Oligarchy

In the eighth book of the Republic, Plato sets forth an order of decline among constitutions, in which oligarchy occupies the place between timocracy and democracy. Oligarchy arises, on this account, when riches and rich men are honored in the state, and when the law fixes a sum of money as the qualification for citizenship, allowing no one whose property falls below the amount fixed to have any share in the government. The honor-loving rulers of the timocratic state, having begun to accumulate private wealth, rewrite the laws to protect what they have gathered, so that property replaces military valor as the title to office. A city so constituted, Socrates observes, is not one city but two, the one of the poor and the other of the rich, dwelling together and conspiring against each other. Plato also describes the soul that answers to this constitution, in which the appetite for gain rules over the spirited and rational parts, and the man who is governed by calculation rather than by conviction is thrifty, cautious, and outwardly respectable.

The objection Socrates raises against the oligarchical principle turns on the difference between wealth and the capacity to govern. Just think what would happen, he asks, if pilots were to be chosen according to their property, and a poor man were refused permission to steer even though he were the better pilot; to which Adeimantus agrees that in government, as in navigation, the probable result would be shipwreck. It may be noted that Plato does not always use the term in this sense. In the Statesman he divides the rule of the few into aristocracy, which has an auspicious name, and oligarchy, the one a government in which the few rule according to the laws, the other a lawless government by the few. In both, the few are the wealthy, so that wealth is there no more characteristic of oligarchy than of aristocracy.

Plato's account of the divided city, and his parallel between the oligarchic soul and the oligarchic state, supplies the terms in which the later tradition conducts the argument. Aristotle takes up the classification and weighs the claims of rich and poor against one another; Aquinas restates the distinction between rule for the common good and rule for private interest; and Marx, in a much later age, renders the division of the city into two as the doctrine of class struggle. Whether the few who rule are men of virtue or men of property is a question treated more fully under the idea of Aristocracy, as the title that wealth may confer to political power is considered under Justice.

Oligarchy and democracy, Aristotle writes, are not sufficiently distinguished merely by the two characteristics of wealth and freedom, nor by reference to the few and the many, unless it is understood that the few are also the rich and the many the poor. The real difference between them is poverty and wealth, and wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy. He does not on that account neglect what he calls the accidental fact that the rich everywhere are few and the poor numerous. In his classification oligarchy is a perversion of aristocracy, as tyranny is a corruption of monarchy, since the few rule with a view to their own advantage rather than to the common good. He distinguishes several forms of the oligarchical constitution, from one which sets a moderate property qualification for office to that extreme in which office passes within a closed circle of families, a condition he calls dynasty, or the lawless rule of powerful men.

The claims of oligarchs and democrats Aristotle regards as complementary half-truths. Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; oligarchy out of the notion that those who are unequal in one respect, namely property, are unequal absolutely. Both parties speak of a limited and partial justice while imagining themselves to be speaking of absolute justice, and both, when their share in the government does not accord with their preconceived ideas, stir up revolution. The ancient defenders of oligarchy could argue that only men of wealth had the leisure requisite for citizenship, and Aristotle allows that nothing is more necessary than that the highest class should have leisure, in office and out of it. He nevertheless thinks it a bad thing that the greatest offices should be bought, since the law which allows this abuse makes wealth of more account than virtue.

Against the instability of both extremes Aristotle proposes the mixed constitution, which combines the elements of democratic and oligarchical justice; but this, he thinks, will not work in practice unless the middle class is large, and stronger if possible than the other two. Whether such a mixture can hold when the propertied class acquires political advantage over time is a question left open. It is taken up by Montesquieu, who looks to structural checks within the ruling body, and later by Tocqueville and Marx, who find the source of the difficulty in economic conditions rather than in the form of the constitution. Aristotle's own exclusion of mechanics and husbandmen from citizenship in the ideal polity has led some readers to ask whether his position on oligarchy is altogether consistent, a question belonging to the discussion of Citizenship and Democracy.

Plutarch treats the opposition of rich and poor less as a problem in constitutional theory than as a matter of biography and legislation. In the life of Lycurgus he relates that the Spartan lawgiver redistributed the land in equal lots, withdrew gold and silver coinage from use, and instituted common meals, with the effect that no considerable fortune could be gathered or displayed. Sparta owed its long stability, on this account, to the removal of the material conditions in which oligarchy takes root. The life of Solon presents the contrary case. Debt bondage had brought the land of Attica into few hands, and the city stood near civil war. Solon cancelled the debts, revised the constitution, and admitted a wider class of men to office, but he declined to redistribute the land, and the old divisions in time reasserted themselves.

The Roman lives extend the inquiry to the manners of a ruling class rather than to its laws. In the account of Coriolanus, the contempt of the patricians for the common people is shown to provoke the very disorders the propertied fear, so that the temper of the few may endanger their position as much as their privileges do. Plutarch's judgments are for the most part practical. Where a lawgiver reaches the concentration of wealth itself, the constitution he leaves behind proves durable; where he reaches it only in part, the settlement is precarious; and where the question is neglected altogether, as in the last age of the Roman Republic, faction passes into civil war. The bearing of legislation upon the manners of a people is treated more fully under the idea of Law.

The comparison of Lycurgus with Solon raises a difficulty that recurs wherever republics are discussed. If the thorough redistribution of property is the only sufficient remedy for oligarchical inequality, that remedy appears to require a lawgiver of extraordinary authority, and such authority is itself a concentration of power of the kind republics are framed to prevent. Machiavelli takes up this difficulty in asking how a corrupted republic may be reformed, and Rousseau returns to it in his discussion of the legislator. The Roman lives were widely read in the century of the revolutions, and the figures Plutarch drew furnished much of the language in which the propertied few were afterward praised and condemned.

Aquinas adopts Aristotle's classification and states its principle in terms of the end which rulers pursue. Government by the few is aristocracy when the few govern for the common good, and oligarchy when they govern for their private interest. The distinction, on this view, does not lie in the number of those who hold power, nor immediately in their wealth, but in whether the goods of the community are apportioned according to merit or according to the advantage of those who apportion them. Oligarchy stands among the three corrupt forms, with tyranny and the perversion of popular rule. Aquinas takes it to be less harmful than tyranny, since power divided among several is more easily resisted than power gathered into one, and more harmful than the corruption of democracy, since fewer men share in whatever benefit the government confers.

In On Kingship he argues that monarchy is the best of the simple forms, while allowing that every simple form is liable to degenerate. His practical recommendation, drawn from the Politics, is a mixed government in which a monarchical element supplies unity, an aristocratic element wisdom, and a democratic element the participation of the people, each restraining the others. The treatment is characteristic of the medieval reception of Aristotle. The categories are Aristotle's, but they are set within a framework in which all authority is measured by its service to the common good, and in which an unjust law is held to bind the conscience in a different manner from a just one. That question is treated under the idea of Law.

A difficulty remains in this account. If oligarchy is the corruption of a legitimate form, and the mixed constitution is its remedy, it may still be asked what secures the mixture when those who hold power prefer to rule for themselves. Aquinas answers chiefly in terms of the obligation of rulers and the direction of law toward the common good, rather than in terms of institutional contrivance. Montesquieu later undertakes to describe the arrangements by which the ambition of the few may be checked without reliance upon their virtue, and Machiavelli, in a different spirit, looks to the opposition of the people for the same effect. The comparison of the forms of government according to the end they serve belongs to the discussion of Government and Aristocracy.

Machiavelli considers the succession of constitutions in the light of Roman history. Following Polybius in the Discourses, he describes a cycle in which monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and popular government into license, after which the round begins again. Oligarchy arises, on this account, when the descendants of able aristocrats inherit the power of their fathers without inheriting their qualities. Governing for themselves rather than for the republic, they provoke the resistance of the people. The greatness of Rome, Machiavelli argues, is to be attributed to the very quarrel between the patricians and the plebeians which other writers have counted among its disorders. The tribunate gave the people a lawful instrument against the ambition of the few, while the Senate drew upon the talents of the nobility without permitting them to hold the state alone.

The disposition of the great to command and of the people to resist being commanded is, in his view, a permanent feature of civil life rather than a disease admitting of cure. What may be determined is whether the opposition passes through the offices and laws of the republic or breaks out in tumult and proscription. Rome, he holds, gave it a lawful channel; Sparta suppressed it under the arrangements of Lycurgus and gained a long tranquillity at the cost of expansion; Florence in his own time neither channelled nor suppressed it. He observes further that a republic which excludes the many from arms as well as from office has little defense against the few, since the citizen soldier who has some stake in the government is the surest guard of liberty. That subject is treated more fully under the idea of War.

In treating the conflict of rich and poor as a source of good laws rather than as a disorder to be removed, Machiavelli departs from the ancient preference for concord in the city, and the departure has been much disputed since. Montesquieu, who admires the Roman example, looks rather to the arrangement of powers than to the tumults of the people. Rousseau doubts that any arrangement of offices will suffice while fortunes remain unequal, and holds that the conflict must be reached at its source in property. Whether civil discord may be counted among the causes of liberty, or only among the causes of revolution, is a question that arises again under the ideas of Revolution and Liberty.

Montesquieu approaches the question through what he calls the principle of a government, the passion which sets it in motion and which is distinct from its nature or structure. Virtue is the principle of republics, honor of monarchies, fear of despotisms; and in that species of republic where the few govern, the principle is moderation, by which he means the restraint the ruling body imposes upon its own appetites. When moderation fails, the aristocratic republic passes into oligarchy. He describes the several ways in which it fails. Great inequality of fortune within the governing body breeds faction among its members; the closing of office against merit fills the magistracies with men of small capacity; and the haughtiness of the rulers toward those they govern provokes the resentment it fears.

Laws, on his account, may do something to preserve the principle. The governing body should hold its privileges without display, admitting the people to enough share in public business to prevent their sense of exclusion from hardening, and it should discourage the gathering of immense fortunes, which corrupt those who hold them and those who covet them alike. His conclusions rest largely upon comparison of the Italian, Roman, and Greek republics. Venice, with its numerous councils and its checks of magistrate upon magistrate, he counts the most durable of aristocracies; yet Venice governs by inquisitors and secret accusation, and a state whose stability depends on the fear of its own people may be thought to have confessed the weakness of the form. The relation of laws to the manners and climate of a people is pursued throughout The Spirit of the Laws.

The remedy Montesquieu proposes lies in the arrangement of powers within the governing body rather than in the enlargement of the body itself, and on this point the tradition divides. Rousseau objects that a constitution which secures moderation among the few still leaves the poor dependent upon the rich, and that no disposition of offices is equivalent to equality of condition among citizens. Tocqueville, who takes much of his method from Montesquieu, applies it to a society in which hereditary rank has disappeared and asks what principle animates a people among whom conditions are equal. The doctrine of the separation of powers, for which Montesquieu is most often cited, is treated under the idea of Government.

Rousseau seeks the origin of the rule of the rich in the history of property rather than in the classification of constitutions. Men in the state of nature, on his account, were nearly equal in their condition, and such inequalities as existed among them were of body and temper only. With agriculture and metallurgy came the division of land and the possibility of accumulation, and with accumulation came a dependence of some men upon others. Property once established stood in need of protection, and the wealthy, being the more exposed, had the greater interest in providing it. "The rich man, pressed by necessity, conceived at length the profoundest plan that ever entered the mind of man: this was to employ in his favor the forces of those who attacked him." The compact by which civil society was founded is thus, in Rousseau's telling, no genuine agreement among equals, but an arrangement in which those who had most to defend obtained the general force for its defense.

He does not conclude from this that every government of the few is illegitimate. In the Social Contract he distinguishes natural, hereditary, and elective aristocracy, and holds the last to be the best of the practicable forms, since a small number of good men may deliberate better than an assembly of all. What he denies is that wealth confers any title to govern. His remedy is not the abolition of property, which he regards as the most sacred of civil rights, but the prevention of extremes: no citizen should be rich enough to buy another, nor so poor as to be compelled to sell himself. Whether such moderation of fortunes can be maintained by law is a question that belongs also to the discussion of Wealth.

The derivation of political inequality from the institution of property passes from Rousseau into the writings of the French Revolution and afterward into the socialist tradition, where Marx gives it a form Rousseau himself would not have recognized, since Marx locates the difficulty in the ownership of the means of production rather than in property as such. The claim that legitimate government presupposes a rough equality of condition among citizens continues to be urged against constitutions which secure equal rights while permitting great disparities of fortune. The relation of civil liberty to the equality of citizens is considered further under the ideas of Liberty and Equality.

Tocqueville considers whether a government of the rich may arise within a society whose laws know no ranks. The aristocracy of the old Europe held land, transmitted its station by birth, and was bound to those beneath it by usage and by obligations that were understood on both sides, however unequally they were discharged. The body of men whom manufacture is raising up in America differs from it in each of these respects. As the division of labor advances, he observes, the workman grows more skillful in one operation and less capable in every other, while the master's view enlarges with the extent of his undertakings; wealth accumulates on one side and dependence on the other. Yet the manufacturer stands in no personal relation to those he employs, owes them nothing when their work is done, and neither commands nor protects them beyond the terms of their hire.

Whether such a class will acquire political dominion Tocqueville doubts. The manners and institutions of a democratic people, and the habit of equality which pervades them, oppose too much to any restoration of privilege in the laws. His apprehension is of another sort. Where great differences of fortune, education, and connection subsist among citizens who are equal before the law, the equality of the suffrage may not prevent the government from falling in practice into the hands of the few. The forms of popular government would then remain while their substance was altered, and he thought this the point at which the friends of democratic institutions should keep their watch. The general tendency of such societies toward centralized administration is treated in the concluding chapters of Democracy in America.

The proposition that oligarchy may subsist under democratic forms recurs throughout the later literature of politics. Marx pursues the analysis of industrial class power at much greater length and with different conclusions, holding the state itself to be the instrument of the propertied. Mill, writing in the same decades, argues that oligarchy remains wherever any class is excluded from a voice in government, and looks to the extension of the suffrage for its removal. Writers of a later generation contend that the direction of affairs in every government, however chosen, falls to a small number of men. Whether these positions genuinely conflict depends upon what is meant by the term, a question raised again in the chapters on Democracy and Aristocracy.

Marx removes the question from the theory of constitutions to the theory of production. For the tradition running from Plato to Montesquieu, the rule of the rich is one form of government among several, arising from particular laws and remediable by other laws. In Marx's account it is not a form of government at all, but the political aspect of a mode of production. The state, and government under whatever name, is on this view the organized power of one class for oppressing another, and the decisive question concerns which class owns the instruments of labor rather than whether the constitution is monarchical, republican, or popular. The bourgeoisie completed its revolution, he and Engels write, when it conquered for itself exclusive political sway in the modern representative state, after which legislation became the will of that class made into a law for all.

The chapters of Capital on primitive accumulation supply the historical part of the argument. Marx there traces the formation of the English capitalist class to the expropriation of the rural population: the enclosure of common lands, the dissolution of the monasteries and the dispersal of their tenants, and the statutes against vagabondage which drove the dispossessed into wage labor. Concentration of property in few hands appears in this narrative not as a corruption of the system but as the condition of its beginning. The remedy proposed follows from the diagnosis. Neither a mixed constitution nor a wider franchise will answer, since both leave ownership untouched; only with the abolition of private property in the means of production, and the eventual withering away of the state, does he expect political equality to become actual.

The Manifesto states this opinion in its most extreme form, but it is not without precedent among writers of very different intention. Smith remarks that masters are always and everywhere in a tacit combination not to raise wages, and that when the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. Mill, writing later, asks whether Parliament ever looks at any question with the eyes of a working man, and finds the remedy not in communism but in constitutional reforms which would end the exclusion of the working classes from any direct participation in government. What separates Marx from these writers is less the observation that wealth weighs upon the scales of legislation than the conclusion he draws from it. The relation of property to political power is treated further under the ideas of Labor, Wealth, and Revolution.