Encyclopedia of Political Theory
Oligarchy
Contributors: Nadia Urbinati
Editors: Mark Bevir
Book Title: Encyclopedia of Political Theory
Chapter Title: "Oligarchy"
Pub. Date: 2010
Access Date: September 30, 2015
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks
Print ISBN: 9781412958653
Online ISBN: 9781412958660
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412958660.n319
Print pages: 985-989
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This PDF has been generated from SAGE knowledge. Please note that the pagination
of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
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Oligarchy (oligarkhía) denotes the rule of the rich few. In ancient Greece (where the
name originated), oligarchy was a political regime in which the ruling power (arkhé)
was held by a small group of wealthy citizens (óligoy) or a class chosen by census.
The regime of the Four Hundred that overturned Athenian democracy in 411 was an
oligarchy. Since its inception, the term has referred particularly to the determination
of a social class to acquire political power in order to further its own interests and so
implied not simply a government by the few, but rule by and for the few. Oligarchy tends
therefore to be unfavorably contrasted with aristocracy, rule of the few (best and wisest)
for the benefit of all, although from the point of view of modern egalitarian ideals, both
will seem objectionable.
Oligarchy in Antiquity
Oligarchy is a form of class rule, and so from the beginning, efforts to analyze it have
focused on the distinctive character of oligarchs and their class interests. In The
Republic, Plato depicted oligarchic men in the following way:
Men of this stamp [oligarchs] will be covetous of money, like those
who live in oligarchies; they will have, a fierce secret longing after gold
and silver, which they will hoard in dark places, having magazines and
treasuries of their own for the deposit and concealment of them; also
castles which are just nests for their eggs, and in which they will spend
large sums on their wives, or on any others whom they please. (Book
VIII)
In The Politics, Aristotle echoed Plato's view that acquisitiveness and a fixation on
economic wealth are integral to an oligarchical class mentality and hence oligarchical
public culture. Thus Aristotle treated oligarchy as a degenerate political regime not
only because the few exercise power in their own interests, but also because they
construe those interests in a narrowly economistic fashion. Both Plato and Aristotle
noted a closely related deficiency of oligarchical regimes: their tendency to exacerbate
antagonisms between the rich and poor. Oligarchical elites, they argued, typically
enjoy their status and privileges at the expense of the populace or the many, those
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whose lives depend on their own work, either because they own no property at all or
because their holdings are too small to exempt them from liability to work. Although in
The Republic Plato ranked oligarchy above democracy, he condemned both regimes for
conflating political authority and private power. In one, political authority is predicated on
the private interests of the wealthy; in the other, it is predicated on the private interests
of the poor. Plato argued that this precludes civic friendship, unity, and peace. This
influential analysis strongly implicates the class connotations of oligarchy in its failings
as a political regime.
In Athens, the theoretical identity of oligarchy as a class and as a model of political
power came to be shaped precisely in its actual struggle against democracy. In the
Pseudo-Xenophon's (or Old-Oligarch's) Constitution of the Athenians (c. 430s BCE),
oligarchy was directly opposed to democracy. The opposition between them reflected
rival interpretations of political equality. The democratization of Athenian society
consisted in a progressive expansion of the community entitled to an equal share in
public responsibility. Initially, this privilege was restricted to those who belonged to the
narrow class of the knights or nobles. They were later joined by members of the middle
class that fought in the hoplite and eventually by the lower class of thetes. In this way
political equality (isonomia or equality before the law, and isegoria or the equal right
to speak in the assembly), initially reserved by those who shared a privileged social
position (equal treatment of social equals), was transformed into a principle distributing
political rights without regard to social position. The Pseudo-Xenophon was among
the first to regard this process as a degeneration of the ideal of political equality typical
of democratic regimes. Later on, Plato's Laws and Aristotle's Politics offered a more
systematic account of this contrast between good and bad equality (associated with
oligarchy and democracy, respectively).
According to Aristotle, both arithmetical equality (treating different individuals equally
or making the unequal equal) and proportional equality (treating different individuals
differently or making only the equals equal) are important in a good [p. 985 ↓ ]
government but only if they are used in the right domain. For instance, from the fact
that all should be treated equally by the law or in a tribunal it does not follow that they
should also share equally in political power. On the other hand, from the fact that official
responsibilities are discharged by an elite, it does not follow that only the members
of this elite should have the right to sit in the assembly or enjoy legal equality. The
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dualism of equality emphasized in the oligarchical polemic against democracy had
tremendously important effects on the meaning of democracy, which came to be
defined as a mirror image of oligarchy. Both regimes, Aristotle argued, apply the two
equalities in an absolute and simple way: proportional equality becoming the privilege of
the few (in oligarchies), arithmetical equality that of the many (in democracies). From an
Aristotelian standpoint, these regimes are equally problematic in that they both institute
monopolies of political power. Yet, by mixing the two kinds of equality propitiously,
each can check the other, effectively neutralizing the monopolistic tendencies of both
the few and the many, or so Aristotle maintained. He concluded that although the
best form of government must institute equality before the law and equal access to
the law-making process (making and obeying laws was the condition of freedom),
some magistracies should nonetheless be distributed according to competence or by
election. The good constitution (politeia) was thus a mixed one. In this context, Aristotle
associated oligarchy not simply with social status and property ownership but also with
personal qualities, intellectual and moral. Presumably, property owners were required
by their business to develop and refine those mental qualities that any government
would also demand. In the end, then, Aristotle did not regard oligarchy as irredeemably
bad; it becomes vicious only when unmoderated by countervailing forces (the same
could be said of democracy). For this reason the mix of the two would produce a good
constitution.
Although oligarchy, through its antithetical relation to democracy, came to absorb
some aristocratic attributes, it was never confused with aristocracy. The aristocratic
ideal of a ruling class stressed distinctive natural or acquired individual qualities, in
particular, certain ethical virtues (courage, honesty, wisdom, prudence) and intellectual
skills (competence in administering and devising financial plans). Property was not
essential to the characterization of aristocracy as it was in oligarchy. The polemical
confrontation between democracy and oligarchy makes this clear. The identification of
democracy with the “rule of the poor” and the emphasis on the low economic status of
the ruling demos gave property a central role in that confrontation. Thus oligarchy, and
not aristocracy, was the polar opposite of democracy; democrats equated oligarchy with
the predation of the wealthy, whereas oligarchs assumed that democratic regimes must
be inimical to the interests of the propertied classes.
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Oligarchy in Modern Society
The specters of class legislation and of the politics of economic resentment reemerged
in the eighteenth century with the reinvigoration of democratic ideals. In “Federalist
10,” we read that the main risk to which a free government is exposed comes from
factions, in particular, those factions that defend the interests of religion and property.
Fanaticism on the one hand and envy on the other are the two dangerous passions
that the republican constitution must tame without sacrificing freedom. But although the
Federalists proposed the republic as a mixed constitution in a way that recalled ancient
Aristotelian ideals, the moderns added something new to the classical analysis.
Two and a half centuries earlier, Niccolò Machiavelli undertook to simplify the classical
typology of regimes, particularly the Aristotelian one. Machiavelli distinguished only
two basic forms of government: one good (the popular or “republican”) and one bad
(government by the one or the few). However, he did not equate the former with
simple democracy but conceived it on the model of the Roman Republic, as a mix of
aristocratic and popular elements. For Machiavelli, government by the few is inherently
bad in all its forms; unlike the authors of antiquity, he made no exception for aristocracy.
His innovation was remarkable and inaugurated a way of thinking about government
that is close to ours: No matter how good an aristocracy might be, rule by a political elite
is acceptable only if the people retain, and regularly exercise, the right to monitor them
and hold them to account.
[p. 986 ↓ ]
So although the dualism of democracy and oligarchy was as central in the modern
political tradition as it was in ancient Athens, it persisted in an altered form. After the
French Revolution, commentators often directly identified oligarchic power with the
aristocratic ancien régime and leveled some distinctive objections to it. According to
this new critique, oligarchical government was subversive of peace and moreover
ineffective in coping with the complexity of modern society. Giuseppe Mazzini, a leading
European advocate for democratic national self-determination, strengthened his claim
for a new continental order by depicting the European powers of his times as oligarchic
and naturally predisposed to war. To him, oligarchy meant a system of social and
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political power that aimed to protect a privileged class. This, he maintained, inevitably
exposed both domestic and international community to a permanent risk of conflicts
and instability. Mazzini concluded that oligarchy promotes war whereas democracy
promotes peace. Karl Marx discerned a similar linkage between an oligarchical class
structure and a propensity toward conflict. His analysis of the Bonapartist degeneration
of the democratic revolution of 1848 and the repression of the Commune of Paris of
1871 referred explicitly to the dictatorial power of an oligarchic class. To Marx, oligarchy
was identical with capitalist dictatorship (with proletarian dictatorship as its opposite) or
the use of the coercive power of the state by the dominant class in order to perpetuate
its economic supremacy over the entire society.
Under modern conditions, oligarchy did not simply put liberty and security at risk. It was
also a symptom of increasingly bureaucratized modes of social control. John Stuart Mill,
a founding father of modern liberalism, denounced the oligarchic structure of power in
mid-nineteenth-century English society and recommended several democratic reforms
as a corrective (especially the extension of suffrage to women and to members of the
working classes). To some extent, Mill's arguments reprised those of the ancients. Thus
he contended that the republics of antiquity persisted only because the competent few
were effectively checked by the many and because under purely oligarchical conditions
there is no way to guarantee the choice of competent magistrates. But Mill put a new
twist on this familiar argument. Although aristocracy and nobility were becoming ever
more anachronistic, he noticed that complex modern societies increasingly depended
on a class of competent, responsible, and conscientious administrators. This threatened
a new, bureaucratic, form of oligarchy, which Mill named pedantocracy. Writing several
decades after Mill, Max Weber similarly suggested that modern government could be
characterized as a bureaucratized incarnation of the sort of privileged clerisy that had
first emerged in the Catholic Church.
The path of analysis that Marx, Mill, and Weber inaugurated in the modern
conceptualization of oligarchy was extremely important. It indirectly inspired a new
critique of parliamentarianism that became influential at the turn of the twentieth
century. But to understand this, we need first to see how the relationship between
democracy and oligarchy was transformed by the development of modern systems of
electoral representation.
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All Power is Oligarchic
In antiquity, the selection of rulers by election was not associated with democracy
but rather with aristocratic and oligarchical regimes. For Herodotus, Aristotle, and
Plato, electing leaders presupposed hierarchical discrimination—for, to be electable,
one must prove oneself to be superior, or in some way specially worthy of the public
responsibilities for which one hopes to be selected. But this sense of distinction conflicts
with democratic ideals of equality and for that reason ancient democracy rejected
election in favor of sortition (selection by lot). As anyone who has served on a jury
knows, lottery is necessarily indiscriminate—blind to the qualities of the chosen.
By contrast, candidates in an election must bring out their differences and claim for
superior qualifications. This led the ancients to perceive a close affinity between
election and oligarchic or aristocratic rule and to doubt the compatibility of election and
democracy. In the eighteenth century, this tension between democracy and election
was reasserted by baron de Montesquieu, the Federalists, and Emmanuel Joseph
Sieyès. Nevertheless, these writers all believed that modern government had to be a
mix of democracy and oligarchy, equality and inequality. According to them, the novel
forms of political representation characteristic of modern [p. 987 ↓ ] political systems
are crucial for combining these otherwise incompatible elements.
By the end of the nineteenth century, many scholars observed that established systems
of parliamentary government were drifting inexorably toward oligarchy. As Carl Schmitt
pointed out, after several decades of performance, parliamentarianism has
produced a situation in which all public business has become an
object of spoils and compromise for the parties and their followers,
and politics, far from being the concern of an elite, has become the
despised business of a rather dubious class of persons. (The Crisis of
Parliamentary Democracy, Preface to the second edition [1926])
As a result, the eighteenth-century ideal of a propitious mix of oligarchy and democracy,
which the Federalists touted as the crowning achievement of the modern republic,
came to be regarded with mounting skepticism. This was particularly so among those
who argued that social and political inquiry should proceed on the model provided by
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the natural sciences. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a number
of political analysts impressed by this ideal of an unsentimental, value-free, and
rigidly empirical form of social science developed a distinctive “theory of elites.”
The three most influential of these elite theorists were Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo
Pareto, and Robert Michels. They maintained that the electoral system upon which the
parliamentary government relied was not a mixture of democracy and oligarchy but
rather truly oligarchical. Elections served to gather popular support for government by
a minority, thus making oligarchy irresistible and legitimate. The classical opposition
between democracy and oligarchy gave way to the theory that all social and political
organization is fated to become oligarchical, no matter how democratic it was originally
intended to be. Without leaders to speak for it, the demos is necessarily a voiceless,
formless mass. In the eyes of these theorists, then, democratic regimes are incapable
of concerted political action unless oligarchical elites impose order and purpose from
above. Michels gave the name of the “iron law of oligarchy” to this phenomenon, which
he thought universal, that is to say, observable in all forms of social life, from industry to
government, from parties to unions.
By asserting that all forms of government are necessarily oligarchic, the theory of
elites obliterated the older, classical distinction between democratic and oligarchical
government. The ideal of a democratic society systematically ruling from below was
dismissed as ideological or absurd or impossible. Differences in forms of government
were nothing but the circulation of elites by different methods. In this view, oligarchy
becomes a social necessity, not a degeneration or a corrupted form of government. In
addition, modern electoral politics gave birth to a new kind of oligarchical organization:
the political party. Although purporting to be receptive conduits of a democratic will,
political parties are in reality would-be elites. Electoral competition forms the venue in
which they vie for control. Once they win power, however, parties govern as oligarchies,
standing above the ruled and imposing their will upon them. And when out of office, they
are little more than oligarchies-in-waiting. Michels's “iron law,” the claim that all political
power, regardless of origin or democratic intent, ends up imposing itself oligarchically,
thus poses a fundamental challenge to modern democratic ideals. It is a challenge to
which representative democracy is still struggling to find an answer.
NadiaUrbinati
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See also
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Aristotle
Bureaucracy
Democracy
Equality
Federalism
Herodotus
Machiavelli, Niccolo
Marx, Karl
Mazzini, Giuseppe
Mill, John Stuart
Montesquieu, Baron de
Pareto, Vilfredo
Parliament
Plato
Political Participation
Weber, Max
Further Readings
Aristotle . (1995). Politics (E. Barker, Ed. & Trans.). Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press.
Machiavelli, N., ed. (1995). The prince (D. Wooten, Ed. & Trans.). Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett.
Machiavelli, N., ed. (2003). The discourses (B. Crick, Ed., & L. J. Walker, ed. , Trans.).
New York: Penguin.
Madison, J., ed. , Hamilton, A., ed. , & Jay, J., ed. (1987). The Federalist papers (I.
Kramnick, Ed.). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Marx, K., ed. (1978). The Marx-Engels reader (2nd ed., R. C. Tucker, Ed.). New York:
Norton.
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Michels, R., ed. (1968). Political parties: A sociological study of the oligarchical
tendencies of modern democracy (C. Paul, ed. , & E. Paul, ed. , Trans.). New York: The
Free Press.
Mill, J. S., ed. (1991). On liberty and other essays (J. Gray, Ed.). Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press.
Ober, J., ed. (1989). Masses and elite in democratic Athens: Rhetoric, ideology, and the
power of the people . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Plamenatz, J., ed. (1973). Democracy and illusion: An examination of certain aspects of
modern democratic theory . London: Longmans.
Plato . (1992). Republic (Rev. ed., C. D. Reeve, Ed.; G. M. A. Grube, ed. , Trans).
Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Schmitt, C., ed. (1985). The crisis of parliamentary democracy (E. Kennedy, ed. ,
Trans.). Cambridge: MIT Press. (Original work published 1923)
Urbinati, N., ed. “A common law of the peoples”: Giuseppe Mazzini's democratic
nationality . Journal of Modern Italian Studies 1 197–222. (1996). http://
dx.doi.org/10.1080/13545719608454915
Weber, M., ed. (1958). From Max Weber: Essays in sociology (H. H. Garth, ed. , & C.
Wright Mills, Eds.). New York: Oxford University Press.
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