For Robert Michels (Cologne, 1876 – Rome, 1936), devoting himself to the sociology of the stranger must have been a task in which scientific interest and personal experience nourished one another. This always holds a great fascination for the reader, who, amid the folds of detached and neutral theoretical reflection, manages to glimpse the man within the scholar. It may even awaken the desire, as we shall attempt to do, to apply to the man the analytical categories elaborated by the scholar, with the aim of better understanding both.

Michels, known above all for having identified the “iron law of oligarchy” that operates within modern democratic parties (1911; 1912), was born in the heart of imperial Germany, in Cologne, in 1876. His was a cosmopolitan education, which led him to travel and to attend courses at several universities and in several countries, besides his own, France, Switzerland and Italy (Genett, 2008; Malandrino, 2010). He moved to Italy, and precisely to Turin, as early as 1907, obtaining a university teaching post (Tuccari, 2007). This circumstance might lead one to suppose that his motive for moving from Germany to Italy was chiefly professional, a matter of convenience, given that the legislation of his native country placed discriminatory obstacles in the academic career of anyone enrolled in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), as he had been since 1902. Yet his life bears witness that, in the choice to live in Italy, there was far more than career aspirations: we can detect attraction, feeling, a sense of belonging. His firstborn daughter, named Italia in 1900, several years before his move, is an early and striking sign of this. Consistently, he began the procedures for requesting Italian naturalisation in 1913, a process concluded in 1921, when the acquisition of the legal status of Italian citizen sanctioned what had already come to pass in his heart and his inclinations. It is telling that shortly afterwards, in a 1927 volume of his devoted to contemporary France, he described himself as “toto corde”, that is, with all his heart, and “without reservations, a citizen of Italy”, with a citizenship “freely willed and freely professed”. Another element of interest in his life story, one that warrants his consideration in “Studi Umbri”, is his having been full professor of General and Corporative Economics in the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Perugia, from 1928 until his death in 1936. This was the work of his most mature years, carried out with our region at its centre. In this light, following key studies fostered by research at the University of Perugia (e.g. Furiozzi, 1984; Michels, 2009), the miscellany promoted by the Research Centre in Human Security (CRISU) of the Department of Philosophy, Social and Human Sciences and Education has just been published, edited by Raffaele Federici: Robert Michels. Un intellettuale di frontiera (Meltemi, Milano, 2020).

Robert, or rather Roberto Michels, since from his arrival in Italy he chose to Italianise his given name as well, thus possessed a particular competence and sensibility for entering into the theoretical analysis of the theme of the stranger: at bottom, he too had been a “migrant”, one who had left his native homeland for an adoptive one, Italy, in which he accomplished a complete process of integration, both legal and emotional, while still maintaining ties with the German cultural world.

His training in the methodology of the social sciences, marked by the teachings of Weber and Pareto, leads him to treat the subject in a search for scientific rigour, objectivity and value-freedom; yet, although these are the prevailing tones, one can catch nuances of personal involvement that lend added interest to a rereading of his contribution. It should be noted that Michels’s essay on the stranger first appeared in a journal, in German, in 1925, and then came to form the third chapter of the volume Prolegomena sul patriottismo, published in both German and Italian, in 1928 and 1933 respectively. This text, after the first Italian translation by Raffaele Federici (2014: https://interculturalita.it/?p=880), was published in 2017 in a fine volume from the Turin house of Aragno, edited and prefaced by Francesco Perfetti (2017).

Perhaps the most theoretically significant contribution of Michels’s study of the stranger lies in his elaboration of a classification of the various types to be found, modelled on the Weberian “ideal types”, which rests on two key elements: citizenship, understood as legal status, and nationality, understood as a sentiment of belonging and as the set of cultural and psychological aspects that bind a person to a country.

All the possible combinations of these two elements are explored, delineating four main categories, numbered in sequence: 1. Those in whom citizenship and nationality coincide from birth, who are therefore not strangers, but who must be kept in mind as a term of comparison, and whose relativity of condition Michels underlines: they are not strangers “as long as their members do not go abroad” (2017: 5), because any one of us can become a stranger the moment he crosses a border; 2. The “unredeemed”, that is, those who feel they belong to a homeland that is subjected to a foreign State, of which they therefore hold the legal citizenship, but not the nationality; 3. Strangers “proper”, that is, those who emigrate and settle abroad, distinguishable into three subcategories: a) those who by sentiment and citizenship remain bound to their country of origin; b) those who acquire the citizenship of the host country, often for reasons of interest and convenience, yet do not develop a corresponding sense of belonging to the new country; c) those who gradually deepen their feelings of attachment to the new homeland, with an inner, psychological adherence, and who consequently come to request and acquire its legal citizenship as well; 4. Those who retain the citizenship of their country of origin, out of regard for the relatives who have remained there, or because they take no interest in formal and legal matters, but who, on the other hand, come to bind themselves culturally and emotionally to the new country; of them it may be said “that they have changed nationality without changing citizenship” (2017: 5). Finally, outside the numbering, Michels treats the category of those “without a homeland”, a broad one, little considered, yet “well worthy of consideration from the sociological standpoint” (ibid.). Beyond the distinctions internal to it, what the sans patrie have in common is having no nationality at all, or being in oscillation, in suspense, between more than one nationality, as are the so-called “sujets mixtes”.

Roberta Cipollini (2002, p. 11) has usefully sought to reinterpret and simplify this complex typology, representing it in a two-way table, since we are dealing with two variables, legal citizenship and psychological belonging (nationality), and applying labels to the categories that emerge from the intersections, so that they may be identified more readily. The choice made by the Italian scholar is to set aside the merely potential strangers and the “unredeemed”, that is, numbers 1 and 2 of Michels’s theorisation, in order to concentrate on cases 3, inclusive of its internal variants, and 4, with a possible extension to those “without a homeland”.

The integrated stranger is an individual who has developed a strong sense of psychological belonging to the country to which he has moved, and has also acquired its legal citizenship; he has made the norms and cultural values of the new country his own and, through a process of adaptation, has taken them as his stable point of reference. The integrated stranger has progressively shed his initial condition of foreignness to become an integral part of the community that hosts him. Of his being a stranger, a trace remains only in his first and last name (if it has not been adapted) and in the history of his origins.

The marginal stranger refers to those who, though well settled into the new host country and adapted to its cultural model, have not yet obtained its legal citizenship. This type of stranger has acquired and shares the norms and values, the language and customs of the society of settlement, but, lacking the legal status of citizen of the State in which he lives, finds himself in a condition of marginality, of instability and of non-participation in certain aspects of the country’s communal life, such as those bearing on eligibility to vote and to stand for election.

The divided stranger refers to the person who, though having acquired the legal citizenship of the State to which he has moved, has not yet developed, or does not intend to develop, a cultural adaptation to the values of the society of settlement, nor a sentiment of belonging to it; he is therefore characterised by a condition of psychological estrangement, motivated by ties that are still strong with his culture of origin.

The fourth type is the excluded stranger, an individual who comes to live in a country other than his own without having developed feelings of psychological and cultural belonging to it and without having acquired its rights of citizenship. In this type of stranger we face an exclusion from the legal standpoint, and an exclusion, which may also be self-exclusion, that is, an unwillingness to integrate and not merely a distancing on the part of the native population, from the cultural standpoint. The excluded strangers, in whom both the nationality and the citizenship of the host country are lacking, may include both those who remain bound, in both these respects, to their country of origin, and those who no longer recognise themselves in, and feel no sense of belonging to, either the society that hosts them or the society they came from, those whom Michels defines, as we have seen, as “without a homeland”.

Even within the “asepsis” of his presentation of the different types of stranger, the scholar from Cologne warns against the “dangerous side” of changes of citizenship unaccompanied by a corresponding psychological and emotional adherence to the new country, whether these are the fruit of policies of “forced assimilation” or are undertaken spontaneously but “solely for reasons of convenience” (2017: 4). We thus note a critical nuance towards type 3b, which in Cipollini’s reworking corresponds to the “divided” stranger and is therefore, one might add, little inclined to loyalty and reliability towards the country that has nonetheless granted him legal recognition of citizenship.

Quite a different assessment emerges from the analysis of case 3c, which in Cipollini becomes the “integrated” stranger: he is the one endowed with “elasticity and ease of adaptation”, an open and pliant mind, therefore, who lets himself be permeated “by the beauty and the cultural values of the new homeland”, arriving at “a new orientation of […] feelings” (2017: 4) and travelling a gradual, credible and respectable path, in which he first develops a sense of belonging, a participation on the level of “elective affinities” with the new country, and only afterwards, consistently, completes the journey of integration with the acquisition of legal citizenship. If one examines the life events of the scholar from Cologne, it is evident that he falls exactly within the type of the integrated stranger described above; and it is no coincidence, therefore, that the essay closes with a kind of apologia for, and valorisation of, this social figure, so ill understood in an age of extreme nationalisms and national antagonisms such as the period between the two world wars, in which anyone liable to the charge of double-dealing is viewed with suspicion. Michels, on the one hand, is “more royalist than the king”, most attentive to bringing potential situations of disloyalty or ambiguity to light and to not abetting them, as when he takes an open stand against the possibility of dual citizenship, for which he invokes “the postulate of absolute inadmissibility” (2017: 127); on the other, he devotes words of heartfelt appreciation to those who change countries, engaging in good faith upon a long and often bumpy path towards a new integration, with a sincere adherence of feeling towards the host country, as, for that matter, he himself had done.

“The love of the stranger, of the adoptive citizen, for his adoptive homeland has at times a particular purity and disinterestedness” (2017: 127); in such cases, when he does come to obtain political citizenship, after long waits, expenses and sacrifices, it takes on a particular value, as something precious and desired, which at the same time entails a heightened vulnerability whose weight he must be able to bear. For the new citizen may go on appearing foreign to his acquired fellow citizens, especially if the accent of his speech still betrays his distant origins, while, on the other hand, he may be regarded as a turncoat, if not a traitor to the homeland, by his former compatriots. On closer inspection, even the stranger who completes the path of integration in both nationality and citizenship may meet with problems of acceptance and occupies a more vulnerable and difficult position in society than the native-born. In the sensitive choice of words, in the power to penetrate a complexity of condition, one glimpses Michels the man, who nourishes the scholar’s theoretical elaborations with lived experience and, perhaps, also wishes to defend his own choices. The loyal and sincerely integrated stranger, such as he himself is, he remarks in concluding the essay, “constitutes an excellent type of citizen, perhaps superior to the average even of his own new compatriots, who, in order to belong to the same national community, have had no other merit than that of being born” (2017: 128).

Robert Michels the Sociologist: The Early Years, a project funded by the 2018 Basic Research Fund of the University of Perugia.

Bibliography

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Marta Picchio, PhD, is a researcher in General Sociology at the Department of Philosophy, Social and Human Sciences and Education of the University of Perugia. Her research interests include the classics of Sociology and the sociology of the stranger, of citizenship and of human rights (marta.picchio@unipg.it).