's Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India. Permanent Black.
- Yadav, Y. (2000). Understanding the Second Democratic Upsurge, in Frankel, F. et al. (eds), Transforming India. Oxford University Press.