Definition: Oligarchy

 

Oligarchy may be defined succinctly as "rule by the few," often by the wealthy few.

The term has long Greek roots; and quite appropriately, as Greek history richly illustrates the economic process leading to oligarchy—as well as the often bitter consequences of oligarchical rule.

Will Durant, for example, in The Life of Greece wrote of the Greeks:

 

"As the seventh century [B.C.] drew to a close the bitterness of the helpless poor against the legally entrenched rich had brought Athens to the edge of revolution. Equality is unnatural; and where ability and subtlety are free, inequality must grow until it destroys itself in the indiscriminate poverty of social war; liberty and equality are not associates but enemies. The

 

concentration of wealth begins by being inevitable, and ends by being fatal. . . . The poor, finding their situation worse with each year—the government and the army in the hands of their masters, and corrupt courts deciding every issue against them—began to talk of a violent revolt, and a thoroughgoing redistribution of the wealth. The rich . . . angry at the challenge to their . . . property . . . prepared to defend themselves by force

 

against a mob that seemed to threaten not only property but all established order . . . ."

(At this juncture the astonishing Solon intervened successfully, in ways beyond the scope of this definition, but the interested reader is invited to investigate the details.)

See also: class warfare, progressivism, populism, plutocracy, and the links below.