Oligarchy

Oligarchy, in its oldest sense, is rule by the few. In the political writing these books inherit, the few are usually the rich, and the word carries a judgment: the few govern for themselves and not for the city. The idea therefore covers two things that are related but distinct. One is a form of government and a party, set up, resisted and overthrown in the Greek cities. The other is the political power of wealth in general, the way money buys office, writes law and gives some classes a voice out of proportion to their numbers. The Harvard Classics follow the idea from Plutarch’s Athens through Machiavelli and More to Burke’s France, Mill’s England and Lowell’s America. Across that span the old name keeps being reached for whenever a writer wants to say that a regime calling itself something else is really governed by a narrow, interested group.

In Plutarch’s Lives, oligarchy is first of all a constitution and a party within the city. It is seldom described in the abstract. It appears as a choice made under pressure. The leaders of Thebes, siding with the Medes, ruled their multitude as the subjects of an oligarchy, so that the few’s hold on power and their collaboration with a foreign enemy appear together¹. That connection between narrow rule and outside power runs through the ancient material. The most vivid oligarchies of these books were imposed by coup or by a conqueror. The Thirty at Athens are remembered in Plato’s Apology for a single order: they commanded Socrates, with others, to seize Leon for execution. The passage shows oligarchy trying to make private citizens complicit in its violence². Plutarch adds a detail that ties the Thirty to the social basis of their rule. They turned the speakers’ platform around, on the belief that landed farmers were less hostile to oligarchy than men whose lives faced the sea³. Rule by the few, on this account, had its natural constituency among those who held land.

The earlier revolution of the Four Hundred shows how oligarchy disguises itself. Plutarch’s Alcibiades tells how the democracy was replaced by a body styled the Five Thousand that was in truth the Four Hundred. Sparta favored the change, since it habitually befriended government by the few⁴. Alcibiades himself prepared the way by offering his help to the “better” citizens if they would take the government from the people⁵. The episode shows that oligarchy is often a matter of opportunity and alliance, a faction finding a patron abroad, as much as conviction. Machiavelli, reflecting on the same history, makes the Spartan method a lesson in statecraft. Sparta held Athens and Thebes by installing oligarchies in them, and still lost them in the end⁶. For Machiavelli the failure is the point. A regime of the few planted by a foreign power rests on a narrow base and does not secure the conquest. Athens practiced the opposite policy with the same instrumental spirit. Pericles overthrew the oligarchy of Samos⁷, and the form of a subject city’s constitution became a measure of its loyalty in the contest between the two powers.

Within the city, the oligarchical party and the people formed the poles of ordinary politics. Plutarch says that Ephialtes made himself formidable to the oligarchical party by defending the people’s rights⁸. On this telling, standing up for the many is how a leader rises against the few. Suspicion runs the other way as well. Andocides was suspected as a hater of popular government and a partisan of oligarchy⁹. He was also said to have invented a story about the desecration of Themistocles’ tomb in order to exasperate the oligarchical faction against the people¹⁰. Charges of oligarchic sympathy were weapons in themselves, and Plutarch does not always vouch for them. The language carried over to Rome. There Cicero delivered an invective against the oligarchical party¹¹, although the Roman few were a senatorial nobility rather than a Greek faction of the rich. In all these cases oligarchy names an identifiable party with interests opposed to the people’s. The ancient question is chiefly who holds power and with what allies, not how wealth as such corrupts government.

The second great theme of these books is the political power of money, and it changes the question. In Plutarch’s account of the Roman Republic’s last years, money does not merely belong to the ruling few. It buys its way past every institution meant to restrain it. Caesar’s wealth bought candidates, votes and senators. Pompey and Crassus were made consuls and Caesar’s command renewed by compulsion rather than persuasion¹². Offices were openly bought in Rome’s corrupt elections¹³. Caesar used the riches of Gaul to lavish gifts and pay off the debts of public men¹⁴. The irony is that wealth served here to raise one man above the few, not to entrench them. The corruption that bought magistrates had already emptied republican forms of their substance before monarchy replaced them. Cellini offers a smaller, Renaissance version of the same truth. One powerful rich man, he observes, outweighs a whole board of counsellors¹⁵. The magistracy remains in form while wealth decides the outcome.

Thomas More pushes the point furthest, because he refuses to treat the power of wealth as a corruption of good government. In Utopia, existing commonwealths are nothing but a conspiracy of rich men advancing their own advantage under the name of the commonwealth¹⁶. This charge is broader than any ancient one. Oligarchy is no longer one constitution among several, or a faction within a city. On More’s view it is the hidden truth of every state founded on private property. Adam Smith reaches a more limited version of the conclusion by a different road. Merchants and manufacturers, he warns, are a small interested class who shape public regulations to their own advantage¹⁷. Smith does not say that all government is a conspiracy. He does insist that proposals coming from this class deserve suspicion, because its interest is not the public’s. Emerson finds the landed version in England. One hundred fifty-four persons sent 307 members to Parliament, and the landowners governed the country¹⁸. Those rich enough could buy a law, and the interests of the governing classes dominated¹⁹. More, Smith and Emerson agree that a narrow class bends law to its interest. They differ over which class, landed or mercantile, does so, and over whether this is the nature of the commonwealth or a remediable distortion of it.

The question of the franchise brings this tension to a point. If property is the stake men hold in the state, should votes be weighted by it, or would that simply write oligarchy into the constitution? Burke reports that the French committee itself admitted its basis of contribution could establish an aristocracy of the rich²⁰. He also entertains the proposal that votes within each mass be proportioned to property, so that wealth would carry its weight in government²¹. Weight given to property, on this view, is a guard against disorder and not necessarily oligarchy. Emerson questions whether proprietors should have more franchise than non-proprietors, since that would let wealth dominate the law²². Between these positions lies the old Athenian observation that landed men favored rule by the few³. Whether representing property steadies a state or merely hands it to the rich is left unsettled in these pages.

Burke’s Reflections contains the most sustained modern analysis of oligarchy in the collection, and it is a prediction rather than a description. The new French order, he argues, calls itself democratic but will become a mischievous and ignoble oligarchy²³. The mechanism is paper money. The scheme of assignats will produce an oligarchy in every republic, as power passes to those who manage the circulation²⁴. These managers, in Paris and the provinces, will gain the whole representative of money and much of the land²⁵. Power will then settle among the burghers of the towns and the monied directors, and the landed gentleman and the peasant will be shut out of government²⁶. France, Burke concludes, will be governed by an ignoble oligarchy of money-jobbers, attorneys and speculators. That oligarchy will be founded on the destruction of crown, church, nobility and people²⁷. Paris will be the focus of the jobbing through which a faction directs the state²⁸. The new administrative bodies are instruments of the leaders’ progress from democracy to oligarchy, which is why they are placed above the law²⁹.

Burke’s argument turns the ancient pattern around. For Plutarch the landed farmer was the oligarch’s natural ally³. For Burke the landed gentleman and the peasant are the ones excluded, and the new few are men of liquid, movable wealth²⁶. His fear is close to Smith’s suspicion of an interested commercial class¹⁷, but it is sharpened by revolution. In Burke’s France, the destruction of older orders clears the way for a new oligarchy rather than removing oligarchy. He also borrows, perhaps unknowingly, the lesson of the Four Hundred. A regime of the few rules best under a popular name^4,23.

Other modern writers apply the word to whatever narrow group they find in power. Manzoni’s seventeenth-century Lombardy is full of little oligarchies: clergy, nobles, military, guilds and lawyers. Above them all stands a rich and violent nobility whose bravoes give it unmatched power³⁰. Here oligarchy is a condition of society, a web of privileged corporations, more than a constitution. Mill, describing the radical creed of his youth, calls the English governing body a narrow oligarchy of landholders propped up by the Church and the legal profession³¹. That description agrees with Emerson’s count of borough patrons¹⁸ and differs from Burke’s defense of landed weight²⁶. Mill also notes that the remedy his radicalism favored has its own danger. Local self-government often becomes the selfish mismanagement of a jobbing local oligarchy³². Breaking up central power does not in itself abolish rule by the few; it may only shrink the few to a parish. Bagehot finds a similar pettiness in the English Commonwealth, where men from the shops shared offices and gifts among themselves and huckstered the state³³. Lowell gives the term its gravest American use. The rebellion of the Southern states, he says, was the work of a slaveholding oligarchy³⁴. A republic founded against hereditary privilege had harbored within it a class whose property in men gave it power over the whole.

Taken together, these texts show the idea widening and changing. The ancients treat oligarchy as a definite party and constitution. It is installed by coup or by a foreign patron, resisted by popular leaders, and suspected in rivals^4,6,8. With Rome and the Renaissance the stress falls on money’s power to corrupt any institution^12,15. More turns that power into an indictment of every commonwealth¹⁶. Moderns from Smith to Lowell use oligarchy as a name for any narrow interest that governs under another name: merchants, landholders, financiers, local cliques, slaveholders^17,31,27,34. Several questions remain open. One is whether property should carry weight in the franchise^21,22. Another is which kind of wealth, land or money, is more dangerous to free government. Burke and the radicals answer that differently^26,31. A third is whether reforms meant to disperse power simply produce smaller oligarchies³². More’s charge goes further than any of these. It holds that the power of wealth is the ordinary condition of states and not a corruption of them, and none of these writers settles whether he is right.