Oligarchy

Oligarchy occupies a curious place in the political vocabulary. While oligarchies are largely predominant economic, social, and political life, few ruling groups would publicly use this word to describe themselves. Furthermore, unlike the word "democratic," few ruling groups would claim to be oligarchical as a way of justifying their rule as proper and legitimate. Conversely, if a political party, a political interest group, or a political regime is described as oligarchical, one invariably wants to refer to the fact that a small class or group is in charge and the vast majority of the party, group, or regime has been excluded from decision making.

The concept of oligarchy has its roots in Greek political vocabulary and literally means rule or political power of the few. The few, as the term was originally used, could be the wealthy, the powerful, or the nobility. In The Politics, Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.) described oligarchy as one of those forms of political rule that does not aim to achieve justice or the public good as compared to monarchy, aristocracy, or a mixed republic, but in fact involves a small, cohesive political class ruling in its own interest. In contemporary society, oligarchy refers to any small, cohesive class or group that is in a position to make decisions or command others in either political or nonpolitical contexts. However, it also has a specifically political meaning, namely as a kind of constitutional arrangement or political regime in which political power is in the hands of a few individuals or a small class of rulers. Oligarchy also can be combined with other constitutional forms, such as democracy, monarchy, or aristocracy, in that all of these constitutions might contain an oligarchical element. Whatever the political arrangement, oligarchy always designates some cohesive group that rules a political community in its own interest, over and against democracy, the rule of the many or the common people.

Although oligarchies have existed in all civilizations, it was among the ancient Greeks that the term was first used explicitly to distinguish different kinds of political communities. From the eighth century b.c.e. on, most Greek city-states were oligarchies—ruled by well-connected, mostly aristocratic groups. The typical forms of political rule in ancient Greek city-states in were either oligarchies or democracies. For Aristotle oligarchies were notoriously unstable, tending to produce injustice and eventually revolutions of the lower classes that often led to tyranny. His proposed solution was a mixed constitution (a republic) that combined oligarchy with democracy. The great advantage of this solution was that each form of rule might balance the dangerous effects of the other.

During the later medieval period and through the renaissance (1400s–1500s), there was an ongoing debate among the Italian civic humanists over Aristotle's republican solution to the problem of oligarchy. Some sided with the model of the Venetian republic that was highly stable and ruled by an oligarchy based on birth. Others sided with the republic of Florence, which was far less stable, but incorporated the lower classes of craftspeople into the rule of the city. In 1513 Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) attacked the model of a republic based on oligarchy as its ruling principle. Oligarchical republics are static and cannot defend themselves from enemies because they cannot rely on the common people. His solution was to construct a republic that encourages a constant but controlled conflict between the ordinary people and the few who desired to rule. By having the common people actively resisting the tendency toward oligarchy through protests and indictments of power-hungry political leaders, laws leading to republican self-government would be introduced and the people could be mobilized to fight on behalf of the republic. Machiavelli was one of the first political thinkers to recognize that even though there was an inherent tendency in all republics for an oligarchical political class to arise, a constant tension between the many and the few would result in political freedom as popular self-government.

oligarchies and elites

In the twentieth century a number of political sociologists—who, ironically, were often called Machiavellians—made the bold claim that oligarchy was inevitable in all aspects of political life. Indeed, they suggested that a new science of politics could be constructed based on studying the behavior of "elites." Often substituting the term elite for oligarchy, they claimed that all significant political changes consisted of changes among elites and that there is an inexorable logic as to why the political domination of elites, or oligarchy, is the rule rather than the exception.

One of the most influential of these theorists, the Italian political scientist Gaetano Mosca (1858–1941), argued that in every society there is a "political class"—a small minority that exercises power and influence—that always rules over the majority. In representative democracies this political class is subject to the votes of the majority, but all policy is shaped by political elites. Proposing an idea central to later political science, he argued that all social change arises from the circulation of elites. New elites arise as social forces undermine the resources of older political elites.

Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) radicalized this theory by arguing that each governing class has a certain quota of psychological vitality that eventually runs out. This vitality can be renewed only by recruiting individuals from the lower non-governing classes who possess the appropriate qualities.

Rather than focus on social forces or psychological qualities, the German economist and sociologist Robert Michels (1876–1936) focused on organization. Though not endorsing this fact, he argued that in modern times, all organizations were governed by an "iron law of oligarchy." All large organizations must delegate decision making, and in modern organizations these full-time decision makers monopolize resources and divide up work according to specialized skill. This tendency toward oligarchy is especially pronounced in organizations claiming to be democratic like political parties, which mobilize large multitudes for political conflict.

These ideas were taken up by a large number of political scientists who argued that a realistic theory of democracy always involved the competition of political party elites for public office and the rule of political elites between elections. According to this account, the masses mainly were not interested in political participation. Further, these "realists" maintained that all interest groups, whatever their popular following, would essentially be led by a small oligarchy of full-time professionals. Thus, the concept of oligarchy became attached to democracy. The collapse of oligarchy into democracy could occur because oligarchy, according to this theory, was not viewed as a distinctive form of political rule but arose from the requirements of "organization" in general. As part of the sociology of organizations, the concept ceased to refer to a political regime or constitution in contrast to other political forms such as democracy, aristocracy, or authoritarian government. Instead, it became a fact of all political life in large, complex societies.

the communist bloc

Also known as the Soviet or Eastern bloc, the Communist bloc was the Cold War confederation of the Soviet Union and its Central and Eastern European satellites. Soviet control was determined by the presence of the victorious Red Army in these areas at the end of World War II, recognized and ratified by the "zones of influence" agreement at the 1945 Yalta Conference. Besides the USSR, the bloc included Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Poland. Yugoslavia's communist government maintained its independence from the late 1940s, as did Romania's from the 1960s; Albania later came under the influence of Maoist China.

The countries of the Communist bloc were also associated in the Soviet-imposed Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance. More commonly known as the Warsaw Pact, the treaty was an agreement signed in 1955 in response to the NATO alliance threat, in which the bloc countries pledged allegiance to and assistance for each other if one should be attacked. The bloc was effectively dissolved after the revolutions of 1989, in which Communist regimes collapsed in the face of massive popular opposition, and the Soviet Union, under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev—whose policy of perestroika had done much to create the revolutionary situation to begin with—did nothing to save them. The Warsaw Pact was officially dissolved in 1991 with the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

However, the distinctive political usage of the term "oligarchy" has not disappeared. In the field of comparative politics (the study of different kinds of states), political scientists often speak of states as being ruled by oligarchies. For example, they analyze military dictatorships or states with warlords as regimes ruled by military oligarchies. They also describe nation-states in which the wealthy classes hold most of the governmental offices through manipulated elections and support of the military either simply as oligarchies or as authoritarian states ruled by economic and military oligarchies. In analyzing the transitions from dictatorship to democracy in Eastern Europe or Latin America during the 1990s, political scientists (and commentators) often absorb the term oligarchy into the concept of authoritarian regime. They do this even though some authoritarian regimes were in fact ruled by oligarchies of wealthy families and the military, as in some Latin American countries, while others were ruled by a political party that generated an oligarchy out of its party hierarchy, as in the communist countries of the Eastern bloc. Thus, political scientists sometimes speak of oligarchy as one kind of authoritarian regime and sometimes they speak of authoritarian regimes as a substitute for speaking about oligarchy. In either case, the contrasting regime form is always democracy.

Political scientists' ambiguous use of the term has a peculiar result, reminiscent of the ancient Greek distinction between oligarchy and democracy. Specifically, by attributing rule by the few privileged and well-connected to authoritarian regimes, it appears that the transition to a democratic regime based on fundamental democratic rights—with free elections, civil rights, contested parties, and peaceful changes of governments after elections—is free of oligarchy. However, as previously stated, in democratic regimes oligarchical rule is manifest in large firms, in political parties, in representative institutions, in governmental administration, and in military institutions. Perhaps these various oligarchies are not all centralized and coordinated. Nonetheless, they pose a challenge to these regimes' democratic claims. If democratic regimes expect to be obeyed because they realize popular sovereignty through constitutional rights, particularly the right of citizens to equally influence governmental decisions, then it would seem that having oligarchy in most of their major economic and political institutions would raise profound questions about their legitimacy. To overcome this dilemma, one must either agree with the elite theorists that oligarchy in the form of political elites is simply an irrevocable fact of political life and modern organization, or recognize that within democracies based on constitutional rights, the "transition to democracy" is still ongoing. In the latter case, the conflict between oligarchical rule and democratic rule that so preoccupied the ancient Greeks in one way and Machiavelli in another is still fundamental to society's attempt to achieve democratic rights.

See also: Constitutional Monarchy; Constitutions and Constitutionalism; Democracy; Dictatorship; Republic.

bibliography

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Bottomore, T.B. 1968. Elites and Society. Baltimore: Penguin Books.

Burnham, James. The Machiavellians, Defenders of Freedom. New York: John Day, 1943.

Linz, Juan J., and Stepan Alfred. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-communist Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. Discourses on Livy, trans. Nathan Tarcov and Harvey C. Mansfield. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Michels, Robert. Political Parties. New York: Free Press, 1966.

Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Mosca, Gaetano. The Ruling Class, trans. Hannah D. Kahn. New York: McGraw Hill, 1939.

Pareto, Vilfredo. The Mind and Society, trans. Andrew Bongiorno and Arthur Livingston. New York: Dover Publishers, 1965.

Schattschneider, E. E. The Semisovereign People; a Realist's View of Democracy in America. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960.

Schumpeter, Joseph Alois. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed. New York: Harper, 1950.

Sealey, Raphael. A History of the Greek City States, ca. 700–338 B.C. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.

Peter Breiner