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Critical Book Review

The new book by Mariano Baena del Alcazar who is a professor of political science, the principal Spanish expert in public administration, author of a celebrated Manual of Administrative Sciences and currently a High Court Magistrate, is quite an unusual work in the Spanish panorama, not only because of the ambitious subject matter and the meticulous approach, but also because of the conclusions which are drawn. This research is the result of over twenty years of the author’s work, has received the collaboration of six other Spanish academics, and has been carried out by meticulously following all the necessary steps involved in canonical methodology. After the careful collection of data, some hypotheses are formed, their scientific backgrounds are analysed, and then the hypotheses themselves are tested and analysed. The book concludes with proposals for new research projects. The subject of this book is none other than power itself. Power in contemporary societies and, therefore, bureaucratically organised power in public and private administrations, the study of which is approached from the perspective of the elite, a classic theme which the studies of the public administration overlap with central, traditional questions of political science and sociology. This theme produces a sensation of unease in those who uphold the democratic theory which, time and time again, is confronted with evidence that, in fact, even in democracies, power is exercised, almost always and almost everywhere, by a minority, a group or an elite. Their response to this has always been to try to demonstrate that either an elite does not exist, or that if it does, it is made up not of fixed or closed groups, but of groups which are porous and open, and whose members circulate and change, i.e. to demonstrate that the elite itself is democratic. The theoreticians respond to this claim by alleging that an elite of the elite exists which is comprised of a hard, unchanging nucleus etc., and so the debate continues. In this context, the book is in some way caught between two traditions. The best known is that of the classic theory of the elite which began with Pareto, Mosca and Michels, was further developed by Wright, Mills and Domhoff and, 528 International Review of Administrative Sciences 66(3)