The ruling class is a particular sector of the upper class that adheres to quite specific circumstances: it has both the most material wealth and the most widespread influence over all the other classes, and it chooses to actively exercise that power to shape the direction of a locality, a country, and/or the world. Most of the upper class does not fit the fundamentals of this description, but some do.

Most stable groups of social animals (including humans) have a visible and invisible "ruling class". The decision makers in the group may change according to the decision-type and/ or the time of observation. For example, it used to be assumed that modern societies were patriarchal and the elders dominated the real decisions, even though many market economies focus on the decisionmakers of each particular (assuredly minor) market sector, who may in fact be children or women.

The sociologist C. Wright Mills argued that the ruling class differs from the power elite. The latter simply refers to the small group of people with the most political power. Many of them are politicians, hired political managers, and military leaders.

In Marxist political economics, the ruling class refers to that segment or class of society that has the most economic and -- only in second line -- political power. Under capitalism, the ruling class -- the capitalists or bourgeoisie -- consists of those who own and control the means of production and thus are able to dominate and exploit the working class, getting them to labor enough to produce surplus-value, the basis for profits, interest, and rent (property income). This property income can be used to accumulate more power, to extend class domination further. The economic power of a class gives it extraordinary political power so that state or government policies almost always reflect the perceived interests of that class.

In other modes of production, there are other ruling classes: under feudalism, it was the feudal lords, while under slavery, it was the slave-owners.

Moreover, Mattei Dogan's recent studes on elites in contemporary pluralist societies have shown that in these kinds of societies, precisely because of their complexity and their heterogeniety and particularly because of the social division of work and the multiple levels of stratification, there are not, or can not be, a coherent ruling class, even if in the past there were solid examples of ruling classes, like in the Tsarist Regime, the Ottoman Regime, and the more recent totalitarian regimes of the 20th century (communist and nazi). The concept of ruling class is incompatible with the concept of industrial society.

Ruling class

See also