Sybil Nolan

It can be hard to know where to start reading the literature on elites because it is not only large but also divided into competing schools with very different approaches and concerns. Current discussions of elites often refer to the vastly wealthy international financial elites who are seen to influence so much of contemporary social experience. Sometimes this understanding of elites seems to completely dominate discourse. However, modern elite theory really got going in the 1920s with European scholars such as Vilfredo Pareto who were interested in ruling elites, and the conditions of their power and decay. After the Second World War, American approaches stressed the role of elites in contemporary democracies. In Britain, class analysis has played an important role in elite research.

In terms of a highly readable introductory text, I particularly like Michael Hartmann’s The Sociology of Elites. Hartmann is a German scholar who is not overly invested in either British or US elite frameworks, has a great understanding of the historiography of elite theory, and writes very lucidly.

What follows is a select bibliography for critical elite studies which I’ve compiled in the course of my own work over the past ten years. My research on elites has focused on the Australian politician and later prime minister Robert Menzies (1894–1978). It is mainly concerned with twentieth-century white male elites and their personal, political and associational networks, and the bibliography reflects this – it’s an idiosyncratic work in progress.

Historiography of elite theory:

Michael Hartmann (2004) The Sociology of Elites. Routledge: London.

A highly readable introduction to the twentieth-century theories that have historically shaped the study of elites. Thoroughly recommended.

Francis Denord, Mikael Palme, Bertrand Reau (2020) Researching Elites and power: Theory Methods, Analyses. Springer: Cham.

Useful survey of recent elite studies, showing the turn to large-scale study of financial elites.

Erzsebet Bukodi, John H. Goldthorpe (2021) ‘Elite Studies: For a New Approach’. SocArXiv. Preprint.

A ‘critical review’ of the decline of elite studies in the late twentieth century. Advocates for small-N studies using prosopography.

Associational elites:

Amy Milne-Smith (2011) London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late Victorian Britain. Palgrave Macmillan: New York. 

Archivally, an extraordinarily rich study of the gradations, machinations and culture of London’s nineteenth-century gentlemen’s clubs. History of masculinity is a key frame.

Mrinalini Sinha (2001) ‘Britishness, Clubbability and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India’, Journal of British Studies, 40:4, 489-521.

A highly significant article about British clubs during the Raj, and practices of racial exclusion based on the construction of ‘clubbability’.

Sybil Nolan (2017) ‘The Snub: Robert Menzies and the Melbourne Club’, Australian Historical Studies 48:1, 3-18,DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2016.1259337

I analyse the social and political reasons for Menzies’ exclusion from the Melbourne Club despite his involvement in the founding of the United Australia Party in the early 1930s.

Claire Lowrie (2023) ‘Chinese elites, hill stations and contested racial discrimination in interwar colonial Malaya and the Philippines’, Journal of Historical Geography, 79, 52-64.

A very interesting comparative study of the treatment of Chinese elites as members of hill station clubs and communities in (British) Malaya and (US) Philippines between the wars.

Educational elites:

Ciaran O’Neill (2013) Catholics of Consequence: Transnational Education, Social Mobility, and the Irish-Catholic Elite, 1850-1900, Oxford University Press: Oxford.

A significant study of marginalised elites. As the blurb says, it’s the study of an Irish elite ‘at once integrated and segregated within what was then the most powerful state in the world’, Great Britain.

Musa Okwonga (2021) One of Them: An Eton College Memoir, Great Britain: Unbound.

A deeply personal account by a Black English writer who was a student at Eton during Boris Johnson’s time there. A fascinating perspective on the formation and influence of elite cohorts.

Tamson Pietsch (2015) Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850-1939, Manchester University Press: Manchester.

An influential study of the role of imperial networks in shaping universities in Australia and other parts of the British Empire. A great exemplar of how network research is an important part of contemporary elite studies.

Jane Kenway and Howard Prosser (2015) ‘Distinguished Spaces: Elite Schools as Cartographers of Privilege’. In J. Fahey et al. (eds), In the Realm of the Senses: Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education, Springer Science+Business Media Singapore.

How elite schools reinforce their position of power through the social aesthetics of their organisation of space buildings, grounds, entrances, car parks etc.

Daisy Dunn (2022) Not Far from Brideshead: Oxford Between the Wars, Weidenfeld & Nicolson: London.

An entertaining yet incisive study of Oxford University in the 1920s and 1930s, framed around the Oxford worlds of three outstanding classicists. Contains a brilliant portrait of Sir Gilbert Murray, an Australian who was Oxford-educated, became Regius Professor of Greek there in 1908, and later chair of the League of Nations Union. He married the eldest daughter of the Earl of Carlisle, whose main residence was Castle Howard, on which Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited was partly modelled.

Martin Crotty (2001) Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity, 1870-1920, Melbourne University Press: Melbourne.

A useful introduction to understanding the significance of private boys’ schools and their culture in the formation of Australian elites.

Male elites, masculinities:

R.W. Connell (1995) Masculinities, 1st edn, University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles.

R.W. Connell and J. Messerschmidt (2005) ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’, Gender & Society, 19(6), 829-859.

Both strongly recommended to understand Connell’s emergent thinking about hegemonic masculinity.

Professional elites:

Dave Trudinger (2004) ‘The Comfort of Men: A Critical History of Managerial and Professional Men in Post-War Modernisation, Australia, 1945-1965’. PhD thesis, University of Sydney. 

An influential thesis on private and professional aspects of men’s lives in the post-war period. Terrific on the rise of the post-war manager; the rise of marketing and men’s role in it; the role of service organisations like Rotary in many men’s lives; post-war husbands and fathers. Trudinger has been a senior NSW public servant for over a decade, interested in social policy development. Thesis freely available online.

Chris Wallace (2021) ‘Changing the Conditions Underpinning Gendered Entitlement in Parliament as a Workplace’, Australian Parliamentary Review, 2(36), 20-35.

Chris is a Professor of political history at the University of Canberra. In her first career she was a member of the Canberra Press Gallery. She has been writing about and researching political elites for several decades. She was Cabinet Historian, Australian National Archives, from 2020 to 2022. She is the author of Political Lives: Australian Prime Ministers and their Biographers (UNSW Press, 2023).

Claire E.F. Wright and Benjamin Wilkie (2024) ‘Small Worlds: Institutional Isomorphism and Australia’s Corporate Elite, 1910-2018’, Business History, 1-24.

A recent prosopographic study of Australian business leaders showing the demographic profile of board members in this country is becoming narrower except in relation to the inclusion of more women. The principal author is a DECRA Fellow based at UTS Business School.

Colonial elites:

James Epstein (2012), ‘A Gentleman’s Way in the World’, in Epstein, J. Scandal of Colonial Rule: Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic during the Age of Revolution,  Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK. 

A fascinating study of struggle between British elite players in the colonies. Has a useful bibliography.