As Winters himself emphasizes, his book is not concerned generally with elites, which would include people whose power comes from their position in organizations. When C. Wright Mills wrote about “the power elite” in the 1950s, he was specifically referring to decision-makers at the pinnacle of corporate, military, and civilian bureaucracies. Winters rejects elite theory as a “detour,” and reaches back to an older tradition of thought stressing the distinctive role of wealth as a foundation of power. He traces his theory of oligarchy to Aristotle (“whenever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy”) and to Machiavelli, who was concerned with the means by which a republic could limit the power of wealth. While Winters seems to me too dismissive of elite theory, his narrowed focus on oligarchy clarifies an aspect of power that has been critically important in most societies and is peculiarly relevant to contemporary American politics.

In a style that evokes the historical sociology of Max Weber, Winters divides oligarchies into four ideal types. Two of these are situations in which oligarchs have direct control of the means of violence. In “warring oligarchies,” such as feudal Europe, nineteenth-century Appalachia, and failed states today, each warlord fends for himself, and in “ruling oligarchies,” such as ancient Athens, the Roman Republic, and fourteenth-century Venice and Siena, oligarchs rule collectively. In the two other types, oligarchs surrender control of violence—to a single “sultanistic” ruler as in Suharto’s Indonesia or Marcos’s Philippines, or to an impersonal state that upholds the rule of law, as in the United States and Singapore. In this fourth type, which Winters calls “civil oligarchy,” the government does not have to be democratic. The crucial element in civil oligarchy is that the rule of law guarantees property rights and frees oligarchs from fear of direct expropriation, while still leaving them at risk of losses from taxation and other redistributive policies.

Under these conditions, oligarchs do not need to involve themselves directly in politics to protect their wealth. If a Michael Bloomberg decides to run for office, Winters points out, it is not because he is trying to keep his wealth safe from rivals or necessarily to advance his material interests. In a civil oligarchy, rather than seeking out the spotlight, the superrich can use their money to exert political influence, and they can hire the busy “worker bees” of what Winters calls the “Income Defense Industry,” including banks, investment advisors, and law and accounting firms. Here he devotes much attention to tax avoidance and evasion, particularly to the creation of tax shelters so costly that they are available only to the ultra-rich. One striking aspect of Winters’s analysis is his emphasis on the difference in interests between the very rich and the “mass affluent.” He argues, for example, that oligarchs have an interest in pushing tax obligations down to the mass affluent through a lower threshold for the highest tax bracket, which deflects some of the burden and may win the super-rich more allies in opposing higher marginal rates.

In his preface Winters contrasts his analysis of political inequality with the standard political science view, which sees the gap in participation between the poor and the affluent as the explanation for skewed national policy. The problem with that approach, Winters says, is that the “lion’s share” of recent gains in income and wealth have gone “to a sliver of the population,” the top “1/10th and even 1/100th of the top 1 percent of households.” If political participation were the key, economic gains should at least have been diffused more widely among the mass affluent. Winters is assuming, however, that taxes and other policies enacted as a result of oligarchic influence are the main explanation for the increased concentration of income and wealth. But market-generated returns have also diverged because of changes in technology and the global economy, and although aggressively egalitarian policies might have limited the breakaway gains at the top, those policies were blocked by a conservative ideological resurgence that cannot be reduced to the influence of big money.