Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Email
Answers.com

oligarchy

 
(ŏl'ĭ-gär'kē, ō'lĭ-) pronunciation
n., pl., -chies.
    1. Government by a few, especially by a small faction of persons or families.
    2. Those making up such a government.
  1. A state governed by a few persons.
oligarchic ol'i·gar'chic or ol'i·gar'chi·cal adj.

Search unanswered questions...
Enter a question here...
Search: All sources Community Q&A Reference topics

Rule by the few, often seen as having self-serving ends. Aristotle used the term pejoratively for unjust rule by bad men, contrasting oligarchy with rule by an aristocracy. Most classic oligarchies have resulted when governing elites were recruited exclusively from a ruling class, which tends to exercise power in its own interest. The term is considered outmoded today because "few" conveys no information about the nature of the ruling group.

For more information on oligarchy, visit Britannica.com.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman takes issue with a statement by new Fed chief Ben Bernanke to the effect that rising financial inequality stems from insufficient educational opportunities. It's not all college graduates who are making more money, Krugman says, it's a small segment of society — an oligarchy:

"...we're seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite."

Link: Graduates Versus Oligarchs

Posted February 28, 2006.


Government by the few. The logically exclusive categories of government by one, the few, or the many have been widely deployed, but the terminology has varied. For example, aristocracy is a form of government by the few. Aristotle distinguished between rulers who govern in the general interest (aristocracy) and rulers who govern in their own interest (oligarchy). Sociologists have made claims about a necessary connection between organization and oligarchy. See also elitism; iron law of oligarchy.

— Andrew Reeve

oligarchy (oligarchia, ‘rule of the few’), the limitation of political power to a portion of the community, such as a few families or individuals (the oligarchs). It was characteristic of oligarchs that they possessed greater wealth and influence than the rest of the community; high birth was not a necessary condition (compare ARISTOCRACY), but in Greece it commonly happened that the oligarchs were a section of the old nobility which had excluded from power the poorer nobles. Even during the second half of the fifth century BC, when Athenian ascendancy promoted democratic forms of government, there were still many oligarchic states in Greece, the most notable perhaps being at Corinth and at Thebes. The government at Rome under the republic is often described as ‘oligarchical’; see NOBILES and REPUBLIC.

Columbia Encyclopedia:

oligarchy

Top
oligarchy (ŏl'əgärkē) [Gr.,=rule by the few], rule by a few members of a community or group. When referring to governments, the classical definition of oligarchy, as given for example by Aristotle, is of government by a few, usually the rich, for their own advantage. It is compared with both aristocracy, which is defined as government by a few chosen for their virtue and ruling for the general good, and various forms of democracy, or rule by the people. In practice, however, almost all governments, whatever their form, are run by a small minority of members. From this perspective, the major distinction between oligarchy and democracy is that in the latter, the elites compete with each other, gaining power by winning public support. The extent and type of barriers impeding those who attempt to join this ruling group is also significant.


(ol-uh-gahr-kee, oh-luh-gahr-kee)

A system of government in which power is held by a small group.

Word Tutor:

oligarchy

Top
pronunciation

IN BRIEF: Government by a few.

pronunciation The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy. — Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), French lawyer and political philosopher.

LearnThatWord.com is a free vocabulary and spelling program where you only pay for results!

Random House Word Menu:

categories related to 'oligarchy'

Top
Random House Word Menu by Stephen Glazier
For a list of words related to oligarchy, see:

Oligarchy (from Greek ὀλιγαρχία (oligarkhía); from ὀλίγος (olígos), meaning "a few", and ἄρχω (archo), meaning "to rule, to govern, to command")[1][2][3] is a form of power structure in which power effectively rests with a small number of people. These people could be distinguished by royalty, wealth, family ties, corporate, or military control. Such states are often controlled by a few prominent families who pass their influence from one generation to the next.

Throughout history, some oligarchies have been tyrannical, relying on public servitude to exist, although others have been relatively benign. Aristotle pioneered the use of the term as a synonym for rule by the rich, for which the exact term is plutocracy, but oligarchy is not always a rule by wealth, as oligarchs can simply be a privileged group, and do not have to be connected by bloodlines as in a monarchy. Some city-states from ancient Greece were oligarchies.

Contents

Examples of oligarchies

Some other examples include the former Soviet Union where only members of the Communist Party were allowed to vote or hold office, Vaishali, the French First Republic government under the Directory, and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (only the nobility could vote). In the time of the ancient Greeks, Sparta was an oligarchy that clashed with the democratic city-state of Athens, (these two nations eventually clashed in the Peloponnesian war in which Sparta defeated Athens causing the city state to rule much of Greece for some time). A modern example of oligarchy could be seen in South Africa during the twentieth century. Here, the basic characteristics of oligarchy are particularly easy to observe, since the South African form of oligarchy was based on race. After the Second Boer War, a tacit agreement or understanding was reached between English- and Afrikaans-speaking whites. Together, they made up about twenty percent of the population, but this small percentage ruled the vast non-white and mixed-race population. Whites had access to virtually all the educational and trade opportunities, and they proceeded to deny this to the black majority even further than before.

Although this process had been going on since the mid-17th- 18th century, after 1948 it became official government policy and became known worldwide as apartheid. This lasted until the arrival of democracy in South Africa in 1994, punctuated by the transition to a democratically-elected government dominated by the black majority.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union on 31 December 1991, privately owned Russia-based multinational corporations, including producers of petroleum, natural gas, and metal have become oligarchs. Privatization allowed executives to amass phenomenal wealth and power almost overnight. In May 2004, the Russian edition of Forbes identified 36 of these oligarchs as being worth at least $1 billion.[4]

A well-known fictional oligarchy is represented by the Party in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Another emerging oligarchy is the rule of Sri Lanka under the Rajapaksa family. The president, Mahinda Rajapaksa has nepotistically appointed hundreds of his family members into governmental postions. The Rajapaksa brothers are in direct control of the country's most powerful government institutions. A new constitutional amendment by the president has seen the elimination of presidential term limits. Minority tamil uprisings demanding equality has been militarily defeated with tens of thousands of civilians summarily executed after the last war. Dissenters, including journalists, human rights advocates and politicians have been disappeared or forced to flee the country.

Mexico, although the fourteenth largest economy in the world and the second largest in Latin America after Brazil, suffers from severe inequality in income and wealth distribution. This leaves power in the hands of the wealthy minority; large gaps remain between the lower and upper classes, and as few as 10% of the population are responsible for 40% of the national income.

Arguably North Korea is an oligarchy because the power descends from one family to another.

Modern democracy as oligarchy

Robert Michels believed that any political system eventually evolves into an oligarchy. He called this the iron law of oligarchy. According to this school of thought, modern democracies should be considered as oligarchies. In these systems, actual differences between viable political rivals are small, the oligarchic elite impose strict limits on what constitutes an acceptable and respectable political position, and politicians' careers depend heavily on unelected economic and media elites. Thus the popular phrase: there is only one political party, the incumbent party.

Corporate Oligarchy (Corporatocracy)

Corporate oligarchy is a form of power, governmental or operational, where such power effectively rests with a small, elite group of inside individuals, sometimes from a small group of educational institutions, or influential economic entities or devices, such as banks, commercial entities that act in complicity with, or at the whim of the oligarchy, often with little or no regard for constitutionally protected prerogative. Monopolies are sometimes granted to state-controlled entities, such as the Royal Charter granted to the East India Company, or privileged bargaining rights to unions (labor monopolies) with very partisan political interests.

Athenian techniques to prevent the rise of oligarchy

Especially during the Fourth Century BC, after the restoration of democracy from oligarchical coups, the Athenians used the drawing of lots for selecting government officers in order to counteract what the Athenians acutely saw as a tendency toward oligarchy in government if a professional governing class were allowed to use their skills for their own benefit.[5] They drew lots from large groups of adult volunteers as a selection technique for civil servants performing judicial, executive, and administrative functions (archai, boulē, and hēliastai).[6] They even used lots for very important posts, such as judges and jurors in the political courts (nomothetai), which had the power to overrule the Assembly.[7]

See also

Government terms:

Relevant authors:

References

  1. ^ ὀλίγος, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library
  2. ^ ἄρχω, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library
  3. ^ ὀλιγαρχία, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library
  4. ^ http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/60263/marshall-i-goldman/putin-and-the-oligarchs, Putin and the Oligarchs, Foreign Affairs. November/December 2004
  5. ^ M.H. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes 97, 308, et al. (Oxford, 1991)
  6. ^ Bernard Manin, Principles of Representative Government 11-24 (1997).
  7. ^ Bernard Manin, Principles of Representative Government 19-23 (1997).
  • Ostwald, M. Oligarchia: The Development of a Constitutional Form in Ancient Greece (Historia Einzelschirften; 144). Stuttgart: Steiner, 2000 (ISBN 3-515-07680-8).

External links


Translations:

Oligarchy

Top

Dansk (Danish)
n. - oligarki, fåmandsvælde

Nederlands (Dutch)
regime van enkele bevoorrechte personen, staat geregeerd door oligarchie

Français (French)
n. - oligarchie

Deutsch (German)
n. - Oligarchie (Herrschaft einer kleinen Gruppe)

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ολιγαρχία

Italiano (Italian)
oligarchia

Português (Portuguese)
n. - oligarquia (f)

Русский (Russian)
олигархия

Español (Spanish)
n. - oligarquía

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - oligarki, fåmannavälde

中文(简体)(Chinese (Simplified))
寡头政治

中文(繁體)(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 寡頭政治

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 과두정치, 소수의 독재자

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 寡頭政治, 少数独裁政治, 寡頭政治国, 少数独裁者

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) حكم القله‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮שלטון מיעוט רב-כוח, אוליגרכיה‬


 
 

 

Copyrights:

American Heritage Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 1994-2012 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Answers Corporation Word Overheard by Answers.com. © 1999-present by Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Oxford Dictionary of Politics. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics. Copyright © 1996, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. Copyright © 1993, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/ Read more
Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: Politics. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Edited by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. Copyright © 2002 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.  Read more
Word Tutor. Copyright © 2004-present by eSpindle Learning, a 501(c) nonprofit organization. All rights reserved.
eSpindle provides personalized spelling and vocabulary tutoring online; sign up free Read more
Random House Word Menu. © 2010 Write Brothers Inc. Word Menu is a registered trademark of the Estate of Stephen Glazier. Write Brothers Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
 Rhymes. Oxford University Press. © 2006, 2007 All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia on Answers.com. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Oligarchy Read more
Translations. Copyright © 2007, WizCom Technologies Ltd. All rights reserved.  Read more

Follow us
Facebook Twitter
YouTube

Mentioned in

» More» More