Plutocracy or plutarchy, defines a society or a system ruled and dominated by the small
minority of the wealthiest citizens.
The first known use of the term was in 1652.
Unlike systems such as democracy, capitalism, socialism or anarchism, plutocracy is not
rooted in an established political philosophy.
The concept of plutocracy may be advocated by the wealthy classes of a society in an
indirect or surreptitious fashion, though the term itself is almost always used in a
pejorative sense.
Usage The term plutocracy is generally used as a
pejorative to describe or warn against an undesirable condition.
Throughout history, political thinkers such as Winston Churchill, 19th-century French
sociologist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville, 19th-century Spanish monarchist Juan Donoso
Cortés and today Noam Chomsky have condemned plutocrats for ignoring their social responsibilities,
using their power to serve their own purposes and thereby increasing poverty and nurturing
class conflict, corrupting societies with greed and hedonism.
Examples Examples of plutocracies include the Roman
Empire, some city-states in Ancient Greece, the civilization of Carthage, the Italian
city-states/merchant republics of Venice, Florence, Genoa, and pre-World War II Empire
of Japan.
One modern, formal example of what some critics have described as a plutocracy is the City
of London.
The City has a unique electoral system for its local administration.
More than two-thirds of voters are not residents, but rather representatives of businesses and
other bodies that occupy premises in the City, with votes distributed according to their
numbers of employees.
The principal justification for this arrangement is that most of the services provided by the
Corporation are used by the businesses in the City.
In fact about 450,000 non-residents constitute the city's day-time population, far outnumbering
the City's 7,000 residents.
Modern politics
Historically, wealthy individuals and organizations have exerted influence over the political
arena.
In the modern era, many democratic republics permit fundraising for politicians who frequently
rely on such income for advertising their candidacy to the voting public.
Whether through individuals, corporations or advocacy groups, such donations are often
believed to engender a cronyist or patronage system by which major contributors are rewarded
on a quid pro quo basis.
While campaign donations need not directly affect the legislative decisions of elected
representatives, the natural expectation of donors is that their needs will be served
by the person to whom they donated.
If not, it is in their self-interest to fund a different candidate or political organization.
While quid pro quo agreements are generally illegal in most democracies, they are difficult
to prove, short of a well-documented paper trail.
A core basis of democracy, being a politician's ability to freely advocate policies which
benefit his or her constituents, also makes it difficult to prove that doing so might
be a crime.
Even the granting of appointed positions to a well-documented contributor may not transgress
the law, particularly if the appointee appears to be suitably qualified for the post.
Some systems even specifically provide for such patronage.
United States
Some modern historians, politicians and economists state that the United States was effectively
plutocratic for at least part of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era periods between the
end of the Civil War until the beginning of the Great Depression.
President Theodore Roosevelt became known as the "trust-buster" for his aggressive use
of United States antitrust law, through which he managed to break up such major combinations
as the largest railroad and Standard Oil, the largest oil company.According to historian
David Burton, “When it came to domestic political concerns, TR’s Bete Noire was
the plutocracy.
In his autobiographical account of taking on monopolistic corporations as president,
TR recounted
’’ …we had come to the stage where for our people what was needed was a real democracy;
and of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere
wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.’’
The Sherman Antitrust Act had been enacted in 1890, with large industries reaching monopolistic
or near-monopolistic levels of market concentration and financial capital increasingly integrating
corporations, a handful of very wealthy heads of large corporations began to exert increasing
influence over industry, public opinion and politics after the Civil War.
Money, according to contemporary progressive and journalist Walter Weyl, was "the mortar
of this edifice", with ideological differences among politicians fading and the political
realm becoming "a mere branch in a still larger, integrated business.
The state, which through the party formally sold favors to the large corporations, became
one of their departments."
In his book The Conscience of a Liberal, in a section entitled The Politics of Plutocracy,
economist Paul Krugman says plutocracy took hold because of three factors: at that time,
the poorest quarter of American residents were ineligible to vote, the wealthy funded
the campaigns of politicians they preferred, and vote buying was "feasible, easy and widespread",
as were other forms of electoral fraud such as ballot-box stuffing and intimidation of
the other party's voters.
Post World War II In modern times, the term is sometimes used
pejoratively to refer to societies rooted in state-corporate capitalism or which prioritize
the accumulation of wealth over other interests.
According to Kevin Phillips, author and political strategist to U.S. President Richard Nixon,
the United States is a plutocracy in which there is a "fusion of money and government."
Chrystia Freeland, author of Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the
Fall of Everyone Else, says that the present trend towards plutocracy occurs - and is self-justified
- because the rich feel "[their] own personal self-interest is in the interests of everybody
else."
Some researchers have said the US may be drifting towards a form of oligarchy, as individual
citizens have less impact than economic elites and organized interest groups upon public
policy.
A study conducted by political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, which was
released in April 2014, stated that their "analyses suggest that majorities of the American
public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts."
that Gilens and Page do not characterize the US as an "oligarchy" or "plutocracy" per se;
however, they do apply the concept of "civil oligarchy" as used by Jeffrey A. Winters with
respect to the US.
Most recently, Jeffrey Winters has posited a comparative theory of “Oligarchy,” in
which the wealthiest citizens – even in a “civil oligarchy” like the United States
– dominate policy concerning crucial issues of wealth- and income-protection.
On Aljazeera on 13.8.2014,Professor Noam Chomsky of MIT in response to questions related to
US responses to the Isreali / Gaza situation, effectively repeated the quote on American
public influence over policies, when questioned further he suggested that significant amounts
of research suggested that the US was in effect a plutocracy.
As a propaganda term In the political jargon and propaganda of
Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and the Communist International, western democratic states were
referred to as plutocracies, with the implication being that a small number of extremely wealthy
individuals were controlling the countries and holding them to ransom.
Plutocracy replaced democracy and capitalism as the principal fascist term for the United
States and Great Britain during the Second World War.
For the Nazis, the term was often a code word for "the Jews".
See also
References
Further reading Howard, Milford Wriarson.
The American plutocracy.
New York: Holland Publishing.
Norwood, Thomas Manson.
Plutocracy: or, American white slavery; a politico-social novel.
New York: The American News Company.
Pettigrew, Richard Franklin.
Triumphant Plutocracy: The Story of American Public Life from 1870 to 1920.
New York: The Academy Press.
Reed, John Calvin.
The New Plutocracy.
New York: Abbey Press.
Winters, Jeffrey A..
"Oligarchy" Cambridge University Press External links
The dictionary definition of plutocracy at Wiktionary
Quotations related to Plutocracy at Wikiquote