Oligarchy, Democracy, and Plebeianism: For a Political Conceptualization

Abstract

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within democratic liberalism, pointed to it as a stage in the development of liberalism that would have been already superseded, such as Santos (2013).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 “strong property rights.” On the other hand, oligarchs do not usually hold office (when they do, “vanity” is often the reason why). In any case, they have developed—by means that he does not actually clarify—an “Income Defense Industry,” hiding wealth, evading taxes, and using “complex tax shelters.” Oligarchs, Winters (2011, xi–xvi, 7–8) argues, are to be seen as individuals (not, for instance, corporations). As he elaborates his arguments, Winters states that—in variance with Aristotle, he suggests, though he also stresses, in a different passage, that the latter links power and wealth—he does not think that oligarchy is simply the rule of the few: He is keen to emphasize its “material foundations,” with wealth inequality producing extreme political inequality (Winters 2011, 3, 27). Winters does recognize that there are other sources of power, based on political rights, official positions, coercive and mobilizational power, along with material power. Official positions are separated out in the modern state; that is to say, they do not directly derive from wealth, he points out. On the other hand, oligarchs are able to exert huge influence on such officials. Although he is mainly interested in what he calls “civil oligarchy” (which depends on a system of laws), Winters (2011, 34ff, 209, chaps. 2–5) proposed a typology of oligarchies (warring, ruling, sultanistic, tamed, and wild, along with the “civil” variant, which is the outstandingly modern one). Finally, Winters stresses the difference between the concepts of oligarchy and “elite,” which obscured, in the case of Mosca and Pareto, the role of wealth since it was too encompassing. The issue would have also been misunderstood by Michels when he defined the German Social Democratic Party as oligarchic. In contradistinction, from the Soviet Union to Cuba, we actually found elite rule, but such societies should not be characterized as oligarchic since wealth played no role in them (Winters 2011, 8, 275–77).

In turn, McCormick is much more ambiguous in his characterization of oligarchy. He mixes without greater worry oligarchy and elites (“socioeconomic and political”) (McCormick 2011, 1, 13–17, 167), without really defining each of them very clearly, though wealth always appears as a major issue for the characterization of their power (with, sometimes, “class” and “class consciousness” being mentioned without any specification). Actually, during most of the book, McCormick barely speaks of oligarchies except with reference to Rome and the Italian Renaissance republics, and mostly as he discusses Machiavelli's work. It is really only in the chapter about “Post-electoral democracies” that McCormick more systematically works with the idea of oligarchy—yet mainly to contrast it with reformed, hence properly democratic, republics (McCormick 2011, chaps. 6–7).

The same mix between “elites” and “oligarchy” appears in Vergara's work. We have experienced—seemingly in the last decades—a systematic decay—“systemic corruption”—of the liberal representative government. It manifests itself in the “oligarchization” of power in society (configuring a “trend”). A small minority has accumulated and monopolized wealth, with dire political consequences. The power of the few has increasingly become exclusive; they have become the sole rulers, against the interests of the many, with the elites left to comfortably “police themselves.” She strongly asserts that liberal representative democracies are not mixed regimes—they are rather “monocratic,” with, simply, a “separation of functions.” Although she had previously mentioned the oligarchization of power in society, she eventually states her main concern: “Political power is today de facto oligarchic” (Vergara 2020, 1–4). Although the latter assertion is largely correct, I believe the former is not. A reason for this different assessment will be given later in this article.

Both McCormick and Vergara are above all intent on defending a plebeian perspective. Their depiction of oligarchy is thus less systematic than Winter's. I will return to plebeianism toward the end of the article. For now, let us critically discuss these authors’ views of oligarchies and elites.

I do not entirely want to deny their descriptions and conceptualizations, yet I think they are often reductive or confusing. It would be ludicrous to overlook how wealth sways political life and how the rich have numerous channels through which they reach out to politicians and influence or even harness their actions according to their objectives. They are surely concerned with the defense of their property, wealth, and income (which are, incidentally, different phenomena). We need, however, to develop a more precise view of oligarchy in modernity, with its specificity, hence also going beyond the loose idea of “elites” (which, moreover, cannot but be infused with underlying positive resonances, recalling aristocracies to mind). Despite the prominence of concentrated economic power, I want to argue that we have to see oligarchy in terms of political power as such. In Aristotle's time, there was a close articulation among material, military, and, for lack of a better word, say, “governmental” power. Rule tightly weaved all these elements together. In modernity, there came about nevertheless a differentiation of the political dimension from other social dimensions, whereas socioeconomic classes are now more central in the material, socioeconomic dimension. The political dimension—likewise the economic one—has acquired its own logic and sources of power. That much is recognized by Winters, as we saw above, though we will need to introduce further distinctions to properly grasp this dimension. In particular, we need to draw the proper conclusions from this differentiation, which Winters only partly does. Finally, McCormick's reference to social classes must be properly articulated, especially regarding modernity.

When I speak of oligarchy in this article, it is therefore basically to political oligarchy that I refer. We could speak of economic oligarchies in order to single out the wealthiest people in one country and, at this stage, even in the whole world, even though dominant economic classes are larger than this cohort of superrich people. More approximatively, we could perhaps point to oligarchies in other areas of human activities, from the arts to sports and beyond. But, of utmost importance to political dynamics, I want to discuss specifically how political power—state-based but with connections in political processes in society at large—is shaped in modernity and how this is established through the rule of the political few. Although political power has also been characterized by the growing importance of wealth, we cannot directly derive this trend, which Vergara correctly identifies, from the influence of wealth, though this is also a cause and effect of political oligarchization. The socioeconomic and political powerful agents who McCormick often joins together in one breath need to be distinguished—not to belittle the role of property and wealth, which are more than just a crucial aspect of class relations in modern societies based on capitalism, but to support a proper understanding of how they relate to political power in its specificity.

This outlook will allow us to see how political power is organized in this specific dimension and is exercised by political collectivities. That is to say, we will observe how it assumes a peculiar form in modernity but also in the attempts to move beyond it, which we can call authoritarian collectivism, where the few also ruled (in a more integral alternative social formation) and rule (after an economic transition to capitalism). We will be able thereby to discuss how pro-capitalist, pro-business political collectivities operate and how left-wing forces are usually traversed by oligarchic tendencies, too, constituting oligarchic structures, which have been transferred from parties to state structures and vice versa. How this combines with elements of the rule of the one—autocratic—and of the many—democratic—can then be discussed. We will, in addition, see how those who do not share in the exercise of power should be defined as “plebeians”—politically, that is—and the contemporary political dynamic, in which the verticality of the exercise of (oligarchic) political power is time and again rejected (Breaugh 2007; McCormick 2011; Green 2016; Vergara 2020; Ramírez 2022), which others prefer to treat foremost through the category of the “poor” (Kalyvas 2019; Arlen 2019).

In the next sections, (1) I further elaborate on the differentiation of the political dimension and discuss the relations among oligarchy, elites, and social classes; (2) I then systematically define the concepts of political system and political regimes, as well as carry out a discussion of the forms of rule in modernity (mainly under liberalism) and postmodernity (authoritarian collectivism), with dynamic elements; (3) finally, I take up the problem of political plebeianism, as well as of the “poor” and related concepts, which leads me to discuss the remedies recently proposed to address these issues; (4) a conclusion follows. I should note, before moving further, that, although strongly engaged with political theory, this is a work of political sociology, which I actually deem of great relevance to furthering the contemporary debate on oligarchy and plebeianism.

There was no politics as such before modernity. Power was undoubtedly an issue that existentially cut across all civilizations and specific social formations (specific “societies”). Neither social life nor social relations, vertical or horizontal, exist without it. Domination and ruling, with their hierarchical verticality, became indeed connected to the state. However, how diverse “sources” of power combined differed significantly from the sort of arrangement modernity brought about. We do not need to accept the idea that an evolution led from simple, undifferentiated societies to complex ones, where differentiation dominated and implied new mechanisms of coordination. There have been many paths in social evolution and development, different combinations of material, ruling, and spiritual power, which do not allow for a flat picture of a unilinear process. Nevertheless, in what henceforth became the “West,” modernity slowly emerged, and the political dimension differentiated out.3 It contained a way of organizing power that initially should be domesticated and perhaps disguised, with any new political features as such disappearing in any case. This was so because the political representative system—both legislative and, even more so, executive—was supposed to merely maintain pristine civil—less so political—rights for all the citizens who had decided to build this new state apparatus, fundamentally based on abstract law. For the observance of law and to keep those pristine rights, legal and repressive forces (eventually a differentiated-out police) linked to the executive and the judiciary had a crucial role to play, which was tin a sense passive, aiming at the maintenance of pristine relations between abstract citizens. As it unfolded, political modernity became increasingly politicized, with the concrete issues of social life invading that abstract dimension in what regards both citizens and state, with at the same time an expansion and democratization of political modernity. This configured an expansive trend regarding the combination of republicanism and liberalism that was hegemonic in modernity (since the 1970s, reversed in the direction of renewed oligarchization, which formally kept democratic institutions).

It is true that we partly use the same vocabulary as the Greeks and the Romans, particularly “politics,” “citizenship,” and the “public,” along with those forms of rule. However, several of these terms meant absolutely different things now and then. Just take “politics,” a central concept in Greece and in modernity. In Aristotle (1996, especially 72ff), in such a “political” framework it is not only, and perhaps not even mainly, the exercise of power that is at stake. As Hegel (1820/1986) perceived, he was referring to an “ethical totality” (Sittlichkeit)—which included the oikos and the family, to start with—as well as values and the belonging to a city—the polis—the only place and circumstance where life was meaningful and genuinely human. Those forms of rule or government—monarchy and tyranny, aristocracy and oligarchy, and isonomy and democracy—directly pointed to the exercise of power, as such not “political,” a word reserved for a more encompassing reality (that of the “polis” in general). The first term of the pair was meant to be positive, virtuous, as rulers would be concerned with the common good; the second, in contrast, was negative, as they would rule according to their self-interest. Aristotle was much more aware than most writers until the beginning of modernity of the role of material interests and power concerning those forms of government or rule, yet the polis was much more than that.

With Machiavelli, we started to speak of naked power, the state, and a particular dimension of the former's exercise. This was consolidated with Hobbes and subsequent authors. Note as well that such forms of rule or government have been seen, from Aristotle through Montesquieu to the “framers” of the United States Constitution and beyond, often as composite, that is, as mixed forms, in which the rule of the one, of the few, and of the many may combine in varied ways. Actually, many authors—such as Aristotle, Machiavelli, and those US “framers”—favored such mixed forms, which they deemed more stable and as embodying the advantages of different principles. The framers were happy to see, hovering above their limited democracy, a “natural aristocracy” of the spirit, as they fancied themselves (Jefferson 1813/1959; moreover, before him and with a direct influence upon his views, see Harrington 1656/1992, 23; see also McCormick 2011, for the Italian Renaissance, especially Guicciardini).

This move also required a reflection on how power—specifically political, now—would be organized, who would rule, and how these persons would rule or govern. The answer developed piecemeal, in theory and practice. The North American War of Independence (replicated but with much less global impact in the south of the continent) and the French Revolution still made use, in a good measure, of the old, classical teachings. New concepts were crafted too, some already found to some extent in the Medieval vocabulary, though in other registers, such as “representation,” to deal with the complexity of the new civilization; or, with its modern meaning crafted slightly earlier, the “state,” to refer to the machine of rule. Nevertheless, what had been, until the beginning of modernity, the standard vocabulary and typology to deal with forms of rule or government—the rule or government of the one, the few, and the many—gave way to democracy, “representative” but for some currents, as a demand, “direct” too, “dictatorship” (meaning something else than it did for the Romans), and eventually more euphemistic, supposedly technical terms such as Dahl's (1960/1963) “closed hegemonies,” “competitive oligarchies,” “inclusive hegemonies,” and “polyarchy”—with henceforth a legion of directly empirically based typologies.

Yet classical ideas somehow lived on, sparsely and incompletely, in some approaches. This was the case, for instance, of Michels’ aforementioned work. They were present in Schmitt's (1928/1993, 292–303) analyses, in particular when he discussed how elections embodied an aristocratic principle, in contrast to the Greek lot and the plebiscitary acclamation he envisaged for his model of (supposedly) “democracy” (see also Manin 1997). “Extra-parliamentary” fierce criticisms of the political system and its insulation from the citizenry also resumed the classical vocabulary (see Agnoli 1967/1990), which was, time and again, applied, curiously, by some analysis of “real socialism” (Tucker 1963; Cohen 1985; Author, 2024). But a major conceptual shift had actually taken place.

The concepts of aristocracy and oligarchy ended up giving way to the rule or government of the “elites” (Mosca 1895/1923; Pareto 1916/1923) when analysts were wont to speak of power differentials, with liberals usually uncomfortable with the looming need to recognize that in their representative democracy there were rulers and the ruled. At the same time, liberal theories concerned with political modernity increasingly tended to see politics as a representation of societal interests (which were either more “universal” as to representatives, as Burke stressed, or particularized ones, as Marx and later liberals such as Dahl pointed out).

To be sure, utilitarian liberalism was aware of what Bentham (1822/1988, 115–122) called “sinister interests” (of lawyers and judges as well as politicians), a sort of interest deviously aiming at one's happiness (“utility”). It was nevertheless seen as connected to the rule of the one or the few. Once the many ruled (through the few, though!), Bentham thought interests—with the universal public good in command—would be aligned appropriately, such as in the United States. He was wrong, though. More control may be achieved, but sectional interests will remain in what amounts to a sort of mixed government insofar as the political system distinguishes between those who govern and the governed, rulers and the ruled, as I further argue below. Partly surely influenced by Rousseau, Robespierre, though accepting the representative principle, he himself a parliamentarian, was aware of the problem and denounced its creeping relevance. In contradistinction to Burke, for instance, Robespierre suggested, as solutions to the autonomization of the interests of the representatives vis-à-vis the citizens who elected them, a number of measures: virtue, more frequent elections, the at least potentially frequent turnover of parliamentarians, hence the immersion of representatives in the people at least for a length of time, along with open public deliberation and the interdiction of participation in the executive of members of parliament (Mathiez 1920/2018, 33–38). Whether the “incorruptible” followed his own advice during his time in office begs the question.4

A further, though brief, discussion of Marxist perspectives as well as a Weberian one that resumes some of its perspectives is in order, as especially the former current has given particular attention to the relation between wealth, property, and income, on the one hand, and political power, on the other; and, of course, to social classes, a concept that cannot be properly replaced by oligarchy (which ends up as a mere synonym for the superrich, also a vague though sensitizing descriptive notion). Political theorists of oligarchy, blending indistinguishably political and economic power, often totally overlook this crucial literature. But they do that at their own peril, as these have been the authors who have really tried to grasp—though drawing upon the concept of social class rather than economic oligarchy or elites—the connection between wealth and property, on the one hand, and political power, on the other—mostly the state in general in their theories, which is also a shortcoming.

Marx and Engels (1848/1978) originally—in a manifesto that referred to a period in which the electoral franchise was extremely restricted—affirmed that the state was a “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” (though their conceptions became increasingly more complex and nuanced as modernity advanced and their thought matured). Almost a century later, although Gramsci (1929-35/2001) stressed the class character of the (enlarged) state and “hegemony,” he did recognize, on the other hand, that usually the ruling classes did not govern directly, maintaining a more distant relation with politics. In the even later Marxist debate, Miliband (1969) argued that the ruling classes did govern directly but was sharply criticized by Poulantzas (1978), who developed a more mediated theory that regarded the state as a “field of struggles” between the classes, jettisoning the simpler idea that it was the executive “committee” of the bourgeois, to start with due to its complexity. Offe's (1972/1973, 1986) perspective was even more mediated: the main concern of the state and politicians was the reproduction of their own power, for which the smooth accumulation of capital was necessary, implying therefore an inevitable adjustment to the interests and demands of capitalists rather than their direct representation. Resuming Poulantzas’ views, Jessop (2008) almost dissociated the state from capitalist classes or classes, though without denying their concrete intertwinement. This had been a step more radically taken by Block (1977) several years before, according to whom (at variance with a class-instrumentalist perspective and going beyond Offe's older works) the responsivity of “state managers” to fragmented capitalists’ interests rests on their own eagerness to remain in power.

We thus see that the tendency within Marxism is to look at politics and the state as conditioned by social classes and (“in the last instance”) the economy, but also that a rather nuanced standpoint was eventually articulated (although there is in these authors hardly an adequate distinction between the state and the political system, which is very important and on which I shall elaborate below). The so-called instrumentalist perspective was ditched. I think this was a very positive development. That is to say, Marxism went far beyond Marx and Engels’ original views, partly historically justified only, which at this point in history are false. This is not to deny that the rich—or the bourgeoisie, however we define it in the era of corporate capitalism—have enormous influence in politics—especially and visibly in the United States; but this influence is indirect, while capitalists—or businesspeople more generally—must grapple with the interests of professional politicians, as well as of bureaucrats (in which, for instance, the European Union excels).

The Weberian tradition, especially with Mann (1993), also came to recognize the links between social classes and the state, hence between wealth and politics, but did not subordinate the latter to the former either, though their solutions (cf. Mann's social “crystallizations” within the state) are elusive. This should be borne in mind in the further development of this article. Such sociological understanding is not inimical to the idea that wealth is a determinant of politics and that the very rich are intent on defending their properties and assets, which they are. It points, however, to a view in which the complexities of modern and especially contemporary society are taken into account. This is, on the other hand, very different from what elitist theories suggest, in which the specific mechanisms of the generation and reproduction of power often tend to disappear and an inevitability of, positively conceived, power differentials is supposed and explained away. Moreover, to be sure, the direct weight of the rich (bourgeoisies or economic oligarchies) upon the political system varies in space-time—from country to country and in different periods—something not to be lost from sight when more empirically oriented analyses are undertaken, which shall not be the case here.

More recently, the professionalization of politics and of political systems has been put under scrutiny. It has allowed for the transition of the kind of politician who, in Weber's (1919/1988) classical terms, lives “for politics” to those who live “off politics.” Traditional oligarchies are hence also overcome, but, as such, this does not alter the oligarchic character of political systems, with politicians very much aware of their specificity and own interests, including enriching themselves since many or even most of them were not really rich before entering politics (Borchert and Zeiss 2003). This transition developed along with the democratization of political systems through mass parties, but it is by no means incompatible with processes that entail de-democratization.

At this stage, the question should thus be unambiguously stated: It is the exercise of power in rather autonomous ways and the customary defense of political power privileges that is at stake for political oligarchies, even though they are frequently closely aligned with the dominant classes (conceptually defined), the rich (phenomenologically perceived and described), and the like, or are actually part of them. If dominant classes and the rich are concerned with property as well as income and wealth, and authoritarian collectivist oligarchies are concerned with maintaining their power, from which the control of the corporate property they enjoyed derived, in liberal systems of rule, control of political power also has an independent logic, separate from the economic dimension, that is, wealth and property (with state capitalism combining both logics). This arrangement is directly related to the modern differentiation of the political dimension and does not depend directly on the wishes of political officials—professional politicians—who may even be uncomfortable with it. It also implies an internal logic related to acquiring and maintaining power, regarding self-interest, and beliefs in the limited imaginary of liberal democracy or oligarchy. This rests on a lot of ideology—this concept understood as the structuration of a universe of meaning that, usually including some varied level of plausibility or truth, hides part of reality and furnishes specious justifications for its problematic or especially ugly aspects. This is even more true of the mix between party-state rule and capitalism today.

Michels was in particular very concerned with how oligarchization developed within organizations—mass organizations, envisaged as a means to achieve the opposite objective, namely, democratization. If liberals have consistently, at least until recently, looked the other way regarding the oligarchic elements of liberal democracy, that closure of power was one of the problems and impasses that workers’ parties and the tradition of workers’ councils tried to tackle. The fact that oligarchized organizations pushed for overall democratization—and largely succeeded—and organized popular participation does not make them non-oligarchic. What is more, this oligarchic character harbored innumerable problems that either did surface with a vengeance in the postrevolutionary period or eventually marred the very possibility of further democratization and true reformism. This is a crucial paradox—Michel's paradox, we can call it—that accompanied political modernity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At least in this form, it is no longer with us, although organizations and especially large national parties, let alone the international sphere, imply such reiterated complication, with, simultaneously, a demand for democratization and the rule of the few, which has become paramount today.5 There has been—today we can clearly see, though many refuse to face it—a rather naive belief in Marxism, according to which once the state and political power disappeared, as a consequence of the end of private property, the problem would also wither away. The working classes would, moreover, control the process and prevent its developing distortions (an issue that made Bolsheviks nervous, though excessive self-confidence led them to wish the problem away—see, for instance, clearly, Bukharin 1925). They all chose to overlook a problem Bakunin (1873/1990) had early on pointed out, with direct reference to Marx.

Oligarchic rule may not be universal and inevitable. It is, however, very hard to overcome in any sort of overall social arrangement.

In order to further elaborate on the differentiation of the political dimension in modernity and grasp some further aspect of oligarchic rule, I must now systematically tackle the concept of political system, which I have thus far employed without properly defining it, as well as the concept of political regime.6 The state has been seen, in too many approaches and analyses, as the site of the exercise of political power. But this is problematic. Both concepts, of the state and of political systems, referring to different issues, must be retained. Although any part of the state may be politicized at any moment, the core of politics is actually the political system, basically the legislative and executive powers, where law is produced and decisions are taken. Politicians, today mostly elected though not always, operate in the political system, whereas bureaucrats occupy non-elective positions. To be sure, this distinction is relative, but most of the state is most of the time politically rather neutral, such as the courts and the at present extremely differentiated administrative apparatus, including the army, though it is permeated by ideologies and political preferences, and in moments of crisis or due to politicians’ decisions its formal neutrality can quickly change. Oligarchic power is exercised fundamentally in and through those two specific elements of the political system. Under liberal representative democracy, elected officials control these spaces, with a more vertical arrangement obtaining in party-state systems. If this is the state aspect of the political system, we must, however, also point to a societal political system, which organizes interests, values, and a societal agenda, in any case often in direct contact with the state political system, although at times it is strongly repressed. Unions, associations, non-profit, and non-governmental organizations are its pillars. The political system, with its two sides, is cast here with an analytical rather than a descriptive perspective.

Political systems are, moreover, concretely organized through different types of political regimes. Political regimes imply different relations between the state and the societal political system, different degrees of articulation between the executive and the legislative, the contours of both, the intensity of surveillance and repression, as well as whether the one, the few, or the many are those who rule (or whether a mixed arrangement obtains). As stated above, typologies of political regimes are legion and may include traditional oligarchy, traditional autocracy, democracy, fascism, bureaucratic military dictatorship, and many other variants for capitalist societies, whereas autocracy and oligarchy were the staples of those who studied “communist” societies. We may say that, from the second half of the twentieth century onward, liberal representative democracy prevailed, but also that since the 1970s a process of re-oligarchization, leading to what we may call advanced liberal oligarchy, has gained momentum (advanced autocracy developing as well—for instance, in Russia, despite its even thinner democratic façade, with aurocratic elements appearing in many places, for instance in the US). Liberal representative democracy has always been a mixed regime, combining polyarchic elements (freedom of speech, manifestation and organization, open contestation, and the free participation of the many) and oligarchic ones (the control of the state political system and, from there, of much of the machine of the state as well as the media and even of other parts of the societal political system, such as non-profit and non-governmental organizations).

It has been the development of its oligarchy core to the detriment of its democratic elements—including the strengthening and closing of the state political system to the detriment of its societal counterpart—that largely explains the concerns of the authors who in the last decades returned to the study of oligarchy. In contrast, whereas the party-state remains in place in many countries, the teachings of the authors who had studied them have seemingly been forgotten. Although there was formerly a democratizing expansion, today we face a strong de-democratizing trend. Wealth plays a role in this developing situation, with politicians and dominant classes intertwined in these new developments, which, moreover, lessen the relevance of the societal political system, in whose opinions and demands political oligarchies are not interested—and may as well try to suppress. Along with de-democratization, neoliberal policies, or at best what can be defined as social liberal policies, have been opposed to universalizing social policies, at best catering for the poor.

If liberal representative democracy is indeed a mixed regime—contra Vergara's understanding of it as “monocratic”—we should not belittle its democratic aspects—which she apparently does. We should stick to this evaluation despite the stronghold exercised by oligarchic agents and institutions as well as the influence of the rich—the capitalist class, to be precise, today often its fractions linked to finance capital, and more recently big tech, as Marxist authors have in different ways emphasized. Those democratic aspects are a crucial acquisition of modernity, in tandem with the development of social rights and the like, through fierce political struggles between the many and the few. They must be resumed, and those political and social aspects further strengthened, including the subsumption of private property to the interests and needs of the citizenry at large.

Some political agents, including professional politicians, would indeed like to overcome this oligarchic character, something very hard to happen as this arrangement is obdurate and very difficult to change, especially at this point in time, when there is little stable citizen mobilization. Superseding it would require, besides, proper alternatives if new forms of the exercise of power were to prevail. The only real alterative ever tried—the power of revolutionary councils—has thus far failed. Besides, the party-state rule has even less room for democracy, if at all: it is purely oligarchic or even autocratic. It is not a mixed regime.

Although oligarchic rule has been reinforced, socio-political dynamics have included another trend. The autonomization, individual and collective, of individuals in the recent decades has gone hand in hand and apace with disaffection with their national political systems, including formerly mass political parties. Although there are powerful underlying social processes contributing in this direction, in particular “disembedding processes” that “free” individuals from political links and force them to autonomously take decisions, it is the self-determination of individuals as political agents and a deep political malaise that stand at the core of such developments. Since the 2000s, we have observed this trend worldwide, with different authors trying to grasp who these agents are and how to mobilize them for social emancipation (Bringel and Domingues 2015; Domingues 2024, chap. 8; Urbinati 2020).

This has had an impact, more or less direct, on political theory andpolitical sociology. A strand parallel to the discussion of oligarchy has thus emerged, even if it is rather the identification of oligarchic rule that was an initial motivation for its further development, whereby both issues appear entangled. This strand has featured the assertion of plebeianism in different forms. Some insist on more subjective perspectives, others on institutional reforms that would provide democracy with a plebeian correction.

In the first case, we find Breaugh and Green. Breaugh (2007, xv–xxiii) speaks of the “experience” of the “plebs” as that of “…achieving dignity through political agency” and reconstructs historical moments of collective mobilization born out of the “desire for freedom.” Plebeianism is for him not an identity but rather the “political event” of the constitution of a “political subject.” It cannot, however, be sustained for any length of time. In turn, Green speaks of the “shadow of unfairness,” which leads ordinary citizens—who are actually second-class citizens—to feel at a “remove” from politics since the many—in contradistinction to the powerful few—do not, and cannot, have any expectation of real political influence. While representation is “opaque” and beyond accountability, the distance from politics for most citizens is compounded, in ways Green does not really explain, by the intrusion of socioeconomic inequalities—plutocracy—in the civic space. Against an exclusively “sunny” view of liberal representative democracy, he stresses its shadows (Green 2016, 3–7). Against this predicament, Green suggests that in “plebeian democracy” (for which he looks especially at Rome for precedents), second-class citizens should learn to engage in various forms of “principled vulgarity” regarding discursivity and gladly embrace some level of “reasonable envy,” “arbitrariness,” and “rancor.” Although he stresses the need for “special regulatory treatment” of the powerful, particularly regarding the wealthy as well as redistributive measures and “protective” strategies for plebeians, Green does not think the situation is really amenable to far-reaching change. This is why he demands a sort of positive political realism. Although he supports liberal democracy, a proven political system in which “free and equal citizenship” has a real, albeit limited, place and in which we can further emancipation to some extent, he claims that politics is unlikely to be a source of happiness for plebeians. They are therefore in need of “solace” and what he calls “extrapoliticism”; epicureanism was, supposedly, exemplary in this respect for the many in Rome (Green 2016, 7–16, chaps. 4–5).

McCormick and Vergara take a different direction, both concerned with the institutionalization of the power of the many against the few, despite fine distinctions between their proposals. They are inspired by Rome and the Italian republics, as well as, in the latter's case, Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg.

McCormick (2011, vii, 1–2, chaps. 4–6) demands an “extra-electoral model of elite accountability and popular empowerment.” These would be offices that exclude the rich from eligibility, the use of lottery alongside elections as procedures for appointments of magistrates, and “political trials” in which the whole citizenry takes part. This is what his Machiavellian democracy amounts to: allowing for more control of citizens over “political and socioeconomic elites.” Note that, against Gramsci's hopes, he nevertheless dismisses the possibility that elite rule can ever be altogether superseded (McCormick 2011, 190, note 15). In turn, Vergara tries to elaborate plebeian remedies against systemic corruption and intensified oligarchization, though, like McCormick, she does think it is really impossible to overcome the division between the few and the many, apparently ever. This requires, according to her, institutions that are exclusive to plebeians and capable of exerting “veto” power over measures stemming from representatives and of censoring them directly, but also of initiating legislation, unchaining constituent power from below from time to time, as well as exercising the surveillance of political offices through delegates, who could impeach officials while forcing them to adopt the assemblies’ decisions. Extended local assemblies (councils) and tribunates, configuring a “plebeian branch” of liberal democracy (today not really a democracy in her view, we are forced to conclude, as, as seen above, its institutions pertain only to the elites). This branch seems to consist, at the same time, in “the people-as-network,” hence giving life to a decentered and heterogeneous political “collectivity” (Vergara 2020, 3–5, chap. 9).

In addition, generally equating the “poor”—to which he gives pride of place—and the “plebs” (as well as the “multitude”), Kalyvas defends a democracy of the poor, radical in that the many would have preponderance. The division between the poor and the rich is, however, mostly instrumental, aiming to increase the power of the former, hence not consisting of an essentializing socioeconomic feature. This radical democracy of the poor is not attached to a “specific form,” with many different historical manifestations: Plebeian sovereignty is compatible with large direct assemblies, the council system, federated communes, and a network of voluntary primary associations; it may include the lottery, rotation, and recall; popular juries and courts; delegation and imperative mandates; and tyrannicide and insurrectional rights. Although less specific than what is proposed by McCormick and Vergara, his pallet is broader. Finally, Arlen (2019) takes a similar direction regarding diagnosis and the mobilization of Aristotle and the Greek tradition rather than Rome or the Italian republics, with a vindication of the poor too. He claims that the demos should be thought of with a “tripartite status as many, free, and poor.” It should be organized to counter “oligarchic harms,” with the many hence needing their own exclusive assemblies. Moreover, with reference to John Stuart Mill, Arlen (2023) has embraced the role of social movements and reforms against “plutocratic encroachment” within the framework of “liberal plebeianism.”

Although Kalyvas has thus far refused the wholesale elimination of the wealth differentials in the democracy of the poor, McCormick and Vergara, as well as Arlen, offer political solutions only, without really molesting the rich, the upper classes, including eventually stripping them of their wealth and property (Green was slightly bolder in this regard, though those other authors may have in mind, not really spelled out, legislative measures that imply a more radical redistribution of wealth). Moreover, they do not show us how to get to these plebeian institutions. Vergara tries to sketch a path but falls short of a plausible answer: Such institutions would be revolutionary but not in need of “an outright revolution” to be implemented. A combination of existing mechanisms and a “New Prince”—which, strangely, is not defined, either as an individual, social movements, or a political party—would be capable of pushing this through. She does not really consider the resistance such a move by the many would raise from the few. Luxemburg, for one, and in contrast, was acutely aware of such problems. Besides, such assemblies might as well be vulnerable to manipulation by the rich and powerful. Nor can one understand why solutions would be merely political insofar as socioeconomic inequality is absolutely crucial in Vergara's diagnosis of the contemporary political decay. After pointing out these shortcomings, Bagg (2022, 405–06, 409) suggests that plebeians’ collective power demands the traditional mass party. He does not elaborate on the issue, though, moreover a very contentious one in a society that has consistently rejected large hierarchical organizations.

Curiously, apart from Vergara's work, in her dialogue with Luxemburg and Arendt, the older socialist/communist/anarchist tradition of revolutionary councils—above all the Paris Commune and the Russian 1905 and 1917 Soviets—is barely brought up in these analyses of plebeianism (with Breaugh tackling the former through the lens of largely fleeting “experience”). These were, of course, attempts at direct democracy. The plebeians who organized them—factory and service workers, peasants and artisans, seconded by middle-class people and revolutionary intellectuals—strove to overcome representative democracy. These experiments failed, for different reasons, and the ones that survived were taken over by party “cadre” oligarchies. Today this looks like a blocked path, which has left us with liberal representative democracy as our ultimate horizon, despite time and again local experiences of direct democracy having ephemerally surfaced. We should not, however, take this as a foreclosed conclusion, even though these experiences should not be reified either.

Can we thus not reinvent democracy, controlling the power of political professionals, of whatever type, or even replacing them someday, altogether or by more contingent political incumbents, hence blocking the development of political oligarchies, which the moreover unlikely and at this stage probably ineffective nationalization of the “means of production” will never self-correct? Cannot anti-oligarchic plebeian democracy underpin the collective appropriation of the whole of social life, to start with the modern political dimension and its eventual dissolution, perhaps through something that is today often characterized as the “commons?” Can the political mass party, with its hierarchical and oligarchic historical tradition and perhaps inevitable largely vertical structuration, ever be resurrected as an instrument of the many? We cannot give these questions a clear answer, hopefully as yet. And yes, we need to be political realists, as Green and Vergara state, in that this is a very hard change to make. But these are issues worth pondering and a path we need to tread. It goes without saying that the socioeconomic issues related to wealth and property that the socialist–communist tradition raised and tried to solve are as important as the political ones, although I have stressed the differentiation of the political dimension. Concrete political systems and regimes are structured by their entanglement and how they mutually influence each other, a process in which capitalism enjoys enormous weight. Nor should they be overlooked in any sort of transformed, really fair social form we can project into the future. After all, if liberal plebeianism is a legitimate position, so is a socialist strand of plebeianism, which in a sense aims at its own abolition, even if this may work more as an immanently regulatory democratic perspective, nevertheless possibly to be achieved in the long-run future, along with a deep transformation in the overall structure of social life.

Theoretically, it remains to stress that criticizing oligarchy does not mean jettisoning the whole idea of representation and “representative democracy” from either a plebiscitary authoritarian or an “extra-parliamentary” position. In the first case, we know what has happened. The direct personification of the people in the most extreme-right “leader” the world has ever seen led to a wholesale catastrophe. This has, of course, nothing to do with democracy. In the second case, there was indeed something naïve, not in the deserved criticism of liberal democratic systems, but because simply getting rid of representation cannot be even envisaged today as a solution. The eternal return of representation is what councils in all revolutionary processes have produced, under the disguise of “delegation” sometimes, with, in contrast, individual revolutionaries and parties becoming new oligarchic elements of political power in the process of system change and the build-up of authoritarian collectivism. Moreover, the complexity of contemporary societies is an inescapable reality. That said, let me now resume some key issues of this article and derive some further conclusions from them.

I have tried to argue here that the imaginary, institutions, practices, and dynamics of political modernity, hence of politics as such, must be seen mainly as autonomous from society at large, particularly from economic interests. These have been at the core of liberalism (once it accepted its abstract rationalist universalism was insufficient to grasp and, in particular, tackle political processes) and Marxism (regardless of whether the economy only in the “last instance” influenced politics, what has been actually weakened in favor of more economist views lately). Many of the political crises of recent years are at heart political crises as such, not a consequence of class projects, though these have hurt and contributed to citizen cum plebeian dissatisfaction. The increasingly oligarchic character of contemporary political systems in much of the world—and the problems that may emerge in party-state regimes may eventually express this too—is responsible for these upheavals. It has been confronted by a plebeian mobilization that shows people's disaffection vis-à-vis politicians—power holders or ruling collectivities, in fact, since they have no special qualities such as the term “elite” was intended to convey.

When we examine concrete situations, we must take the entwinement among economic, political, and social power into account, without collapsing and conflating different dimensions, especially the political dimension. However, to fully understand a political regime, the diverse possibilities (this is never univocal) of connection between power holders, that is, ruling collectivities on the one hand, and (dominant or subaltern) classes and other societal and state collectivities on the other, must be contemplated and investigated. In the case of advanced political oligarchy, a looming political regime, finance capital, and global corporations (now probably including big tech) have stood out, but this must not be seen as exclusive or inevitable. What is more, the specific connections between them must be identified, demonstrated, and conceptualized rather than taken for granted (mere elective affinity of views and indirect inferences of influence will not do).

Besides, the discussion of oligarchy may allow us to recover some older themes of political thought. If Vergara is correct and insightful when she brings up the more general idea of corruption as decay, a characteristic that increasingly seems to mark the role of political agents is ordinary corruption, defined according to liberal thought and modern state institutions (the illegal appropriation of public resources by state and societal individuals and collectivities, that is, neopatrimonialism). In addition, the visibility of corruption has produced and evinced the malaise that affects plebeians and has led to recent political mobilizations. Yet, if we take the republican tradition more broadly, oligarchy may be linked today to a much more encompassing definition of corruption: the decadence of political institutions and values, in republican terms, which is also a far-reaching phenomenon of our time and includes, of course, that liberal, more limited definition of corruption (Araújo 2013). This has to do with the restriction of democracy and the unaccountability of so-called political “elites”—which are not “elites” in any sense, though personal demonization is not the case either, as it is first of all the actual structure of political systems that matters. To be sure, all regimes can be corrupted in both senses. Nevertheless, beyond the role of the judiciary, particularly in modern liberal republics, it is within the affirmation of democracy that both sorts of corruption may be counterposed against the consolidation of advanced liberal oligarchy (as as wel as of advanced autocracy and their mixed forms).

Beyond such particularly awkward moments, in order also that radical democracy as a regime—which, based on immanent critique, may become a regulatory ideal against which to measure actual democratic regimes—does not remain oblivious to the oligarchic dynamic of power and is projected as a way to contain it, we must, first of all, recognize the issue of political power in its specificity. Only then can we properly think of emancipation, exercising a permanent critique, practical as well, of actual democracies, implying true democratization and control of those on top political positions. Leninist and social democratic politicians may not like the idea that they respond, when in office and when not, largely, albeit often not exclusively or overwhelmingly, when “sinister interests” prevail, to their desires and projects, including acquiring and keeping political power, with its attendant benefits in other spheres. Nevertheless, for most people, this should be—and increasingly tends to be—seen as a crucial factor in the distribution of power in the modern and perhaps a postmodern civilization. Those who engage in politics, especially when occupying official elective positions, should be aware of these problems, with the aim to fight against them. Urbinati's (2014) dialogic model of representation—which does not correspond at all to contemporary practices—would be a step in this direction. The proposals thrown up in recent discussions of oligarchy and plebeianism—councils, assemblies, and tribunates, among others—may also contribute to democratic advancements, with the proviso that they may be implemented only as a result of probably fierce and nasty clashes. Our political imagination can in any case further develop, giving more power to plebeians, workers, the poor, and the multitude—in other words, the subaltern many who have always been the bedrock of democratic demands and advancements.

We may never approach absolute isonomy or democracy. In this regard, plebeianism may never disappear since rulers and the ruled imply a division difficult to utterly overcome. However, the horizon, the goal, and the movement toward them are exceedingly important and must be borne, in mind. This should be a core element of a critical theory of political modernity and its immanent critique, also beyond modern civilization, both at present and in whatever power arrangements the future may bring into being.