Oligarchy is back. That is, it has recently essayed to make a conceptual comeback because it has never disappeared from the way societies are ruled and, particularly and specifically in modernity, political life. What is it, though? Mostly it has remained untheorized or undertheorized in modernity, despite some critical approaches having mentioned it in connection to liberalism, such as Castoriadis’ (1999, 153ff), whereas others, within democratic liberalism, pointed to it as a stage in the development of liberalism that would have been already superseded, such as Santos (2013). This article precisely aims to engage with it in modernity and critically assess its relation to democracy, including its relation to plebeianism.
Since apparently the Persians, but more consistently with the Greeks and above all Aristotle, oligarchy entered the vocabulary of power and rule (or “government”), having a sort of half-life in Medieval times, when monarchical power and the papacy held center stage in the discussions about power. Oligarchy re-emerged in the Renaissance, for instance, in Machiavelli, and early modern thinking, including Montesquieu, but was eventually sidelined by a different sort of vocabulary in which the ancient tradition of “forms of rule” (or “government”) played no role. Yet the theories of “elites,” especially Mosca and Pareto, as well as liberal approaches, provided new names for this old phenomenon, which could not be entirely overlooked, actually hypostatizing it as a universal and inexorable phenomenon (Urbinati 2010). Only here and there, with limited consequences, were such ideas resumed by modern thinkers. The state, representation, and other concepts took the place of the forms of rule within a new caesura regarding the discourse about power and the emergence of a specific dimension in modernity, the political one.
Despite the analysis of the oligarchization of the inner life of political parties as a distinctive phenomenon, particularly in Michels’ (1911/2009) classic work about the German Social Democratic Party (which refrains from discussing oligarchy as a form of government or rule), that is, as strictly political, oligarchy has primarily been understood according to Aristotle's (1996) definition, that is, as the self-oriented rule of the few. These are, in fact and at the same time, the rich—thus configuring a “plutocracy.” This is also McCormick's (2011) and Winters’ (2011) perspective, the main references for contemporary discussions, as well as that of other recent authors such as Arlen (2019, 2023), Vergara (2020), and Bagg (2022), as well as Kalyvas (2019), with an opposition between the oligarchy and the “poor.”1
Winters stresses that oligarchs are concerned with and dedicate themselves to the “defence of property,” which is based, differently from Rome, on
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