PLUTOCRACY. - In the etymological sense, p. (from πλοῦτος = "wealth" and κράτος = "power") means the dominion of wealth or of the men who possess it — industrialists, bankers and great landowners. The term, however, is not usually employed to indicate a particular political regime, one distinguished by characteristics of its own from other forms, but serves rather to denote, in a somewhat vague way, a social condition in which the major possessors of wealth have a preponderant, often indirect, influence over the administration of public affairs. P. can therefore be associated with any form of regime — with monarchy as with republic, with aristocracy as with democracy. Only a conception resting on the theory of the exploitation of the proletariat by bourgeois regimes led Karl Marx to define as plutocratic all forms of social organization in which private property is preserved.
Aristotle designated the dominion of wealth as the distinguishing mark of oligarchy, in opposition to aristocracy founded on virtue. Although this distinction rests on the political experience of his time and therefore does not have a universal value as a principle of systematization, it can nevertheless be said that p. easily leads to oligarchy. It has nonetheless been observed that what favored its affirmation in the most modern times was precisely democracy, inasmuch as the democratic regime, articulated around the great mass parties, in need of vast capital for their organization and propaganda, becomes the instrument of maneuver of those who finance such parties, whose ends they are then constrained to serve.
Scarce examples of p. are found in antiquity, where the preponderant influence of the propertied classes certainly cannot have been lacking. Carthage is cited, and for more recent times Venice, with little correspondence to the modern meaning of the term. True p. is a phenomenon connected with the modern capitalist regime, which, having permitted the concentration of wealth in a few hands through the creation of large and powerful industrial organisms, could not then avoid the possessors of capital invading the most sensitive ganglia of social life, establishing a capillary and suffocating dominion over governments and their directives, dictated by operating the hidden levers in their power. Capitalism and p. are two twins of the introduction of the machine and of the progress of industrialism. To combat them, every social movement inspired by Marxist ideas proves inadequate, because it rests on the same error of overvaluing the sensible and earthly good, opposing to the egoism of capital the egoism of class, to private p. the p. of the State. Only a spiritualistic conception, which re-establishes the hierarchy of values, can be an antidote to the dominion of wealth, with its more equitable distribution among the social classes.
Antonio Messineo