Elite and People: Who Causes What? (Part II)
This video is the second part of Michele Boldrin's reflection on the relationship between elites and the people (or masses). Boldrin argues against the idea that elites are simply a product of the people, instead making the case that elites are the true innovators who shape, define, and create the culture and values of their societies. Using historical examples from Venice, Fascist Italy, Spain's transition from Francoism, and the Protestant Reformation, he builds a compelling argument that elite initiative — not some mystical "spirit of the people" — drives historical change.
1. Setting the Stage: A Casual Return to the Debate
Boldrin opens with a lighthearted apology for the technical difficulties he's been having with his fiber internet connection, joking:
"Who knows — is it the people's fault or the elite's fault? We don't know."
He then reminds viewers that this is a continuation of a discussion from a week earlier, where he had argued against the popular theory that elites are simply a product of the people they lead. This episode is reserved for subscribers — what he warmly calls "camera caritatis" (a private chamber) — and he promises to go deeper into the argument.
2. The Problem with "People Cause Elites"
Boldrin revisits the core flaw in the simplest version of the theory, which says: the people → causes → the elite. For this to work, you'd need to assume that:
- A "people" is a homogeneous entity with a unified set of values, culture, and organization.
- This homogeneous people then naturally "elects" or produces a dominant elite to represent it.
But this creates an almost magical assumption — that from the very beginning of history, different peoples in similar physical and economic environments somehow spontaneously developed radically different identities. How did the Egyptians become one thing, the Persians another, the Sumerians yet another? And within what we call "Greece," how did Sparta and Athens become so dramatically different?
"This requires a magical hypothesis — that the spirit of the people exists, attached to a certain physical area, and magically produces Aristotle in one place and Darius in another."
Boldrin argues that this "spirit of the people" idea simply doesn't hold up, because these supposedly fixed identities keep evolving, merging, splitting, and changing — especially when one group led by a specific elite clashes with another militarily, economically, or culturally.
3. The Alternative: Innovators Within Communities
If there's no pre-existing "spirit of the people," what actually drives historical differentiation? Boldrin's answer is that within any community, certain individuals or small groups take the initiative — they invent religions, propose new value systems, suggest new ways of organizing power, and then either convince or impose these ideas on the rest.
"Within a certain community, some individuals, some typically small groups, invent things — religions, value systems. They propose a different state organization of power, they manage to convince or impose... and they pull along a piece of the so-called people."
This is the key insight: the elite is not chosen by the people — the elite shapes the people. Once a group of innovators wins the competition (sometimes by persuasion, sometimes by force), the broader population begins to identify with their gods, their rules, their food laws, their symbols.
4. Venice as a Case Study 🚢
Boldrin uses Venice as a concrete historical example. When Venice was born (roughly in the 8th century AD), it started as a fairly undifferentiated group of farmers and fishermen fleeing invasions from the East, seeking shelter in the lagoon.
How did this humble community become the mighty mercantile and naval republic of Venice?
"It seems quite obvious to me that the defining characteristics of that population are the product of the initiative of those among them who had the most initiative — the leaders."
Boldrin argues it wasn't destiny or the "Venetian spirit" that made them sailors and traders. It was specific, more enterprising individuals who started building boats, trading, navigating — and the others learned from them. Someone had to invent the idea of San Marco as the patron saint. Someone had to build the Bank of Saint George. These were acts of individual innovation, not collective inevitability.
5. The Same Pattern in Medieval Communes and Beyond 🏙️
The same logic applies to the rise of commercial and bourgeois communes after the year 1000. A more enterprising minority imposed new rules, created new institutions, and set the direction — not through pure physical force alone, but through a mix of persuasion and power.
"Someone more skilled at trading must exist. Someone more clever who sets up the Bank of Saint George must exist. Someone who invents the story of a saint and proposes it — in Venice, Saint Mark — must exist."
The point Boldrin wants to emphasize is clear: for any community to take a specific form that distinguishes it from neighboring communities, there must be an act of initiative by certain people with particular characteristics.
6. Modern Elites: Zalone, Ferragni, and Musk 🎤
Boldrin jumps to the present to show the same dynamic is alive and well. He brings up Checco Zalone (the beloved Italian comedian), Chiara Ferragni (the influencer), and even Elon Musk as examples of modern elites — none of whom were "elected" by the people.
"Nobody elected Musk. In Italy, nobody elected Fedez, or Zalone — choose the singer, the writer, the director that inspires you most. But they represent and create the culture with which people identify."
A viewer argues that Ferragni only exists because of her followers. Boldrin pushes back sharply:
"The followers of Ferragni are the product of the existence of Ferragni herself. Without her invention, someone else would have invented something."
The "easy answer" — that Zalone succeeded because Italians wanted Zalone — is technically true but banal. What's genuinely interesting and non-obvious is how Zalone invented his way of representing Italian identity, just as Alberto Sordi did before him. Similarly, Italian hip-hop artists didn't emerge because Italians were "destined" to love Italian rap — they copied and adapted the African-American innovation of hip-hop, translated it into Italian, and built their audience from scratch.
"These are the innovators within a certain social group or community who determine the direction of that community itself."
7. Mussolini and Fascism: Nothing Was Predetermined 📜
One of Boldrin's most powerful historical arguments concerns Fascism in Italy. He insists that there was nothing inevitable about Mussolini's rise to power:
"There is nothing predetermined in the emergence of the Fascist movement and in its coming to dominate Italy for more than 20 years."
Yes, there were social tensions, war veterans, communist movements — but other outcomes were entirely possible. If the liberal bourgeoisie had shown a bit more courage and suppressed both communists and fascists simultaneously, Italy might have evolved along a constitutional monarchy path and never handed control of parliament, the state, and the Ministry of Culture to Mussolini.
"The people wanted 'Faccetta Nera,' wanted the oceanic rallies, wanted the Young Balilla... No. There were certainly elements going in that direction, but there were also elements going in another direction."
There was popular Catholicism, socialist movements, traditional liberalism — a wide range of competing cultural proposals. The Fascists won not because the Italian soul demanded it, but because of small historical perturbations: specific choices made by Mussolini's opponents (like the Aventine secession), moments of weakness by the king, and so on.
But once that elite came to power — it created its people. The Fascist regime built Italy's institutions, its symbols, its buildings, its culture of values. And Boldrin notes with striking self-awareness:
"Even today we recognize ourselves, without even knowing it, in certain value systems of the Fascist regime, in its institutions — prefects and such — in its symbols. We still have the train stations and buildings we recognize as distinctly Fascist."
This is the long shadow of elite innovation: more than a century later, the effects are still visible.
8. Italy's Return to a Right-Wing Government and Renzi's Blunder 🗳️
The same logic applies to the recent political landscape. Boldrin attributes the return of the right-wing government under Meloni not to some deep Italian right-wing spirit, but to a series of specific mistakes by the center-left:
- The failure of Monti's technocratic government
- The even worse failure of Draghi's technocratic project
- The collapse of the Five Star Movement
- And most pointedly: Renzi's arrogance in betting his entire political career on a pointless institutional reform, then losing the referendum
"If Renzi hadn't had the arrogance and blindness to invent that institutional reform and gamble his entire political career on that foolish, useless reform... perhaps we wouldn't have this governing coalition, this distribution of votes, and this culture of modernized neo-Fascism that is now asserting itself."
Again: small perturbations, individual decisions, elite choices — they determine history, not the inevitable will of the people.
9. Spain's Democratic Transition: Elites Fooling Elites 👑
Boldrin offers the Spanish transition from Francoism as another illuminating case. Franco famously said "Todo atado y bien atado" ("Everything tied up, everything very well tied up"), convinced that his carefully designed succession plan would preserve the authoritarian state.
But Juan Carlos I, together with a small group of advisors, generals, and diplomats, essentially deceived the Francoist establishment, saying yes to everything while quietly dismantling the autocratic structure from within. He handed power to Suárez (after whom Madrid's airport is named), allowed elections, and the Communist Party had the enormous courage to say:
"Yes, I'm a republican, but I accept the monarchy."
In doing so, they avoided civil war, avoided military repression, and allowed Spain to become what Boldrin calls "a quasi-republic with the most symbolic king in the world." This was not the Spanish people's spirit expressing itself — it was a small group of political innovators making bold, strategic moves.
10. The Protestant Reformation: The Ultimate Elite Innovation ✝️
Perhaps the clearest example of elites creating peoples (rather than the reverse) is the Protestant Reformation. Northern European peoples didn't become Lutheran because their "people's spirit" demanded it.
"The peoples of northern Europe didn't become Lutheran because they were supposed to become Lutheran, but because Martin Luther took the initiative — with a group of other friars and ex-priests leaving the Catholic Church."
And once Luther established the principle that heresy was survivable — that you could propose a slightly different version of Christian ethics and build a following — the floodgates opened: Calvinists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Anglicans...
"Who said that the inhabitants of Utah had to be Mormon? And what spirit of the people of Utah makes them Mormon? Come on, let's not kid ourselves."
Calvin's proposals happened to fit better with the commercial bourgeoisie of certain Swiss cantons. The Church of England arose from Henry VIII's personal desire to remarry. These were elite decisions with massive, centuries-long consequences for entire populations.
11. The Final Argument: Elites Call the Shots 📣
Boldrin ties it all together in his closing argument. While it's obvious that no elite is completely alien to its surrounding culture and people, it is equally true that:
"In the struggle for power, dominance, prestige, conquest of the market, celebrity — among the various elites (artistic, academic, scientific, economic, political) — there is a process of innovation. And it is the elites, in the end, who call the shots, who point the directions, who offer the menu, who define the agenda."
He even includes himself as an example — a minority elite of intellectuals proposing a different set of values and political rules, influencing a small but real segment of public debate.
The final formulation draws explicitly on Schumpeterian economics (the theory of creative destruction and innovation by entrepreneurs):
"The top of the population is made up of those capable of thinking outside the box, of writing a different book, composing different music, giving a different speech, dancing differently, painting a different picture, inventing a different way to make the steam engine work."
And his bottom line?
"If I have to choose, I have to add the percentage: not 100%, but it's the elites who create their peoples — and not the other way around — even within the dynamic we've been describing."
Conclusion: Elites as History's True Authors
Boldrin's argument is provocative but historically grounded. The "spirit of the people" is a myth — a convenient but logically circular and empirically fragile idea. What actually drives historical differentiation, cultural identity, political systems, and even religious belief is elite innovation: small groups of more enterprising, creative, or determined individuals who propose new models, win the competition for hearts and minds (sometimes by persuasion, sometimes by force), and then forge the people in their image.
This doesn't mean the people are passive or irrelevant — elites must ultimately convince enough followers to survive. But the direction, the menu of options, the cultural agenda? That comes from the top down. Whether it's Venice's merchant republic, Italian Fascism, Spain's democratic transition, or the Protestant Reformation, history keeps telling the same story: innovators lead, and peoples follow. 🌍
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