Against Elite Theory

The Hobbesian Alternative

On Friday, May 29, 2026, I participated in a Platypus panel at the University of California Irvine on the role of “elites”. Often my work is mischaracterized as having something to do with elite theory, when it is really to do with Hobbes, who was not an elite theorist. So, in this talk, I leaned heavily into my Hobbesian side, to force the Platypus members to reckon with it. I did this in part because I have learned that Platypus members will be reading some of Leviathan, and I would like to influence their engagement with it. In particular, I want them to think about the concept of “personation”.¹ Here follows the text I worked from over the course of that night:

Elite theories arose when it became evident that the working class was not capable of doing politics. I regard them as an attempt to preserve the possibility of politics in the aftermath of this collapse. They involve positing an alternative social unit that is able to do politics. There are all sorts of candidates—the oligarchs, the professionals, the middle class, the students, the new social movements, et cetera.

Elite theories operate from the premise that politics still occurs, so someone must be doing it. The task of the theorist is to figure out how to best describe the social unit that does the politics that must somehow still be going on. But there is another possibility—politics itself may no longer occur, or its form may have changed, such that it is no longer appropriate to speak in this way.

To sort out the degree to which it is still appropriate to speak of politics as something that social units do, we need to have an operational understanding of what it means to be able to do politics. So, for our purposes today, let me suggest that politics involves three things.

First, there must be common abstractions about which there is intractable disagreement. We don’t agree about what these abstractions mean, but we can nonetheless cooperate with people on the basis of a shared commitment to them. In this way, we have an agreement that contains disagreement. And this agreement can only be had in and through the disagreement—if we try to abolish the disagreement, we can only do this by abolishing the agreement, too. Once we adopt concepts that exclude others outright, it becomes impossible to do politics with those who have been excluded. Their ideals become strange to us, and the possibility of hostility emerges. , if we insist on full agreement as a prerequisite for cooperative activity, our cooperation is not political in character. It remains limited to the terrain of the social.

Second, there must be deliberative institutions through which this disagreement can be processed. In any given situation, we have to decide how to operationalize our shared abstractions. But since we understand the abstractions differently, this operationalization will generate acrimony. The deliberation is not for the purposes of avoiding this acrimony, it is itself an acrimonious form of processing, in which the deliberants hear each other out and attempt to find a good way forward together.

The processing does not end in agreement. So, politics requires a third thing, a closure mechanism capable of ending the deliberation and issuing a decision. Unlike a social consensus or contract, political decisions bind even those who have not been convinced. Political decisions are not merely compromises or exchanges—a political decision makes an imposition. It generates reasonable resentment on the part of those who have not been persuaded. But the bearers of resentment nonetheless submit to the decision. Why do they submit? Perhaps they recognize that the political system is committed to their abstractions, even though it has interpreted them differently in this instance. Or perhaps they see no compelling alternative to the political system that they are capable of realizing. Either way, political decisions bind the recalcitrant. In this way, politics allows for decisions to be taken with a lower level of agreement than is required for social action. So, politics is a technology that expands our capacity for action. It is not military action, which involves the use of violence to overcome hostile opposition. Nor is it social activity, which operates by agreement and by exchange.

Now, critically, politics is also different from administration. Administration is not deliberative. Administration solves the problem of disagreement by creating a chain of individuals, each of whom has defined powers to advance, reject, or demand revisions to whatever is put before them. Sometimes an administrator’s decision can be appealed, but there is no possibility of having a deliberation with an administrator. Attempts to deliberate with administrators are socially awkward, they involve a misrecognition of the kind of activity in which one is engaged. It is also unclear whether administrators share common abstractions with those who are subject to their decisions. So, administrative decisions often appear opaque. They can be issued with no explanation. You apply for something, you get rejected, you don’t understand why, you demand feedback, you don’t get any. Indeed, in demanding feedback, you are being a Karen, asking for something to which you are not entitled. If you don’t like the decision, make an appeal through the proper channels. If there is no appeals process, then that’s it, it’s over. When you approach an administrator it is as a supplicant, not a citizen.

Elite theories conflate hostile activity, social activity, or administrative activity with politics. They claim that politics involves distinguishing between friend and enemy, making compromises and exchanges, or the administration of people. Marxism itself can become an elite theory, in so far as Marxists claim that the working class is doing politics when it is doing other things. In an important sense, an elite might be considered to be one who is capable of doing politics, and so to attribute political capacity to a social unit is to attribute eliteness to that unit.

The contemporary left conducts discussions among people who do not share common abstractions or do not have an effective closure mechanism. These discussions are misconstrued as deliberations. The organizations that hold these discussions are talking shops, not political organizations. The people who participate in them are not elites.

So, am I saying that politics does not occur at all today? No, I think it does happen. But I do not think elites are the principal political actors. Politics does not occur primarily among or within social units. It occurs among corporate persons.

An elite is a particular person. A corporate person is a person-by-fiction. Corporate persons are brought into being through the activity of particular people, but they are not reducible to the particular people who personate them. The personators are administrators, they have specific legal powers they gain through the occupying of offices they obtain through supplication. They receive these powers only in so far as they use them on behalf of the corporate entity that they personate. If they misuse these powers, they will be disciplined or terminated. Sometimes the personators come to identify with the entities they personate. This identification makes them feel as if corporate actions are their own actions. Very often, corporate actors insist that they are ones doing the things they are doing. And, if you haven’t thought about it very hard, it will seem as if this is true. If you simply use your eyes and ears, it will look and sound like they are indeed doing the things they are doing, that they are the elites, and that they are doing politics. But these people are only able to play the roles they play because they have conformed to the administrative incentive structure that distributes roles. Their identification with the roles they have submitted to is a palliative they use to protect themselves from the reality that, in accepting these corporate roles, they have become instruments of an impersonal power structure. They do not choose their own abstractions, deliberate about how to operationalize their abstractions, and act on the basis of these deliberations.

Have you ever seen Avatar: The Last Airbender? Do you remember Koh, the Face-Stealer? Koh is a spirit that wears the faces of particular people. It looks like those people are talking, but they can only speak on behalf of Koh. If you show emotion around Koh, if you become afraid, then he will steal your face. In Avatar, you can survive without a face, but you are caught between life and death, and this condition can persist for a long time. This is what happens to people who personate corporate entities. They are not elites, they are not ruling. They succumb to fear and make supplications to corporate entities. Because they succumb to fear, they are reduced to doing nothing other than enabling Koh to speak. And yet, their faces do all the talking and acting, and without their fear, Koh would be unable to speak through them. Elite theorists are deceived by faces. They don’t see Koh. Often, they do not even remember that Koh is there.

Corporate persons are really different from particular persons. The purpose of a corporate entity is not the subject of deliberation, it is stipulated in its charter. The structure of a corporate entity is prefigured in the law. It is not open to political revision. The laws that create corporations may have been instantiated through political action at some point in the past, but the purpose of these political acts was to depoliticize decision-making, to instantiate an impersonal, non-political mechanism that can issue decisions that previously would have been made through a social or political process. The citizens who made these decisions created the corporate persons as tools, as instruments for achieving their ends. In this sense, corporate persons may have been created by elites. But once they were brought into being, even very prestigious, high-income corporate roles came to be performed by supplicants.

It might even be said that corporations are a kind of artificial intelligence, a way of making decisions by a process that no particular person can properly identify with.² In and through corporations, law is elevated above politics, and we get what is commonly called the “rule of law.” But the rule of law is not the rule of man—man can rule through the use of tools, but man cannot rule as a supplicant to his own tools.

The tools, however, can have a politics of their own. Corporate persons can do politics with each other. Indeed, corporate persons can, through politics, make themselves into supplicants to an even higher form of administration. This is how the United States was made. A set of corporate persons came together and, through politics, made a second-order corporate person. This compound corporation has gradually centralized administrative affairs. It turns first-order corporate persons into supplicants, in much the same way those corporate persons made supplicants out of particular persons. After the United States was made, we heard endless complaints about “sovereignty” and “states’ rights”, which were the complaints not of particular people but of the first-order corporate persons against the second-order.

Marxists misrecognize this process as the subordination of the social to politics and of the social classes to the Bonapartist state. Post-Marxists identify the state as the province of an elite class of one kind or another. But what we are really talking about here is first the subordination of politics to administration and then of administration to itself. This subordination was articulated more than 200 years before Marx wrote The 18^th Brumaire by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan. There, Hobbes argues that, for the sake of a common abstraction—peace—we should create a corporate entity, the modern state, that administers formerly political affairs. Modern political thought is the attempt to preserve, in some sense or other, the possibility of reasserting the political against Hobbes’ machine. It is in this sense that elite theories fail to be instances of modern political thought—they fail to recognize the corporate character of modernity, attributing political capacities to social units that do not possess them. In so far as Marxism itself engages in this behavior, it regresses into that which it condemns.

We need to grasp what is new about now. After World War II, the United States joined together with other large compound corporations to create a set of international administrative institutions, such as the IMF and the WTO. These third-order corporate persons now make decisions that bind even second-order corporate persons. And the second-order corporate persons, who made the third-order corporations to serve as tools, are now expected to behave as supplicants before their own instruments.

If there is any possibility of the reemergence of politics by social units, it will come in and through a crisis of corporate personation. This crisis is best understood as a legitimacy crisis—a crisis in which corporate persons increasingly struggle to make decisions that successfully bind those subject to them. It is too hastily assumed that the audience for legitimation must consist of particular persons or social units. In some cases, legitimation crises are administrative all the way down. To grasp this dynamic, it is necessary to be able think in terms of corporate units. This involves a recognition that lamenting the need for a concept without changing the conditions that give rise to it accomplishes nothing. What is needed is not lamentations, it is a change in conditions such that the concepts can be overcome. We live in a time where there is no latent social unit that can politically assert itself. An insistence on the primacy of social concepts fails to tarry with this situation and constitutes a form of reaction. In so far as politics still occurs, it is obscure, not because it is done by elites in secret island hideaways, but because it is done by what are very appropriately called “political actors”—those who personate, who make by fiction that which acts in and through them.

For let me remind you: This is more than Consent, or Concord; it is a real Unity of all, in one and the same Person. This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather, to speak less reverently, of Koh the Face-Stealer. For, through the faces given to Koh by every particular person, Koh comes to have the use of so much power and strength that Koh is able to strike terror into the hearts of all particular persons.³ This pervasive fear allows Koh even to form the wills of the particular persons, to create subjects who are dependent on the administrative mode, who are not just depoliticized but desocialized, too.

If you would seek to overcome Koh, you must not only create conditions in which it is possible to regain social and political capacities. You must even create conditions in which it is possible to show no fear. Corporate persons were invented to protect us from fear. So, a possibility of overcoming corporate personation cannot be generated through forms of naïve anti-statism, which plunge us back into the condition of fear that presses us to turn over our faces to Koh. Rather than negate or avoid Koh, you must find a way to create a form of life that enables you to do what Avatar Aang does in “The Siege of the North Part 2.” There, Aang purposefully seeks out Koh and engages with him. Because Aang does not show fear, Koh is unable to steal his face, and Aang is even able to learn something valuable from the encounter. You too can learn something from states, if you can discover a way to look at them without fear.

1. For some good secondary literature on personation in Hobbes, which discusses personation with far more precision and detail than I do in this piece, see Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State,” Journal of Political Philosophy 7.1 (1999): 1-29; David Runciman, “What Kind of Person is Hobbes’ State?” Journal of Political Philosophy 8.2 (2000): 268-278; Sean Fleming, Leviathan on a Leash (Princeton UP, 2020). I strongly recommend to Platypus members that they seriously consider these perspectives when thinking about what corporate persons are, and I hope they will recognize that there is an important sense in which the modern state is itself a corporation.

2. This idea is not original to me. See David Runciman, The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs (Profile, 2024).

3. See Ch. XVII of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Hackett, 1994), p. 109.