On Oligarchy

A few weeks ago, I attended a fascinating paper by Andreas Kalyvas (New School). The underlying issue circled on the history of the displacement and disappearance of oligarchy as an analytic concept, and Kalyvas’ arguments for renewing its role in social theory. It’s not up to me to share his arguments and the significance thereof.

But since Kalyvas and I share few political, theoretical, and normative commitments, I think I can tell my own story without reference to his while acknowledging my general debt to his raising of the issue. In addition, it may be worth noting, and perhaps somewhat surprisingly, I have used ‘oligarchy’ as an analytic concept a few times in my own work.

Anyway, let me start my story. Hume rarely uses ‘oligarchy’/’oligarchic’ (and their cognates); when he does, he treats it as an actor’s category albeit a familiar one. To the best of my knowledge Mandeville never uses ‘oligarchy’ or its variants. This is a bit surprising because Thucydides does use it (also in popular English translations), and both Mandeville and Hume have some non-trivial debts to him. It’s not like ‘oligarchy’ is never used by seventeenth century authors: we can find it in Harrington, especially, and Filmer.

Now, Hobbes, an expert on Thucydides, kind of casts an aspersion on the use of ‘oligarchy,’ which he treats, we might say, as a term of appraisal and not a descriptive category. (Leviathan, Part 2, chapter 19). For Hobbes oligarchy is just an aristocracy one doesn’t like. And it seems, then, to have no place as a term of art in his science.

That is to say, quite a bit of people who we don’t tend to think of Hobbists or Hobbesian, do follow Hobbes in not deploying ‘oligarchy;’ even though these same people will use ‘aristocracy’ (and its cognates) much more freely as can be readily ascertained by word-searching the works of (say) David Hume. But those writing in a self-consciously republican tradition do keep using the term—this is the significance of my mention of James Harrington above. And by the end of the eighteenth century, this includes non-trivial American founders like Madison and John Adams, but also somebody like Bentham, and many nineteenth century radicals/utilitarians, including J.S. Mill, with him.

In fact, and I am moving toward my point, in the last great work of nineteenth century liberalism Hobson’ famous (1902) book on imperialism, the category of ‘moneyed’ oligarchy or ‘financial’ oligarchy is rather important to the explanatory analysis. So, one may well say that ‘oligarchy’ is an analytic feature of nineteenth century liberalism. This is nicely illustrated by one of the moral and rhetorical highpoints of 19th century liberalism, John Bright’s great speech at Rochdale on 4 December 1861, which describes the Confederacy as a “slave oligarchy of the South.”

Of course, oligarchy, was not the only available category; many liberal radicals also used ‘vested’ or ‘sinister’ interests to capture the way concentrated economic power translated into concentrated political power, and Vica versa, that is, the oligarchic elements in political life.* In addition, Ricardo’s treatment of rent, Ricardian Rent, also allowed for the development of a theory of economic privilege/rents divorced from the use of ‘oligarchy.’

At this point one may well wonder how so many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theorists could do without ‘oligarchy.’ And one may well suspect that the omission (except in the few republicans which harkened back to ancient glory and virtue) may well be caused by a fondness for actually existing oligarchy (or for the feudal order it was displacing), and its property rights.

My own view is that there is a kernel of truth to this suspicion, but that this was also already diagnosed by reformist theorists. So, for example when during the eighteenth-century people criticized ‘monopoly’ or the ‘spirit/system of monopoly’ they were criticizing a system of organized, corporate privilege granted by the monarch or the sovereign. This critique predates Adam Smith, but in Book IV of Wealth of Nations, Smith gives it prominence by coining ‘mercantilism’ and detailing how the political and economic (and legal) features interact (and then it also shows up in great anti-slavery writings). Importantly, (recall) Locke and his influence is Smith’s target. And, in fact, as my regular readers know, I would argue (recall especially this post) that Smith’s critique of mercantilism is a key foundational moment in the historical (anti-Lockean!) self-constitution of subsequent liberalism. And looking at the world today, I daresay that such anti-mercantilism will renew liberalism’s vitality and salience going forward.

That’s really all I wanted to digress today. But in reflecting on the lovely steam-ships passing in the night between Kalyvas and myself, it may be worth noting (in a non-polemical way) that those Marxists and progressives who see in liberalism as the party of capital, capitalists, and/or capitalism often find it very hard to grasp that liberals can understand themselves in a non-delusional way as the anti-oligarchic movement par excellence (while allowing that there are some really existing anarchists who may outdo us in anti-oligarchic fervor). In fact, liberalisms’ critique of Leninism and state-planning not to mention patents/copyright and all forms of rent-seeking often builds on the long history of polemics against the system of privilege/monopoly that is characteristic of modern and managerial oligarchy.

---

*This a point made by a former post-doc in my department, Gordon Arlen.