Are The Elites Accountable To Democracy?

On January 30th the US Department of Justice released a second batch of the Epstein files. The documents offer an unprecedented insight into the behaviour and nature of the global elite. World-leading scientists, scholars, artists, businessmen, and statesmen were exposed as part of Epstein’ close social circle, long after his criminal conviction in 2008 for soliciting minors. The range of individuals who the files show had dealings with Epstein is astonishing, including Noam Chomsky, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, New Labour grandee Peter Mandelson, British Royalty, and of course Donald Trump.

What the email exchanges between Epstein and his associates expose is above all a sense of entitlement and impunity regarding their behaviour, whether it was about sharing government secrets or their illicit sexual escapades. So, are conspiracy theorists right when they imagine the world being run by secretive exchanges between a global elite? Is democracy capable of holding this elite accountable for its actions and constrain its power? Or are elites always in charge, advancing their interests, and the people incapable of overthrowing them?

About the Speaker:

Hugo Drochon is a political theorist and historian of political thought, with interests in Nietzsche's politics, democratic theory, liberalism, centrism, and conspiracy theories. He studies the different facets of modern democracy to develop a 'dynamic' theory of democracy. He is Associate Professor of political theory at the University of Nottingham and the author of Nietzsche’s Great Politics (Princeton, 2016) and Elites and Democracy (Princeton, 2026). His current research is on elite theories of democracy — Mosca, Pareto and Michels — and the impact their thinking had on the development of democratic theory in the US and Europe after WWII, notably on figures such as Joseph Schumpeter, Robert Dahl, C Wright Mills and Raymond Aron. He has a book entitled Elites and Dynamic Democracy under contract with Princeton University Press.

He regularly writes for the TLS, Guardian, New Statesman, The Nation, Project Syndicate, Irish Times, Persuasion, Unherd, The UnPopulist, RSA Journal, Le Grand Continent, the Cambridge Journal and Engelsberg Ideas, and has appeared on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4, France Culture, Al Jazeera and Talking Politics. He has spoken at the Hay and Cheltenham Literary Festivals.

The Moderator:

Alexis Papazoglou is Managing Editor of the LSE British Politics and Policy blog. He was previously senior editor for the Institute of Arts and Ideas, and a philosophy lecturer at Cambridge and Royal Holloway. His research interests lie broadly in the post-Kantian tradition, including Hegel, Nietzsche, as well as Husserl and Heidegger. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New Republic, WIRED, The Independent, The Conversation, The New European, as well as Greek publications, including Kathimerini.

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