Elite

In political and sociological theory, the elite (/ɛ.ˈliːt/ or /ɪ.ˈliːt/; from French: élite, from Latin: eligere, to select or to sort out) are a small group of powerful or wealthy people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege, political power, or skill in a group. Defined by the Cambridge Dictionary, the "elite" are "the richest, most powerful, best-educated, or best-trained group in a society".

American sociologist C. Wright Mills states that members of the elite accept their fellows' position of importance in society. "As a rule, 'they accept one another, understand one another, marry one another, tend to work, and to think, if not together at least alike'." It is a well-regulated existence where education plays a critical role.

Youthful upper-class members attend prominent preparatory schools, which open doors to elite universities, known as the Ivy League, which includes Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University and Princeton University (among others), and the universities' respective highly exclusive clubs, such as the Harvard Club of Boston. These memberships in turn pave the way to the prominent social clubs located in major cities and serve as sites for important business contacts.

A 2025 study analyzed the educational backgrounds of 6,141 of the most influential people in the world and found that a small number of universities are responsible for educating the global elite, especially Harvard. Ranked in terms of number of alumni who went on to elite positions, Harvard was followed by Stanford University, the University of Oxford, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Yale University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley. If all American elites are removed, Harvard again came out on top by a large margin, but was then followed by Oxford, the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics, the École nationale d'administration, the University of Tokyo, Sciences Po, and MIT.

According to Mills, men receive the education necessary for elitist privilege to obtain their background and contacts, allowing them to enter three branches of the power elite, which are:

According to Mills, the governing elite in the United States primarily draws its members from political leaders, including the president, and a handful of key cabinet members, as well as close advisers, major corporate owners and directors, and high-ranking military officers. These groups overlap and elites tend to circulate from one sector to another, consolidating power in the process.

Unlike the ruling class, a social formation based on heritage and social ties, the power elite is characterized by the organizational structures through which its wealth is acquired. According to Mills, the power elite rose from "the managerial reorganization of the propertied classes into the more or less unified stratum of the corporate rich". In G. William Domhoff's sociology textbooks, Who Rules America? editions, he further clarified the differences in the two terms: "The upper class as a whole does not do the ruling. Instead, class rule is manifested through the activities of a wide variety of organizations and institutions...Leaders within the upper class join with high-level employees in the organizations they control to make up what will be called the power elite".

The Marxist theoretician Nikolai Bukharin anticipated the elite theory in his 1929 work, Imperialism and World Economy: "present-day state power is nothing but an entrepreneurs' company of tremendous power, headed even by the same persons that occupy the leading positions in the banking and syndicate offices".