By Alexander Perepechko

Published on May 23, 2015

When I tell my fellow Americans that I study American elites, I often get a bizarre reaction: “How can you, a foreigner, study American elites?” It happens so frequently that a special essay is required.

It is not unusual for foreigners to scrutinize American elites. Just like many other scientific disciplines, elitology in the United States was founded by immigrants. Moisey Ostrogorsky and Pitirim Sorokin, immigrants from the Eastern Europe, were among the founding fathers of elitology in America. Ostrogorsky was a Belarusian Jew. Sorokin’s father was Russian and his mother was Komi. American elitologist and strategist Edward Luttwak was born into a Jewish family in Romania. By the same token, Sergey Kurginyan, one of the founding fathers of elitology in another country – the Russian Federation – is also a “foreigner” there with Jewish and Armenian cultural roots. I often utilize his provocative findings about military and national security elites in my work. Thus, it is not credible to conjecture that an immigrant cannot study American elites.
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