In political and sociological theory, the elite (French: élite, from Latin: eligere, to select or to sort out) are a small group of powerful people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege, political power, or skill in a group. Defined by the Cambridge Dictionary, the "elite" are "the richest, most powerful, best-educated, or best-trained group in a society".^[1]

American sociologist C. Wright Mills states that members of the elite accept their fellows' position of importance in society.^[2] "As a rule, 'they accept one another, understand one another, marry one another, tend to work, and to think, if not together at least alike'."^[3][4] It is a well-regulated existence where education plays a critical role.

As European settlers began to colonize the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries, they quickly realized the economic potential of growing cash crops which were in high demand in Europe. Owned by the planter class, plantations, large-scale farms where large numbers of enslaved Africans were held captive and forced to produce crops to create wealth for a white elite, emerged.^[5] According to the London School of Economics (LSE):

"The dominant elite in the South before the Civil War were the wealthy landowners who held people in slavery, the so-called "planter class". Their influence in politics before the war can best be illustrated by highlighting that of the 15 presidents before Abraham Lincoln, eight held people as slaves while in office."^[6]

While the Civil War ended slavery, the former planter class kept control over their land, and thus, they also remained politically influential.^[6] As stated by the LSE, "this persistence in "de facto power" in turn allowed them to block economic reforms, disenfranchise Black voters, and restrict the mobility of workers."^[6]

Youthful upper-class members attend prominent preparatory schools, which open doors to elite universities, known as the Ivy League, which includes Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University and Princeton University (among others), and the universities' respective highly exclusive clubs, such as the Harvard Club of Boston. These memberships in turn pave the way to the prominent social clubs located in major cities and serve as sites for important business contacts.^[3][7]

According to Mills, men receive the education necessary for elitist privilege to obtain their background and contacts, allowing them to enter three branches of the power elite, which are:

• Political leadership: Mills contended that since the end of World War II, corporate leaders had become more prominent in the political process, with a decline in central decision-making for professional politicians.
• Military Circle: In Mills' time a heightened concern about warfare existed, making top military leaders and such issues as defense funding and personnel recruitment very important. Most prominent corporate leaders and politicians^[who?] were strong proponents of military spending.^[when?]
• Corporate elite: According to Mills, in the 1950s when the military emphasis was pronounced, it was corporate leaders working with prominent military officers who dominated the development of policies. These two groups tended to be mutually supportive.^[8][9]

According to Mills, the governing elite in the United States primarily draws its members from political leaders, including the president, and a handful of key cabinet members, as well as close advisers, major corporate owners and directors, and high-ranking military officers.^[10] These groups overlap and elites tend to circulate from one sector to another, consolidating power in the process.^[11]

Unlike the ruling class, a social formation based on heritage and social ties, the power elite is characterized by the organizational structures through which its wealth is acquired. According to Mills, the power elite rose from "the managerial reorganization of the propertied classes into the more or less unified stratum of the corporate rich".^[12] In G. William Domhoff’s sociology textbooks, Who Rules America? editions, he further clarified the differences in the two terms: "The upper class as a whole does not do the ruling. Instead, class rule is manifested through the activities of a wide variety of organizations and institutions...Leaders within the upper class join with high-level employees in the organizations they control to make up what will be called the power elite".^[13]

The Marxist theoretician Nikolai Bukharin anticipated the elite theory in his 1929 work, Imperialism and World Economy: "present-day state power is nothing but an entrepreneurs' company of tremendous power, headed even by the same persons that occupy the leading positions in the banking and syndicate offices".^[14]

The power elite is a term used by Mills to describe a relatively small, loosely connected group of individuals who dominate American policymaking. This group includes bureaucratic, corporate, intellectual, military, media, and government elites who control the principal institutions in the United States and whose opinions and actions influence the decisions of the policymakers.^[15] The basis for membership of a power elite is institutional power, namely an influential position within a prominent private or public organization.^[3] A study of the French corporate elite has shown that social class continues to hold sway in determining who joins this elite group, with those from the upper-middle class tending to dominate.^[16] Another study (published in 2002) of power elites in the United States during the administration of President George W. Bush (in office from 2001 to 2009) identified 7,314 institutional positions of power encompassing 5,778 individuals.^[17] A later study of U.S. society noted demographic characteristics of this elite group as follows: ^{[citation needed]}

Age

Corporate leaders aged about 60; heads of foundations, law, education, and civic organizations aged around 62; government employees aged about 56.

Gender

Men contribute roughly 80% in the political realm, whereas women contribute roughly only 20% in the political realm. In the economic denomination, as of October 2017, only 32 (6.4%) of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women.^[18]

Ethnicity

In the US, White Anglo-Saxons dominate in the power elite.^{[citation needed]} While Protestants represent about 80% of the top business leaders,^{[citation needed]} about 54% of the members of Congress of any ethnicity are also Protestant.^[19] As of October 2017, only 4 (0.8%) of the Fortune 500 CEOs are African American.^[18] In similarly low proportions, as of October 2017, 10 (2%) of the Fortune 500 CEOs are Latino, and 10 (2%) are Asian.^[18]

Education

Nearly all the leaders have a college education, with almost half graduating with advanced degrees. About 54% of the big-business leaders, and 42% of the government elite graduated from just 12 prestigious universities with large endowments.

Social clubs

Most holders of top positions in the power elite possess exclusive membership to one or more social clubs. About a third belong to a small number of especially prestigious clubs in major cities like London, New York City, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, D.C.^[20]

In the 1970s an organized set of policies promoted reduced taxes, especially for the wealthy, and a steady erosion of the welfare safety net.^[21] Starting with legislation in the 1980s, the wealthy banking community successfully lobbied for reduced regulation.^[22] The wide range of financial and social capital accessible to the power elite gives their members heavy influence in economic and political decision making, allowing them to move toward attaining desired outcomes. Sociologist Christopher Doob gives a hypothetical alternative, stating that these elite individuals would consider themselves the overseers of the national economy. Also appreciating that it is not only a moral, but a practical necessity to focus beyond their group interests. Doing so would hopefully alleviate various destructive conditions affecting large numbers of less affluent citizens.^[3]

Mills determined that there is an "inner core" of the power elite involving individuals that are able to move from one seat of institutional power to another. They, therefore, have a wide range of knowledge and interests in many influential organizations, and are, as Mills describes, "professional go-betweens of economic, political, and military affairs".^[23] Relentless expansion of capitalism and the globalizing of economic and military power bind leaders of the power elite into complex relationships with nation states that generate global-scale class divisions. Sociologist Manuel Castells writes in The Rise of the Network Society that contemporary globalization does not mean that "everything in the global economy is global".^[24] So, a global economy becomes characterized by fundamental social inequalities with respect to the "level of integration, competitive potential and share of the benefits from economic growth".^[25] Castells cites a kind of "double movement" where on one hand, "valuable segments of territories and people" become "linked in the global networks of value making and wealth appropriation", while, on the other, "everything and everyone" that is not valued by established networks gets "switched off...and ultimately discarded".^[25] These evolutions have also led many social scientists to explore empirically the possible emergence of a new transnational and cohesive social class at the top of the social ladder: a global elite.^[26] But, the wide-ranging effects of global capitalism ultimately affect everyone on the planet, as economies around the world come to depend on the functioning of global financial markets, technologies, trade and labor.

• Ansell, Ben W.; Samuels, David J. (2015). Inequality and Democratization : An Elite-Competition Approach. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521168793. OCLC 900952620.
• Heinrich Best, Ronald Gebauer & Axel Salheiser (Eds.): Political and Functional Elites in Post-Socialist Transformation: Central and East Europe since 1989/90. Historical Social Research 37 (2), Special Issue, 2012.
• Cousin, Bruno & Sébastien Chauvin (2021). "Is there a global super-bourgeoisie?" Sociology Compass 15 (6): 1–15.
• Cousin, Bruno, Shamus Khan & Ashley Mears (2018). "Theoretical and methodological pathways for research on elites" Socio-Economic Review 16 (2): 225-249.
• Osnos, Evan, "Ruling-Class Rules: How to thrive in the power elite – while declaring it your enemy", The New Yorker, 29 January 2024, pp. 18–23. "In the nineteen-twenties... American elites, some of whom feared a Bolshevik revolution, consented to reform... Under Franklin D. Roosevelt... the U.S. raised taxes, took steps to protect unions, and established a minimum wage. The costs, [Peter] Turchin writes, 'were borne by the American ruling class.'... Between the nineteen-thirties and the nineteen-seventies, a period that scholars call the Great Compression, economic equality narrowed, except among Black Americans... But by the nineteen-eighties the Great Compression was over. As the rich grew richer than ever, they sought to turn their money into political power; spending on politics soared." (p. 22.) "[N]o democracy can function well if people are unwilling to lose power – if a generation of leaders... becomes so entrenched that it ages into gerontocracy; if one of two major parties denies the arithmetic of elections; if a cohort of the ruling class loses status that it once enjoyed and sets out to salvage it." (p. 23.)
• Jan Pakulski, Heinrich Best, Verona Christmas-Best & Ursula Hoffmann-Lange (Eds.): Elite Foundations of Social Theory and Politics. Historical Social Research 37 (1), Special Issue, 2012.
• Dogan, Mattei (2003). Elite configurations at the apex of power. BRILL. ISBN 978-90-04-12808-8.
• Domhoff, G. William (1990). The power elite and the state: how policy is made in America. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-0-202-30373-4.
• Hartmann, Michael (2007). The sociology of elites. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0-415-41197-4.
• Jenkins, J. Craig; Eckert, Craig M. (2000). "The Right Turn in Economic Policy: Business Elites and the New Conservative Economics". Sociological Forum. 15 (2): 307–338. doi:10.1023/A:1007573625240. JSTOR 684818. S2CID 141188855.
• Rothkopf, David (2009). Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-374-53161-4.
• Scott, John, ed. (1990). The Sociology of Elites: The study of elites. Edward Elgar. ISBN 978-1-85278-390-7.
• Francis, David (2007). "Government Regulation Stages a Comeback". Christian Scientist Monitor: 14. Retrieved 5 December 2012.