It is well known that the attitudes of the Latin Americans towards race are not the same as those of the inhabitants of Europe and the United States. This observation led scholars as distinguished as Gilberto Freire and Arnold Toynbee to put forward the view that there is no ‘race prejudice’ in Latin America, a view that has been criticised by more recent writers. In Latin America distinctions of ‘race’ are indeed made, but not on the basis of the same premisses as in North America and, though raza and race are the same word, they do not bear the same connotations in Spanish-speaking as in Englishspeaking countries—outside scientific circles, perhaps. ‘Race’ is a system of classifying individuals and, as such, part of each culture, and therefore liable to vary from one to another. But what science has done with the word is another matter.

The Evolution of patterns of selection and recruitment to the British political elite has been most authoritatively explored and presented in the work of W. L. Guttsman (1), which covers the period roughly from 1830 to 1955. For developments in the period since 1955 one may turn only to a few sources where the subject is partially treated (2) and to a large mass of journalistic commentary. This article examines the political elite in this most recent period, concentrating particularly on what appear to be the most striking developments of this period. Since, however, these developments are only comprehensible when set against their historical background, we start with a brief summary of the position reached by the mid-1950s.

L'origine sociale des deputes des débutés de la IIIe á ceux de la Ve République traduit, de façon frappante, l'incidence des mutations de la société française sur la composition de l'éiite politique: les fils de la bourgeoisie moyenne, un siécle aprés la Révolution de 1789, ravissent le pouvoir á ceux de la noblesse et de la haute bourgeoisie et assoient leur emprise á la faveur de deux guerres mondiales; les fils d'ouvriers et de petite bourgeoisie, dans le même temps, apparaissent comme des forces montantes dont le développement, cependant, semble s'arrêter en 1945. Le tableau 1 ci-aprés, extrait d'une étude de Mattei Dogan, où l'originé sociale est définie par la profession du pére de chaque député, atteste aisément ce double phénoméne — prise du pouvoir par les couches moyennes et blocage de l'ascension politique des couches populaires — qui éclaire la fonction des élites dans un systéme politique complexe et pluraliste comme celui de la France.