Oligarchy, government by the few, especially despotic power exercised by a small and privileged group for corrupt or selfish purposes. Oligarchies in which members of the ruling group are wealthy or exercise their power through their wealth are known as plutocracies.

Read More on This Topic political system: Oligarchy In the Aristotelian classification of government, there were two forms of rule by the few: aristocracy and its debased form, oligarchy....

Aristotle used the term oligarchia to designate the rule of the few when it was exercised not by the best but by bad persons unjustly. In this sense, oligarchy is a debased form of aristocracy, which denotes government by the few in which power is vested in the best individuals. Most classic oligarchies have resulted when governing elites were recruited exclusively from a ruling caste—a hereditary social grouping that is set apart from the rest of society by religion, kinship, economic status, prestige, or even language. Such elites tend to exercise power in the interests of their own class.

It is a recurrent idea that all forms of government are in the final analysis reducible to the rule of a few. Oligarchs will secure effective control whether the formal authority is vested in the people, a monarch, the proletariat, or a dictator. Thus, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels insisted that, throughout the history of capitalism, the key capitalists had controlled the government; they coined the dictum, “the state is the executive committee of the exploiting class.” The Italian political scientist Gaetano Mosca likewise insisted that a “ruling class” always constituted the effective oligarchic control. Vilfredo Pareto elaborated the idea in his doctrine of the “elite.” The modern tendency to analyze social patterns in terms of an elite, though greatly reinforced by Pareto’s theory, goes further back than Marx and Engels, who employed elite to describe the class-conscious communists, the leading group within the proletariat.

Friedrich Engels, German socialist and supporter of Karl Marx, 1879. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/REX/Shutterstock.com

One of the most famous modern uses of the term oligarchy occurs in “iron law of oligarchy,” a concept devised by the German sociologist Robert Michels to refer to the allegedly inevitable tendency of political parties and trade unions to become bureaucratized, centralized, and conservative. His reasoning was that, no matter how egalitarian or even radical the original ideology and goals of a party or union may be, there must emerge a limited group of leaders at the centre who can direct power efficiently, get things done through an administrative staff, and evolve some kind of rigorous order and ideology to ensure the survival of the organization when faced by internal division and external opposition. Subsequent writers of various persuasions have attempted either to expand on Michels’s thesis, extending it to legislatures, religious orders, and other organizations, or to restrict or criticize the thesis, charging that the iron law of oligarchy is not universal and that some unions and parties do maintain a viable system of democratic expression and governance.

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Political science and sociology have differentiated more carefully between various types of control and power. The type of power held by a party boss in a democracy, while overwhelming in relation to any single member of the party, is very different from that wielded by the boss of the single party in a totalitarian or authoritarian system. Likewise, the controlling group within an organization does not occupy the same position under democratic conditions (which allows for effective challenges to the group by outsiders at regular intervals) as it does under an authoritarian plan. If effective control changes hands as rapidly as it does in a city of the United States or a British trade union, it is doubtful that those exercising it should be spoken of as a “class” or an “elite.” The expression “the few” is too abstract to convey much information.

Despite the spread of democracy in the 20th century, oligarchies continued to exist, including in countries that were nominally democratic in form. Among industrialized countries that have been identified as oligarchies are Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union and China since that country’s embrace of capitalism in the late 1970s. Some political scientists have argued that the contemporary United States is an oligarchy or a plutocracy, because its great inequality of wealth and income (as compared with other industrialized countries) enables economic elites and corporations to influence public policy to their advantage, often against the preferences of the majority of ordinary citizens.